Cut Your Carbon By 10%--No ​Pressure--​Your Choice

@Maddus Mattus: And once again because you seem to have missed it: Complex systems -> small change leads to large effect.

It doesn't matter that we're not the largest producers of CO2, it matters that we are a recent, rapid change to the CO2 output. The amount is not as important as the speed at which it is introduced because any feedback systems may not have had enough time to compensate yet and a small nudge off-balance can send the system off to some other equilibrium point.

Just because you don't understand the mathematics of dynamic systems is no reason to dismiss them. I have a limited knowledge of this subject because I studied just enough of it during my Masters Degree that I understand the basic principles and know enough to know that I don't know enough.  The mathematics behind it are well established and not just limited to climate, but are used extensively throughout biology.

Herbie

@Dr Herbie: First you totally need to understand that complex system before you can say our contribution is small. Maybe our contribution is not small but negligable, they can't tell. So to take any course is folly, we just don't know.

We don't know the risks, we don't know the extent of our own impact, hell we don't even know what's driving the thing and here we are making life altering decisions, condeming people to poverty and generally destroying our civilisation, just because we have a hunch our impact on the complex system is small? I totally don't agree and I don't have a choice about it! That's what's bugging me the most.

...  and here we are making life altering decisions, condeming people to poverty and generally destroying our civilisation, just because we have a hunch our impact on the complex system is small? I totally don't agree and I don't have a choice about it! That's what's bugging me the most.

Hyperbole doesn't wash -- we're not destroying our civilisation, we're just making changes to how we get our energy. We will eventually have to make these changes anyway, given that fossil fuel supplies are not infinite.

And our hunch is that our impact on the complex system is LARGE! Our contribution to the CO2 level is small, but the impact is LARGE!  I'm stunned that you don't seem to understand that part of the argument, so for the third time: Complex systems -> small change leads to large effect.

Herbie

I've been watching you guys fight it out for a few days now, but Herbie and Sven, you should know better than to mud-wrestle with a pig: you only end up losing your dignity and the pig enjoys it.

I've compiled a short list of quotes demonstrating Maddus's contrarian attitude, pasted below. I think when someone is this derranged they're not worth debating with. No-one on the Internet has any hope of influencing a creationist to reject dogma, and this is just the AGW equivalent; you're all just wasting your time. Your best hope is just to make sure they can't influence the policy-makers.

• "They just want to kill people,.."
• "Carbon footprint [...] does not exist in real life."
• "dont know what CO2 does, period. Oh they have theories and simulations, but that's it."
• "a theory that has yet to be proven"
• "You can't see climate. You can't see our influence on the climate. It's just a theory."
• "science can never be settled"
• "That's exactly my point, they dont have any actual proof, just vague guesses and labratory experiments, not one shred of real proof"

...all this does is demonstrate he has a complete and total lack of understanding about science in general, and even less about climatology.

<EDIT>Uncharitable remark removed.</EDIT>.

As I stated before here, I feel that someone should state the pro-climate change arguments because otherwise the deniers will get all the attention and people might start to think that everyone was a denier.

Herbie

@W3bbo: Because I dont agree, I dont understand science?

Here is how I see science:

• Scientist has a theory
• Scientist then thinks about an experiment to prove the theory
• Scientist then documents his theory and releases it for peer-review
• Other scientist evaluate his work and they go back to the first step

@Dr Herbie: Deniers? That's a bit harsh no? Realist is more like it.

@Maddus Mattus: I have heard this argument before (aimed at my PhD, in fact).

The view that science is entirely based on experiment is rather outdated.  There are many fields where this just does not happen; not all science is done in the laboratory.  Science has moved on from basic Chemistry and Physics which can be done in your garden shed, to fields where experimentation is not feasible, either due to time involved, or the size of the system under test.

The field of Ethology, by definition, excludes experimentation.  It is based on observation only and is accepted as a science (Encyclopaedia Britannica describes it as a science).

Astrophysics contains no experimentation; because planetary systems cannot realistically be experimented on.

Was Einstein's work science?  He never did any experiments to prove E= mc^2, but he is generally accepted as a scientist.

Herbie

@Dr Herbie: I understand there are different ways of doing science, and I do agree that the vision I presented is outdated. I was merely answering to the ad-homien attack of W3bbo.

Still the rules of reproduceability applies. And what climategate has tought us is that they do not confirm to this basic principle. They did not share their data and their models, they just published the results.

Maddus Mattus said:

Fact of the matter is, they dont know what CO2 does, period. Oh they have theories and simulations, but that's it.

Sorry if this has already been mentioned, I've skipped a lot of the thread, but that statement isn't entirely true.

We know very well what CO2 does and the science behind it, particularly on an individual molecule basis, is well understood. It is, for instance, essentially the same science as Infrared Spectroscopy.

What is not so well understood the macroscopic effect in the highly complicated system that is the world. You should not discredit the theories and simulations so quickly - can you tell me some specific shortcomings of specific simulations? Sure, they won't be perfect, they may even be wide of the mark, but that doesn't mean they're bunkum.

In fact lots of science is juts "simulations" and "models". Most of the thermodynamics and statistical mechanics that can be usefully applied, for instance, is essentially based on modelled systems. The fact that they're models doesn't mean they don't work, these particular models do work. What is important is knowing where the limitations lie - what the limits of accuracy are, what the information is actually telling you and which scenarios it's valid in.

The same is entirely true of climate models.

There are some things we can be sure of. Think of the earth as if it were a giant chemical reaction. The earth and its atmosphere can be considered as a large system constantly maintaining, and repositioning, and equilibrium. When we start p**sing about with the system - for instance by adding large amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere we will move the equilibrium of the system to another point. Other factors in the system (e.g. "conditions" such as temperature) will have to change to match this equilibrium point. A la Le Chatelier's principle on a larger scale. Whatever the new equilibrium, we probably won't like it because it won't be what we're used to.

Finally I think it good to remember the words of my physical chemistry tutor, when discussing atmospheric modelling (specifically ozone depletion): "The first rule of atmospheric chemistry is that everything that happens is bad."

@GoddersUK: thanks for that nuance, I lack that sometimes.

And I agree wholeheartly with the understanding where the limitations of these models lie.

That's the main issue I have with them, they are presented to us and (more damaging) to policy makers as fact. And that's not right.

Can't we all just get along?

Even if the science behind this were real (and I'm not saying if it's real or fake), the politicians have grabbed on to this as a way to force "green" ideas on the general populace. The world is so caught up in this that Al Gore got a Nobel Prize for making a documentary that has been shown to have several false statements in it.

All I want to see is to remove the politics from it all, and study this a bit more before we all switch over to electric cars, solar panels, and other things that just end up polluting the environment more in the end.

@dahat:That's pretty sick also,.

In contrast:

45 minutes ago, Maddus Mattus wrote

@dahat:That's pretty sick also,.

In contrast:

I just remember something funny. I remember the O zone problem is related to certain chemical that breaks down something and in combination with storms that trapped the chemical in that areas, the O zone is thinner there, not CO2 for sure.

I don't really care about Carbon. Reduce population will solve everything because that reduced all our impact on Earth.

18 hours ago, Dr Herbie wrote:

Astrophysics contains no experimentation; because planetary systems cannot realistically be experimented on.

Was Einstein's work science?  He never did any experiments to prove E= mc^2, but he is generally accepted as a scientist.

Huh, wha?

Astrophysics experiments are mainly observations ... they build expensive, giant telescopes and send some of them expensive, giant telescopes into space to observe things and look for signs of things like black holes based on their theorectical impact on surrounding light emitted from stars and things like that.  That's experiment.

Einstein is famous for "thought experiments", and those are experiments too.  Then they take the theory based off of the thought experiments and test the theory against observable phenomena, like gravitational lensing during a solar eclipse, or frame dragging using satellites.  So, yeah, there is experiment there too, it HAS to have an experiment to validify theory, otherwise it isn't science, it's just a guess.

And when Einstein and his buddy Poldolsky, and Rosen, IIRC were hanging out one day talking about how much b.s. quantum mechanics was they invented experiments to prove it wrong, saying, "hey QM proponents, what about this weird effect, where two particles would communicate faster than the speed of light if you set up an experiment like this ... that's just 'spooky' and shows there's no way QM is true", and then in fact experimentalists built the experiment to show that entanglement was an actual real physical phenomena.  Theorists like that have to invent experiments to test their ideas, the experimentalists build them.

@magicalclick: The Ozone damage was caused by CFC gasses.  Since we reduced the use of CFCs, the ozone hole has now started to repair itself and shrink.

Herbie

The climate and ecology of the planet should be engineered to meet our needs.  It's all about Man vs. Nature and I don't plan to lose.

I like the view of this guy: http://climategate.nl/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Why_we_need_those_10-10_goals.pdf (pdf alert)

Let's go for 1010ppm!