by frog
Image created by Robert A. Rohde / Global Warming Art
Despite the protestations of frogblog’s resident trolls, New Zealand contributes to this increase, every day. Kiwis have one of the highest per capita emissions profiles in the world. There can be no free-riders when it comes to climate change. No carbon bludgers.
We are well outside of the normal climate variability in which humans evolved. It’s time to clean house or get evicted.
Hat tip to bjchip
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Published in Environment & Resource Management by frog on Sun, July 5th, 2009
Tags: climate change, CO2, emissions target

on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
- “We are well outside of the normal climate variability in which humans evolved”
Well that’s just complete nonsense.
In just the last millenium there’s been the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. Today’s climate is entirely unremarkable.
On the hand hand, if, despite what you sentence says, you’re trying to say that CO2 is at a higher level, then you may be right (although of course in geologic terms, today’s levels are extremely low.)
But then you have the obvious problem that, although CO2 levels are higher, temperatures are not; evidence that CO2 is not the powerful forcing agent you would have us believe.
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Per-capita is meaningless.
For example, China only emitted 2.1 metric tons of CO2 per capita in 1990. Can’t have it both ways.
Hope we’re smart enough to just pretend to take part in this con. Nothing we do as a country makes the slightest bit of difference, but we will make ourselves a lot poorer.
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NIMBY
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Incidentally, the graphs at the top of this thread come straight out of the “How To Lie With Statistics” book because, of course, they are not zero-based; they are truncated so any increase looks absolutely huge.
What would that increase look like on an honest graph?…
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/01/50-years-of-co2-time-for-a-vision-test/
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wat,
you think that that was an example of an honest graph? A graph in which the key information is lost during rounding off for display purposes. A 30% increase looks huge because it IS huge. We have had as much increase above the highest concentration in the last four hundred thousand years as the total range during those four hundred thousand years, and it has all occurred in the last two hundred years.
If the zero point had been displayed on the graph, the detail would have been halved, but it would still look like a big increase.
And there is no sign of an end to this rise, at least not until all the coal, oil, gas and tar sands are burnt. Then what will you do?
Trevor.
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Gee, it looks just like a graph of the BAC someone on a fatal drinking binge
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Trevor29,
- “A 30% increase looks huge because it IS huge.”
If you start your own religion, and then get someone else to join, you’ll have seen a 100% increase, which is huge.
But when you put your religion in context…
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The reason we have not seen a big rise in temperature despite a big rise in CO2 concentration is simple – it is called “thermal mass”, and the earth, air and oceans have a lot of it. If we stopped pumping more CO2 into the air than the planet can remove so CO2 concentrations stopped rising now, the temperature would continue to climb for centuries. But we aren’t even aiming for that target. CO2 levels will continue to rise for some time, and temperatures will rise for even longer.
Trevor.
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Let’s put it in context then wat. In a world of two people, that’s a rout!
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LOL, wat lectures us on dogma!
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Or perhaps I should have said: on being dogmatic!
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And what exactly do automatic dogs have to do with anything?
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Trevor29,
Many do indeed recommend ocean temperature as the best measure of climate trend, because of its thermal mass. However, the oceans have been cooling recently…
http://climatesci.org/2009/05/05/have-changes-in-ocean-heat-falsified-the-global-warming-hypothesis-a-guest-weblog-by-william-dipuccio/
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We are pumping 70 million tons of burning crap into the air a day… There is a price to pay… Cause and effect, cause and effect…
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Dipuccio provides us with an argument that the results from Argo disprove that warming is happening. Never mind that heat content isn’t warming, they are coupled measurements, and the distinction, while important isn’t that relevant here.
It appears that he has “removed” the bias of the instrument problems in some manner. This is not described. Willis simply dumped it at first.
http://oceans.pmel.noaa.gov/Pdf/heat_2006.pdf
Then he corrected the lot.
http://climaticidechronicles.org/2008/11/15/ocean-cooling-a-science-lesson-for-denialistsdelayers/
Somehow his results don’t match DiPuccio,
… and the supplemental check on the data (the actual volume of the ocean changes as a function of its temperature and is expressed as a sea level increase) does not and never did, agree with the faulty Argo results… or for that matter the results of DiPuccio
http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/global_change_analysis.html
DiPuccio has 5 years of data from a brand new instrument and he declares every other bit of science done faulty? The man has the arrogance thing down pat.
Alternative theory (besides that he is just wrong) –
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88520025
Given the amount of melting in the Arctic and the pumping action of the haline cycle the the ocean could be pushing heat down below 700 meters. But the object is to disprove AGW so alternative explanations of the data are not permitted.
To quote RealClimate…
As far as this is concerned the data is not complete yet anyway. Five years is way too short for conclusive evidence of anything in climate science.
The planet surface IS showing warming.
The ocean IS showing thermal expansion that is unexplained without it being warmed.
Willis’ revisions of his analysis show warming, not the cooling that DiPuccio is getting. This difference is not explained. If DiPuccio’s data were correct the sea level would have gone DOWN ( unless there is a LOT more melting and falling into the ocean than we realized ).
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/Nature/rahmstorf_etal_science_2007.pdf
…and that is something it has surely NOT done.
Keep yearning. It ain’t happened yet.
BJ
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Delightful bj. Thanks for all the great links! Saves me having to rebut the dogmatic wat when you do it so brilliantly…
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Re Ocean heat: Levitus et al. Global ocean heat content 1955–2008 in light of recently revealed instrumentation problems. Geophysical Research Letters (2009) vol. 36 (7) pp. 1-22 covers all the bases, and shows no signs of cooling. If I could, I would show the graph, but you can see it here.
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Normally I don’t bother feeding the trolls (is this blog ever going to have a “don’t see any posts from XXX user” feature?), but wat dabney wrote:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/01/50-years-of-co2-time-for-a-vision-test/
You see a graph that possibly has some distortion (there can be a case made either way on having the axis go to zero), and you reply with a reference to graph with even more distortion because of a poor choice of scale?
Let’s look at another quantity that is sometimes graphed, say temperature. Do you always measure that from zero degrees Kelvin? In this case all climate and weather temperature graphs are going to look _really_ flat, and a 10% change would not look like much on a graph, but it would be more than enough to kill us (a 28-29 degree change). For things that are normally stable around a certain level, it can be the variation that matters, so it is honest to graph it that way.
It is also evil, stupid or badly misinformed (I can’t think of any alternatives) when people write about something not being important because it is a trace gas. To take another naturally occurring trace gas, if there was 200-400 ppm of carbon monoxide in the atmosphere we’d all be very sick or worse.
It is possible that there are some valid arguments made by people who think that AGW isn’t happening. Unfortunately I haven’t seen any that don’t have a very solid rebuttal. I guess any such arguments would be so buried in the mass of non-science (I’m not even going to dignify it as pseudo science), misuse of statistics, cherry picking of data, conspiracy theories and personal attacks that any contribution of value is likely to overlooked.
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bjchip,
The NASA sea surface temperature chart has been falling since around 2001/2002:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/
What you are doing is speculating and yearning for some mechanism to explain how, actually, there is more heat, but somehow it has all of a sudden started diving down below the 700m mark where (and I sure this is just coincidence) no measurements are taken.
What other laws of physics changed in that year I wonder? Really, it’s hilarious: you breezily speculate that “Given the amount of melting in the Arctic and the pumping action of the haline cycle the ocean could be pushing heat down below 700 meters” and then (this is the best bit) angrily and pre-emtively dismiss anyone who should have the temerity to doubt this entirely unsupported bit of wishful thinking with the line “But the object is to disprove AGW so alternative explanations of the data are not permitted.”
Damn those who doubt that your throwaway bits of speculation should be treated with any less respect that a weighty treatise stuffed with evidence. Damn them to heck!
What’s also spooky is the fact that the sea surface temperature stopped going up at about the same time as the satellite data started its 8 year downtrend.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
Roy,
- “You see a graph that possibly has some distortion (there can be a case made either way on having the axis go to zero), and you reply with a reference to graph with even more distortion because of a poor choice of scale?”
No, and that’s the whole point.
The chart I pointed to is zero-based. So it isn’t distorted. It puts the whole thing in perspective.
- “It is also evil, stupid or badly misinformed (I can’t think of any alternatives) when people write about something not being important because it is a trace gas. To take another naturally occurring trace gas, if there was 200-400 ppm of carbon monoxide in the atmosphere we’d all be very sick or worse.”
And if that feather that fell onto my head today had been a brick, Roy, I’d be dead.
Scary, no?
And yet, do you know what, there are some people who are “evil, stupid or badly misinformed” who choose to make some distinction between the feather and the brick landing on my head.
Please write some more.
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bjchip,
One other thing…
Continuing with the Antarctic issue from the earlier thread, which is rapidly disappearing from the bottom of the page, you pointed me at this recent notorious claim to have discovered the elusive Antarctic warming (which is so necessary to salvage the agw theory):
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/science/earth/22climate.html?_r=1&fta=y
You might not realise, but one of the team who made this “disovery” was our old fraud, sorry, friend, Michael Mann; whose statistical incompetence led him to generate the infamous Hockeystick chart which was so comprehensively demolished by real statisticians.
All they did, because there are not many stations down there, was to “fill in” the spaces with data they invented.
“The problem with Antarctica, though, is that has so few weather stations. So what the computer had been programmed to do, by a formula not yet revealed, was to estimate the data those missing weather stations would have come up with if they had existed. In other words, while confirming that the satellite data have indeed shown the Antarctic as cooling since 1979, the study relied ultimately on pure guesswork, to show that in the past 50 years the continent has warmed – by just one degree Fahrenheit.
One of the first to express astonishment was Dr Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a convinced believer in global warming, who wryly observed “it is hard to make data where none exists”. A disbelieving Ross Hayes, an atmospheric scientist who has often visited the Antarctic for Nasa, sent Professor Steig a caustic email ending: “with statistics you can make numbers go to any conclusion you want. It saddens me to see members of the scientific community do this for media coverage.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/4332784/Despite-the-hot-air-the-Antarctic-is-not-warming-up.html
There’s a very revealing quotation in your link from one of those who literally invented this new data: “But Drew T. Shindell of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, who is another author of the paper, said, “It’s extremely difficult to think of any physical way that you could have increasing greenhouse gases not lead to warming at the Antarctic continent.””
Does that sound like a man who, when given the chance to invent some new algorithm for generating false temperature data, is going to produce something which doesn’t fit his preconceptions?
And this is your evidence? Manufactured figures created by professional alarmists?
Enhanced polar warming is demanded by the physics of your agw theory.
The “evidence” you have offered – a set of figures literally made up by professional warmers – is perhaps the most worthless thing you have ever presented here.
Do you have any thing else to demonstrate enhanced warming at the Antarctic? Or will you agree that this essential fingerprint of the theory is noticable by its absence?
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You mean like the increasing ice mass loss, now estimated at over 100 Gtonnes per annum? Try reading the report linked here.
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Wat
One might phrase this less politely but you are making a mountain of nothing. LOOK AT THE GRAPH!!!! It clearly shows increasing temperature over the long term. The lowest low of the first 10 years is lower than the lowest low in the second. The highest high (excluding the 1998 el-nino outlier) in the first 10 is lower than the highest high in the second. The slope from beginning of measurements to the end is positive. The slope from 2001-2004 is indistinguishable from zero and the only decrease in the period you just mentioned is from 2005 to 2008 which is CHARITABLY, as much as 4 years.
You have been told before that short time intervals are irrelevant to climate measurement. You are being told that again. I know that you are convinced that the whole world is wrong , the scientists are lying and it is all a plot to form one-world-government. It is clear that no evidence of truth or refutation of error is going to actually make the slightest difference. However, the ocean heat content has been increasing and is running well over the initial estimates of the IPCC.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/07/more-bubkes/#more-692
The only thing spooky here is that you are completely impervious to being shown an error, even if it is NOT yours. I showed DiPuccio was wrong.
I ALSO suggested another issue, from back when they thought heat was missing. Something that is still completely unknown and without which any claim of “refutation” could not be complete EVEN if the surface temperatures placed in evidence by DiPuccio agreed with anyone elses. Including the folks from project Aqua and Dr Willis…. and it does not.
What I suggested is that we don’t know much about the deep sea haline circulation and levels of heat contained in the deep ocean. Damn near nothing. There may or may not be heat getting pumped down there, and there are two important consequences. One is that we don’t know the real thermal content of the ocean. The reverse of what I said could ALSO be true, it could be getting colder there and the heat in the upper ocean could be coming from that.
Again, your first choice was to attack without thinking. Polite discourse be damned, and by your discourse you are.
You haven’t QUITE taken on board that I pointed out FIRST that the heat is actually there in the upper ocean and it is DiPuccio who made an error.
You ignore the thoroughness as well as the points being explained. I doubt that you seriously even read what I post. You look for ways to bring in talking points from the climaticide crowd to try to beat me with… and it doesn’t work very well. The science is on my side.
I showed you were wrong with Spencer’s own chart.
I showed you were wrong with the GISS dataset.
I showed you to be wrong with the corrections made by Willis and Project Aqua vs those of DiPuccio.
Spencer’s chart of change in ocean heat content goes back 30 years. The chart you complain about maps CO2 and goes back 400,000 years.
It is completely meaningless to worry about zero-basing the latter, but it can be done if you feel like it, the data set is there.
Pick a baseline to call zero and map the differences around it. If you think about this for more than a couple of seconds you will realize that it doesn’t make a shred of difference to the numbers in the latter part of the 20th century, or for the past 600,000 years. The CO2 is going up 50 times faster than it has EVER done in the past 600,000 years. The temperature appears to be at the beginning what appears to be the climate equivalent of an attempt to reach escape velocity.
CO2 is already higher than it has been since about 3 MILLION years ago, during the Pliocene .
That of course was a time when the climate was VERY different, the continents were different and the human species was not yet present. The temperature was about 3 degrees warmer. The North pole was ice-free in summer. The southern ocean ice was largely gone in summer. The ocean was about 25 meters higher…. and that was steady state.
What we’re doing to our currently habitable climate, is a step function increase in forcing, hitting it with a hammer so to speak, and it will ring like a bell before it settles back down to some steady state. What that state will be is predicted by paleoclimate and models both, as EVENTUALLY about +3…. but nothing like this increase has happened since some big rock hit the planet, or the Deccan traps let go. Notable extinction events both.
I suspect that you’re not done yet, but it is OK. Every year someone spews garbage here and we clean it up. Mostly because we don’t want strangers to the blog to get the wrong idea about the actual science. We’re used to it. The real annoyance is that the mistakes are so repetitiously, boringly similar.
Like this one.
Trace gases are important to the absorption bands in the atmosphere. Much as trace elements are important to the electronic properties of a transistor. Get the mix slightly wrong and you vastly different final characteristics. I don’t know what field you study so I don’t know what analogies would make sense to you.
Again… here is a link to assist your understanding of why a trace gas like CO2 makes a difference. I am not going to go into long explanations with you anymore.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/08/the-co2-problem-in-6-easy-steps/
You are badly informed and from all indications you intend to remain so.
BJ
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Wap!
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Wat
Enhanced polar warming is demanded by the physics of your agw theory.
Bullsh!t
The physics does not demand equally strong RESULTS at both poles. It can’t. One hemisphere has most of the land and the other has most of the water. They do behave differently, and this is noted by the IPCC.
Funny, we were just talking about the effects of the ocean. How quickly we seem to forget. The models predict the smaller signal…
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/351.htm
Which is not the same as no signal at all… though if it were it would make little difference. There are two poles and the model’s predictions are born out well. Even to the fact of there being a difference between them.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/308/5721/541?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&author1=vaughan&searchid=1114170075528_4017&stored_search=&FIRSTINDEX=0&fdate=10/1/1995&tdate=4/30/2005
and this…
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?old=2006030221819
BJ
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There are a couple of comments of mine in moderation Wat…
Frog, please just release the second one… the first one had an unfortunate typo which I corrected but it didn’t make a difference to the filter.
I’ll provide an inkling of what they contain.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?old=2006030221819
respectfully
BJ
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Good comments, bjchip.
Completely wasted on that wat dabney person, but some interesting stuff for the rest of us. Someone might even wander into this thread and learn something!
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you go..!..bj..!
..you ‘hammered’ it..!
i’m making it into a story..
phil(whoar.co.nz)
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http://whoar.co.nz/2009/climate-change-debunkergets-a-serious-debunking/
phil(whoar.co.nz)
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could/dare we introduce a new term to the lexicon/zeitgeist..?
(..as in..’ol wat got really ‘chipped’ there..?..eh..?..)
(‘chipped’(def.):..having fatuous/false pretences reduced to ‘mincemeat’..)
..(ahem..!..excuse the non-vegan metaphor..
..but..’reduced to faux-meat’..lacked a certain oomph..!)
phil(whoar.co.nz)
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Thanks Phil
Nothing like a wider exposure of the truth.
I went to the meeting in Wellington. Except for the numbers I needn’t have bothered. Nobody was arguing the science. Nick Smith gave a PPT that basically accepts the science as I understand it and the scope of the problem.
The only real question is what target to go into the Copenhagen meeting with and how to manage the negotiations.
Rick Leckinger spoke for the Greens and assured the Minister that if he adopts an ambitious target the Greens support will be there.
Pretty much everyone else there was from 350 or the Greens, advocating for 40% which is a massively difficult target even if everyone gets on board with it. Basically it is the same as our entire agricultural sector emissions. I think we can get there but agriculture has to bear some of the burden. The minister seemed to want to exclude agriculture, but was not explicit about that preference. I had to leave early so I did not see all of it.
It appeared to be a love fest with speaker after speaker opting for that difficult target as I left.
Discussion:
Part of the issue is that our efficiencies of raising beef and lamb makes them “cheap” and a big part of our diet (too big), and the ruminant CH4 is a much larger percentage of our emission profile than any other single thing.
England and Holland have started to campaign for “meatless” days. Different days, but one day a week without meat.
It isn’t exactly what YOU want, but it is a step… and it impacts the market for beef and lamb, which WOULD affect our emissions (and pork and chicken which aren’t such a problem). Wouldn’t do much for the milk cows, but it could cut something off the top, and right now there is nothing to be had from the agricultural sector at all.
The thing is that the object here is to shrink the farm sector somewhat, and THAT means that marginal operations will slip over the edge and stop producing altogether with land possibly going into tree farming instead, which gets us big credits on the CO2.
I am pointing at a policy possibility here. One I will post on the Green forums shortly.
respectfully
BJ
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OK… that’ll have to wait a tick. www3.greens.org.nz is not responsive.
BJ
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Having read Gareth Morgans book, it conformed a few things in my mid:
The science is not settled. Anyone claiming so is a liar.
The science is too complex for scientists, let alone lay people. Beware of lay people, and scientists, who claim understanding.
We do not have scientific certainty.
We may not be able to wait for scientific certainty given the risk.
The climate always changes.
There might be a link between co2 levels and temperature.
IPCC, Al Gore and environmental politicians are best ignored. Ignore anyone trying to quantify AGW and make projections.
Clouds are very interesting.
Free marketers and anti-consumerist Greenies use this issue as a trojan horse for ulterior political agendas. They cancel each other out.
Policy must not use a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Climate change may not be a catastrophic event. Nobody really knows.
The last thing we can afford is to be held to ransom by myopic, single issue activists.
That’s the facts.
Cap n trade is a CON. Fight the sc*m who would sell us out for their ulterior agendas.
When the facts change, I change my mind.
How about you, Sir?
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Heh heh : should read “confirmed a few things in my mind”
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>>It appeared to be a love fest with speaker after speaker opting for that difficult target as I left.
Then they can all be ignored. They’re clearly all a complete joke.
New Zealand would be an economic basket case, which will kill a lot more people a lot more quickly than AGW will.
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BP
I haven’t read either Gareth Morgan’s book or Wishart’s. When I want an opinion on climate I tend to go to the source. You have made numerous assertions which you think are facts, but which I reckon to be fallacies.
Notice this about the clouds (besides the fascination they hold for folks who are hoping for a miracle). With CO2 at the levels we have NOW, the climate was 3 degrees warmer. That matches what we’d expect modeling things and is in fact the paleoclimate that pertained at the time. Clouds did not “fix” things… and the sun was not so hot then – it IS getting hotter on that million year timescale.
These assertions of yours I agree with.
“We may not be able to wait for scientific certainty given the risk.”
- a tautology.
“We do not have scientific certainty.”
Scientific certainty is an oxymoron, and it does not ever appear. If you expect it you are missing out an important fact about science.
“The climate always changes” – yup. Whether it is us or something else it DOES always change. However, it hasn’t been hit this sharply by an external forcing since before humans existed.
The rest of the post is your opinions reasserting themselves. What Morgan’s book brings to the mix I have no idea.
respectfully
BJ
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BP
“New Zealand would be an economic basket case, which will kill a lot more people a lot more quickly than AGW will.”
Taking on a target in cooperation with the rest of the planet means that we should not be placed at a disadvantage with respect to the rest of the planet.
The Europeans did a little dance on that issue themselves, committing to 20% no matter what and 30% if there was international support. That was suggested as a sane option.
respectfully
BJ
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>>f you expect it you are missing out an important fact about science.
But it’s the environmental lobby that was claiming the science was settled! On this very blog!
>>What Morgan’s book brings to the mix I have no idea.
He spent a lot of his own money, got together a group of highly regarded scientists on both sides of the debate, and said “let’s hear it”.
They couldn’t agree on much, and clearly the issue is a lot more complicated than the resident arm-chair scientists like to make out.
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BluePeter is fulfilling his role as the ‘knobbler’ marvelously, with his well practised “The science isn’t settled” lines and curled-lip digs at those who see beyond his spin . He’s even captured the curmudgeonly hurrumphing of the likes of Garth George and blended that with the over-stretched and too, too righteous proclamations of Ian Wishart, to produce a strain of ignorance that is ‘pure Pete’ and we are very grateful for his tireless work. What entertainment! What a laugh! And what a sweet provocation it is to act in ways that Peter will have Peter turning blue with apoplexic fury. To work!
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>>20% no matter what and 30% if there was international support. That was suggested as a sane option.
It’s not a sane option if your economy is based on agriculture. It’s barking mad.
If we reduce our herd or increase our prices over and above Argentina, the result is bleedin’ obvious. Our income plummets and Argentinas increases and nothing, in terms of global temperature, changes.
These people calling for 40% are clearly morons.
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1 2 many ‘Peters’
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Whatever, Greenfly. You guys are on 7% and falling, and we’re in power.
Ha ha.
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bjchip Says:
July 7th, 2009 at 10:01 am
> I went to the meeting in Wellington. Except for the numbers I needn’t have bothered. Nobody was arguing the science. Nick Smith gave a PPT that basically accepts the science as I understand it and the scope of the problem.
BJ, I think it was good that you went. Lots of people talked about the importance of emission reductions, but you were one of the few who acknowledged that it isn’t going to be easy. I think it’s important for Nick Smith to hear people talking about the importance of doing what we can in the face of the recognition that it won’t be easy. I’m regretting that I didn’t stand up and say something about the development and exporting of solutions for reducing emissions, because that area wasn’t really covered.
I was surprised by the lack of deniers there.
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>>I was surprised by the lack of deniers there.
Doesn’t surprise me. It’s about as likely as a greenie going to a Top Gear show to debate gearboxes.
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Cripes! Peter played the devastating ‘I win, you lose’ card. It’s game over for me!
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If we reduce our herd or increase our prices over and above Argentina,
Gosh BP… I KNOW you can read. I KNOW I said international support and you even quoted that.
So what in the hell makes you THEN expect that Argentina can get “excluded” from the same process in my analysis?
That was not up to your usual standards.
BJ
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If Top Gear ever came here I’d be lining up for it.
Your stereotypes are showing.
BJ
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Well, come on geniuses.
If we impose extra costs upon ourselves, that other agrarian economies of a similar GDP do not face, what happens next, hmmm?
Production shifts from New Zealand to, for arguments sake, Argentina.
How are you going to pay for your EnviroSchools then? Your welfare? Health? Where is the money coming from? You haven’t changed the temperature one bit.
Calling for a figure, like 40%, is too stupid for words. If we’re going to participate in this con, then at least have the good sense to call for no more/worse treatment than agrarian based economies of a similar GDP.
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>>KNOW I said international support and you even quoted that.
How many countries have included agriculture? Are they all calculating the sinks the same way? What countries are excluded from these obligations? Surely it’s either all or nothing? Why would one country willingly destroy their economy so that another economy can pick up where they left off?
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If we impose extra costs upon ourselves, that other agrarian economies of a similar GDP do not face, what happens next, hmmm?
STOP!
You DID NOT READ THIS PROPERLY! and you are yourself appearing quite stupid.
What I said and what was clearly understood by all, is that we can’t do it all by ourselves but that it MUST be part of a global agreement.
GLOBAL AGREEMENT MEANS EVERYONE IS ON BOARD. Harping on the “what if Argentina isn’t on board” point is entirely irrelevant.
BJ
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>>Cripes! Peter played the devastating ‘I win, you lose’ card. It’s game over for me!
Well, now you might like to reflect on your own drivel at 10:37 am…..
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>>GLOBAL AGREEMENT MEANS EVERYONE IS ON BOARD.
Like this you mean….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kyoto36-2005.png
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Thanks BP… I think we are cross posting…
No discussion in the early part of the meeting of what a unilateral target would look like. Maybe there was none, I did not stay.
It is indeed an “all or nothing” issue with respect to participation at 40%.
A TARGET mind you, for negotiations that haven’t yet happened between countries who may or may not participate.
You ask questions about future political agreements. You would obtain more certainty if you stuck to the science questions.
respectfully
BJ
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No BP… since the negotiations haven’t even started it is not reasonable to conclude that they will be stymied by US non-participation.
respectfully
BJ
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Sure, but New Zealand can’t achieve 40%, so there is no point in calling for it.
They’re either “Not Serious” or “Barking Mad”.
So which is it?
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Given New Zealand’s emissions mostly come from agriculture, would the 40%-ers please explain exactly how we will achieve 40% (reduce the herd?) and what costs and economic risks this will impose?
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Sure, but New Zealand can’t achieve 40%, so there is no point in calling for it.
Really? I missed the part that said that it was impossible. If you could prove that I’d be very surprised. We all acknowledge that it is extremely difficult, but impossible?
Did you get to the part where I pointed at this?
http://en.cop15.dk/news/view+news?newsid=1530
The idea of reducing the herd is NOT bad. The point is that there has to be an economic reason for it. The idea of that things like beef get more expensive for EVERYONE we export to (rumination remuneration) isn’t all that bad either. (Though I’d prefer not to penalize the poor, and Phil would probably prefer to curtail pork and chicken consumption as well )
Can we get 20% reduction (or credits) off the farmers 40% of emissions in various ways? That would leave us with 32% to make up out of the rest of the economy. Transport, Power Generation, Heating and the like. Taking a chunk out of each. We have to consider our migration targets seriously as well, as our rate of population increase is not sustainable. Electric cars are of use in meeting the goals.
“Massively difficult” isn’t the same as impossible. I suggest that you review the consequences of hitting plus 3 degrees.
Compared to adapting to that on a planetary basis, massively difficult looks easy.
The only way you can describe this as barking mad is if you are COMPLETELY certain that we are wrong about warming. Which begs the question of your previous stance that we simply don’t know enough.
respectfully
BJ
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>>The idea of reducing the herd is NOT bad.
Reduce it here, it will increase elsewhere. Zero sum, New Zealanders lose. Shame we don’t have more coal stations we could close down.
>>I suggest that you review the consequences of hitting plus 3 degrees.
I think I’ll give up talking to warmists. Sacrificing lambs at the altar didn’t work in 607AD, and it still won’t work now.
I’ll leave it there. Suggest you read Gareth’s book. I dare say you’ll actually agree with the conclusions.
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I think I’ll give up talking to warmists
The battle took an unexpected turn, when the contestant in the blue corner threw down his arms and left the field, vowing never to return.
Meanwhile, something stirred in the shadows … wat’s this! An old adversary returns, beating his chest and flailing his arms wildly. The beat goes on….
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BP
If the cost is shared, how is “the herd” increased elsewhere? Does “elsewhere” have more ability to remove their demand for electricity in favor of giving the methane producers a free ride?
Somehow you ALWAYS get back to this idea that it can’t be done fairly, (possibly true), and ignoring that we required that the negotiated result has to be fair (certainly true).
I think it would be a good idea if you gave up BP. You haven’t made any point except that you only read PART of what is written anywhere and you have a bad attitude.
BJ
BJ
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bjchip,
-”One might phrase this less politely but you are making a mountain of nothing. LOOK AT THE GRAPH!!!! It clearly shows increasing temperature over the long term.”
Actually it doesn’t. It shows increasing temperatures over a very short term. I’ve already told you you should provide us with a graph that clearly shows recent abnormality compared to the previous one or two thousand years at the very least.
Of course, you can do no such thing because there is nothing at all remarkable about the recent temperatures or trends. And we both know it.
Sure, less than a decade is too short a term to make any strong claims; but then short term is all you want to argue about, because the long term exposes your claim as being nothing but hysteria.
- “You have been told before that short time intervals are irrelevant to climate measurement. You are being told that again.”
No, it was me that told you that.
Please provide the aforementioned long term graph which shows what you are concerned about. Time to put up or shut up.
You have claimed that recent warming must be caused by CO2, on the grounds that the natural influences are all accounted for. By implication you are saying that every effect and every feedback of every climate influence is now fully understood; there is no more to be learned.
When did we reach this level of 100% knowledge about the climate? What year was that? What was the final piece in the jigsaw?
Because, of course, the reality is that our understanding of the climate is still primative. But you have to make such a laughable claim because there’s no other way you can pretend there’s even an issue.
You are in effect stating that there can never be any more announcements about new climate discoveries, because we already know everything about it. It’ll be interesting to see how that pans out for you…
- “The CO2 is going up 50 times faster than it has EVER done in the past 600,000 years.”
And we’ve had nearly a decade of flat or cooling temperatures. NASA’s satallites show it. NASA sea temperature records show it. It’s almost like they’re, oh I don’t know, uncorrelated.
- “The temperature appears to be at the beginning what appears to be the climate equivalent of an attempt to reach escape velocity.”
All that’s going up at an alarming rate is your shrillness. What was your recent classic? Something about the scientists soiling themselves with fear or something?
You might be less hysterical if you had some tangible facts you could wield; facts like these scientists sifting the evidence in the recent Australian government questions examination:
http://joannenova.com.au/globalwarming/wong-fielding/7-carter-evans-franks-kininmonth-due-diligence-on-wong.pdf
And yes, the theory does demand enhanced polar warming; to deny it is to deny the very efficacy of CO2 as a forcing agent.
Do you know what was the most intersting thing about that piece published in Nature? It wasn’t that it was beyond incompetent, it was the response of the alarmists to it.
Before then they’d shrugged off the absence of the predicted warming and claimed that, actually, their models could be made to fit this data. But when it was published they leapt on it and said how the discovery of the fingerprint of global warming was proof of the theory.
It was commented on at the time that there seems to be no climate pattern which doesn’t confirm the warming theory.
And that’s pretty much what you did, isn’t it: I prompted you about the lack of Antarctic warming fingerprint and you found the Nature piece and posted it as evidence. But now that even you are forced to concede what a complete fabrication it is you too turn on a dime and suddenly we’re told it’s “Bullsh!t” to expect any such thing.
And you wonder why more and more people are seeing through your alarmism.
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I guess even bj gets tired of answering your shit.
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