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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (23290)	7/8/2006 10:40:09 AM
From: Alastair McIntosh	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 541375

Not really related to flat-earthdom but in "An Inconvenient Truth" Gore warns, for example, that Europe may experience a new ice age, which seems a little paradoxical in a discussion of global warming. However, he says, about 10,000 years ago, when the last glacial ice sheet melted in what became North America, fresh water flooded the Atlantic and shut off the Gulf Stream, thus stopping a conveyer belt of warm temperatures that gave Europe a temperate climate; a new ice age developed and froze the continent for about 900 years. Could happen again, Gore says. The Source of Europe's Mild Climate The notion that the Gulf Stream is responsible for keeping Europe anomalously warm turns out to be a myth The article ends with: The Longevity of a Legend When Battisti and I had finished our study of the influence of the Gulf Stream, we were left with a certain sense of deflation: Pretty much everything we had found could have been concluded on the basis of results that were already available. Ngar-Cheung Lau of the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) and Princeton University had published in 1979 an observational study in which he quantitatively demonstrated the warming and cooling effects that large-scale waves in the atmosphere had in Europe and eastern North America, respectively. In the 1980s, atmosphere modelers such as Brian J. Hoskins and Paul J. Valdes at the University of Reading in England and Isaac M. Held and Sumant Nigam at GFDL had shown how such stationary waves, including those forced by mountains, warm western Europe. In the late 1980s, two other GFDL researchers, Syukuro Manabe and Ronald J. Stouffer, had used a coupled ocean-atmosphere climate model to determine the climate impacts of an imposed shutdown of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation. Their modeled climate cooled by a few degrees on both sides of the Atlantic and left the much larger difference in temperature across the ocean unchanged. Other published model experiments went on to show the same thing. Further, the distinction between maritime and continental climates had been a standard of climatology for decades, even centuries. What is more, by the late 1990s satellite data, and analyses of numerical models into which those data had been assimilated as part of the weather-forecasting process, had shown that in mid-latitudes the poleward transport of heat by the atmosphere exceeds that by the ocean several-fold. All Battisti and I did was put these pieces of evidence together and add in a few more illustrative numerical experiments. Why hadn't anyone done that before? Why had these collective studies not already led to the demise of claims in the media and scientific papers alike that the Gulf Stream keeps Europe's climate just this side of glaciation? It seems this particular myth has grown to such a massive size that it exerts a great deal of pull on the minds of otherwise discerning people. This is not just an academic issue. The play that the doomsday scenario has gotten in the media—even from seemingly reputable outlets such as the British Broadcasting Corporation—could be dismissed as attention-grabbing sensationalism. But at root, it is the ignorance of how regional climates are determined that allows this misinformation to gain such traction. Maury should not be faulted; he could hardly have known better. The blame lies with modern-day climate scientists who either continue to promulgate the Gulf Stream-climate myth or who decline to clarify the relative roles of atmosphere and ocean in determining European climate. This abdication of responsibility leaves decades of folk wisdom unchallenged, still dominating the front pages, airwaves and Internet, ensuring that a well-worn piece of climatological nonsense will be passed down to yet another generation. Read it all at: americanscientist.org

To: Lane3 who wrote (23290)	7/10/2006 11:04:15 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541375

So where do you think the threshold of flat-earthdom is? Short version first, maybe some people who won't read the whole post, will at least read the short version. Believing that the earth is flat is totally unreasonable. It either requires staggering ignorance, or irrationality to believe the earth is flat. The belief that either the earth is not warming in an unusual way, or that if it is it isn't caused by, or isn't primarily caused by human action, probably isn't correct, but it doesn't require either staggering ignorance, or a significant level or irrationality. Long version - I might give some small weight to the percentage of people who believe an idea correct or incorrect. If 99.9% of people reject an idea it might be a sign that its problematic. I might also give some weight to how long an idea has been discredited. If new evidence discredits and idea its probably not quite as irrational to doubt the evidence as it is to doubt evidence and confirmations accumulated over decades or centuries. I might give a bit of weight to the complexity of the issue and the evidence. In the end though the main criteria is how solid the facts and evidence are. Anthropogenic global warming, falls short of "flat earthdom" by all of these standards. The evidence has really only been reasonable solid for a few years. As recently as when I first posted on the issue on SI the evidence was more mixed. Part of the change is just accumulating more evidence on the global warming side of the balance. Part of it is that some of the counter evidence has been shown to be faulty or questionable. So global warming fails to achieve "flat-earthdom" on the time criteria. The percentage of people who disagree with global warming is probably significant even though it is also probably a minority. I doubt very much it would be in the single digits, it could be as high as a third or even higher. The percentage of scientists in general, or scientists in a relevant field who disagree that anthropogenic global warming is an established fact is a minority, probably a small minority, but almost certainly not a fraction of one percent. Depending on how they define "established fact" it might even be in the low double digits. So global warming falls short of "flat earthdom" in terms of how many people believe in it and how many people with relevant expertise believe in it. The idea that the earth is flat is only believed by an insignificant minority of people, and a still smaller percentage of educated people. You would have to look long and hard to find any scientist in any field who believed it. It gets no support at all. I imagine it likely that many of the members of the Flat Earth Society signed up as a lark and don't really believe it. Out understanding of climate is imperfect, and climate is a very complex subject. The temperature record is imperfect and even to the extent it can be relied on requires complex statistical evaluation to determine how likely changes in temperature over a period of years or decades are part of a trend or just normal fluctuations over time. Looking at the evidence it seems reasonable to conclude that recent changes have been up, and up by more than is likely from random fluctuations. Also there has been some disputed and uncertain evidence of warming on other planets which would seem to indicate an increase in solar output. I think the evidence on the anthropogenic global warming side, is far more solid at this point. If it was a civil suit the anthropogenic global warming side would win hands down IMO. OTOH I might not vote to "convict" homo sapiens of the "crime" of global warming if I was on a jury for a criminal trial on the issue. I think its clear that global warming falls short of "flat-earthdom" in terms of having simple proof that the idea is wrong, and I also think it falls short (if not as far or certainly short) of that charge on the certainty of the evidence, which I consider the most important criteria. Tim