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Record return of artic ice cap

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DWill

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Re: Record return of artic ice cap

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Robert Tulip wrote:
ant wrote:This isnt about "the good guys" trying to save us from the evil money hungry polluters.
Yes it is. Supporters of business as usual have sold their souls to the devil. The challenge is to preserve capitalism in a context where it has been corrupted by cronyism. Only innovative technology produced through free market methods will enable sustainable geoengineering at scale, which is the only thing that will save us from global warming.
ant wrote: global warming crazies
Just like Churchill was crazy for opposing Hitler in the 1930s. Climate denialists are worse than holocaust denialists, since the global impact of runaway climate change would be much worse than the second world war.

I see ant has not conceded that his Daily Mail shitsheet was lies, as proven by the scientific rebuttals I posted. Remember, ant does not believe in atomic theory. Go figure.
Geoengineering--ugh! As though we haven't yet demonstrated hubris enough in regard to controlling nature. And this geoengineering will occur through market forces and not through government fiat? How?

I think the view of all of this as a pitched battle between good and evil, the view Robert takes, is more than a bit much. There is a lot of crude labeling of the actors involved.
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geo

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Re: Record return of artic ice cap

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DWill wrote:. . . I think the view of all of this as a pitched battle between good and evil, the view Robert takes, is more than a bit much. There is a lot of crude labeling of the actors involved.
I agree with this statement wholeheartedly. The idea that one year's worth of ice formation (in the arctic only) can be seen as evidence for or against global climate change is pure nonsense, of course. However, I think it behooves us to see that most of the climate change movement has very little to do with science. There's science at work, no question, and it continues to bolster our confidence that human emissions are causing or contributing to warming. However, it's still a very broad kind of scientific understanding, not much more than an extrapolation of the greenhouse effect. This is to be expected of course based on the complexity of climate and the fact that we are still in early stages of learning about it.

Normally we don’t need to take a hard line position when it comes to scientific theory and we don't usually have to rely on the consensus view. In this case, however, we don’t have time to sit back and wait for smoking-gun evidence which might never come. We have to act right now. But the conversation remains more nuanced than some try to make it out to be. There’s plenty of room for debate about what we can do to address global warming—the political side of the argument.

Given that state of things, I don't think it's really fair to say "climate deniers are worse than holocaust denialists" because a big part of the debate has to do with the political side. Those who aren’t willing to jump on the political solutions bandwagon are being labeled as “deniers.” Us-versus-them. I don’t see how it helps.

I like Judith Curry's take on a recent NPR interview. She says, we just don't know.

http://www.npr.org/2013/08/22/213894792 ... ate-change

See the link at the bottom of the page for a different persepctive.
-Geo
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Record return of artic ice cap

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geo wrote:The idea that one year's worth of ice formation (in the arctic only) can be seen as evidence for or against global climate change is pure nonsense, of course.
So scientists put this year in the context of 34 years of detailed measurement as shown in this graph of the Arctic death spiral since 1979, as I have been explaining in this thread. Here we see how close the Arctic is to zero summer ice. When that happens, the albedo amplification effects could make the situation permanent, especially if we continue to add forty billion tonnes of CO2 to the air each year as a forcer. Great for shippers' and miners' dreams, but a good recent paper estimated net costs in the tens of trillions of dollars. The danger of methane permafrost release from arctic warming is big. The Arctic is the canary in the global coal mine, where climate sensitivity is double the rest of the planet. The crisis is happening now.

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geo

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Re: Record return of artic ice cap

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I should have said if it's true that this year's ice formation in the arctic ice is normal, we still couldn't use it as evidence for or against global warming. (That's the gist of the article, right?) Because it's just one year and that could be an anomaly.

That said, I don't think it's true that ice formation in the arctic is normal. The graph Robert posted confirms that ice formation is actually much lower now than in the 1970s. That alone doesn't prove anything either, but it is part of a growing body of evidence that the earth is in a definite warming trend.

What is normal ice formation in the arctic anyway? Even if we knew the last 10,000 years, that's still only a very limited snapshot. We humans are so arrogant and pretend to know the big picture when we don't. We're always so sure that catastrophe is just around the corner. Whatever happened to the overpopulation catastrophe predicted by Malthus? Whatever happened to the acid rain scare? The thinning ozone layer scare? The rainforests being cut down scare? Turns out we're not really very good at predicting the future. I'm not saying that global warming isn't a real threat. I do think it is.
-Geo
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