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What will it take to convince you of climate change?

tzrider said:
How much we influence it determines how much we can do about it.
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I disagree. There truly is no bearing on how much we cause and how much we can fix it.

The "But it's not us" argument is convenient. Instead of focusing on the issue (climate change), the argument gets shifted to blame.

It's like having a kid that all of a sudden starts swearing a lot. You can try and fix it, or you can argue about which parent said "fuck" in front of him. In all likelihood, he is hearing it from both parents, kids at school, tv, etc. But instead of finding a solution, you waste his youth blaming each other. The kid grows up with a foul mouth and the parents hate each other for it.
 
Shit like this is why I don't participate in political activities. For some reason, this is connected to political parties. So, if you are a believer in climate change, you are also an athiest baby killer, a liberal, you worship Hilary Clinton, and want to have Obama's baby, and I don't know very many people that fall into those categories.

Oh yeah, Limbaugh and Savage both ridicule it, and say that every one of the 93% of climate scientists, are corrupt, kind of like the Harley guy on the last page said. Every one. I tend to believe scientists more than I believe people that spew hate for a living.
 
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Brokenlink said:
I disagree. There truly is no bearing on how much we cause and how much we can fix it.

The "But it's not us" argument is convenient. Instead of focusing on the issue (climate change), the argument gets shifted to blame.

It's like having a kid that all of a sudden starts swearing a lot. You can try and fix it, or you can argue about which parent said "fuck" in front of him. In all likelihood, he is hearing it from both parents, kids at school, tv, etc. But instead of finding a solution, you waste his youth blaming each other. The kid grows up with a foul mouth and the parents hate each other for it.
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I think the problem is that the bulk of us feel like we're in the dark and you're probably much more educated in this area, so you don't have those questions. If we create 100 tons of particulates every day and they want us to reduce it by 500 tons a day, well then we have a problem. That's part of why it's good to know, but when people say, "yeah shush, just focus on fixing what I say", it creates an automatic distrust because, historically, those are the people who feed you with one hand and finger you with the other.
 
Brokenlink said:
I disagree. There truly is no bearing on how much we cause and how much we can fix it.

The "But it's not us" argument is convenient. Instead of focusing on the issue (climate change), the argument gets shifted to blame.

It's like having a kid that all of a sudden starts swearing a lot. You can try and fix it, or you can argue about which parent said "fuck" in front of him. In all likelihood, he is hearing it from both parents, kids at school, tv, etc. But instead of finding a solution, you waste his youth blaming each other. The kid grows up with a foul mouth and the parents hate each other for it.
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Exactly. This.

Does it matter who was in the captain's seat when we hit the iceberg? If so, let's just continue to argue about it instead of bailing water.

This strategy is the foundation of the stalling tactics used by industrialists and their paid politicians who want to grandfather in old polluting tech (because that's where they've already invested), and to dis-incentivize the R&D and commercial use of new tech.

Pretty clever, actually. Nothing gets done, the ship keeps sinking, and the fat cats still rake in their billions on the backs of tomorrow's generations.
 
Can you point to something quantitative that's not too difficult to read? Like we emit x amount of x and it floats around for x amount of time and reflects x amount of heat so we see roughly an x rise in temp over x area and x time. Also, I assume since x reflects our surface heat and prevents it from escaping, it must also work in a beneficial way where it prevents heat from coming in by reflecting it back out the atmosphere before it reaches the surface and there's some sort of differential measurement?
 
This chart doesn't yet include the latest research. At the bottom, you see the probability of positive or negative radiative forcing due to man. When this chart was made (I believe 2007) there was a tiny sliver of probability the man has a net cooling effect on climate. Based on reports in conferences I attended from 2010-2013, I understand that the sliver is now gone entirely, along with any reasonable argument that climate change is a myth.

figure-ts-5-l.png
 
Ooh I like that top one, will have to do some self educating to really put it together though. Is the second a formulated derivative of the first? Does the blue numbers represent the positive reflective part I was asking about?
 
Brokenlink said:
I disagree. There truly is no bearing on how much we cause and how much we can fix it.

The "But it's not us" argument is convenient. Instead of focusing on the issue (climate change), the argument gets shifted to blame.

It's like having a kid that all of a sudden starts swearing a lot. You can try and fix it, or you can argue about which parent said "fuck" in front of him. In all likelihood, he is hearing it from both parents, kids at school, tv, etc. But instead of finding a solution, you waste his youth blaming each other. The kid grows up with a foul mouth and the parents hate each other for it.
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This is logical.
 
byke said:
Can you point to something quantitative that's not too difficult to read? Like we emit x amount of x and it floats around for x amount of time and reflects x amount of heat so we see roughly an x rise in temp over x area and x time. Also, I assume since x reflects our surface heat and prevents it from escaping, it must also work in a beneficial way where it prevents heat from coming in by reflecting it back out the atmosphere before it reaches the surface and there's some sort of differential measurement?
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There is no simple way but if we were to pick CO2 concentrations you would start off with the countless research papers that have proven the warming potential of co2 in labs. We then have the ability to do accurate readings of co2 at a fairly non bias spot (manua loa) and we also know based off the atmospheric chemistry that the typical life is 100-120 years in the atmosphere. From there you can have a super simplified model that would just take into account the warming based off the current concentration.


Unfortunately there is no simple way to do that lol.

Another thing you can do is a super simplified energy balance model. Look into the famous paper written by Budkyo.
 
byke said:
Ooh I like that top one, will have to do some self educating to really put it together though. Is the second a formulated derivative of the first? Does the blue numbers represent the positive reflective part I was asking about?
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Yes blue is what is technically cooling the atmosphere while red is warming.
 
byke said:
Ooh I like that top one, will have to do some self educating to really put it together though. Is the second a formulated derivative of the first? Does the blue numbers represent the positive reflective part I was asking about?
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The first two bars are for the four major classifications of greenhouse gasses. CO2 is the most abundant, but the least "greenhousy." Due to its abundance it gets its own bar. The bar below it sums up the positive radiative forcing effect of the trace gasses that induce a very strong greenhouse effect relative to their concentration.

The blue bars represent cooling due to reflectance of heat (albedo). The error bars are huge there, especially for aerosols and clouds. Old-school thought about aerosols was that they are almost always cooling, but as we learn more about aerosol composition, we see that many types have a marked warming effect. Nowadays a large part of the climate change research that I'm aware of is going into aerosol albedo and aerosol cloud condensation nucleation (CCN) activity. I co-authored a paper on CCN in Environmental Science and Technology that has a decent summary of the topic in the intro, and I'll forward it to you if you'd like. PM me if interested.
 
I'm also interested in seeing your CCN paper. Did you talk about cloud seeding to create the higher level clouds?? Or is it discussing the usage of aerials as CCNs.
 
Pierre I am said:
I'm also interested in seeing your CCN paper. Did you talk about cloud seeding to create the higher level clouds?? Or is it discussing the usage of aerials as CCNs.
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It's more about chemical functionalization of aerosol components and their relationship to hygroscopicity. PM me your email and I'll send it your way.
 
I've always read that water is the biggest greenhouse gas, why doesn't it seem to be proportionately represented in the first graph? Wish I could take a class specifically on this subject.
 
byke said:
I've always read that water is the biggest greenhouse gas, why doesn't it seem to be proportionately represented in the first graph? Wish I could take a class specifically on this subject.
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Because of its short time span in the atmosphere and the fact that it is extremely localized. When looking a long term global scale its effects are negligible at best when dealing with warming.
 
In regards to the short time span, does it take into account the cyclical nature, or is that just saying that a specific particle doesn't suspend for very long? Like if the particles don't stay in the air very long, but there's so many that there's always a bunch in the air at any given time that it doesn't really matter if they don't suspend very long. Not sure if I expressed that very well...

With extreme localization, that doesn't jive with what we know about large regions that are super humid, or maybe it's relative to elevation?

For the record, I don't ask about water as a means of looking to say, "but it's natural!!!". I get the self-propagating cycle of humans contributing to certain insulating particulates causing heat to be trapped and leading to an increase in evaporation, which leads to an increase in insulation, which leads to more heat and evaporation.
 
byke said:
In regards to the short time span, does it take into account the cyclical nature, or is that just saying that a specific particle doesn't suspend for very long? Like if the particles don't stay in the air very long, but there's so many that there's always a bunch in the air at any given time that it doesn't really matter if they don't suspend very long. Not sure if I expressed that very well...

With extreme localization, that doesn't jive with what we know about large regions that are super humid, or maybe it's relative to elevation?

For the record, I don't ask about water as a means of looking to say, "but it's natural!!!". I get the self-propagating cycle of humans contributing to certain insulating particulates causing heat to be trapped and leading to an increase in evaporation, which leads to an increase in insulation, which leads to more heat and evaporation.
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Water particles have a different effect than gaseous water. Gaseous water absorbs heat, and water particles/droplets tend to reflect heat, although this depends on other components of the particles, and where and when the particles exist.

The net effect on climate forcing due to water in the atmosphere depends primarily on temperature. As temps go up, so does the abundance of gas-phase water. In general, this is a positive feedback mechanism where increasing temperatures lead to more positive radiative forcing due to water, but the evaporation of water subtracts heat from the system. The net effect is zero for "natural" occurrence of water, which is why water produced from hydrocarbon oxidation is the only water on that chart. As least that's how I understand it.

The net addition of water to the cycle from oxidation reactions of hydrocarbons in the atmosphere is accounted in the climate forcing chart.
 
I had to read that five times, but I think I get it. To say it another way, it's because the chart is looking at temperature effects and not gas/particle volume and they're not 1:1..?
 
Yeah, kinda. The take away is that the natural phase changes of water induce a net zero effect on radiative forcing.
 
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