by Judith Curry
[H]ow we meet the needs and aspirations of all of humanity while sustaining the planet’s ecology, is what the Anthropocene is all about. – Keith Kloor
What is the Anthropocene and are we in it?
The Smithsonian has a short article entitled What is the Anthropocene and are we in it? Sub title: Efforts to label the human epoch have ignited a scientific debate between geologists and environmentalists. Excerpts:
Anthropocene has become an environmental buzzword ever since the atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen popularized it in 2000. This year, the word has picked up velocity in elite science circles: It appeared in nearly 200 peer-reviewed articles, the publisher Elsevier has launched a new academic journal titled Anthropocene and the IUGS convened a group of scholars to decide by 2016 whether to officially declare that the Holocene is over and the Anthropocene has begun.
Many stratigraphers (scientists who study rock layers) criticize the idea, saying clear-cut evidence for a new epoch simply isn’t there. “When you start naming geologic-time terms, you need to define what exactly the boundary is, where it appears in the rock strata,” says Whitney Autin, a stratigrapher at the SUNY College of Brockport, who suggests Anthropocene is more about pop culture than hard science.
Some Anthropocene proponents concede that difficulty. But don’t get bogged down in the mud, they say, just stipulate a date and move on. Will Steffen, who heads Australia National University’s Climate Change Institute and has written articles with Crutzen, recommends starting the epoch with the advent of the industrial revolution in the early 1800s or with the atomic age in the 1950s. Either way, he says, the new name sends a message: “[It] will be another strong reminder to the general public that we are now having undeniable impacts on the environment at the scale of the planet as a whole, so much so that a new geological epoch has begun.”
Eco-pragmatism or doom and gloom?
Keith Kloor has an insightful article Facing Up to the Anthropocene that discusses the environmental movement and the idea ‘anthroposcene.’ Excerpts
It was a battle between what I called the green modernists and the green traditionalists.
The problem for the green traditionalist is that this redundant message has lost its power. There have been too many red alerts, accompanied by too many vague, screechy calls to action.
Green modernists, I wrote in 2012, dared to remake environmentalism:
Strip it of outdated mythologies and dogmas, make it less apocalyptic and more optimistic, broaden its constituency. In this vision, the Anthropocene is not something to rail against, but to embrace.
This was heresy. For the Anthropocene, as I noted in a follow-up piece at Slate, had already been characterized by green thought leaders and earth scientists as an irredeemable disaster for the planet.
The future of environmental discourse, I argued, would turn on how the Anthropocene was ultimately defined.
Fast forward to the furious debate playing out this week, kicked off by a recent talk by Andrew Revkin, which he discussed at his New York Times Dot Earth blog. The title of his talk is called “Paths to a ‘Good’ Anthropocene,” which, as he explains, has quotation marks “around the adjective ‘good’ to stress that values determine choices.”
A number of people took offense to the notion of a “good” Anthropocene. Indeed, it appears that many of Revkin’s critics are objecting strenuously to the Anthropocene being described as anything but awful.
This doesn’t bode well for environmentalism, which is already saddled with a doom and gloom reputation. Even more unfortunate–if you are a progressive green open to diverse perspectives– is the hostile attitude towards The Breakthrough Institute (BTI), an Oakland, California think tank that challenges green shibboleths. Those who are most passionate (and outspoken) about climate concerns seem to be the most dismissive of eco-pragmatists and often try to discredit them as a legitimate voice, by suggesting they are part of the problem and not the solution.
After my 2012 Slate piece came out, Bryan Walsh at Time magazine wrote a thoughtful, largely sympathetic critique. His interpretation of eco-pragmatism:
The message of the modernist greens is: in a world of 7 billion plus people, all of whom want (and deserve) to live modern, consuming lives, we need to be pragmatic about how we use—and how much we protect—nature. We don’t have any other choice, so we’d better start dealing with the realities on the ground.
There is no other way, unless you want to wind back the clock to…go ahead, choose another time in history you would prefer to live in.
As for me, I’ll take the Anthropocene, with no regrets. I have a quality of life unprecedented in the history of humanity and I think everyone on the planet deserves to enjoy the same privileges and opportunities I have. This means much of the world has to still modernize for billions of people to enjoy higher living standards. You can’t wave a magic wand to achieve that. It’s going to require massive economic development and massive outlays of energy that is going to stress the planet. There is no way around that.
How we manage this challenge, how we meet the needs and aspirations of all of humanity while sustaining the planet’s ecology, is what the Anthropocene is all about. And I’m fine with that.
JC reflections
Well, it will be interesting to see what the IUGS (International Union of Geological Sciences) comes up with regarding the Anthropocene as a geologic epoch. Hopefully traditional stratigraphic analysis will prevail, rather than the perceived need to send a ‘strong reminder to the general public . . .” I.e. hopefully geologists will not fall into the same rat trap that climate scientists have.
Even if the Anthropocene doesn’t make it as a geological epoch, it seems here to stay as an environmental meme. As an environmental meme, it has some promise – the sustainability meme is limiting and rather stale. Eco-pragmatists seem to have a fighting chance at seizing the narrative.
About two months ago, I gave a presentation on climate change to a group of Georgia Tech alumni. Someone in the audience asked me ‘What did you do for Earth Day?’ I answered ‘Nothing. I think turning out the lights on Earth Day sends the wrong message – I want to see the lights go on in Africa.’ I guess that puts me in the Eco-pragmatist camp.
I think Keith Kloor sums it up superbly with this statement:
As for me, I’ll take the Anthropocene, with no regrets. I have a quality of life unprecedented in the history of humanity and I think everyone on the planet deserves to enjoy the same privileges and opportunities I have.
Nomenclature of geological time spans is the property of the hard and proper scientific sub-set named ‘geology’.
There is no place for emotional Jonny-come-lately quaint folk who think that a concern for the environment qualifies as another sub-set of science. It does not. Go away.
Description — English: Advertisement for Ivory soap in 1888, displaying a couple of native Americans and these verses.
Date — 1888
Source http://www.flickr.com/photos/nyctreeman/2653458316/in/set-72157612435041395/
Author — Proctor & Gamble
Source — wiki commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1888_Ivory_Soap_Advertisement.jpg
Geoff is spot on. In an age where some PC preachers pretend that someone would name a football team in deep disrespect, rather than admiration, of Native Americans, the Proctor&Gamble ditty is sobering. It’s anthropocene that’s obscene!
And now, we’re tidy-clean, politically-correct wrongheaded hypocrites who fear the weather and believe light bulbs grow on trees.
“Nomenclature of geological time spans is the property of the hard and proper scientific sub-set named ‘geology’.”
Official responses to Climategate revelations from leaders of the scientific community (NAS, RS, etc.) have raised doubts about the existence of all formerly hard and proper disciplines of science.
The Galaxy-sunspots-climate connection finally revealed!
The huge electric galactic center-magnetar sends electricity to all the Milky-way [Eatough R. P. et al]. In our solar system, mostly Jupiter and secondly the other planets periodically divert a part of this electricity (that stimulates them) from its course to the Sun, causing him a solar minimum and to the Earth more atmospheric and magma stimulation: more thunderbolts [Gurevich A.] (even from CLEAR sky, without clouds), storms, quakes [Jain R.] and volcanic eruptions-clouding-glacials [Ebisuzaki et al], all AVERTABLE with proper MESHES [global-providence.info] over active craters and the equator, where from most electricity hits our planet.
The reason why the sunspot cycle is averagely 11 years is because the charge-discharge of Jupiter lasts as long as it takes him to evolve around the Sun and it depends on the other planets’ positions [Wilson I. R. G.].
AVERT,
Jo Nova and David Evans are successfully using the collective engineering approach to understand the source of energy that sustains the lives of all Earth’s inhabitants, . . .
Instead of the competitive way of theoretical physicists trying to elbow their way to the next Nobel Prize!
Yes, of course … propaganda destroying hard-won geological science
However:
>Even if the Anthropocene doesn’t make it as a geological epoch, it seems here to stay as an environmental meme< Judith Curry
This is the crux of the issue. Empty minds and full shopping carts, buttressed by a truly despicable MSM
Quite so. The greatest disaster for the planet is the interference of these environmental eco Jihadis, who seem intent on persecuting the poor. Shame on them all.
The Holocene is a geological epoch which began at the end of the Pleistocene[1] (at 11,700 calendar years BP) [2] and continues to the present. The Holocene is part of the Quaternary period. Its name comes from the Greek words ὅλος (holos, whole or entire) and καινός (kainos, new), meaning “entirely recent”.[3] It has been identified with the current warm period, known as MIS 1 and based on that past evidence, can be considered an interglacial in the current ice age.
The Anthropocene is an informal geologic chronological term that marks the evidence and extent of human activities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth’s ecosystems.
Green modernists, Keith Kloor wrote in 2012,
dared to remake environmentalism, strip it
of its out-dated myths, make it less-apocalyptic –
and hey you environmentalism-creators out there,
yer’ve dared ter remake geological epochs also.
Well done u!
Anthropocene is a pretentious nomenclature. At best we can discus the current times as the Homo sapiens explosion event. This is similar to other such events, such as the Azolla, or the KT boundary event.
There’s a reason why cartoons of humans having a good idea are shown by putting a light bulb over their heads.
Rigorous honesty is the first requirement to achieve this noble goal!
When humans can provably prevent global temperatures from falling and causing the next glaciation, then we can begin the Anthropocene.
Humankind, for the first time CAN AVERT volcanic clouding-cooling:
The Galaxy-sunspots-climate connection finally revealed!
The huge electric galactic center-magnetar sends electricity to all the Milky-way [Eatough R. P. et al]. In our solar system, mostly Jupiter and secondly the other planets periodically divert a part of this electricity (that stimulates them) from its course to the Sun, causing him a solar minimum and to the Earth more atmospheric and magma stimulation: more thunderbolts [Gurevich A.] (even from CLEAR sky, without clouds), storms, quakes [Jain R.] and volcanic eruptions-clouding-glacials [Ebisuzaki et al], all AVERTABLE with proper MESHES [global-providence.info] over active craters and the equator, where from most electricity hits our planet.
The reason why the sunspot cycle is averagely 11 years is because the charge-discharge of Jupiter lasts as long as it takes him to evolve around the Sun and it depends on the other planets’ positions [Wilson I. R. G.]. http://www.global-providence.info/
The goal should be to create prosperity for everyone in the world, not make everyone equal in misery.
Big Environment seems to want misery for everyone — except themselves.
+1
+1 indeed
While I agree with the goal you write, the question seems to be what quantity of humans can the planet sustain if all people enjoy fairly similar levels of benefits.
There is a lot of energy in the Universe and I’ve long predicted that man will not ultimately use all of it. Similarly, there is a lot of poverty in the Universe; I suspect man will not ultimately eradicate all of it.
Hmmm. Unless both at once.
=================
We don’t need to ask that question; it will emerge in the fullness of time. If there is any insurmountable constraints to further growth of human population at any stage, then humanity en masse will adapt without central direction. In short, don’t worry, be happy, you won’t live to see any limit which might (or might not) be reached.
kim. I’d appreciate it if you could direct some of that untapped energy to me.
Kim: “man will not ultimately use all of it”. Have you considered a growth of the super rich conspicuous consumptioners such as Al Gore and John Podesta?
Population will sort itself out. No need for even more government interference.
I’d start the “Anthropocene” with the domestication of the goat, ~10,000 years ago. There goes the “Holocene”…
Are you suggesting it should be renamed the Goatocene?
No, I’m pointing out that population explosions of domesticated goats are probably the first significant example of human modification of the climate. Just how significant, I can only guess, but that’s all I can do about CO2. All anybody can do.
AK,
Humans were affecting the environment long before that. Burning forests as a means to hunt animals began around 40,000 years ago in Australia and presumably long before that elsewhere. Some argue those activities prolonged this interglacial period.
Links? Preferably peer-reviewed? I suppose regular burning that was significantly different from the natural version might have affected the climate, but I’m skeptical. Certainly, the sort of burning practiced in the European Mesolithic (IMO) wasn’t sufficient to modify the climate. (That’s the only sort I’m very familiar with.)
In any case, if your contention is correct that actually does eliminate the “Holocene”, as well as pull a good deal of the the Pleistocene into the “Anthropocene”.
AK,
http://www.dpaw.wa.gov.au/management/fire/fire-and-the-environment/41-traditional-aboriginal-burning
https://theconversation.com/how-aboriginal-burning-changed-australias-climate-4454
http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2010/12/aboriginal-burn-off-theory-hosed-down/
I’m with Peter Lang on this. In addition to the extensive use of fire which transformed the Australian environment can be added the role of plains Indians in maintaining and expanding the American prairie, and others. Stephen Budiansky has a good account of this in his ‘Nature’s Keepers’. The date from which ‘The Fall’ commences is usually 1492 in America or 1788 in Australia, because the the Apocalypticism is all about the sins of industrial society. After the Apocalypse, of course, comes the unchanging utopia of the Millennium – or the ‘Sustainable Society’ when the virtuous are saved. We’ve had a substantial impact on the environment when we domesticated wild emmer wheat (and before).
Yes. look how far life has progressed in the past half billion years since the last time a geological period was named after an animal – The Ediacarin Period:
http://www.pir.sa.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0012/11055/mj37_ediacara_golden_spike.pdf
Would the environmentalists prefer to be Ediacarans?
There is little doubt that this will leave a geological mark that can be found a million years hence. There will be a boundary where sea levels rose back to Eocene levels, and high-latitude forests returned to replace the arctic tundra again as was true in the Eocene, and there will be significant extinction of species in the ocean and on land. That won’t happen in a century but in a thousand or so years, which is a geological blink, a very sharp boundary. Not only would it end the Holocene epoch, but the Quaternary period, defined by having Ice Ages, and possibly the Cenozoic Era which existed since the last mass extinction from the meteor strike 65 million years ago.
But geologists will naturally identify the catastrophic changes with the Obama Administration, and call it the Obamacene. But they won’t find the species extinctions, but rather an explosion of species because the humans created isolated artificial environments called cities, filled with countless new niches and pets, garden plants, and pests transported by cars and airplanes before becoming ecologically stranded, as if they were on an isolated Pacific island.
Nah that would be call Obcene
The Promisecene
What do you mean?
Less for thee’n
And more for me’n.
===============
That is your best comment yet, jimmy dee. Nice suggestion. They can name it Anthropocene, in about a million years.
Since most of us know so little about geologic epochs, starting another enviormental ruse seems par for the course along with polar bears stranded on icebergs.
“Anthropocene”
The hubris is laughable. Wait another 5 or 10 thousand years…maybe less…when Long Island is covered by a sheet of ice a mile thick. Wonder what they’ll call it then…
How about the “oops-o-cene?”
This sentence: ” environmental movement and the idea ‘anthroposcene.’” has it spelled wrong, it’s anthropobscene.
“…hopefully geologists will not fall into the same rat trap that climate scientists have.”
Are you implying that you and your fellow climate scientists are rats?
/sarc off
From the post:
“[It] will be another strong reminder to the general public that we are now having undeniable impacts on the environment at the scale of the planet as a whole, so much so that a new geological epoch has begun.”
(end quote)
This guy probably also believes that if he clicks together his heels he will get back to Kansas.
jim2, unfortunately “that guy” has some influence in Australia, and is part of the gang seeking (fairly successfully) to thwart the government’s electoral mandate to wind back CAGW-related expenditure.
Let me guess. Is “that” guy a super wealthy conspicuous consumptioner of the Al Gore and John Podesta ilk?
I think we should name it the Politicene.
+1
Judith, This sentence needs some help.
Are the IPCC toast yet? I think they are.
“Anthropocene”
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.
H/T W.S.
I think that we are killing Gods off with increasing frequency, the number of religions is shrinking.
But wait. We’re on the road to Serfdom – being led by a tyrant, worst president in the history of the country, who is hellbent on destroying capitalism so eco-N*zi scam-artist academics can line their pockets with grant money and starve poor children in Africa.
You wish.
Joshua,
Nah, I think Jimmy Carter was much worse; ‘incompetent imbecile’ does not begin to covey the man’s stupidity and utter lack of judgement. But Obama does flout the law as written more than any president in the last 50 years. Whether that is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depends a bit on whether you think the consequences of ignoring the law are good or bad. In the short term, they are politically expedient, of course, but I rather suspect those pleased by Mr Obama’s refusal to be bound by the letter of the law will be less happy when a conservative president does the same.
BTW, I don’t think Mr Obama wants to destroy capitalism, but I do think he is not sufficiently experienced in life to judge accurately when that is the consequence of his policy choices. He is not a terrible president, but I think it is good for the country that his second term will soon end.
I think the Anthropocene or some similar appellation has some legitimacy in describing the period of the past 50,000 years, as described above by Lang and others.
Just put an asterisk by the name saying ‘may not strictly qualify as a geologic epoch–stay tuned.’ Geologists of the future will probably see clear evidence of the more recent period covered by this term. They will see differences in radioactivity associated with nuclear testing and archaeologists will have to work hard to miss some of the more concrete (sorry–really sorry) evidence of our construction and destruction.
Whether they will label such evidence as a stratigraphic boundary will depend on fashions in earth sciences at that time. For our purposes the name seems to have some utility. Why not use it?
Tom,
I don’t know. The human impact on Earth was minuscule until the advent of widespread agriculture… Or at most starting with large mammal extinctions in the new world with the arrival of humans about 12,000 years ago. But 50,000 years? That is too much of a stretch I think. We dominate Earth’s flora and fauna, of course. But that dominance is very recent.
I wrote above it is closer to the Azolla Event.
Cue Arthur Brown: “I am the god of hellfire and I bring you…”
Tom, I was on the corner of the stage at the Middle Earth basement club when Arthur Brown’s roadie managed to set the place (starting with a speaker cabinet) on fire. Not normally part of the act, the fire was usually contained.
Amazed at the greenie transformation into misanthorpe. ‘Tis holistic suicide by way of collapsing into the perceptual focus
Is Misan related to Jim?
Hahaha .. No. Throppled that one
Anthropology used to be a subject now it’s a scene. The last scene of ‘The Wanderers’; Karen Allen walks out of the fifties and into the sixties with a coffee house where Bob Dylan is performing. Now that’s a scene, man.
Well, having just commented on an Arthur Brown gig, I must say that I saw Dylan at Gerdie’s Folkhouse (approx) in 1962, put perhaps that wasn’t the Karen Allen coffee house.
I’m impressed. Sounds like you’ve been around the block. What’s the title of your autobiography?
Montypythoncene?
Deadparrotocene
thatwasn’taminuteocene. thanks jim/LB
As a Geologist and partial warmest, I believe in global warming but reject the premise of catastrophic AGW, and an atheist I have always found the whole argument around climate change filled with humanistic hubris. Maybe I’m a fatalist, but the talk of the end of the earth, or destruction of the earth always confuses me. If you look back through geologic history, change on dramatic scales is the norm not the anomaly. Why do so many believe that a climate change would be the end of the earth. A truly great and dramatic shift in climate may result in the end of humans dominance of the present ecology and our civilization, but the earth would change, recover and continue on. We would just be another of the great extinctions. Actually that’s also hubris, we would just be a minor extinction. I admit that this would be a bad result for humankind but no worse than has happened to other species. It just that our hubris and belief that we are “ordained by God” would take a mighty beating. The geologic record would contain the “Anthropocene” marker if there was some future intelligent species to recognize it, if no other intelligent species were there to puzzle over it, we come to the old saw “If a tree falls in the forest and no on is there to hear, does it make a sound?”
But Phyllograptus! We must keep the earth EXACTLY the way it was when we found it! Anything less is a moral offense to Nature!
+1
Phyllograptus,
I agree with your whole comment
I am a partial warmist too. I accept AGW, but not CAGW for the same reasons as you’ve stated. But I’d go further. I lean towards believing CO2 emissions and warming have done much more good than harm so far and will do more good than harm for most of, probably all of, this century.
I also believe humans will manage the issues and the risk very well, in our own largely undirected, innovative ways. I believe central control and direction by the self appointed experts has been doing far more harm than good for over 50 years and continues to do so. The ‘Progressives’ are retarding progress by advocating their beliefs and prescriptive, top-down, irrational, solutions..
Peter Lang we do gave a serious problem: we are running out of oil.
That’s a different issue. That’s not about climate change. If that is an issue to be dealt with it, then deal with it, not try to use it as an excuse for GHG mitigation.
But our world is not well understood. Time and space is not understood. Theoretical physicists are searching for a world of 4+ spatial dimensions and there are serious theories that the world lies in a time machine; that everything we experience has been predetermined, as if there is video of the universe including all events since the beginning of time, and we are experiencing a rerun. If CAGW is occurring it is beyond our control and we have no control over anything. Prove me wrong.
Fernando, we are not running out of oil, we are running out of “cheap” oil. There is enough oil for centuries, but it will be more difficult to access and more expensive to produce. We are also running out of “politically secure and accessible” oil.
The Antrhopocene has plenty of potential to be a legitimate geological time unit.
It’s fine for the IUGS to argue about stratigraphy, but that’s not what defines geological time units. They’re defined by faunal boundaries (hence the “-zoic” in Proterozoic, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic). Moreover, faunal boundaries can be time transgressive, so a given geological time unit need not start at the exact same time everywhere.
We have more than enough evidence that humans have had a massive impact on Earth’s fauna. As Mr. Fuller points out, this starts quite early, with the extinction of the Australian megafauna at 30-some-odd thousand years ago, proceeds with other megafauna extinctions on various continents and microcontinents up through about 13,000 years ago, and is gaining steam with continuing extinctions around the globe. And of course agriculture now claims nearly 40% of earth’s land surface, which I guess you’ll all agree is a substantial alteration of the earth’s flora, leading to a substantial change in fauna. And last but not least, for a variety of reasons including agriculture, humans have drug thousands of species from one continent to the other and let them loose, which would create rather abrupt appearances of new fauna in the geologic record.
So I don’t think it’s the least bit outside science to designate a time unit in which humans are the predominant faunal group shaping the planet. The only real question is where to put the boundary.
‘The only real question is where to put the boundary.’
I’m sure we con come up with suggestions.
JH-Geologist: there is biostratigraphy and chronostratigraphy. the first occurrence of a species is usually diachronic, Because of yhis diachronism, Golden Spikes are always site specific. eg the base of the Maastrichtian Stage is defined as the first appearance of Pachydiscus neubergicus at level 115.2 on platform IV of the geological site at Tercis les Bains (Landes, France).
Also the base of the holocene is based on “an abrupt shift in deuterium excess values, accompanied by more gradual changes in !18O, dust concentration, a range of chemical species, and annual layer thickness”
So the base of the Holocene is defined without a biostratigraphic marker!
“there is biostratigraphy and chronostratigraphy”
Indeed. Nonetheless, all the major units of geologic time are biostratigraphic.
“Also the base of the holocene is based on “an abrupt shift in deuterium excess values”
Yes, upon reading a bit more about the holocene in particular I see that it’s definition is a nasty mess. It’s the only “climate-stratigraphic” unit in the geologic time scale. All the more reason to straighten the mess out and properly define the later part of the Quaternary with new Epochs and Stages that are biostratigraphically derived.
IMO, the Holocene must go. It should be replaced by the Anthropocene, which should be divided into Early (~35Ka – start of megafauna extinctions), Middle (~13Ka, End of megafauna extinctions) and Late (0.15? Ka, rapid growth of agriculture.
Yes, I would say that the Holocene, so far, has just been another Pleistocene interglacial. It seems a little fake to give it its own epoch when the Eemian was the same kind of thing and did not make epoch status. We should still be in the Pleistocene epoch (until now).
if fauna is the key, then perhaps Monsantozoic or Monsantocene, marking widespread direct manipulation of plant life characteristics.
“And of course agriculture now claims nearly 40% of earth’s land surface, which I guess you’ll all agree is a substantial alteration of the earth’s flora, leading to a substantial change in fauna.”
I stopped reading right there. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO):
http://www.fao.org/docrep/005/y4252e/y4252e06.htm
Shame, it looks like the FAO only considers Food as in grains, fruits etc. There are a lot of “other” crops out there.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/12/1209_051209_crops_map.html
Well, never let it be said that Revkin and other self-appointed saviours of the planet are not into “recycling”.
Three years ago, even The Economist was flogging Crutzon’s baby, i.e. The Anthropocene. [details at The Economist dives into uncharted waters of “The Anthropocene”]
Sorry, link above s/b The Economist dives into uncharted waters of “The Anthropocene”]
They keep saying we are heading for the 5th great extinction. It hasn’t happened – and the vast majority of species carry on in a way or another. This is no argument for complacency – but really what – other than a moral panic – we are going to do about it.
I have a suggestion – and anew project – http://watertechbyrie.com/
Actually Skippy, it’s the 6th great extinction, as there were already 5 great extinction events well recorded in the geological record.
http://news.sciencemag.org/2011/03/are-we-middle-sixth-mass-extinction
I knew there was a 5 somewhere.
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/life/dinosaurs-other-extinct-creatures/mass-extinctions/
So – we are not heading for the 6th great extinction – JC SNIP
Looks like Judith will let certain ad homs pass if they strike her as funny enough, and certainly Skippy, you are always the funny one, but unfortunately your brand of humor relies on belittlement of others. Formally, I would request that she snip your humor in this case.
So has gatesy given up calling being snide and noxious? The endless insults and belittlement? I shouldn’t think that’s part of the game plan.
So has gatesy given up being snide and noxious? The endless insults and belittlement? That would be a major shift. I shouldn’t think that’s part of the game plan.
Robert I. Ellison
I’m still on Aussie time: awakened at 3 AM EDST and couldn’t sleep, so I do what I usually do, get up and read.
I read your essay on the unstable math of Ghil, and, it seems I become more comfortable with concepts each time I re-read.
Thank you
Agree. Dr. Ellison also makes philosophical sense. The universe, our societies, ecology, and life are a complex system of subsystems. Why should the climate be anything different?
I don’t have a PhD – I have degrees in engineering – specialising in hydrology – and in environmental science.
I am in the very early stages of a project on the Millennium Development Goals – but it is looking good. The Ghil essay has been rewritten – and I am rewriting it again for popular publication as well as submitting it for peer review.
I am about to post a new soil carbon article – this is one of the most practical and useful ways forward.
Cheers
Let me know when your soil carbon article is available
Every biological form on this planet has some impact on the planet. Biological activity (the Biosphere) can’t help but modify the other spheres, and of course, the biosphere modifies itself. Now generally this influence has been spread around amongst thousands of species, however, during this particular interglacial, one species, namely Homo sapiens, now dominate all the spheres with their activity. To the best of our knowledge, this has never happened before, or at least not in the past 50 millions years or so. For that distinction alone, that is, humans being the dominant change agent species on the planet, the current period merits some distinction, rather than just another interglacial. Certainly this interglacial will stand out from others of the last few million years. GH gases will be higher than any previous interglacial since the Quaternary started, and indeed the highest since the Pliocene. The Anthropocene is an appropriate descriptive term, regardless of strict formality, just as Human Carbon Volcano is a very apt and descriptive term for the massive transfer of carbon from lithosphere to atmosphere by human activity. That both of these terms cause some (mainly faux-skeptics) heartburn and are casually rejected by them, is a very predictable response.
It is symptomatic of a moral panic – and wholly counterproductive.
Darwinist too huh
Interestingly, the HCV is in fact one of the key features of the Anthropocene, as the rapidity with which carbon is being transferred from lithosphere to atmosphere is very rare in the geological history of the planet. One would in fact have to go back to the PETM to find a similarly rapid transfer, and even that was not as rapid. This fact lends even more weight to the appropriate nature of the term Anthropocene, with humans as the cause of this massive movement of carbon via the HCV.
The biological use of ‘information’ offloads and weights to a hidden unstated background context. The physical meaning and usage of ‘information’ is intended to eliminate implied background context.
RG – The HCVocene.
IF we are looking at the atmospheric changes as the defining element of an era, looking at the CO2 levels/changes is certainly a legitimate measure on which to measure a shift. I find your HCV metaphor instructive and provocative. The changes in CO2 are dramatic and likely unprecedented.
However, with the rise of mining, agriculture, civilization, roads, cities, and globalization, the impacts of CO2 are at best indirect and will most likely be details only for historians of science.
2-3 degrees C hotter than 2014 over the course of a century will lead to technological adaptation that will leave direct traces – but the smart money is that the technology itself will be the thing that leaves the mark, not CO2 as a cause. Especially because innovation (driven by mitigation policy or the logic of capital) WILL create new technologies, and those new technologies will drive the culture/narrative of the future.
Right or wrong – historians of the future will be dealing with political/technological/social changes, not a technological by-product that collects and disperses in the atmosphere on a decade timescale. Unless science historians manage to maintain the CO2 narrative over centuries (millennia?) the fact that the HCV drove the technology will be little more than a footnote, even if you are right.
At most we are talking about an anthropogenic flux of 3% of natural carbon dioxide flux. Half of the increase in the atmosphere is from warmth effects on vegetation and soils – warmth mostly unrelated to CO2 and likely to disappear just as quickly. Against a background of quite spectacular natural CO2 change. Minor anthropogenic changes horribly exaggerated for invidious political purpose.
Despite your attempts to obfuscate the essential dynamics, the point remains that human activity is adding more net carbon to the atmosphere than any process since the PETM. You can arm wave all you want, but the process and scale of the HCV is quite clear. Oh, and of course, when you lack other ways to obfuscate the essential details, you launch your ad homs. All very much the pattern of Skippy Ellison.
Another pointless, irrational and trivial personal attack from Randy.
“At most we are talking about an anthropogenic flux of 3% of natural carbon dioxide flux. ”
—–
This is a common way for faux-skeptics to misrepresent the actual situation– that is, comparing the anthropogenic carbon transfer to the atmosphere to the natural background rate. This is a false comparison, for the natural background rate is part of the overall rock-carbon cycle with natural feedbacks to keep carbon in a range during interglacials. When these feedbacks are overwhelmed, as they are with the HCV, the cycle is unbalanced. A disruption of the rock-carbon cycle is another hallmark of the Anthropocene,
That are much more dynamic sources of both carbon dioxide and carbonate than silicate weathering.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Steinthorsdottir_CO2_stomata_2013_zps0180f088.png.html?sort=3&o=108
Rather than the cycle – it is the narrative from such as Randy that is unbalanced.
In my pre-retirement job as a B.S. Detector, determining where some government funds should go, Gates’ argument does not pass the test. There is no proof that feedbacks can be overwhelmed and it is very suspicious that overwhelming occurs precisely at the level of natural background.
Sometimes I feel so embarrassed for you I wish I were dead.
Educate yourself out of those feelings Aaron.
Ultranatureomethaniem.
Gates
Making up dramatic new terms (HCV) to instill fear is not reliable evidence that the CO2 emitted by humans will lead to dramatically worse conditions for humans.
Heh, it’s just his general preference for debate through the use of fear and guilt that he misnames the Human Carbon Cornucopia as the Human Carbon Volcano. He’s afraid, and we’ll just have to learn to tolerate those most prey to fear and guilt. It takes all kinds.
==============
New terms that aptly and concisely describe a dynamic in a way that illuminates the true situation can only be positive. The HCV is precise and accurate. If this invokes fear, then that reaction says more about the person who is fearful versus the creator of the term. Like any dynamic in the universe, the HCV is neutral to human emotions and is merely descriptive of a dynamic.
Right, ‘volcano’ and ‘cornucopia’ are terms neutral to human emotions. Sometimes I feel so embarrassed for you I wish you were.
===========
Kim,
A cornucopia implies something completely positive whereas a volcano is just an event– dramatic to be sure, but really not positive or negative. Volcanoes can bring great destruction, but also provide the seeds for a new wave of life in the region affected– much like a wildfire in fact. So the HCV is a description rather than an proscription or emotionally laden term like “cornucopia”. The fact remains that the human transfer of carbon from lithosphere to atmosphere is very much like a large, long-lived carbon volcano. If you find this scary or negative, then that says more about you than about the actual dynamics.
The use of misleading, emotive and wildly exaggerated terms is an absurd and hugely ineffective political posturing.
Rationally – carbon dioxide is the smaller part of a much broader challenge facing humanity this century. Even with climate the issues are multiple gases, land use, population, development, etc.
Getting things back to a rational perspective is the goal du jour. Frankly this involves ignoring – silencing and marginalizing where possible – the peanut gallery to reach the mainstream.
R. Gates,
My theory is that climate skeptics don’t like the ongoing rise in CO2 being described as a human carbon volcano because that phrase very neatly and succinctly captures exactly what is going on and what is causing it. In just three words.
They admit the idea of a human carbon volcano is scary and alarming. This is why they want you to stop using the term. They don’t want to be scared.
They’d rather cover themselves in a security blanket of vague and mealy worded descriptions that minimize what is going on, such as calling it “an anthropogenic flux of 3% of natural carbon dioxide flux”.
Why do you need scare stories?
Who are you trying to scare?
The sceptics? Why should you care what they think?
The Government? Do they care what you think?
Or are you trying to scare yourselves?
Or perhaps convince yourselves?
Have you stopped to think that your scare stories may be the cause of much of the scepticism which you complain about?
Gates,
Why not call it what it is HCE human carbon emissions. Humans are not volcanoes.
ordvic – emissions are not scary. volcanoes are violent/destructive. Unless of course you enjoy Hawaii, in which case they are fantastic – especially riding down them on a bike at sunrise, or for the 1.3 million people who live on the islands they created, or the 14 Billion dollars in tourism they generate.
>The Anthropocene is an appropriate descriptive term, regardless of strict formality …<
Post-modern "science" in full swing … vomitous
R. Gates: The Anthropocene is an appropriate descriptive term, regardless of strict formality, just as Human Carbon Volcano is a very apt and descriptive term for the massive transfer of carbon from lithosphere to atmosphere by human activity. That both of these terms cause some (mainly faux-skeptics) heartburn and are casually rejected by them, is a very predictable response.
So far, the aim of promoters of “anthropocene” seem to be using in mainly as a pejorative. Perhaps that will change and the word will come to have neutral connotation. But “Human Carbon Volcano” (HCV) is clearly an exaggeration. Terrestrial volcanoes do sometimes have long term fertilizing effects, so if those are borne in mind along with the fertilizing effects of increasing CO2 HCV might not be offensive forever — but it is still an exaggeration.
I have alwas thought that the “Anthropocene” represented the triumph of the city bred humans who fail to recognise how small the human race is. Occasionally it will hit them — usually literally — when there is something like a violent storm or an earthquake, but the rest of the time they think they are the centre of the universe.
It is much harder to believe this when you live in New Zealand like I do. Then to get to the next plane takes three hours when you see nothing but water. To get to the USA takes the best part of a day — and you see nothing but water. To get to the UK takes a couple of days, and most of that time you see nothing man-made.
Then you realise how insignificant the human race is in the scheme of things.
Mary
If you knew Detroit, you would have a much different perspective. Enjoy your remoteness.
In my wanders to and fro’it,
Often wondered why the exiles
Rush and fill so many new aisles,
From Brooklyn and Detroit.
===================
When is the last time they named a geologic epoch to send a strong reminder to the general public? In 1941, RememberPearlHarborocene? Fast forward to 2001, 9/11ocene? In honor of our lovely current First Lady, Eatyourvegetablesocene?
I think they should call it the Pauseocene. Let’s take a vote.
I vote for Pauseocene. The deep ocean is warming at 1/500th of a degree per year and we only have 100 years worth of fossil fuel left. IPCC are toast
If you need a stratigraphic tracer, why not human made nucleotides from atmospheric nuclear blasts? The first would be the Trinity test on 16 july 1945 at 5.30 pm Nevada time, although not globally detectable.
That will probably be what the geologists a hundred and fifty years in the future will decide on as the beginning of the Nuclearocene, Hans. Humankind will be worshiping nuclear power by that time. It’s the only viable replacement for fossil fuels.
of course,
Now if we need a truly global event, then perhaps the Bikini H-Bomb test is more global as a marker, although a golden spike is usually located on a single site, however the start of the holocene is sitting in a fridge in Denmark and defined as ” 11,700 yr b2k (before AD2000) […] with an estimated 2s uncertainty of 99 yr.”
In hydrology and hydrogeological evaluations, geologists routinely analyse and measure the Tritium concentrations in water as their short half life and wholely anthropogenic source as a by product atmospheric nuclear bomb testing make them an extremely useful age dating method in the hydrologic cycle. This is a globally detectable tracer, however within a century or so it will no longer be usable unless atmospheric bomb testing is re initiated
There are both anthropogenic and natural sources of tritium in the atmosphere. Tritium is produced by cosmic-ray neutrons interacting with nitrogen in the atmosphere. Atmospheric thermo-nuclear bomb testing in the 1950’s and 60’s certainly contributed a major spike to the natural tritium inventory that is often used as a tracer in hydrological and hydrogeological studies but useful measuremnts are now made using T-3He dating techniques that don’t rely on knowledge of the tritium input curve. Of course you are right that within a century or so there will be no evidence of the T spike of the 1950’s and 60’s
Anthropocene
The term is mainly used so as to draw attention to evil stupid small-minded destructive humanity. It is a recent application of the classic BODY versus MIND debate. I.E. ‘Mind’ is stupid, volatile delusional undefinable etc.
Yeah well here is a clue … There are two types of people … Those who consider thoughts to be rubbish and those who find worth in thoughts.
The categorizer for ‘Mind’ versus ‘body’ is set by perception and topology
Object descriptions pertain to body. All objects are independent and isolated. Making jumps across discontinuous voids pertains to ‘mind’. The jumping is effected by a timely slur
Pingback: ¿Ha empezado Antropobsceno? | PlazaMoyua.com
Rather than anthropocene, I believe a better label would the Hubrisocene. Starting in the sixties or seventies, and post-modernism (whatever that is), where a few self defined “smart people”, usually some government bureaucracy, academic, or activist think that they can tell everybody how to live often based on personal beliefs and prejudices masquerading as science. Hubris.
The things that everyone “knew” to be true that turned out to be nonsense are legion. Anything Freud said, fat and eggs cause heat disease, ulcers are the result of stress, DDT should be banned, polar bears are going extinct, CO2 causes asthma and heart problems (latest EPA rules), the government should encourage high density living, mass transit, high speed rail in the California desert, welfare reduces the number of people in poverty, learning styles theory, catastrophic anthropomorphic climate change, etc… People come up with theories and insist that they are put into policy before they are actually verified as true. Hubris
The conceit of central planning by Marx leading to the new deal of Roosevelt and on to the ever expanding list of rules and regulations promulgated at all levels of government by elected officials and bureaucracies are the result of the hubris that we, mankind, are now in conscious control and that nature, randomness, organic social movements are minor factors at best. Damage due to a hurricane must be “caused” by Global warming, bad building codes, poor zoning, ineffective government response, racism (Katrina), or some other factor under our control. Hubris.
Climate change theory is just the latest chapter in the hubrisocene era.
@ jknapp1949
Got it in one; thank you.
How about Deniocene in honor of the people who keep saying “This can’t be happening”?
Jest one small edit re yr succinct sum up,jkn, ‘hubrisobscene.’
Or just The Obscene, because Anthrobscene is redundant to those who use Athropocene.
SERF PONDERINGS ON GEOLOGICAL EPOCHS AND
PREDICTION.
Life is not easy fer serfs living as they do on the littoral,
nor fer kings neither, fer uneasy, they say, is the head
that wears the crown, ‘Et tu Brutus?’ but I digress…
Beware, not jest the Ides of March, but also sins of
uncertainty and hubris, heed Socrates and Judith C,
eschew certainty and certainly eschew long term
predictions, shamen machinations that defer
refutation and demand action ‘now!’
A serf.
Three arguments for beginning Anthropocene, as I have seen in this blog are:
nuclear explosions, global spreading of species and transfer of buried CO2 into the ocean/atmosphere system.
The first has already been detected in sedimentary layers, I believe. And the second will show up once these creatures are deposited in the sediments far away fromtheir origin. The Co2 isotopes will provide evidence of the third.
It may be hubris, but I for one will be sad if the demise of the elephant and whale is added to the beginning of the the Antropocene.
Two thousand years ago Rome had a population of 1 million people and spread for fifty miles. It gathered the food from far and wide, including North Africa, in order to feed its population.
It brought in species hitherto unknown in the countries it ruled, for example in Britain they brought rabbits. They brought architecture, rule of law, organisation and the wholesale cutting down of forests and replacement by fields.
In their time the climate changed from warm to very warm, whereby Beech trees disappeared from the city and Nero entreated citizens to build their streets in a way to combat the heat of the city following the great fire.
Then the climate cooled considerably and some argue, was their downfall.
So can the Romans claim to be the start of the Anthropocene in as much they had a great impact on their surroundings?
If so, we can also learn that-despite mans efforts the world will continue to warm and cool. As Hubert Lamb said shortly before he died;
“The idea of climate change has at last taken on with the public after generations which assumed that climate could be taken as constant. But it is easy to notice the common assumption that mans science and modern industry and technology are now so powerful that any change of climate or the environment must be due to us. It is good for us to be more alert and responsible in our treatment of the environment, but not to have a distorted view of our own importance. Above all, we need more knowledge, education and understanding in these matters.”
Hubert Lamb DEC 1994
Anthropocene? I think we need to heed Lambs words and the examples of cities like Rome and stop imagining that we are more important than nature.
tonyb
Thanks Tony.
Why not go back to Qin Shi Huang (260–210 BC)? He was mass casting iron arrowheads from what they have found in his tomb. Blame China.
and stop imagining that we are more important than nature.
We are natural. The dead dont imagine
There are any number of markers of our current era that will be visible in 100K years, for example, thin layers of lead from tetra ethyl lead, massive extinctions, various stable isotope ratios disturbed, layers of ores displaced, etc.
http://rabett.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/explain-universe-give-two-examples.html
so what?
It will mark the end of an epic period of carbon deprivation for the biome.
====================
Dr Rabett, the most reliable marker will be a series of evenly spaced concentric steel pipes filled with cement. These will be accurate markers which will gradually emerge from the earth as the surface is eroded. Very accurate dating will be achieved by looking at the type of steel used, the cement isotopes, as well as the stamps, which will have symbols such as Sumitomo, Mannesman, Vallourec, and Magnitogorsk Steel Combine 26.
800,000 year old footprints recently discovered along UK shoreline:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0088329
About 799,500 years later, we invented football, which we codified in the 19thC. Now we don’t know how to win a World Cup game. Everything changes.
Mounds like no other civ
“Even if the Anthropocene doesn’t make it as a geological epoch, it seems here to stay as an environmental meme. As an environmental meme, it has some promise –”
Memes prosper in the direction of narrative success, not veracity. And with a term for which the absolute truth, as noted above, in the strict geological sense, can only be determined a million years hence, this term is highly fluid and hence at high risk of simply falling into alignment with the dominant apocalyptic narrative as established by the ‘traditional’ Greens. To have a more positive counter-narrative that can successfully challenge the environmental apocalypse story, I guess one needs a whole bunch of allied positive memes, some at least of which are less easy to hi-jack, and all of which must hit emotive hot-buttons, but of the optimistic not pessimistic kind.
I’ve long called Techno-Optimists v Malthusian Doomsayers not even a sporting contest. Historically, who always wins this one, sadly and unnecessarily replayed over and over on the late night channel?
================================
Kim – the Malthusians always win today, while the techno-optimists always win tomorrow. And tomorrow is just today away.
Bonding/Building a common culture via Storytelling ( I.E. Climate Mythology)
Climate training with Al Gore: learning from the best
http://judithcurry.com/2013/08/11/climate-science-sociology/#comment-364265
Quotes from the Great Darwinist Theologian E. O. Wilson
Science and religion are the two most powerful forces in the world. Having them at odds… is not productive.
People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/17/climate-change-is-sucking-funding-away-from-biodiversity/#comment-1664385
Mike (Aesop) Hulme
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/04/quote-of-the-week-cru-scientist-disses-cooks-97/#comment-1558534
Kloor, once again, confuses his prosperity with that of others and the future. But then again, he always was oblivious.
Rabett, once again, confuses his propensity with that of others and the future. But then again, he always was obvious.
===================
Kloor, once again, confuses his perspicacity with that of others and the future. But then again, he always was obtuse.
=======================
You lose the rent a clue coupon Eli sent for your birthday?
Nice formula, Bunny. I could keep banging the drum all night long, but won’t.
==========
It’s standard off-the-shelf Kim. One uses a trivial truth (in this case Kloor’s prosperity), to establish the apparant veracity of a sentence, which if not read too critically means our minds will often accept the rest of the sentence (essentially, the invalidity of Kloor’s argument) as also being correct. Following up with a mild insult to the original party, or alternatively a gooey truism, typically delivered from perceived high moral ground, will act as a ‘lock’ to ensure that for readers who may be tempted to spend a few milliseconds more thinking about the meaning of the sentence, the established relationship is pressed in before that can happen.
If you want fun seeing how a whole string of blindingly obvious and simple lines of this kind, strung together in a narrative see-saw engine, can so easily fool people, google / bing the popular meme “the paradox of our time”. Hundreds of thousands of sites find the verses wonderful and inspirational. Their real information content is zero, and worse they can serious harm one’s understanding of the world.
w?
Don’t feel too bad, Andy. Kim makes a lot of people feel bitter and angry.
Andy’s book about something or other is available on kindle, for the discounted price of 99 cents:
http://www.amazon.com/Engines-Life-Tales-Evolution-ebook/dp/B00DTT8MZE
Don Monfort | June 23, 2014 at 12:03 pm |
Don, I think you must have completely misunderstood, I wrong-threaded it but see my reply below: andywest2012 | June 23, 2014 at 1:29 pm
Added to which, I was just contributing how the (generic version of) the formula employed by Rabbett, works.
Don
West quotes Mosher. That alone should recommend him.
well, be happy you have something to bang besides your head.
“kim makes people bitter and angry”?? What sort of warped people would they be? I would open my door to them only from compassion.
kim is non pareil like the Scarlet Pimpernel.
beth the serf.
The Bunny Soothsayer bunny peers into the Bunny future. He knows. He knows.
Don Monfort | June 23, 2014 at 12:03 pm |
Don, I think you must have completely misunderstood. Kim always makes me feel rather wonderful, and never bad. Plus he’s often made some nice poetic additions to my comments, which I appreciate very much. As I also appreciated very much his comments in reply to Rabett here.
I was merely pointing out that the formula that Rabett was using, and which Kim rather playfully and wonderfully set in context, was not in fact a Rabett production, but a standard off-the-shelf model used very many times indeed, and therefore not a product of Rabett imagination, but merely borrowed. The meme I mentioned uses the same mechanism many times end to end in a narrative see-saw.
However, I have no problem with you promoting my fiction works. There’s even a sceptical cli-fi story in the volume you link, which was reviewed by Judith here on Climnate Etc. :)
I also admire kim. He comes across as very smart, because very often
I don’t understand him. Better to consider him smart than to consider me stupid. – Are you sure that kim is a “He”?
rls: Are you sure that kim is a “He”?
Um, no. But Kim transcends gender boundaries anyhow :)
My sincere apologies, Andy. After I work on my reading skills, I will read one of your books to atone for my faux pas. One of the free ones : )
Don Monfort | June 23, 2014 at 4:53 pm |
No worries, Don :) Try ‘Truth’ from my site or free in various formats at Smashwords. Lyrosophical style, very climate skeptical indeed, and only an hour to read.
Andy – apparently your book is not a best seller. I suppose that RG is using that to disparage your comment. I hope that irony makes you smile.
“is kim a “he”?” I’m convinced he began as a street-urchin in Lahore about 130 years ago, his wit and wisdom have been accumulated over a long period.
Find any people on this planet who have become poorer over the last century or so, who’s life expectancy has decreased, who’s quality of life has worsened.
Well, now I’m 72, I would say that my life expectancy has decreased from what it was, say, 50 years ago.
The trouble with this silly digression into terminology is how would you date the end of the Anthropocene, short of the end of Man?
Ah, the Holocene Interglacial has apparently ended. Welcome to the Frozen Portion of the Anthropocene.
=======================
The Anthropopsicleocene.
kim – I think you mean the end of Mann is the reframing of Anthropocene into “the time of humanities thriving and dominance.”
Hah! I only wish that the humanities were about humanity’s thriving!
Why wouldn’t the Anthropocene start about 5-6 thousand years ago with the development of large scale agriculture?
That’s when we really began to make the massive changes on the landscape with probably under appreciated climatic consequences.
James – where is the emotional appeal in that – unless of course you think that humanity mastering food is a period in evolution worth noting.
It has nothing to do with emotional appeal.
Without agriculture we could not sustain our large populations. Without large populations human effects would be vastly reduced.
Direct effects of agriculture include the destruction of forests for cropland – still continuing today. This puts CO2 into the atmosphere, eliminates the aerosol contribution of the forest, and directly destroys entire ecosystems.
There has been some research suggesting that population decline of native Americans after the arrival of the European directly contributed to the Little Ice Age because the croplands tended by the native Americans began to become reforested.
Unfortunately Mark Lewis is right, it has everything to do with emotional appeal. In a debate that wallows in uncertainty, the terms with the highest emotional punch rise to the top. They enforce alignment, assist their own retransmission, and via amplification of confirmation bias / noble cause corruption / motivated reasoning and similar mechanisms (the emotive load creates a gateway into the pysche for these), they also help to preserve the uncertainty that fostered the terms in the first place. They can even alter the accepted landscape of social and moral norms.
Plasticine, after the infinite plasticity of the CAGW meme.
Bakelite an Egyptian.
==============
:)
double :-)
Lovely :)
Plasticity is an essential characteristic for a wild meme. For one that you want to keep tame in order to use as a counter-narrative, a wolfhound to battle the wolf, then infinite plasticity is a big disadvantage. It means your wolfhound will likely slip the leash and become wild also. While ‘wild’ doesn’t always equal ‘bad’, I figure it probably would for the term ‘anthropocene’, which already has intimations of disaster and could simply get absorbed into the umbrella of CAGW, so end up helping and not bounding this.
Plasticine – love it, especially as even the climate cultists admit it’s more for marketing than science.
Why not go all the way and call it the ‘New-Improvedicine”?
Plus one.
Why not Apocalypticine – saves all the translation laers inbetween.
I think it is a strong Malthusian influence which has led the enviro/green movement down a self-defeating path. The basic arguments for utter doom are unchanged from the Club of Rome heyday in the late 1960’s. It seems to matter to the enviro/green cabal not at all that all the C of R predictions were proven wrong. The Malthusian influence on environmentalism produces policy goals which are disconnected from reality and unable to evolve based on new information. Malthus was wrong, get over it.
Great Britain a once green and pleasant land is now scorched, no bird song and the rivers are acidic.
Of course it’s not true but hey why would the Eco Morons care? Any lie will do.
Maybe we should call it The Obscene?
My preferred name for the current eco-correct era is ‘risibilocene’. The silliness of the green movement will not show up in the rock strata, of course, so the humor will be lost on whoever is examining the strata 20 or 30 million years hence.
Ribisiscene.
Here’s an idea: why not let geologists of the future analyze the stratigraphic column?
Homo sapiens share a common interest in understanding correctly the source of energy (The Sun) that sustains our lives by meeting the needs and aspirations of all of humanity.
Jo Nova and Dr. David Evans may be on the right track to fulfill that need by collectively “Building a new solar climate model” via the engineering method of “reasoning together” versus the competitive (I’m right but you’re wrong) method of theoretical physics.
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/06/big-news-part-vi-building-a-new-solar-climate-model-with-the-notch-filter/
” I have a quality of life unprecedented in the history of humanity and I think everyone on the planet deserves to enjoy the same privileges and opportunities I have.”
I think this sentence, more than the simple ‘realist’ vs. ‘deniers’ camps, encapsulates the position of have the climate change debate.
The first half is true and the second half is moral, at least as far as I define moral. Cheap abundant energy lifts humanity out of poverty and poverty sucks.
I made the following comment on another site, in another context, but it sure seems relevant here…
Consider the following –
• The proportion of undernourished people in the developing world fell from 23% in ’90-’92 to less than 15% in ’10-’12.
• More than two BILLION people gained access to potable water in the last decade.
• Never in the history of the world have so many lived such a good quality of life.
• Indicators of environmental quality show a steady IMPROVEMENT over the last half-century in the US.
Then why all the negativity? I’m not sure, but Schumpeter (of Creative Destruction fame) may offer a clue. He predicted that capitalism would lead to a rise in living standards (which it has), which in turn would lead to a great increase in the educational level of the population (which it has). Then the educated but uncompetitive would blame the system for their failings, and seize control of educational and cultural institutions so that they could propagandize that capitalism doesn’t work (which seems to be the case). Ya gotta wonder…
Because the Bunny can see into the future, and he shake and shudders.
I’m extremely worried about the forthcoming end of oil crisis. The sea level rise associated with the increase in ocean energy content is also concerning me because I own property close to the beach. However, I’m encouraged by the signs that global warming is taking place at a much slower pace than the models projected. And the end of oil impact will be softened by the warmist movement. Which means we are likely to survive even if some of us won’t do so in one piece.
Anthropomorphicene.
Keith Kloor is getting there.
The way to make the world a better place for everyone and everything, is to emphasise the positive of role of science, engineering, and the industrial revolution.
Specifically scientists and engineers who want to create novelty and to actually make things. Not the Cider-with-Rosie approach which harks back to a golden era which never existed. That merely panders to those who wish to find fault and to stop us doing things. People who like making laws for others to obey.
Politicians need to stop funding negative science and politicised science. It is quite easy to spot. It is people who are looking to find a disaster [for which, conveniently, there often already seems to be a ready-made solution which involves more laws.]
I also turn a jaundiced eye upon any politician who proclaims a “war on xxx”, where xxx=pretty much anything. Such “wars” generally don’t work out too well and seem to end up funding lots of things that shouldn’t be funded, even when ‘the cause’ is laudable.
–e.g., the Senate’s war on capitalism.
I was really happy to see Bush lead the invasion of Iraq and replace Saddam with Nouri Al Maliki. Nouri’s term should be short lived, and soon we will see the Mahdi Army led by the great Moqtada al Sadr take control of all the sacred sites. This will lead to the emergence of a glorious Shia power, which together with the Hezbollah cadres and the brothers from Iran will form the nucleus of a much stronger and well organized jihad. Mr Bush will get a statue built in Karbala, protected by a steel cage to make sure Sunni heretics won’t toss their shoes at the inventor of Shia democracy and the new 21st Century Califate.
After the 9/11 attack, advisors to Bush evaluated the threat of terrorism and concluded that it wasn’t limited to a threat from Al Qaeda. The Bush administration then developed a strategy which was called the Global War on Terrorism. It is popular to denigrate Bush, but he correctly identified the threat and recognized that the world would not be safe until that threat was defeated. Now that the GWOT has been dismantled and replaced with no strategy; terrorism is on the rise and people of the world are less safe; there may be greater threats than global warming.
We blasted through the Space Age and built our Towers of Babel in the Information Age so, what’s next, the Age of Flimflam?
We are living in the sand age; glass and concrete are our principle building materials.
Pretty amusing irony, Judy, reading Roz Pidcock buy that stuff about the missing heat going into the deep ocean, but only for a little while now.
=============
Climate Etc’s skeptics are displaying a profound ye utterly unnecessary ignorance of the Anthropocene … an ignorance that Pope Francis’ team is working hard to remediate:
• The Fate of Mountain Glaciers in the Anthropocene
• Sustainable Humanity, Sustainable Nature: Our Responsibility
• Scientific Consensus and the Role and Character of Scientific Dissent
Reminder There’s a whole lot more to mathematics, physical science, economics, politics, and morality than superannuated Ayn Rand novels, juvenile libertarian fantasies, and astroturfed Big Carbon polemics!
Both climate-science students and Climate Etc conspiracy-theorists will do well well heed Francis Bacon’s four-hundred-year-old advice advice
Conclusion There is no effective difference twixt folks who choose not to read the scientific literature, and folks who cannot read that literature.
Good on `yah, Team Francis!
“Procure to know more”, Climate Etc conspiracy-theorists!!
These considerations aren’t complicated, Climate Etc readers!!!
When unable to effectively make your case for action with reasonable science or economics, Fan justifies his/her religious like beliefs by citing another religious person.
Fan—I respect your right to BELIEVE in whatever personal form of religion that you wish. Whether it is you, or the people in ISIS that try to force your system of BELIEFs on others is when I have a disagreement.
You keep going on with that “backtest overfitting” comment and I can only assume you are out to further discredit CSALT. Not that I mind. WebHubbleTelescope ought to be able to defend it, but he can’t.
And BTW, how is the super el nino, that is going to end the pause coming along?
FAN is warning the economists not to get involved in a “hard” science.
They tend to make a mess of things, kind of like a diaper-less baby wandering around a dinner-party.
As I noted elsewhere in this comment thread, I am verifying the SOI model against coral proxy records from 1100, 1300, and 1600 and the fit is appearing outstanding. CSALT + SOI = MNFTIU.
Climate Etc readers are invited to verify for themselves that the Pontifical Academies’ secular scientific workshops do a terrific job of recruiting top-rank scientists, economists, and even philosophers of all nations and all faiths (attendee list here and here).
In contrast, Vatican workshops that explicitly unite science with theology are a separate class that includes (for example) the recent Via Humanitatis: The Status and Future of Man
Good on `yah, Pope Francis!
It is a pleasure to provide concrete facts to help allay your inchoate suspicions, Rob Starkey!!
We can all of us — students especially! — cheerfully and diligently “procure to know more” regarding the Anthropocene, Climate Etc readers!!!
Fan
You once again FAIL the test of providing any reasonable evidence to support your BELIEFs. Providing 2 links to a religious sites views of glaizers and sustainability is NOT a case for action to implement CO2 mitigation actions.
You BELIEVE that these actions make sense, but you fail when asked to identify what specifically will change as a result.
You BELIEVE that these actions make sense, but FAIL to address that in the real world there are limited resources and spending funds on CO2 mitigation leaves less funds for the construction and maintenance of robust infrastructure. The only thing that actually helps reduce harms from adverse weather
Fan
I took the trouble to record thousands of glacier movements over the last 3000 years based on the work of, amongst many others, Pfister and Ladurie.
see figure 5
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/16/historic-variations-in-temperature-number-four-the-hockey-stick/
During roman times glaciers were substantially smaller than today.
http://climateaudit.org/2006/08/07/green-alps-1/
They were topped up again during the LIA that had the coldest and snowiest decades of the last 5000 years.
It is those glaciers that have been melting since around 1750. I have personally visited several in order to observe movement for myself. The current retreat is nothing out of the ordinary unless your historic perspective is less than a century.
tonyb
The (too-common) observational sin of cherry-picking a localized historical record facilitates the (too-common) scientific sin of backtest overfitting, TonyB!
Deducing global-scale conclusions solely from spatially localized. sparse-in-time, often-anecdotal historical records is ill-advised.
*EVERYONE* appreciates *THAT*, eh TonyB?
Fan
Far more knowledgable climate scientists than you believe CET to have considerable merit as a proxy for a much wider geographic area. I have listed them numerous times.
The Glacier observations come from thousands of observations from all over the world with a bias to the NH. Hardly localised. Hardly cherry picking-merely inconvenient for your argument.
Anyway, judging from your dismissal of such records you will never attempt to use ice cores from a single location as any sort of reliable proxy for the wider earth will you?
tonyb
Graphic record of one weather station at 1800 m above sea level, that has not moved since 1900.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SwissData.htm
shows that the precipitation is synchronised with the sunspot and the temperature with the magnetic cycle.
Meteorologists may have reason to tamper with temperatures, but had no reason to bother with the rain/snowfall measurements.
I am happy that you found a use for my link on ‘backtest overfitting’, fanny. Of course, we will pretend that the consensus climate science doomsayers avoid such things.
FOMBS has posted the same links, insults, and banality for years. Nothing to see here, move on.
Note the contemporary dates ChuckL …
•02-04 April 2011 The Fate of Mountain Glaciers in the Anthropocene
•02-06 May 2014 Sustainable Humanity, Sustainable Nature: Our Responsibility
•06 May 2014 Scientific Consensus and the Role and Character of Scientific Dissent
It is a pleasure to assist your continued learning in keeping up-to-date in regard to the ever-accelerating reality — and this-year’s ever-strengthening science — of 21st century climate-change, Chuck L!
The strength of your commitment to life-long learning is appreciated!
a fan of *MORE* discourse: Climate Etc’s skeptics are displaying a profound ye utterly unnecessary ignorance of the Anthropocene
It would be helpful if you quoted something specific.
This is principally a debate about how to identify a time at which the influence of humans on climate is clear, and whether to give it the name “Anthropocene”. Presumably you are accusing someone of not knowing when such human effects are clear, but without a quote any such inference by readers is itself pretty unclear.
I like the phrase “[procure] to know more”: literalist that I am, I have in fact been buying a bunch of books on climate science; though I am loathe to pay for papers behind paywalls, because they are much more expensive per page (and per idea) than books. And I “spend time” reading blogs and links from blogs.
Conclusion There is no effective difference twixt folks who choose not to read the scientific literature, and folks who cannot read that literature.
Be careful there. It seems you are “baffled” by my writing, most of which isn’t all that hard to understand, certainly not as hard as, say, the books by Henk Dijkstra, Pierrehumbert, Kondepudi and Prigogine, and Leroux.
Your reading list is pretty good Matthew R Marler!
Students of energy-balance climate-models will require also:
• Statistical Mechanics for example, Frenkel and Smit’s “Understanding Molecular Simulation: from Algorithms to Applications”
• Transport Theory expecially good is Bird, Steward, and Lightfoot’s “Transport Phenomena”
An indispensable reference for *EVERYONE* is the free-as-in-freedom
• History Spencer Weart’s “Discovery of Global Warming”
Thank you, Matthew R Marler!
a fan of *MORE* discourse: what about this one puts it on the list? • Statistical Mechanics for example, Frenkel and Smit’s “Understanding Molecular Simulation: from Algorithms to Applications”
For example, does it answer the question of how much of the extra 3.7w/m^2 hitting the ocean surface gets converted into the latent heat of water vapor and how much to warming the water. From its title it seems no more relevant to the climate debate than a text on numerical linear algebra for statisticians.
Frenkel and Smit is good for appreciating at the molecular-dynamic level: (1) the exchange of CO2 between atmosphere and ocean, and (1) the role(s) of CO2 in oceanic pH.
More broadly, it’s prudent to cross-check one’s understanding of transport processes compatibly within three frameworks: (1) a thermodynamic framework, and (2) a statistical mechanical framework, and (3) a computational simulation framework.
Your inquiries are appreciated Matthew R Marler!
a fan of *MORE* discourse: More broadly, it’s prudent to cross-check one’s understanding of transport processes compatibly within three frameworks: (1) a thermodynamic framework, and (2) a statistical mechanical framework, and (3) a computational simulation framework.
One of my main points is that you can have an understanding of a process ( and so can I, and so can many others) and still not have an adequate quantitative answer to a specific important question. In BigPharma the computational chemists can do a great job simulating the interactions between molecules and receptors (complete with energy flows, electron migrations and conformational changes), and still not be able to figure out without large scale experiment whether the drug is effective against the target disease.
With this answer unknown (What will actually happen at the liquid water surfaces when dwlwir increases by 3.7W/m^2?) and trillions of dollars of wealth transfers recommended/requested, it seem to me that our contribution to delineating or continuing the anthropocene ought to include building of more dams and irrigation systems, not more wind farms and solar farms.
The book recommendation I take seriously. I may procure it.
As it seems to me, Frenkel and Smit’s Understanding Molecular Simulation deserves its favorable Amazon reviews , whereas Bird, Steward, and Lightfoot’s Transport Phenomena is not a particularly excellent book, yet alas there is (at present) no better one.
Most students find that Amazon’s reviews of advanced-level technical books are pretty dang accurate … perhaps because sales of these textbooks are so deplorably sparse that no-one bothers to astroturf the ratings!
Sincere best wishes for enjoyable reading and happy learning are extended to you, Matthew R Marler!
Einstein can be remembered as a scientist who was humble in discussions with other scientists. And when he was concerned he went directly to those he could influence, not to the press, and did not try to denigrate other scientists.
AfoMd:
I’m curious – what is your first language? The only times I have encountered your type of strained, rigid, formulaic postings is by non-native English speakers who are not comfortable with traditional prose and syntax and need a crutch. So I am just curious as to your background.
FAN,
Do tell me this from your infinite store of wisdom.
What is the best value of Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity?
Remember that IPCC 2013 declined to choose a value and instead gave a very wide range and some excuses.
Some of us see measures like ECS as fundamental to the plausibility of the whole greenhouse gas global warming tentative hypothesis. A value of zero ECS has not been discounted, nor has the sign of the temperature/GHG concentration equation been agreed.
Our attitudes have nothing to do with how we vote, whether we are receiving the perceived wisdom accurately, how our grandchildren might feel, whether POTUS and Kerry are acting from altruism or hubris, etc etc etc.
The attitude is determined by the usual way in science, by inspecting the best data to be found and then ascertaining its rigour.
The present tentative greenhouse hypothesis fails. If it had succeeded, we might plausibly expect that there would be several keynote papers that definitively address the link between temperature and CO2 concentration, for example. (My shortcuts in expression are to avoid repeats of what has now become common expression and I’m not inviting discussion based on my wording).
There are no such papers.
I have read a great deal of scientific literature – plus a good deal more that is grey and poor. Chances are low that I’m missing something vital.
When you choose to blog about the essence of the problem, that is, the failings of the data to date, I guess I’ll start reading you again.
You could start by giving reasons for your choice of best ECS, or TCR, or both; then move on to why there is no keynote paper of the type above.
Hint: If you have not studied the several Nic Lewis essays of the last 12 months, you might have some interesting reading to do.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-kinds/
Mosher, are you suggesting we read that, or avoid it?
I sampled the most promising chapter: 1.1.3 Promiscuous Realism
I prefer your videos of attractive dancing Korean women.
Read it. hmm maybe I’ll do a synopsis.
videos. Now that you mention it.
fascinating people and culture, centuries of sorrow. stunning
scientific achievement ( first range gauge, first moveable type printing, yup before gutenberg ), maternity leave back in like 1400..
hardest working most multi talented folks I have ever met. bar none.
How do you keep celebrities humble in Korea?
Simple you make the boy bands do the girl band dances.
That won’t play on my laptop. I think my security software blocks dancing boys. How about one with girls only? Did you see that Michele Wie won the lady’s Open?
Mosh
I’ve been to Korea three times. As you say, it’s a fascinating place. You have posted several historical references to that country which I have kept.
Is there a reliable Korean/English on line transator you could suggest?
Tonyb
Michelle has a scary good swing. Flawless.
Here Don.
Before you watch any of this you have to understand the cultural backdrop. here is a cute canadian couple that are very popular in Korea explaining the difference between showing your shoulders and showing your legs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBcoH3WiG7Q
thats how you can get a song like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6f-LLM1H6U
and there is a new one called “short hair” I just shake my head
at the marketing power these companies exercise both over their talent and the populace.
“I’ve been to Korea three times. As you say, it’s a fascinating place. You have posted several historical references to that country which I have kept.
Is there a reliable Korean/English on line transator you could suggest?
###############
ah yes the annuals. I love that the royal diarists even wrote down the kings complaints about having all his words recorded.
I’ve been looking for papers in Korea about meterology during the time periods you are interested in.. I will let you know if I find anything
There is no good translator hmm my samsung Phone has a good one but even with that its hard. The usual thing that screws up is the totally different word order that Korean has. I’m currently working as a tutor.. I teach english and they teach me Korean. Just started. I tried to teach myself for the last three months and nobody understood a damn thing I said. Ouch. the alphabet is easy to learn. but making actual sentences.. you are talking entirely different word order.
There are about 400 stations in Korea that I am looking to get data from,
but then I got distracted by this. the korean version of the haiku
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sijo
Until someone demonstrates the existence of philosophy, I won’t waste any time on it.
Henry Paulson, the Republican central planner who gave you TARP, now joins with progressive Democrat political financier Tom Steyer, and the scourge Big Gulps, former NY City mayor Nanny Bloomberg, to inform us that “it’s worse than we thought,and we have to act now” on globalclimatewarmngchange.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/opinion/sunday/lessons-for-climate-change-in-the-2008-recession.html?_r=2
Read the whole thing for one belly laugh after another. But my personal favorite is this:
“Already, observations are catching up with years of scientific models, and the trends are not in our favor.”
Somebody needs to read the occasional newspaper when he’s not lunching with his fellow crony socialists.
Breaking News
Pope Francis I excommunicates Mafia for ‘adoration of evil’
GaryM , what is the likelihood (in your view) that Pope Francis will similarly excommunicate climate-change denialists for short-sighted “adoration of selfishness“ and/or selfish “adoration of mammon“?
Solid scientific, economic, and moral reasons lead toward this moral outcome … *EVERYONE* appreciates *THAT*.
Is denialism’s short-sighted selfishness sinful per se?
The world ponders!
Fan
Are you comparing sceptics to the Mafia?
tonyb
TonyB, the willful public embrace of ideology-driven ignorance is *ALWAYS* associated to scientific excommunication … this already is a plain reality of scientific practice.
As young students of science (especially) appreciate!
a fan of *MORE* discourse: GaryM , what is the likelihood (in your view) that Pope Francis will similarly excommunicate climate-change denialists for short-sighted “adoration of selfishness“ and/or selfish “adoration of mammon“?
Do we care? That is the organization that put Newton’s book on the list of forbidden reading and rejected the heliocentric view of the solar system for many decades. With the First Amendment active in the US, the Catholic Church is free to excommunicate anyone they want for any reason without hindrance from the voters’ petitions to Congress.
climatereason: Fan
Are you comparing sceptics to the Mafia?
Yes he did. It’s of a piece with his (her?) use of “denialism” and cognate words to denote people who critique extravagant or baseless claims.
What an interesting topic Matthew R Marler!
• Makes “offers that you (and your neighbors) can’t refuse“?
• Corrupts high-level politicians and judges as required?
• Despised by the Church?
Verdict Guilty as charged!
*THAT* verdict is obvious to *EVERYONE*, eh Matthew R Marler?
fan: What an interesting topic Matthew R Marler!
Don’t thank me alone. Share the credit with tonyb.
a fan of *MORE* discourse: Matthew R Marler wonders “Is FOMD comparing [Big Carbon] to the Mafia?”
But first you compared skeptics to the Mafia.
Fan,
The likelihood, in my view, of the Pope excommunicating skeptics is indistinguishable from my view of the likelihood that you will ever develop into a serious commenter. I put the probability of both at zero.
I disagreed with TARP, but at least they bought assets and sold them for a profit. I think deficits would have been much higher if it wasn’t for TARP paybacks and profits.
Terence Corcoran: The cost of climate change alarmism
http://business.financialpost.com/2014/06/24/terence-corcoran-the-cost-of-climate-change-alarmism/
I won’t claim to have been a scientific participant, but I was certainly near the front row of the peanut gallery for the Vendian/Ediacaran controversy, the Quaternary counter-revolution, and a few other stratigraphic controversies over the last couple of decades. They had their own absurd politics, but at least the issues turned on reasonably well-understood criteria and essentially scientific goals. It took over a century to organize the chaos of geological nomenclature into a relatively sensible (if insanely slow), internationally consistent system. It’s painful to see this process overthrown by people who see stratigraphy as just another billboard on which to slap on overnight posters for their favorite brand of ideology.
Look at everything you should be worried about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate
Funny thing, weather deaths aren’t on the list.
Why – because at 0.06%, they’re just less than dead last.
As a researcher/artist working with sinksam (non-buoyant marine debris) I’d suggest that future geologists will be able to recognize one of the Anthropocene’s layers by its content of that wonderfully ubiquitous derivative of fossil fuels, plastics. Given that much of the rock strata of our world are formed at the bottom of the oceans or seas, given that nearly half of plastics sink, and given that away from UV and high temperatures, most plastic is essentially immortal, I contend the Plasticene Epoch will be clearly visible, particularly in sedimentary rock formed by turbidite flows close to the shore.
As technology develops better ways to convert coal into plastics rest easy knowing future geologists will not have to search hard to find the Plasticene’s colorful layer in the hopefully thick strata of the Anthropocene. If it is found at the next great extinction boundary then the evolved cockroach Geologists of the future will have a strong clue as to what was going on.
Will that survive geological processes? Plastics are plastic, and organic, and exist naturally.
Mendacitocene
+10^10
Are we in the “Anthropocene? No, we are not: Holocene. Anthropocene is a made-up word (Stoermer, Crutzen) associated with human effects on the earth. As such, it is another razzzle-dazzle word in the same sense that “Climate Change” has been associated with “Global Warming”.
“Misanthrope” is a more suitable name for those who push “Anthropocene”.
HAL: “How about a nice game of Thermo-nuclear War?” (War Games, 1983)
That would get rid rid of those nasty anthropos. And the misanthropes.
we are in the “recent”
All words are made up.
Usually not because they are politically useful bafflegab / gobbledegook..
How many other geologic periods are there that can be measured in a small number of human lifetimes?
Polls show that the public has no concern regarding CAGW. Could this be the result of catastrophy fatigue? What will happen if the pause continues? Is the CAGW communty out on a limb?
Hopefully, the new Congress can be persuaded to take away the right of the EPA to regulate CO2.
From the article:
The Supreme Court on Monday mostly validated the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to regulate power plant and factory emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming while imposing some limits on the agency’s reach.
The justices said the EPA could not rewrite specific standards written into the law, but they still handed the Obama administration and environmentalists a big victory by agreeing there was another way for the EPA to carry out its program.
“EPA is getting almost everything it wanted in this case,” Justice Antonin Scalia said from the bench, in announcing the decision. “It sought to regulate sources that it said were responsible for 86 percent of all the greenhouse gases emitted from stationary sources nationwide. Under our holdings, EPA will be able to regulate sources responsible for 83 percent of those emissions.”
The decision concerns rules separate from the EPA’s proposed more comprehensive plans released earlier this month to cut carbon emissions from existing plants by as much as 25 percent over 15 years.
“Today is a good day for all supporters of clean air and public health and those concerned with creating a better environment for future generations,” the EPA said in a statement.
Perhaps of more value than the specific case, the court reinforced its view that the Clean Air Act gives the agency the ability to regulate greenhouse gases. Sean H. Donahue, who represented environmental agencies in the case, said the decision makes clear that seven of the nine justices hold that view.
(end quote)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/supreme-court-limits-epas-ability-to-regulate-greenhouse-gas-emissions/2014/06/23/c56fc194-f1b1-11e3-914c-1fbd0614e2d4_story.html
Amend the capacious definition in the Clean Air Act. Where Green House Gases are mentioned in the definition of “pollutant”, amend to exclude CO2.
Justice Stevens. 2007. “MASSACHUSETTS ET AL. v. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY ET AL.” http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/06pdf/05-1120.pdf. (Page 04, 05 (Syllabus): #3.)
I am pretty sure that most people don’t care what it’s called. Take a survey of 500 folks in cosmopolitan NYC and see how many of the local progressive cognoscenti know what geologic ‘ocene we are living in. Multiple choice:
1. Kerocene
2. Halocene
3. Anthrocene
4. Bush’sfaultocene
5. don’t have a clue and don’t care anyway
Results:
1. 9%
2. 11%
3. 12%
4. 16%
5. 52%
It will not be our call anyway, the next kingdom will take care of itself.
The sages teach “Look for the Messiah only when the day comes that we scarcely need Him.”
So perhaps the religious folks have a point about climate-change!
Sages are wise but not fortune tellers.
Thank you for your reply. I’m impressed by your knowledge but wonder why you would quote a sage, perhaps only as an introduction to the interfaith website? But why use it? Would it be sacrilegious to disagree with an interfaith group or the Vatican?
That “sages are wise but not seers” is ancient wisdom, rls! Abba Hillel Silver’s A history of Messianic speculation in Israel is commended to your attention:
The same sage considerations apply (needless to say) to those climate-change denialists whose ideology unwisely worships a Messiah of transhumanized technological progress and a Golden Calf of Carbon Assets!
Thank you for your sage remark, rls!
BTW fan, you surprised me at how (unknowingly) close I was to ancient wisdom. Respectfully.
Fan: I misplaced a reply to you; can’t operate these new fangled gadgets. Please see the reply above.
Good theme, but disagree that “the sustainability meme is limiting and rather stale.” I think it is limiting, but not stale. It is limiting when isolated from issues of human development and social justice. But it is not stale. Indeed, sustainability, and sustainable development for all people, is what the Anthropocene is all about!
Pondering the misantropocene
The Pleistocene is considered to have started around 2.5 million years ago, the beginning of he current ice age. Why do so many definitions found via Google “Pleistocene” say the present interglacial, the Holocene, is the beginning of something different? Is this geological or political?
Here’s what the Anthropocene climate looks like:
“The last month that was cooler than normal was February 1985, marking 351 hotter than average months in a row.”
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-06-global-temperature-all-time-high.html#jCp
But, according to many faux-skeptics the supposed “cooling” will continue for another 2 or 3 decades. Odd way for the Earth to cool…351 hotter than average months in a row.
It’s kooling, not cooling. The globe is getting hipper, daddy-o.
Gates
You completely miss the point. Show that this is unprecedented. Otherwise you brought up a big yawner. When someone displays data that shows we are in uncharted territory then that will be a persuasive argument.
Here you go:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/CO2_history_500.jpg
Ummmm lolwot, Gates was talking about temperature. I was talking about temperature. So, now you have the challenge. Show me that these temperatures are unprecedented. While you are at it, tell me what the pre 1950 OHC trend was since Gates has been asked repeatedly and so far has wimped out. That is a big test I know, but you’re up to it.
Indeed, just because temperatures rose in paleoclimate every time after volcanoes injected CO2 into the atmosphere, doesn’t mean it will happen when humans do it just as much and so much faster, right?
Jim D
Note the silence of lolwot & Gates. Now with you, that makes makes 3.
The crickets are becoming deafening.
Jim D
Some attribute cooling to volcanic activity, I.e. LIA. Your logic is on the other side of that argument. So which is it? Also, if we can have an LIA in spite of an increase in CO2 from what appears to be a natural 100,000 years oscillation doesn’t that discredit your premise. Can’t have it both ways.
Nottawa, that first sentence bears repeating –
You completely miss the point
Lolwot fails his test. The only point is what shows Temperatures to be unprecedented and what shows pre 1950 OHC trends. I knew you couldnt handle a simple question.
Nottawa, I will put it simply. Volcanoes have dust. That leads to cooling. Some volcanoes eject significant CO2. That leads to warming. CO2 stays longer in the atmosphere than dust. Long term effect is warming. See anything written about the Permian-Triassic and Eocene warming episodes. You apparently do not know that in paleoclimate, the largest rises in CO2 were caused by volcanic periods.
R. Gates: But, according to many faux-skeptics the supposed “cooling” will continue for another 2 or 3 decades. Odd way for the Earth to cool…351 hotter than average months in a row.
My forecast is that the decade Jan 2014 – Dec 2023 will have a mean temp slope of less than 0.05C/decade. It won’t count as “cooling” unless the slope is less than 0. However, the surface “warming” of 1978 – 1998 has definitely been interrupted; the “-ing” does not get much support lately.
What was your bet in response to Steve Moshers question for the least-squares trend for 2014? I passed on + vs -, and bet on less than 0.5 s.d. different from 0. Just curious. Any idea when the deep ocean warming will again start to show up as surface warming?
Any idea when the deep ocean warming will again start to show up as surface warming?
The amount of available energy (the potential) that will dissipate by diffusion into the ocean interior is remarkably small in the southern ocean eg Nikurashin
The effect of diffusion, computed as a change in the unavailable potential energy (that is, potential energy of a motionless fluid) and thus including the effects of both explicit and spurious numerical diffusion, is negligible, 0:3mWm^-2.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n1/full/ngeo1657.html
” Any idea when the deep ocean warming will again start to show up as surface warming?”
——
The flow of energy from ocean to atmosphere is continuous. There are many upwelling locations around the global ocean. The assumption that energy from the deep ocean is not continually affecting surface warming would be incorrect. Of this flow was not continuous, the atmosphere would cool rapidly. One of the chief causes of the hiatus is that the rate of this flow has decreased slightly, but it never stops. This decrease is related to the cool phase of the PDO.
R. Gates: The assumption that energy from the deep ocean is not continually affecting surface warming would be incorrect. Of this flow was not continuous, the atmosphere would cool rapidly
Of course the flow is continuous. From about 1978-1998 it was manifest in surface waming; since then, the surface warming rate has been indistinguishable from 0. So my question: when will the deep ocean energy again be manifest as surface warming like in the late 20th century?
“From about 1978-1998 it was manifest in surface waming; since then, the surface warming rate has been indistinguishable from +0.2C/decade”
Fixed it for you
lolwot: “From about 1978-1998 it was manifest in surface waming; since then, the surface warming rate has been indistinguishable from +0.2C/decade”
Very droll.
Good question! Answer Immediately?
A fan of *MORE* discourse: Good question! Answer Immediately?
that might be correct, but so far it is compatible with my near 0 slope prediction for 2014 and 2014-2015. I meant next achieving something like the slope of late 70s – late 90s, give or take a half standard error of the estimate.
If it starts now, then my prediction of a less than 0.05C/decade slope for 2014-2023 will be quickly disconfirmed.
Also here (four of the warmest five Mays have been in the last four years – gives some pause)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/23/hottest-may-record-temperature-_n_5523031.html
Also in today’s news, yes, he can.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/23/supreme-court-climate-change_n_5521827.html
2001 to 2012.25 is flat; 2001 to May 2014 ain’t flat
And from that article:
…
Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who’s been monitoring sea levels, told Science magazine a forthcoming El Niño later this year could likely rival the one in ’97. “I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this before,” he said.
…
Looks like the El Nino could very well poop out. Kevin is a bit too excited.
‘Specifically, when the major modes of Northern Hemisphere climate variability are synchronized, or resonate, and the coupling between those modes simultaneously increases, the climate system appears to be thrown into a new state, marked by a break in the global mean temperature trend and in the character of El Nino/Southern Oscillation variability. Here, a new and improved means to quantify the coupling between climate modes confirms that another synchronization of these modes, followed by an increase in coupling occurred in 2001/02. This suggests that a break in the global mean temperature trend from the consistent warming over the 1976/77–2001/02 period may have occurred.’
https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/kswanson/www/publications/2008GL037022_all.pdf
It is the most modern and powerful idea in climate science – get used to it.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1995/plot/uah/from:2002/trend
Some have seen something like it before.
http://web.atmos.ucla.edu/tcd//RESEARCH/enso_regrfcst.html
Funny, but I didn’t experience a warm May.
As a matter of fact, tired of being cold all the time, we stopped in Tahiti for 5 days on our way to Sydney and our daughter’s wedding June 14th. As we were traveling to Darwin for a week after the wedding, I took note of the weather in Tahiti to make a comparison with that in Darwin since the surface pressures between the two sites are recorded and compared making up in part the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI). The SOI is the atmospheric component mixed with the ENSO water warmth component for predictions of El Nino.
In Tahiti the Easterlies were strong such that the big sailing cats had two reefs in their main sails and hadn’t set the jibs. I guess, any more power and the boat and ship’s company would take a real pounding. We had arrived in Tahiti’s dry season, but the skies clouded up and it rained. I was told this was unusual for this time of the dry season.
In Darwin, the Easterlies persisted over all three weeks as far as what was on the TV weather maps when we caught up on the news. Also it rained during the dry season; another thing that was exceptional. Fortunately not during Darwin’s Race day.
My understanding is that for an El Nino to occur, there has to be puffs of Westerlies to slow down, stop and reverse the Easterlies before there is an El Nino.
Now the man who knows all about these things and has stated that there will be a rip snortin’ El Nino this year, one to rival 1997, that is, Kevin Trendberth:
Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who’s been monitoring sea levels, told Science magazine a forthcoming El Niño later this year could likely rival the one in ’97. “I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this before,” he said.
Funny thing, the Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology’s Brent some-body-or-other says that this year’s El Nino in the Spring of 2014 (being down under he means September to November 2014) he says, there MAY be an El Nino, but more likely than not, not anything special and certainly nothing like 1997 although it is still possible with climate change and all.
Now I’m from the USA and am a betting man and we have the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Down’s and on this horse race between Brent and Kevin I do like the odds for Brent being correct, not because he has anything better to say, only I like his accent.
As for the B of M, well, collectively they are a bust: 4, 3, 2, and 1 day forecast for rain on Saturday June 14. My daughter had to make the call: wedding inside a hired hall, or, in Clark Park, overlooking Sydney Harbour with the Sydney Harbour Bridge as a back drop. “Dad? what should I do?”
Well, says aye, there’s enough blue in the sky to make a sailor’s pants, so, in an hours, there will be sunshine for your wedding outside. Comes 1:15 PM, family and friends gather outside in streaming sunshine and a gentle breeze and our last daughter and I walk the serpentine path in the park to the edge of the Park, high above, and overlooking the harbor. Vows exchanged.
I have little faith in what Brent, B o M or Mr. Trendberth have to say about weather and El Nino.
Says aye, El Nino will take a siesta this year. The news of the Child coming is greatly exaggerated.
It’s been relatively cool in Fort Worth. So what? The ONI is -0.2. What do you think the wind conditions should be?
in 2009-2010 El Nino the PDO was negative
in the current cycle the PDO positive
It’s eating your butt, chef, and it’s going to be fun to watch you under pressure.
JCH,
The Chef will be aggrieved even more. I am working on fitting the ENSO paleo data collected at Palmyra by one GaTech professor and the preliminary results to my ENSO model are outstanding.
We have a group at the Azimuth Project that will be working on an open-source project to improve ENSO predictions. Will aggrieve the Chef further.
Here’s someone with some actual credibility – http://web.atmos.ucla.edu/tcd//RESEARCH/enso_regrfcst.html – as opposed to incredible twits doing unbelievable spin.
What are we actually expecting here? An end to the pause from a moderate El Nino?
‘Specifically, it was shown that when these modes of climate variability are synchronized, and the coupling between those modes simultaneously increases, the climate system becomes unstable and appears
to be thrown into a new state. This chain of events is identical to that found in regime
transitions in synchronized chaotic dynamical systems [Pecora et al. 1997]. This new
state is marked by a break in the global mean temperature trend and in the character of
ENSO variability. Synchronization followed by an increase in coupling coincided with all the major climate shifts of the 20th century, and was also shown to mark climate shifts in coupled ocean-atmosphere simulations. While in the observations such breaks in temperature trend are clearly superimposed upon a century time-scale warming presumably due to anthropogenic forcing, those breaks result in significant departures from that warming
60 over time periods spanning multiple decades. Using a new measure of coupling strength, this update shows that these climate modes have recently synchronized, with synchronization peaking in the year 2001/02. This synchronization has been followed by an increase in coupling. This suggests that the climate system may well have shifted again, with a consequent break in the global mean temperature trend from the post 1976/77 warming to a new period (indeterminate length) of
roughly constant global mean temperature.’ https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/kswanson/www/publications/2008GL037022_all.pdf
Unless they have some more serious science than webby and JCH – I suggest they are in trouble.
Things they neglect to mention:
The horror years of 1902-3 and 2002-3 in Oz were “weak” El Ninos. The whopper of 1997-8 was fairly benign. Then there is that long string of El Nino-free years from the mid 1920s to 1940…when ENSO forgot to read the rules and we had all that heat and drought. Eastern Australia’s lethal heat and fire of 1938-9 occurred in a La Nina season flanked by neutral years.
The trouble is that the climate is unqualified and, not only without peer review, but totally unpublished. It reads none of the literature and just does whatever.
Sack the climate.
JC SNIP What matters is the statistical quantitative contribution of ENSO to the climate. This is a natural variability that is a significant fluctuating factor on top of the warming trend. Defactoring ENSO from that warming trend allows the true AGW component to be batter isolated.
The denialists are afeared that this defactoring will happen so they raise a ruckus as a means of creating FUD. Alas, science can not be stopped.
Web, I hope your model works. I just want to know how you avoid the trap of backtest overfitting.
the mighty PDO is positive. How high will it go, nobody knows. Negative for your 25 year BS – highly unlikely
The linear trend of the PDO since around 1983 has been progressively downward. 31 years of progressively less and less contribution to the surface air temperature. Its peak-to-peak cycle is around 43 years. It takes about 10 years to reach a peak in a hurry. It’s the lesson from Tsonis: the change in direction is what matters. Only when Tsonis saw the change in direction of the PDO around 1983, he made booboo. He dropped his best gal, the PDO, and started dancin’ the North Atlantic, which doesn’t wag; it gets wagged.
Probably made the mistake because he does not want to believe CO2 caused a lot more than 50% of the warming since 1970. Maybe mixed a bit of religion and politics into his thinkin’. Wanted to believe ocean cycles did a big big part of it. Lost his marbles and switched to the North Atlantic, which is too freakin’ small to do jack.
Extraordinary that a rough but handy observation set, once given its own aronym, becomes a mechanism or a lever on the literalists’ kiddie console of climate. Science, they call it!
JCH, yup. The Atlantic has little influence on global temperature variability, neither NAO or AMO, unless the AMO is included in some generic Stadium Wave type of profile. In the latter case, simply use the long-term LOD which keeps track of a composite PDO + other multidecadal oscillations.
Dickey and colleagues at JPL have a concise energy conservation argument for converting measured angular momentum changes via LOD into equivalent temperature changes.
Look at the context for backtest overfitting. The warning is to those people doing financial heuristics that are trying.to fit a curve to something that is nothing more than game theory.
The difference is that real physics is involved in climate science as opposed to the psychology of human behavior.
The IPO had a peak value in the early 1980’s and turned negative after 1998. You should think of this as cold upwelling and atmospheric cooling or not – a bistable state. Not as in the home spun philosophy of JCH as peak warming followed by cooling.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Dai2013IPO_zps4fdd2693.png.html
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/adai/papers/Dai-IPO-US-P-ClimDyn2012.pdf
The current cool seems likely to peak sometime in the next decade or so.
JC SNIP
Oh no, he invokes the IPO. It drives; It is driven? What is it?
Lol. It’s governed by a beach phenomena called the IBTWYPDBPO:
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*
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*
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(Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini Decadal Oscillation). It oscillates every 23 years from thong to granny panty and back again.
So motivated incompetence is worth a snip? It is of course a play on motivated reasoning – motivated reasoning leads to motivated incompetence. It is impossible to understand these people without understanding the unquestioning commitment to an ideological construct and the emotional impetus to post hoc rationalization. And if you think that snipping motivated incompetence is going to help – you have rocks in your head.
The IPO is ENSO+PDO btw. The physical reality is upwelling or not in the eastern Pacific.
You are extremely sensitive to when you perceive that WHUT insults you, so I snip his insulting comments; which means I will snip your personal comments about WHUT.
Imprint of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation on Tree-Ring Widths in Northeastern Asia since 1568
“Although AMO is a feature of the North Atlantic Ocean basin, recent studies suggest that it is also related to multidecadal variability of Asian and Indian monsoons [13]–[17]. Through comprehensive observational analyses and ensemble experiments with atmospheric general circulation models (AGCMs), it was found that twarm-phase AMO leads to warmer winters in much of China, resulting in less precipitation in coastal areas of southern China and more precipitation in northern China [17]. Wang et al. [16] extended these analyses to examine the seasonal dependence of the AMO influence on Asian monsoon. Their results indicated that warm-phase AMO causes increases in air temperature in East Asia and rainfall in Northeast China in all four seasons. In addition, positive phases of AMO induce strong Southeast and East Asian summer monsoons, and a late withdrawal of the Indian summer monsoon [15]. All these studies have together demonstrated a probable influence of Atlantic SST anomalies on Asian climate on multidecadal timescales.”
Not true – webby’s abuse is of the juvenile and puerile variety. Chef for instance – which is of course in terms of wordplay at the level of a 3 year old.
btw – I cooked Mexican last night.
http://food.ninemsn.com.au/recipes/ipork/8348014/mexican-pork-cutlets-with-avocado-salsa
You can make taco seasoning easily – very yummy
R gates, I’ve always wondered if those who use this argument are using a propaganda argument knowing it doesn’t hold water or whether they just lack awareness of simple math? The surface temperature rose, then it stopped rising and has held steady for over a decade. This means we are experiencing a slightly warmer weather than we did in the past. It’s natural, and expected, to see temperatures to stay warmer than “average” because they haven’t changed that much in the 21st century. The absence of surface warming looks set to continue for a couple of decades. This means we have a breather we can use to figure out what we should do about global warming, if we do feel we need to do something beyond what’s already being forced on civilized nations by somewhat misguided governments.
er, you do know that they’re talking about averages of monthly anomalies and not about actual temperatures, don’t you?
A group in Detroiters have applied to the UN for help because water to 3,000 residents was shut off by the public utility there for non-payment. Additionally, water rates are going up. All of this is of course being ignored by the MSM despite the fact it is the rich who are said to have caused the problem and who are now depriving Detroit’s poor of their right to clean water. In a saner world, however, these people who cannot pay their water bill would be seen as climate refugees, deprived of employment by the Leftist, liberal Utopian values and policies that cost Detroiters their jobs to begin with and are now raising the cost of living across in the US.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.
I rate neo-greens not by how skeptical, moderate, lukewarmist or pro-anthro they might be. I rate them by their enthusiasm for white elephants. Sadly, most neos are just as keen on those pale beasts as are their apocalypto predecessors.
Be a true conservationist. Shoot the white elephants trampling our economies.
“Anthropocene is more about pop culture than hard science.” Agreed, but “Will Steffen, who heads Australia National University’s Climate Change Institute [shame!] says the new name sends a message: “[It] will be another strong reminder to the general public that we are now having undeniable impacts on the environment at the scale of the planet as a whole, so much so that a new geological epoch has begun.”” So it’s not about science, it’s about a group of activists high-jacking geological nomenclature with highly specific application for political ends. As I thought.
Well said, Bryan Walsh: “The message of the modernist greens is: in a world of 7 billion plus people, all of whom want (and deserve) to live modern, consuming lives, we need to be pragmatic about how we use—and how much we protect—nature. We don’t have any other choice, so we’d better start dealing with the realities on the ground” – and Keith Kloor – “I have a quality of life unprecedented in the history of humanity.”
Perhaps sanity will prevail after all.
I think it is premature to declare a new epoch on such evidence. In
the geological sense there is little evidence in the rocks, compared with past epochs. By the time the rocks are affected there is likely to be standing room only in many parts of the planet. In fact it is likely to de an era when few people will be able to afford to have children.
t
Greenpeace executive flies 250 miles to work
Environmental group campaigns to curb growth in air travel but defends paying a senior executive to commute 250 miles to work by plane
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/10920198/Greenpeace-executive-flies-250-miles-to-work.html
Me ‘At most we are talking about an anthropogenic flux of 3% of natural carbon dioxide flux. Half of the increase in the atmosphere is from warmth effects on vegetation and soils – warmth mostly unrelated to CO2 and likely to disappear just as quickly. Against a background of quite spectacular natural CO2 change. Minor anthropogenic changes horribly exaggerated for invidious political purpose.’
Randy ‘Despite your attempts to obfuscate the essential dynamics, the point remains that human activity is adding more net carbon to the atmosphere than any process since the PETM. You can arm wave all you want, but the process and scale of the HCV is quite clear. Oh, and of course, when you lack other ways to obfuscate the essential details, you launch your ad homs. All very much the pattern of Skippy Ellison.’
I guess that saying that it is wildly exaggerated and misdirected is an ad hom – and the retailing of any strange whine about ‘faux sceptics’, deniers, senile old white men, conspiracy-theorists, sinful, selfish corruptors of government, mad, etc. is fair dealing.
You reap what you sow. Deal with it. Just spare us the faux indignation.
I think this period will be marked by a layer of plastic and styrofoam.
I have a theory.
At critical population levels, species respond with self destructive behaviour.
Al Qaeda, Greenpeace. What’s in a name?
BREAKING NEWS ON SLASHDOT
Earth Smashed A Record For Heat In May 2014,
Effects To Worsen
The real news is the witty Slashdot comments … which mercilessly ridicule denialism in all its forms.
Conclusion The world’s technorati now overwhelmingly reject climate-change denialism.
Nowadays the sobering realities of climate-change are obvious to *EVERYONE* — especially young mathematicians, scientists, and engineers — eh Climate Etc readers?
And yet, despite this imminent doom, Greenpeace executive commutes 250 miles daily by air!
Rational request by Rob Starkey, cherry-picking/backtest overfitting claims like “Sea level is lower than eight years ago!” by Tony Watts/WUWT!
It is my pleasure to slake your thirst for science, Rob Starkey!
Fan
A complete miss on you part.
The link you provided nothing to support your claim of an individual stating that the climate does not change.
Your incorrectly cited Tony Watts but the link only references an error on how much sea level has been changing
Of course the sobering reality is that the world continues not to warm and is likely not warm for decades.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_May_2014_v5.png
‘We construct a network of observed climate indices in the period 1900–2000 and investigate their collective behavior. The results indicate that this network synchronized several times in this period. We find that in those cases where the synchronous state was followed by a steady increase in the coupling strength between the indices, the synchronous state was destroyed, after which a new climate state emerged. These shifts are associated with significant changes in global temperature trend and in ENSO variability. The latest such event is known as the great climate shift of the 1970s. We also find the evidence for such type of behavior in two climate simulations using a state-of-the-art model. This is the first time that this mechanism, which appears consistent with the theory of synchronized chaos, is discovered in a physical system of the size and complexity of the climate system.’
Climate shifted again in 1998/2001.
This is the most modern and powerful idea in climate science. Ultimately standing against the tide of knowledge is not something young engineers and scientists will abide.
a fan of *MORE*: Rob Starkey requests “Fan, can you point out a single individual that does not believe that the climate changes?”
Rational request by Rob Starkey, cherry-picking/backtest overfitting claims like “Sea level is lower than eight years ago!” by Tony Watts/WUWT!
Your quotes a person who believes that climate is always changing. It merely points out that the change is not uniform in time, and the rate of change not clearly related to anthropogenic CO2.
TJA, did yah ever notice that XKCD has got yer number … and so has Tom the Dancing Bug … and even The Onion?
Conclusion The world’s mathematicians, scientists, and engineers — younger ones especially — now utterly reject and mercilessly ridicule climate-change denialism.
Fan
Can you point out a single individual that does not believe that the climate changes??? LOL
Whoops! See answer above!
A fan of *MORE* discourse: Conclusion The world’s mathematicians, scientists, and engineers — younger ones especially — now utterly reject and mercilessly ridicule climate-change denialism.
Those sources are light on the details of CO2 induced warming and its fluctuating rates.
Fan
Same thing I heard during the MWP.
Fan
I am intrigued as to how you believe we know the global ocean temperatures back to 1880. Can you clarify how these are calculated and what data is used?
tonyb
@ climatereason
“I am intrigued as to how you believe we know the global ocean temperatures back to 1880. Can you clarify how these are calculated and what data is used?”
As practice for that, how about they clarify how they can measure, and track over multi-century time frames, the ‘Annual Temperature of the Earth’ with hundredth of a degree precision–or better–when two independent teams of climate scientists could not independently instrument my county in VA using state of the art instruments, collect data for a year, calculate the ‘Annual Temperature of Bob’s County’ for that year, and have the two results agree within a hundredth of a degree. And I’ll be generous and let them use Centigrade.
In what other time in human history did parents send their children off alone to cross the border to make their way in an evil foreign land?
http://jaysromanhistory.com/romeweb/laterome/art11.htm
Looks like it would have been better for the Romans to have only taken in their children.
I was told the Anthropocene started in 1984. And Big brother says so from our flat screen TV’s, that I have in every room in my house. So it must be true.
Humans are having huge impacts on the environment by what we no longer allow to happen. Forest fires are contained and minimized preventing forests from renewal. Huge plains fires no longer sweep the midwest sequestering carbon in the soil, rivers are prevented from flooding sending silt in the oceans.
The engineering challenges to deal with a few degrees of warming and a few feet of additional ocean depth are easy to deal with compared to learning how to live with 5000 feet of ice above your head in Chicago. Can we start to worry about that and what wil that period be called? The Frostycene?
A malcontent named Vice President Gore appeared in Australia’s Parliament House today.
Would the USA please send a rescue and recovery team to reclaim this poor wandering soul, who is a gross embodiment of the ‘anthropocene’ in some intangible way.
(Maybe he invented it).
George Soros’ yacht is on its way.
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