Ben Gunn on 7/3/2008 at 15:12

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Jay, I know that many here are on the brink of imbecility but there are still some who deserve the credit.
To make it a forbidden movie... I dont know, it's a tad bolshevik, imho.

Ben Gunn on 7/3/2008 at 16:33

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Subtle sarcasm ftw.

Mingan on 7/3/2008 at 23:12

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Global warming or not, anthropogenic or not, we're still shitting the place up with our residues, affecting ecosystems; isn't that enough of a reason to clean up our act? If only so that our kids (and further) can enjoy life in a non-fucked-up environment.

This is not tree-hugging stuff; I'm sure it is very possible to live very decently without destroying everything so the next generations live in dumpsters or whatever.

jay pettitt on 8/3/2008 at 08:46

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Yeah, whatever.

Channel 4, who commissioned the programme, posted on the main programme page of it's TGGWS micro-site in November 2007 to have received formal complaints of misrepresentation from 2 of the programmes contributors. I'm not interested in discrediting anyone interviewed on the programme (except perhaps Singer, who is dishonest as the day is long). I don't suppose that either Naviv, or Christy for that matter, are attempting to distort the truth, misinform and mislead the public at large to suit a partisan agenda - the programme's makers, however, most definitely are. The programme fails on every standard of journalistic ethics. If the only platform you can argue your scepticism to climate change from requires you to discard truthfulness, objectivity, fairness and impartiality then, well...

Naviv remains a sceptic and all credit to him. However the assertion that current climate change is substantially caused by solar activity and cosmic rays has been considered and rejected by due scientific process. His own published research regarding the influence of cosmic rays on climate doesn't back up these claims either, he emphasises in his (http://http://www.gsajournals.org/perlserv/?request=res-loc&uri=urn%3Aap%3Apdf%3Adoi%3A10.1130%2F1052-5173%282003%29013%3C0004%3ACDOPC%3E2.0.CO%3B2) 2003 paper that his conclusions on the influence of cosmic rays on climate is only valid on a multimillion year time scale. Naviv is arguing from the fringes of and against the grain of accepted scientific consensus - in and of itself no bad thing, but without a significant body of supporting evidence and with a growing body of conflicting evidence I'm not going to consider it as anything other than an interesting sideline. I'm afraid that's how science works, cherry picking individual hypothesis while wilfully ignoring vast chunks of conflicting evidence isn't for me.



What? The accusation is precisely that of a conspiracy and of gross corruption and dishonesty amongst the scientific community on a global scale.


--edit--
Also, what Mingan said. There's really no need in the 21st century to be quite so dirty, wasteful and downright anti-social all the time.

jay pettitt on 8/3/2008 at 10:47

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Industrial emissions of CO2 and aerosols happen to dwarf typical volcanic output - though granted, represent only a small drop in the ocean compared to the total CO2 naturally flying about in the carbon cycle. You should consider though that the increase in the system from burning fossil fuels is accumulative and the current system of carbon sinks - the oceans, forests and soils etc - are pretty much saturated leading to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere having increased by just shy of a third from pre-industrial levels. That's a pretty significant increase.

It's good you mention eccentricities in the Earth's Orbit though. The big graph thing where Al Gore goes - 'ooh look CO2 and Temp - they match, but it's complicated for you little people' and the Swindle Programme goes - 'ooh look, Gore got it back to front nerr nerr nerr' is all about Milankovitch cycles. Plotting orbital wobbling against glacial and warm periods match up just as you'd expect. Earth warms when our orbit takes us closer to the sun and cools again as we move away. The Swindle programme is right to note that temperature increases first in the climate record, but then asks you to draw the conclusion that CO2 can't then be responsible for increasing temperature, which is false. What actually happens is that as we warm the CO2 sinks lose their ability to act as sinks - as ice sheets melt they release immense quantities of CO2 trapped within, forests become stressed etc. The sequence is that temperature rises, CO2 then goes up, temperature rises some more by way of a positive feed back loop. Fortunately Milankovitch cycles are cyclical and cooling follows. Unfortunately they are reasonably well understood and can't be attributed to the warming over the last hundred years or so and can't be relied upon to provide cooling anytime soon.

Of course I'd argue that there is considerable evidence supporting the case for anthropogenic climate change. That CO2 has more molecules than two is pretty much certain - as is the notion that gasses with three or more molecules absorb infra-red radiation much more effectively than those with only two producing a green house effect. These are testable and observable and have been unchallenged staples of physics for well over a hundred years. It is widely accepted that the greenhouse effect is responsible for increasing the surface temperature by about 30 degrees C compared to the outer atmosphere. This is measurable and we can increase the concentration of greenhouse gasses and watch the temperature go up accordingly. Not wanting to ascribe human traits onto gasses, but that's the lower atmosphere's job.

So the role of CO2 and the other greenhouse gasses is understood, it's effects are measurable and predictable. The quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere is measurable and an increase can be clearly assigned to industrial activity.

We also have evidence from geology and the ice core records about how the environment reacts to warming and cooling periods. Various control systems collapse depending on whether we are in a warm or cool state. We can also observe that happening in real time. Because of the state of decay of those controlling systems there is good reason to believe that we are close to the brink for switching into a new climatic period and we expect to continue to move ever close to that switch as we continue to warm ourselves up in the coming years.

At least, that's what I'm told.

There are wild cards I suppose. It's possible that the Sun is about to enter a chilly phase and provide us a grace period, but it doesn't strike me as a strategy unless we can be very sure it's going to stay cool for a bloody long time.

I'm really not sure there's all that much left, other than to continue to sit back and watch it happen.

What I suppose is safe to say, is that we don't know is what will happen once a switch takes place or how or to what extent we adapt to it. My background is variously in ecology, landscape archaeology and countryside management. I think it is notable that hominids have only been a successful group of species during the Holocene and have to say I worry about the prospects of feeding 6 billion plus people outside of climatic conditions conducive to agriculture.

I'm sort of with you on the population thing. It would appear that we're just another species that got too successful and our environment isn't able to properly sustain us. I'd suggest that there is a tricky moral maze to be negotiated when it comes to reducing the population though and would much rather look at reducing our impact and be increasingly smart about the demands we place on the environment as much as possible and hope that population can be steadied with a gently gently kind of approach. Failing that we should nuke china.