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The Final Globe Earth v Flat Earth Debate


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51 minutes ago, thplinth said:

You can find this graph everywhere... is it correct?

PhanerozoicCO2-Temperatures.png

So if it is a fair representation of earth's past - why would Earth's climate suffer a runaway greenhouse effect now when CO2 is so low versus millions and millions of years when it was much much higher?

It is a fair representation (without checking the content of that particular chart). No one on here said earth was going to have a runaway greenhouse effect. What you see from that graph is the way that earth has tipping points between different equilibrium states for the whole system. You have to remember that over the course of that much time it's not just CO2 concentration changing, at points the atmosphere was very different so other things like the degree of albedo and radiative transfer also change. Generally if you look at past tipping points you find that CO2 concentration changes follow the impact of another factor, emphasising the change and continuing to increase or decrease, alongside other factors, until the new  equilibrium is reached. In the past the original change has been caused by a number of factors such as biological change (change from CO2 metabolism to oxygen metabolism) geological (massive volcanic activity releasing huge amounts of methane), or external / solar (Milankovitch cycles for example: changes in the earth's orbit which marginally change the incident radiation from the sun - we understand these and they're not to blame for current changes)  The worry at the moment is that that human activity is the initial factor which is rapidly pushing us towards a tipping point. 

From your other post you don't give a toss about the deaths of millions of people from famines, flooding and other consequences of climate change. Your choice. But you're acknowledging it'll happen, it seems, you just don't give a rats arse. Species extinction is a big topic in science, it just doesn't get as much media coverage. Many scientists in that area will tell you were currently going through the sixth great extinction on earth, and the cause of it is human activity. 

The snowball earth thing is an interesting one too, there's a lot of debate about whether or not it has happened previously. It's not going to be completely unreversible though, but it'd be stable until one of the other factors I mentioned above happened to change the equilibrium. 

And yes, there's a reproducibility problem at the moment. I believe it's more pronounced in some disciplines than others. There needs to be a change in approach to deal with this. However, this is why science relies on consensus building. There is a consensus around global warming because results have been replicated. The debate is about degree, mitigation and adaptation. 

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2 hours ago, phart said:

Got to love the doublethink by researchers.

"More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature's survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research.

The data reveal sometimes-contradictory attitudes towards reproducibility. Although 52% of those surveyed agree that there is a significant 'crisis' of reproducibility, less than 31% think that failure to reproduce published results means that the result is probably wrong, and most say that they still trust the published literature."

Last sentence is astonishing. It's probably the right answer even though when i do it i get a different one...

reproducibility-graphic-online1.jpeg

 

http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-reproducibility-1.19970?WT.mc_id=SFB_NNEWS_1508_RHBox

That's fascinating, and gives some authority to a niggling feeling I've had for some time. The scientific method is wide open to abuse. Thanks for the link.

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12 hours ago, calmac_man said:

:rolleyes: Funnily enough he didn't literally say that.

 

Why did you imply that he did, then? That's not very scientific. You're not going to convince many non believers by making stuff up, IMO.;)

Einstein didn't didn't really show that Newton was wrong. What he did was,  put limits on what Newton was right about. 

Einstein was inspired by Newton and his work but even more so by James Clerk Maxwell. He didn't set out to prove either of them to be wrong. He wanted to add to what they had already achieved. That's what most good scientists try to do. 

 

 

Edited by Orraloon
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12 hours ago, calmac_man said:

That's exactly right. It's easy to wonder how burning a bit of coal can make much difference, but the amount of CO2 in the air is very small - it was under 0.03% (or 300 parts per million) before the industrial revolution, while water vapour makes up only 0.4%. Over 99.5% of our atmosphere does practically nothing to retain heat. A very small part of our atmosphere plays a huge role in temperature regulation, and if we didn't have them we'd be bloody freezing every night as heat radiated into space.

That touches on something that I haven't yet seen explained adequately. Maybe you can point me in the right direction?

Most of the climate change/global warming discussion seems to be focused on CO2. Every time we burn one mole of a hydrocarbon we produce 1 mole of CO2 but we also produce another 2 moles of H2O. I believe water vapour has a bigger green house effect than CO2? As you say there is far, far more water vapour in the atmosphere than there is CO2. The amount and distribution of water vapour is much more variable than CO2. A lot of that water vapour is in the form of clouds which reflect heat as well as help to trap heat in. This must be very unpredictable and difficult to measure. Why is so much of the focus on CO2 when water vapour would seem to me to be much more important? 

 

 

 

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52 minutes ago, Orraloon said:

Why did you imply that he did, then? That's not very scientific. You're not going to convince many non believers by making stuff up, IMO.;)

Einstein didn't didn't really show that Newton was wrong. What he did was,  put limits on what Newton was right about. 

Einstein was inspired by Newton and his work but even more so by James Clerk Maxwell. He didn't set out to prove either of them to be wrong. He wanted to add to what they had already achieved. That's what most good scientists try to do. 

 

 

He did show that Newton was wrong, even though Newtonian mechanics still works on most scales. It's not that Newton was right, it's just that the results of his wrongness still work ...

Einstein was remarkably conservative (vide his introduction of the cosmological constant to his equations of general relativity, and his God playing dice quip). He didn't set out to prove either Newton or Maxwell wrong, as you say, but I'd agree with Calmac that what he did wasn't an addition, it was an overturning - a paradigm shift in our view of the universe.

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3 hours ago, biffer said:

 

From your other post you don't give a toss about the deaths of millions of people from famines, flooding and other consequences of climate change. Your choice. But you're acknowledging it'll happen, it seems, you just don't give a rats arse. Species extinction is a big topic in science, it just doesn't get as much media coverage. Many scientists in that area will tell you were currently going through the sixth great extinction on earth, and the cause of it is human activity. 

 

"Cheer up, it's no the end of the world"


 

 

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1 hour ago, Orraloon said:

That touches on something that I haven't yet seen explained adequately. Maybe you can point me in the right direction?

Most of the climate change/global warming discussion seems to be focused on CO2. Every time we burn one mole of a hydrocarbon we produce 1 mole of CO2 but we also produce another 2 moles of H2O. I believe water vapour has a bigger green house effect than CO2? As you say there is far, far more water vapour in the atmosphere than there is CO2. The amount and distribution of water vapour is much more variable than CO2. A lot of that water vapour is in the form of clouds which reflect heat as well as help to trap heat in. This must be very unpredictable and difficult to measure. Why is so much of the focus on CO2 when water vapour would seem to me to be much more important? 

 

 

 

The water cycle is more complex and faster than the carbon cycle. In the short term (I.e. weeks or months) water can end up in the atmosphere, ocean, soil, or in animals and plants, co2 generally stays in the atmosphere for I think a couple of centuries (that’s off the top of my head but it’s that kind of order of magnitude). If you put more water into the water cycle, it’ll balance the total amount out fairly quickly, some of it having a positive and some a negative effect on temperature. The carbon cycle will eventually do this too but it will take centuries. The changes in these cycles are key to equilibrium that I was talking about earlier. The change in cloud cover and its effect is one of the areas the least certainty in climate change. It’s not just total,cloud cover either, clouds at different altitudes and of different types have different effects, some of them contributing to warming, some cooling. 

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15 hours ago, calmac_man said:

Ok.

But we don't really need to wait and see. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air is up by 40%, about a third higher than at any time in the last half million years and probably much longer, and we know that's from human activity. 

Other greenhouse gases have rocketed too. Methane is 25 times worse as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide is almost 300 times worse. Both of these have shot up, mostly through agriculture and land use.

Air temperatures are over 1 degree warmer than pre-industrial times, with most of that coming since the 1970s. It would be very weird if the increase in temperature was due to something other than the increase in greenhouse gases. The vast bulk of the warming has gone into the oceans, having impacts on measured sea levels, ocean circulation and marine life.The effect closer to home is that Scotland is notably warmer and wetter, with most of the additional rainfall coming in the summer. We have far, far fewer days of ground frost in the winter. 

You sometimes hear people say the models are rubbish, but that's not remotely true, we've been within the margins of the models for many years now, and the past three years has pushed us ahead of what they projected.

There are many debates in climate science, but there is no debate about the fundamentals - that the planet is warming, and that it's due to greenhouse gases that humans are causing.

I can only theorise why people argue against that, but there's a paper in the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Climate Science this month looking at this: http://climatescience.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228620-e-328#

Up until a few years ago I would have agreed that that is probably correct but now I'm a little less sure of that. I would need more convincing that we have a system in place that can measure the temperature of a planet to a sufficient degree of accuracy to be able to to say that the planets temp has increased by, say, 0.2 degrees in the last decade, or whatever the number is. 

I'm sure it would be possible to do this, but how much data would we need to have sufficient confidence in the level of accuracy? And how reliable is the data? That's the bit I would need more convincing of.

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6 hours ago, thplinth said:

You can find this graph everywhere... is it correct?

PhanerozoicCO2-Temperatures.png

So if it is a fair representation of earth's past - why would Earth's climate suffer a runaway greenhouse effect now when CO2 is so low versus millions and millions of years when it was much much higher?

Aye, even when CO2 levels were up at 7000 ppm the temp only got up to about 22C. Sounds awright to me. Panic over.:ok:

 

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6 hours ago, phart said:

The thing that stumps me is pan evaporation being down. That's a simple direct experimentation with no models just nice easy repeatable experiment folk have been doing world wide for decades. Models predict it should increase. Models are incorrect as it hasn't, now introducing variables like solar energy, wind speed and vapour pressure.

 

Modelling is never a replacement for actual experimentation.

There's a crisis in some sciences atm, called the replication crisis, where no one can actually replicate experiments. Huge numbers of experiments that fail the scientific method at the first hurdle. It's not getting much press cause of the implications but it shows how much nonsense is produced by "scientists", folk can't even replicate their own experiments.

1/6 scientists know a colleague who falsified their own experimental results.

I am one of those 1/6, but I'm surprised that is as low as 1/6. 

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Consensus means feck all in science. Or in anything the Truth is what it is. Science is in a publish or perish tail-spin, folk want research grants so study shit and say shit that will get them research grants. The ability to get research grants becomes the driving force in Science. Look at Feynman he had worked on the bomb so didn't have to worry about tenure or anything, so he started fannying about spinning plates on poles trying to work out the angular momentum and it morphed into his nobel prize work. 

The holocene extinction dates back to the end of the last iceage as opposed to the industrial revolution. So we'd have to die out to stop that. It coincided with mass human migration.

Climate is changing though.

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1 hour ago, Orraloon said:

Aye, even when CO2 levels were up at 7000 ppm the temp only got up to about 22C. Sounds awright to me. Panic over.:ok:

 

They get up to 22C several times with wildly different CO2 levels. But well done picking the highest level only. Very honest of you. Do you work for that IPCC crowd by any chance?

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3 hours ago, thplinth said:

They get up to 22C several times with wildly different CO2 levels. But well done picking the highest level only. Very honest of you. Do you work for that IPCC crowd by any chance?

Why wouldn't I go for the highest? I just want to know how much fuel I can burn before I need to start worrying about the planet getting too hot for me. Based on that chart, I'm not going to start worrying until it gets to about 6000 ppm. 22C sounds not too bad to me. A wee bit warm but I think I could adapt.

I wonder why it never seems to get much higher than 22C?

 

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Despite the y-axis title, that 22C is not the average temperature of the whole "globe" is it? :unsure:

If that's us back on topic, do the FEs explain the different angles of the light/shadow on a half moon at different latitudes?   I remember being blown away by the moon on my only visit to the tropics.   "Shit it's fallen over!"

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3 minutes ago, Grim Jim said:

Despite the y-axis title, that 22C is not the average temperature of the whole "globe" is it? :unsure:

If that's us back on topic, do the FEs explain the different angles of the light/shadow on a half moon at different latitudes?   I remember being blown away by the moon on my only visit to the tropics.   "Shit it's fallen over!"

It's the average surface temp.

It is thought that the temp at the core of the planet could be as high as 7000C.

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The 22C come from the "Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum" a huge warming event 55 million years ago. Which coincidentally helped bring about conditions for our ancestors to thrive.

The models don't predict that and it's considered analogous to current day events, in fact it's barely understood at all, but of course "the science is settled".

Saying Science is settled is another one of those "offensive" remarks that folk have been whining about in this thread.

 

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1 minute ago, phart said:

The 22C come from the "Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum" a huge warming event 55 million years ago. Which coincidentally helped bring about conditions for our ancestors to thrive.

The models don't predict that and it's considered analogous to current day events, in fact it's barely understood at all, but of course "the science is settled".

Saying Science is settled is another one of those "offensive" remarks that folk have been whining about in this thread.

 

Yip, I agree. As soon as somebody says to me "the science is settled" or something along those lines, I immediately start to think "Is this person a scientist?"

Another one which, I think, doesn't help their case is how they continually go about "Carbon emissions" and Carbon this and carbon that, when what they really mean is "carbon dioxide". Why do they do that? It shouldn't be difficult for a scientist to give stuff it's proper name.

 

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43 minutes ago, Orraloon said:

Why wouldn't I go for the highest? I just want to know how much fuel I can burn before I need to start worrying about the planet getting too hot for me. Based on that chart, I'm not going to start worrying until it gets to about 6000 ppm. 22C sounds not too bad to me. A wee bit warm but I think I could adapt.

I wonder why it never seems to get much higher than 22C?

 

Coz it is in a long term equilibrium?

And if you notice we are at the bottoming out of a recent ice age / cold curve and just on the way back up the historical temp scale...

It is going to go to 22C no matter what we do or do not do because that is what it always does...cycle after cycle over millions of years. In fact 22C is the earths default temp looking at the graph. It is the temp the earth likes to be at... most.  We are in a massive dip in temp while moaning about global warming. It is going to get hotter no matter. But the scale is millions of years. What is the point?  It puts all these hysterical CO2 claims into some perspective...

Edited by thplinth
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14 minutes ago, Orraloon said:

Yip, I agree. As soon as somebody says to me "the science is settled" or something along those lines, I immediately start to think "Is this person a scientist?"

Another one which, I think, doesn't help their case is how they continually go about "Carbon emissions" and Carbon this and carbon that, when what they really mean is "carbon dioxide". Why do they do that? It shouldn't be difficult for a scientist to give stuff it's proper name.

 

Doubt is the element i would love to introduce most. Too much certainty. Folk citing "science" as the evidence.

 

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3 hours ago, Grim Jim said:

If that's us back on topic, do the FEs explain the different angles of the light/shadow on a half moon at different latitudes?   I remember being blown away by the moon on my only visit to the tropics.   "Shit it's fallen over!"

Indeed...

Moon-observer.jpg

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15 hours ago, thplinth said:

You can find this graph everywhere... is it correct?

PhanerozoicCO2-Temperatures.png

So if it is a fair representation of earth's past - why would Earth's climate suffer a runaway greenhouse effect now when CO2 is so low versus millions and millions of years when it was much much higher?

I've seen that chart before. I can't remember all the comments about it, but they include:

  • The original version of this chart has huge error bars. Going back to Pangea means the evidence gets pretty weak.
  • The time scale is vast; if you broke it down into charts that are comparable to those we use to show the last half million years or so, they may show more correlation between CO2 and temperature. This chart flattens out detail as it's covering that period in a couple of pixels. Of course, we couldn't meaningfully produce such a chart because we wouldn't have enough data that far back.
  • Plant and animal life were very, very different further back in time. This chart includes a long period before the evolution of grass, for instance. The carbon cycle was completely different. We have a reasonably good idea of how much CO2 the natural environment can process, and how much humans are producing. We know what the excess is and we know that it's driving a sharp increase in atmospheric CO2. Nothing in the historical record can re-assure us that this increase won't cause warming.
  • There are lots of other factors that have a bearing on global temperatures, like the ocean currents, the location of land (when there's land at the equator rather than sea, more solar radiation is absorbed), whether there are ice caps or not, Milankovitch cycles, etc. None of these can explain recent changes. 
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