Why Climates Change
 

A talk called "Why Climates Change" will be given Friday (Apr 8) at the Lake Miona Recreation Center at 4 PM, for the Philosophy Club, which is open to Villager residents.

Interesting! I thought that climate change was a science, not a topic for philosophers.

Our climate has been changing since the dawn of time. There was been ice age, and a tropical age there is nothing we can do to stop the next

Perhaps the talk could be titled "Why NOT climate change"?

Yes, but we haven’t been burning fossil fuels since the dawn of time.

A big nothing burger when you look at evaluating the Glacial - Interglacial cycles of the last 450,000 years. The Earth has been much warmer during periods of time when humans were not even present.

Our air is cleaner now than it was in the 60s. To clean the air up you will need to get China,Russia,India and some of South America to do something about their air quality. When you get that to happen then we can talk.

It is all about the money. If they were so worried they wouldn't be flying their huge jets. They wouldn't allow huge controlled burns.

On 60 second clock of time humans haven’t even registered yet meaning you can break down millisecond that much….

Don’t forget Mexico where all polluting companies escape and wind just blows across southwest.

Maybe why sun comes up and goes down would be better topic? At least that can be explained over time with no theories of opinions…..

Accurate cliche…

The one thing constant about climate is change.

Exactly

Also 100% correct

That’s nice. What does it have to do with climate change?

We can do all kinds of things to be better stewards of our environment and mitigate our carbon footprint but way to many other countries are not doing much to help. I think you will understand now.

Remember the days when LA was covered by a yellow smog, Pittsburgh a smoky haze as did numerous other US cities. Thanks to a massive program to reduce contaminants, these cities and others have helped clean up the air. So what has happened to temperatures? They have gone up according to the "stewards" . So if that happened here, and we encourage, help other countries do the same, what results might we expect? I am not a scientist, but my thoughts would suggest some more warming. Why? Perhaps clearer skies allow more heat absorption. Less reflection of the Sun's rays.

An example of global temperature impact by air pollution is the 1883 explosion of Krakatau volcano in what is now Indonesia. Not a huge Volcano in height but an extremely large emission of airborne pollutants. Reportedly impacted global temperature by about 1 degree F for 5 years.

The earth has undergone glacial and interglacial cycles forever. Some suggest every 100,000 years, Mostly glacial 90000 years vs 10000 years interglacial. We are interglacial now. Perhaps the cause is something out of our control. Like tilt of the earth? Higher tilt, higher temperatures. Something out of human control. Some say Milankovitch cycles. Beyond me.

So, some speculate that global warming is not caused by use of fossil fuels. You should not assume that we all understand and agree with your stewardship comment.
Lots of theories and unanswered questions.

Not saying clean air is bad for our health, but not a sure case to claim that we will solve global warning by improving carbon footprint.

India announced they are re-opening 100 coal mines, plus China continues to build new coal plants. Both understand climate science, and that CO2 is not a problem.

Imagine, 99% of the world's scientists are just in a big conspiracy to milk money from your pockets. Of course, they are. Who else could possibly have a horse in this race?

It's not "99%"

It's 90+% of those that are dependent on government grants, a government that has set their agenda.

So who really has a horse in this race?

Please provide source data for the 99% value.

Climate change is a global topic, not a United States topic. But, if you take away all of the research studies and articles done by US scientists and US companies and universities, what research would you have left? I think it's mostly about getting money from the US Government.

Ditto. The American Meteorological Society (AMS) did a member survey in 2016. Results show that 67% believe climate change is mostly human-caused -- but -- only 53% of members responded. Since responses where not secret and since most members directly or indirectly work for government (such as academic government funding), many did not respond. Personal contact with some National Weather Service members confirms this.

True. It is easy to get grants to study man-made climate change, but not natural climate change.

Or perhaps they do not care. China is rather incredibly polluted where water must be filtered to be safe to drink.

CO2 is not pollution. CO2 is invisible, odorless, and tasteless. Pollution (such as trash mountains) can be seen, smelled, and I hear don't taste very good.

That's a pretty narrow definition of pollution. A better definition of pollutant would consider detrimental effects.

India and China are your measure of good science and decision making???

I don't know how those countries feel about CO2 in particular but they have a very poor track record on environmental issues. I'm sure there was no consideration given to climate change and pollution when they made the decision to increase coal consumption.

[URL="https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/10/more-999-studies-agree-humans-caused-climate-

"More than 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that climate change is mainly caused by humans, according to a new survey of 88,125 climate-related studies.

The research updates a similar 2013 paper revealing that 97% of studies published between 1991 and 2012 supported the idea that human activities are altering Earth’s climate. The current survey examines the literature published from 2012 to November 2020 to explore whether the consensus has changed."

There is no 99% or even 97%. That number gets tossed around from a much criticized paper by John Cook, IIRC. The question being asked is not what you think and the manipulation of the numbers to achieve the oft quoted percentage is laughable. Those who break out that number are typically clueless. Human activities have been altering the climate for a long time. You need to look no further than the urban heat island effect. There are, however, two actually important questions to ask: How much of recent temperature increases are anthropogenic and are we facing a dire situation in the future? The answer to both questions is "we don't know". Increasing CO2 does yield temperature increases because it changes the radiative transfer balance in the atmosphere. By itself, however, this is not enough to create the catastrophic effects that some claim are just around the corner. There would need to be positive feedbacks in the atmospheric/oceanic system from CO2 related temperature increases in order to create a dire situation. These are the types of climate dynamics that are not well understood and therefore difficult to numerically model. The catastrophic predictions for the future are based on numerical modeling. This is still an area of research. We are about 12,000 years into an interglacial period and temperature and sea levels can be expected to continue to rise. Anthropogenic warming is likely to be a positive perturbation on this trend.

Full disclosure: I am a retired research meteorologist who developed numerical atmospheric models for NASA and the National Weather Service.

They increased coal production for the same reason we did, to reduce the cost of industrial development. That justification, which we also did, is changing almost daily with solar now close to or less expensive than fossil fuels in many locations. Wind power is also becoming competitive.

Sorry, my bad, I meant peer-review papers written by people who actually work in that field that tries to understand the long-term climate as opposed to people whose career to trying to predict tomorrow's weather.

[URL="https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/10/more-999-studies-agree-humans-caused-climate-

"More than 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that climate change is mainly caused by humans, according to a new survey of 88,125 climate-related studies.

The research updates a similar 2013 paper revealing that 97% of studies published between 1991 and 2012 supported the idea that human activities are altering Earth’s climate. The current survey examines the literature published from 2012 to November 2020 to explore whether the consensus has changed."

Yes, they know and understand climate science -- CO2 is not a pollutant. They, like NASA, also know that CO2 is plant food and is helping to green the earth -- and more CO2 would be beneficial.

This is from their website. Keep in mind that personal opinions are not peer-reviewed.

Climate Intervention - American Meteorological Society

"Adopted by the AMS Council on 2 February 2022
It is now well established that global average surface temperatures are increasing, and the associated changes in climate are causing ecological and societal disruptions. Further, there is overwhelming evidence that climate change in recent decades is caused by human activities. Greenhouse gas emissions, particularly of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, have already contributed and will continue to contribute to widespread climate changes, with major negative consequences for most humans and ecosystems. "

Or deforestation of the flyover states for plantation of corn and soybeans. :shocked:

It is competitive -- but only on windy days -- but not on very cold days as some of their produced energy is needed to heat the turbines oils, etc.

As with so many posts on here, the last sentence implies that anyone is suggesting a silver bullet.

The people that have spent their lives studying climate have said (99.9% of peer-reviewed papers) that human actions are contributing to climate change. It is also commonly agreed by them that we have passed the "tipping point" meaning the climate will continue to change at ever-increasing rates (positive feedback).

What they do say, is that it is too late to "solve" the problem, at this point the best we can do is help reduce the rate of change - reduce the problem. And reducing the carbon footprint is just one of many recommendations. Saying reducing carbon won't solve the problem is an over simplification of the recommendations being made.

"More than 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that climate change is mainly caused by humans, according to a new survey of 88,125 climate-related studies.

That shows that whoever created these scientific papers are clueless to a 99.9% certainty. That would imply that climate change has only occurred since humans were around and more specifically since they began using fossil fuels to a great extent.

Statements like this are the reason why there is widespread disbelief in "these government trolls and politicians" trying to institute their beliefs as fact.

The problem is there is no proof humans cause climate change -- only pollution. The science world is full of sky-is-falling rhetoric throughout history -- just like the next ice age scare in the 70s.

Yes, absolutely. There are a lot of examples of anthropogenic changes. We should try to tread lightly when we can. Fortunately, the atmospheric/oceanic system has negative feedbacks. A very simple example of a negative feedback would be if the atmosphere warmed then it could hold more water vapor which could result in more clouds but the clouds would reflect more sunlight, but the clouds can also radiate more long wave radiation back to earth. These are the sorts of things that are numerically modeled. It is very non-linear. The difference between the atmosphere warming and cooling is a difference of a few watts per square meter in the radiation budget and the solar constant is about 1300 watts per square meter. We are essentially looking at the small difference between two large numbers which is why the modeling is difficult and still an area of research.