Al Gore receives Nobel Peace Prize

[adios]

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Because we've spent tens of thousands of years adapting our civilization to it mebbe.

[/ QUOTE ]ummm....no. The climate is in constant flux. if it is in constant flux, why is warming worse than cooling?

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The climate is in constant, very slow flux. A sharp change of several degrees will be disruptive to a couple of billion people, whether it's up or down. Also climate changes have ended civilizations in the past.

Climatologists have been doing a huge amount of work on just what the effects of various levels of CO2 will be, and to be fair it's just not clear. One problem is that there are a variety of positive feedback mechanisms. At a certain temperature large amounts of carbon will be released by methane hydrate deposits and various other sources. If that happens then the changes will be dramatic and unpredictable. For reference, you know the Nevada Desert? That was a forest at one point, and then runaway carbon feedback caused a 15 degree temperature rise.

So ultimately the question is - wanna gamble? It may not be too bad at all. It may be the end of civilization as we know it. We can use renewables, sequestration, nuclear power, biofuels and higher efficiency to dramatically reduce our carbon output. We can supplement that with measures to reduce incident solar radiation. It won't cost that much. It will make us less dependent on unstable regions of the world. It will relieve concern over the inevitable peaking of our oil production. It will mean that the money being spent on hydrocarbons goes to provide real jobs, rather than lining the pockets of petty dictators.

So, do you feel lucky?

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And cost an unknown amount of money and it's probably alot more than what anything that could be imagined. Don't leave out the cost. No proof that anything proposed by the US and/or UN will do anything thats effective, thus reducing the risk as you propose it.

[Jamougha]

adios,

yes, I accept that cost is a legitimate concern. However the costs have been studied. The Stern Report was commissioned by the UK government and performed by one of the UK's leading economists. He indicated that the total economic cost for the UK would be less than one year's GDP growth. Even if it's a significant underestimate it's clearly worthwhile, at least to my mind.

[TomCollins]

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Because we've spent tens of thousands of years adapting our civilization to it mebbe.

[/ QUOTE ]ummm....no. The climate is in constant flux. if it is in constant flux, why is warming worse than cooling?

[/ QUOTE ]

The climate is in constant, very slow flux. A sharp change of several degrees will be disruptive to a couple of billion people, whether it's up or down. Also climate changes have ended civilizations in the past.

Climatologists have been doing a huge amount of work on just what the effects of various levels of CO2 will be, and to be fair it's just not clear. One problem is that there are a variety of positive feedback mechanisms. At a certain temperature large amounts of carbon will be released by methane hydrate deposits and various other sources. If that happens then the changes will be dramatic and unpredictable. For reference, you know the Nevada Desert? That was a forest at one point, and then runaway carbon feedback caused a 15 degree temperature rise.

So ultimately the question is - wanna gamble? It may not be too bad at all. It may be the end of civilization as we know it. We can use renewables, sequestration, nuclear power, biofuels and higher efficiency to dramatically reduce our carbon output. We can supplement that with measures to reduce incident solar radiation. It won't cost that much. It will make us less dependent on unstable regions of the world. It will relieve concern over the inevitable peaking of our oil production. It will mean that the money being spent on hydrocarbons goes to provide real jobs, rather than lining the pockets of petty dictators.

So, do you feel lucky?

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SRSLY! The sky is falling!

[adios]

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adios,

yes, I accept that cost is a legitimate concern. However the costs have been studied. The Stern Report was commissioned by the UK government and performed by one of the UK's leading economists. He indicated that the total economic cost for the UK would be less than one year's GDP growth. Even if it's a significant underestimate it's clearly worthwhile, at least to my mind.

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A caveat, I respect what you have to say and your ideas on this. I don't know about the UK but any kind of government estimate I see on cost is always vaslty underestimated in the US. What is the Stern Report? I've haven't seen anything coming from the US, UK, UN, and/or anywhere else that if implemented will prove to be effective. Perhaps the Stern Report recommendations have recommendations that would prove to be effective. I'll Google Stern Report and check it out.

Edit: I googled the Stern Report and found this link highlighting the issues and recommendations:

Stern Report Article

I'll just make two quick comments:

1. This report calls for a lot of international cooperation which would be necessary but I have my doubts that this report can estimate the costs accurately of obtaining such cooperation.

2. From the article:

The cost of reducing emissions could be limited to around 1% of global GDP; people could be charged more for carbon-intensive goods.

In fact just the opposite is happening in the states, going green costs more money not less. The electric company offered to raise the cost of my electric bill if I used electricity generated by wind power. Now why should sign up to pay more money for that? I should be paying less if people are really serious.

[kidcolin]

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It's just strange, because Al Gore doesn't really work to end world conflict, he works to educate the world about the dangers of global warming... You would think the person they award the Nobel Peace Prize to would work in some way to end some conflict somewhere in the world... So you can see how it's confusing.

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I read an interesting Tribune Op-Ed piece about this yesterday. Global climate change is definately on the Pentagon's radar screen for its potential to cause war in the future. I must have heard a dozen times that war will be increasingly fought over water and war will be more likely to be fought in areas that dry out because of global warming.

Last year's Peace Prize winner was the guy who started handing out microloans in the 3rd World. This has very little to do directly with peace, but the idea was that reducing poverty would tend to lessen war over time. Global warming has the potential to increase poverty by making once marginal farms barren. Everyone in the MSM like the microloan prize because that guy wasn't identified with an ideology and everyone on this forum liked it because it was a free market solution. The fact that Gore is neither has gotten many of your goats, but his efforts to stop global warming will hopefully pay dividends in the future in stopping war.

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Or, since regulations may get passed to stall global warming, economies all over the world may get poorer, and wars might break out due to that. It's really anyone's guess.

[wacki]

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What ever happened to the scientific method? Your reasoning here isn't anything like the scientific method in making conclusions. Yet you want to basically have people spend alot of money (anything green seems to always cost more money) on something that is basically at the hypothesis stage IMO. The climate models are unproven and I find it laughable to the point of absurdity that anyone can vouch for these models being gospel when we're modeling something as complex as the climate and the models are in their early stages of development.

One thing that we do have experience with and know very well, the special interests that stand to benefit from laws that are passed in the name of solving the problem of "climate change" are lining up at the trough. Laws that we have no idea or proof of that they'll do a bit of good regarding "climate change."

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Adios, Dr. William Gray is the most distinguished climate change skeptic with experience in forcasting yet his performance lately has been ranked as "the bottom of the barrel".

http://tinyurl.com/ywp8c3

If you can point me in the direction of a climate change skeptic that can predict hurricanes as accurately as climate change models then I will listen to you. Until you accomplish this, your claims of "unproven models" aren't going to hold a lot of water.

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This response is lame and pathetic. Very revealing that you take my comments personally. They certainly weren't meant that way. I already know what your beliefs are about this.

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Well I missed the words in italics. The models certainly aren't gospel. But this isn't personal this is about facts. The following statements are either true or false:

*Climate models aren't made to model hurricanes yet their predictive ability is better than traditional statistical forcasts.
*The climate change skeptics (e.g. Bill Gray) are the bottom of the barrel when it comes to predicting hurricanes.
*Climate model coupled forecasting is the best tool we have for predicting hurricanes.
*Climate model coupled forecasting methods correctly predicted hurricanes in areas where Bill Gray thought was "impossible".
*The predictions that beat the old-school methods were made at course resolution (>200km) and current models have nearly double the resolution at ~125 km.
*Many top modeling experts believe a resolution of 45km is needed to successfully simulate intensity and tracks. Despite this, 200km resoltion was enough to beat old-school predictive methods.

It's not personal. Either these statements are true or they aren't true. If we can't agree on these statements then we have a real problem.

Now if we can agree on these statements then I'm a bit confused why you would so harshly criticize the models. Sure there is uncertainty, and sure some people (like Al Gore) try to claim there is no uncertainty, but to use such harsh language is a bit much.

[wacki]

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You brought up the validity of climate models in predicting hurricanes. Please educate us more. We are still waiting for you to tell us about 2006 climate model predictions versus actual number of hurricanes.

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Sorry for the short delay but this is the first time I've been back to the politics forum. I can't access precise numbers from where I'm sitting but here is something from the AGU:

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/200...GL030740.shtml

Based on 12 years of re-forecasts and 2 years of real-time forecasts, we show that the so-called EUROSIP (EUROpean Seasonal to Inter-annual Prediction) multi-model ensemble of coupled ocean atmosphere models has substantial skill in probabilistic prediction of the number of Atlantic tropical storms. The EUROSIP real-time forecasts correctly distinguished between the exceptional year of 2005 and the average hurricane year of 2006.

And from a leader in the business:

The results have been astonishing; all three groups predicted > 20 NATL tropical cyclones for 2005 in the june 1 forecasts (Meteofrance picked up the large activity as early as their April forecast). This year all three June forecasts were lower than the statistical forecasts, with ECMWF being the lowest because it successfully caught the the incipient El Nino. .... I predict that after next years debut of the European operational seasonal forecasts for global tropical cyclone activity, that the empirical statistical forecasters will be out of business.

http://tinyurl.com/38w4yy

An informal documentation but one that clearly gets the point across. Maybe later, when I'm sitting at a different desk, I can get some hard numbers but 2006 might be behind the firewall as the european models haven't really gone 'official' yet. But abstracts from the AGU should be enough to get the point across.

BTW, for the last year I've asked for the sources of some of your 'anti-consensus' arguments, facts and figures as I have a hobby of documenting fraud. I have even gone as far as repeatedly posted bolded requests in multiple threads. And for more than a year you have avoided answering my questions/requests. Do you still intend on protecting frauds or are you finally going to grow up and give me some of your sources?

[Utah]

Thanks for responding and thanks for posting the info. I don't have a problem with climate models predicting hurricanes. For all I know, they are great and Gray may suck. I doubt it, but I can't intelligently speak to it because I have done almost zero research on the subject. My ongoing problem is with the selective use of facts by the global warming community.

Here are some simple questions:

1) Why does an article from 2007 decide to skip over the 2006 hurricane season and instead to use 2005 as the basis for showing the accuracy of climate models in predicting hurricanes?
2) The first article you posted used the climate model from Meteo-France. What was the quantitative forecast from Meteo-France at the start of the 2006 season? I looked and could not find it.
3) What was Meteo-Frances 2007 prediction?
3) Why does the quote you just posted call 2006 an average year when 2006 had the lowest # of named storms in 10 years, it tied for the lowest # of major storms in 10 years, and not a single hurricane reached landfall? Would you consider that an average year? I would like to see the actuals versus predicted instead of relying on the qualitative comments.

[Copernicus]

because of the certainty he attributes to his claims in Inconvenient Truth.

CNN "Keeping them Honest" tonight.

[dhattis333]

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Global warming has the potential to increase poverty by making once marginal farms barren.

[/ QUOTE ]Assuming global warming is happening, why would one assume that the net affect is negative? What is to say that the current temperature is optimal?

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Its not just about "temperature" its also about moisture distribution patterns, sea level rise etc.

http://www.scidev.net/News/index.cfm...amp;language=1

http://africa.reuters.com/top/news/usnBAN251297.html

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/clim...ea-level_N.htm