--- On Tue, 21/7/09, b.schulz...@scu.edu.au <b.schulz...@scu.edu.au> wrote:
> It is fairly well established within > the scientific community that there is a "fight" > between CO2 keeping IR within the Earth's atmosphere and > aerosol (in a climate science context this means particles > such as smoke, rubber dust, clouds, sulphur dioxide etc) > reducing solar insolation. There has also been no real sun spots since December 2007, sunspots indicate how active the sun is, and there is speculation that the sun started to decline in output since 2003/2004 as it went toward the end of the last sun spot cycle. There was a largish blemish the other week but there is uncertainty if this is really the start of the next cycle or not, as the sun's output keeps dropping. > This explains why there was a slight cooling trend within > the 70's as the bulk of the industrialised world had > very poor emission control schemes. Once pollution control > (mostly in the form of sulphur dioxide scrubbers in coal > power stations) became more widespread the Earth's > temperature began to rise again. There also seems to be about a 20 year cycle of heating and cooling, which coincides with 2 sunspot cycles. > Due to this, I would not be surprised if the current > warming trend has been slowed due to increased aerosol > emissions from developing industrial nations such as China > and India. There is something like 26 factors that effect the earths climate, the sun is the major contributor funnily enough :) But there is also geothermal inputs too. > The general public skepticism towards climate change > probably has it's roots in the media. Essentially the > media has a tenancy to give equal air time to for and > against arguments, despite 84% of scientists believing that > climate change is a result of human activity > (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090710/sc_nm/us_science_survey_1). Science by virtue should be skeptical of all claims until there is hard evidence that proves things one way or another, and one of the biggest problems I have with the current debate is errors in existing data. Weather stations are used to tell you what the weather is like near you, however they don't always make good climate stations, and the majority of data is probably corrupted by numerous factors, from things like people in Russia prior to 1990 making the temp seem colder to get more rations, and now things being more automated don't report the temperature as cold. Parking jets near weather stations don't help either: http://www.surfacestations.org/images/lovelock_mig480.jpg Putting stations in the middle of Melbourne's CBD which shows a great increase in temp over time compared to one of the nearby airports. http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2248 I can keep going if you want :) > A 2005 study (Hansen et al, 2005) showed that the Yup, he's the reverend of the church of climatology, it took people years and years to get him to release both his data and methods to reproduce and check his work, a lot of researchers are failing to release all their information especially in a timely fashion so people can peer review. This isn't science. > Anyway, I encourage you to do your own research as that > would be far more convincing that the 2nd hand opinion of > some random figure on the Internet. An excellent starting Yup I do look into this a little more than I probably should, raises my ire at time at how shoddy some of these researchers try and pass off junk science as actual science. I subscribe to this blog: http://wattsupwiththat.com Which is a little less maths intensive then this blog: http://www.climateaudit.org Both are extremely informative into the shannigans that are being pulled, there is very little peer review currently going on in this space, and in fact there was a report some time ago on slashdot.org about how little peer review was being conducted in general and that at least 10% of papers were recanted by their authors. > Lastly, the extreme emotion people can feel over this issue > is arrises when someone becomes convinced of climate change > and educated in its ramifications. These people can see > disaster awaiting humanity and want to do everything in > their power to avert it. Certainly if you saw a child run in > front of a car while chasing a ball you would do everything > within your power to stop them. I'm glad you brought this up, earlier this week this was as a quote of the week: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/20/quote-of-the-week-15/ From the Atlantic: An Interview With Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling, Part Two – Conor Clarke #3 But I tend to be rather pessimistic. I sometimes wish that we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening — you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth — that would get people very concerned about climate change. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
