The Political Thread

[Mikey]

I find it really baffling that human influence on climate change is 'bollocks' but magnetic energy, life force and the ether are credible in the slightest.

I think Mr Sharky is making a point about just believing what's reported in the mainstream media and that 'outsider' ideas are dismissed out of hand, when they should be given some air. We've been around this whole climate thing before now and me and he will likely never agree on the core of the subject. But I think we agree there's an issue with how the information is used by the governments of the world. What I do understand is that research on the climate was stimulated by the drop in temperatures reported in the 60-70s, that led to some speculation (not peer reviewed papers) on the onset of another ice age. A bunch of scientist dudes realised they didn't really know enough to say if that was the case. Next thing you know they tell us we're heating the place up to fuck. A lot quicker than was expected in the early part of an Interglacial at any rate.

My take (as I've said before) is that I think there is an inherent distrust of science and therefore scientists as they are seen as well paid (to say the right thing) and part of the 'establishment'. From my perspective, and experience, this isn't the case. Don't know if it's been a hatchet job or that it's a reaction to an increasingly technological society where people haven't been told how stuff works. I'd be inclined to go for the latter on the most part, which is why I read SF.

And, generally speaking, scientists take a long time to be convinced of anything until there's a good chance it's probably 95% right.

M.

EDIT: And what TB said.

[Recrewt]

I think it is human nature to look to the scientists to come up with a definitive answer but in regards to climate change they can not.  It is difficult to provide quality data for more than a few decades and there are huge margins of error with the rest.  Climate modelling can provide us with ball-park estimates but they are not a definitive answer. 

As for why it matters - well, obviously all scientific research should be aimed at finding the truth but beyond that governments and the like are using this to determine energy policies e.g. more nuclear plants. 

[The Legendary Shark]

Gosh - a lot to respond to!

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First, though, I don't think anyone's lying - and I want to make that absolutely crystal clear. When the scientists of the day thought the sun orbited the Earth, they weren't lying. The astronomers who initially taught Einstein that there was only one galaxy weren't lying. Climate scientists today are not lying. All these errors are based on incomplete understanding and a necessarily outdated education. (Most education must be outdated because you can only teach what has already happened and what seems to be true at the time - this is not meant as an insult to education or the educated, mark you.)

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To demonstrate my point, one of the criticisms levelled at my position concerned the carbon captured by so-called "fossil-fuels". It is argued that oil is basically dead dinosaur juice - and this really makes little sense to me. For an oilfield to form, there must have been some massive concentration of life that died all at once, got covered in rocks over millions of years and not only never dessicated in all that time but remained fluid enough to contain millions of barrels of the stuff. And this miracle didn't happen just once but thousands of times all around the world. Why isn't this process still going on? What was so special about the dinosaurs that they were made from petrol and we aren't?

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Okay, so maybe oilfields don't die in pockets but globally, somehow. A mass extinction, 98% of all the biomass on the Earth wiped out in one go. All that putrid juice just leeched into the ground and pooled into oil wells? Maybe, as the weather and rivers wash all the slush into pools or underground aquifers to, again, remain viscous for millions of years.

.

Is it possible that oil is not fossil-based at all but some form of on-going deep-Earth geological or even biogeological process? The vast bulk of life on Earth is bacteria, after all, and most of this lives to great depths. There are  oil-eating bacteria, so why shouldn't there be oil-defacating bacteria?

www.nytimes.com/1995/09/26/science/geochemist-says-oil-fieldsmay-be-refilled-naturally.html?src=pm

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So, if the fossil-fuel plank of the anthroprgenic climate change theory is wrong, how would that affect the calculations?

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It might also surprise some people to know that Saturn's frigid moon Titan contains hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than the Earth. Was the Solar System once much hotter so that there were dinosaurs all over Titan? Hundreds of times more dinosaurs than ever existed on Earth? When the sun cooled and all the Titanian dinosaurs died, did their juices remain fluid to the present day? Or did the hydrocarbons on Titan come from somewhere else? Emerge from some other process?

www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-20080213.html

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Dead dinosaurs? The more I think about it, the less sense it makes. But I've believed it for decades because it's what I was taught and it's what most everyone else seems to think.

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Saying what you think is not lying.


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Also, farmers around here (and around the world) pump extra CO2 into their greenhouses to increase yields.

[TordelBack]

My take (as I've said before) is that I think there is an inherent distrust of science and therefore scientists as they are seen as well paid (to say the right thing) and part of the 'establishment'. From my perspective, and experience, this isn't the case.

Encouraging mistrust of scientists of all stripes is obviously in the interests of politicians, religions, big business and even much of the media:  how can you make a career out of peddling self-serving lies when there is an entire body of people whose goal is to establish the truth in a transparent, testable, repeatable way? 

The problem is that even when intelligent, perceptive people know that these supposed pillars of society are generally as altruistic as Wayne Rooney volunteering for Meals on Wheels, they then take this hard-won cynicism and apply it to the sciences, not realising that the sciences thrive on exposing misconeptioons and errors.  Of course there are seat-warmers in sinecures, greedy bullies and lazy thinkers, but that is not the culture of science in the way it is in business and politics: it is indirect opposition to it. Indeed, science itself is the mechanism for rooting out chancers.

EDIT: Sincere pologies for mis-representing you re: accusing scientists of lying, Sharky. However, I don't know where to begin to respond to the rest of your post.  I think I'll just tag-in Mikey...

[Jim_Campbell]

To demonstrate my point...

Oh.

My.

God.

You have no point. I simply don't understand why you would attempt to engage in discussion on a subject of which you clearly do not have the slightest fucking understanding.

To disabuse you of all your misconceptions and explain the entire topic of discussion from first principles is a task requiring more skill and patience than I will ever be able to muster. Good luck to any boarder brave/foolish enough to try.

Your contribution here is somewhat akin to me saying "Yeah, well, particle physics — it's all a load of old shite, innit?"

It may or may not be, but because I know absolutely fucking nothing I at least have the decency to say nothing on the subject.*

Gnngh.

Jim

*Note that I don't claim expert knowledge on fossil fuels, climate change or geology, but I have taken enough of an interest as a layman to have some broad, imperfect surface knowledge which I try to maintain through broad reading and, where possible, some attempts to grapple with raw data.

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

Has anyone heard of the confirmation bias? I read an article about it once, but I didn't really believe it, so it must be a load of bollocks.

[Mikey]

It is difficult to provide quality data for more than a few decades and there are huge margins of error with the rest.

That's not the case.

http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/bas_research/science_briefings/icecorebriefing.php

http://www.clim-past.net/9/2489/2013/cp-9-2489-2013.html

Resolution of course changes when using proxies from the rock record I referred to before, but there's enough quallty information to get a good idea of how the climate has varied even in very old rocks - back to perhaps as far as around 750 million years ago, when Earth was maybe Hoth:

http://www.snowballearth.org/

To demonstrate my point, one of the criticisms levelled at my position concerned the carbon captured by so-called "fossil-fuels". It is argued that oil is basically dead dinosaur juice - and this really makes little sense to me. For an oilfield to form, there must have been some massive concentration of life that died all at once, got covered in rocks over millions of years and not only never dessicated in all that time but remained fluid enough to contain millions of barrels of the stuff. And this miracle didn't happen just once but thousands of times all around the world. Why isn't this process still going on? What was so special about the dinosaurs that they were made from petrol and we aren't?

...

Is it possible that oil is not fossil-based at all but some form of on-going deep-Earth geological or even biogeological process? The vast bulk of life on Earth is bacteria, after all, and most of this lives to great depths. There are  oil-eating bacteria, so why shouldn't there be oil-defacating bacteria?

...

So, if the fossil-fuel plank of the anthroprgenic climate change theory is wrong, how would that affect the calculations?

Dead dinosaurs? The more I think about it, the less sense it makes. But I've believed it for decades because it's what I was taught and it's what most everyone else seems to think.

Anyone who told you it was 'dead dinosaurs' was an ass hat. And if I follow you correctly, you are saying that if hydrocarbons are abiotic there's not greenhouse gas produced by burning them? You do use the term biogeological - that's pretty much what I understand it to be!

I don't know if you are being disingenious, but there's enough information about regarding how coal and hydrocarbons form and evidence for a biologcal source for much of it (on Earth). The key word is fossilisation - there are different types of preservational environments. And the process is understood to be happening (well, the early stages) in some places today. As regards hydrocarbons on Titan, that's yer chemistry doing crazy shit right there. Many comets have water ice - did it rain on them once?

M

[Recrewt]

It is difficult to provide quality data for more than a few decades and there are huge margins of error with the rest.

That's not the case.

http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/bas_research/science_briefings/icecorebriefing.php

http://www.clim-past.net/9/2489/2013/cp-9-2489-2013.html

Resolution of course changes when using proxies from the rock record I referred to before, but there's enough quallty information to get a good idea of how the climate has varied even in very old rocks - back to perhaps as far as around 750 million years ago, when Earth was maybe Hoth:

http://www.snowballearth.org/

I think the main area of contention in my earlier statement would be 'quality'. 

Ice cores can provide a wealth of information but it is not necessarily without issues.  Firstly, ice does not just stay in one position and sub-layers can move around.  It is a difficult task dating an ice sample and this is even more complicated the further you go down where you cannot determine between the layers.  Add to this the possibility of contamination, especially where additional fluids need to be added to maintain the stability of deep cores and then there is the fact that different gases are trapped at different depths in ice and that the pressures involved in deep ice are also likely to have an impact.

The simple view is that a bubble of air is trapped and remains there for 500,000 years unchanged, but this is not the case.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core

[TordelBack]

The simple view is that a bubble of air is trapped and remains there for 500,000 years unchanged, but this is not the case.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core

Recrewt, are you arguing that an entire sub-discipline of palaeoclimatology has ignored/not realised the methodological problems you outline?  Any science, even shoddy humanities wannabes like my own, makes tackling these very issues its priority: it's the starting point of any single piece of research, the subject of theses, grants, courses, interdisciplinary projects, conferences, synthetic overviews etc. etc. 

Yes, there's always room for constant refinement in method, collection, analysis and interpretation of data, but you'll find a statement of the limitations of any serious study presented right there in the project report.  There may be better data around the corner, but we can only ever work with what we have, through the lense of what we know about it.  The palaeoclimate data being supplied from ice cores has already been put through the ringer before you or I get to go 'but what about...'.  Dismissing the value of something because it has acknowledged limitations is a road to nowhere.

I know I sound like some kind of brainwashed science-zealot here.  I'm not sure what I can do about that.

[Theblazeuk]

What was so special about the dinosaurs that they were made from petrol and we aren't?

Nothing at all. Other than that they died millions of years ago. Surpisingly you are right - bacteria can 'defecate' oil. This is in a vague sense the anaerobic decomposition that creates fossil fuels when combined with the sheer ridiculous pressure of geological forces over geological time.

Increasing C02 into a greenhouse does increase yields you are right. This seems an odd analogy given that the Greenhouse Effect is what is being denied, incidentally. However as with most things, this is not a universal rule. What is good for one plant is bad for others. There are many complicating and limiting factors involved, the most obvious of which are changes to temperature which if you know anything about growing plants, is a reet bastard. And remember plants dont grow to the beat of just one drum, what might be right for one, may not be right for some....

[TordelBack]

What was so special about the dinosaurs that they were made from petrol and we aren't?

Just so long as Pat Mills never sees that phrase...

[Recrewt]

The simple view is that a bubble of air is trapped and remains there for 500,000 years unchanged, but this is not the case.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core

Recrewt, are you arguing that an entire sub-discipline of palaeoclimatology has ignored/not realised the methodological problems you outline? 

No, but am I arguing the normal reporting of this data over-emphasises the accuracy of the data and underplays the potential flaws? 

Or that links such as Mikey included from the British Antarctic survey include potentially misleading comments like "Crucially, the ice encloses small bubbles of air that contain a sample of the atmosphere — from these it is possible to measure directly the past concentration of gases (including carbon dioxide and methane) in the atmosphere." but only mentions one potential flaw with the method " although we do have to be cautious, as artefacts can arise at sites with high concentrations of other impurities.".

[Hawkmumbler]

What was so special about the dinosaurs that they were made from petrol and we aren't?

What the actual fuck? Do you even know how fossil fuels are formed? I'll give you a clue, it's in the name.

[Mikey]

What do you mean by 'normal reporting'? And there'll always be emphasis on accuracy! It brings up the point about constant refinement mind-though it doesn't change the overall picture I'd say. 

M   

[JayzusB.Christ]

Michael Portillo: it's not a life skill in terms of something you need to survive. Instant meals are available or you can go out to restaurants.

Let them eat cake...

Haven't read all the climate change posts, but I will.