Comment by quink | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quink | Hacker News Reader

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http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models-intermediate....

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-...

And can you please stop with the 'Warmist' label? It's stupid, about as much as 'denialist' is narrow for the veritable zoo of opinions - educated or uneducated - that's sprung up in the public discourse.

I've also read your post and 1-2 W/m2 does sound like very little. However, and I quote from Wikipedia:

> Of the ~340 W/m2 of solar radiation received by the Earth, an average of ~77 W/m2 is reflected back to space by clouds and the atmosphere, and ~23 W/m2 is reflected by the surface albedo, leaving about 240 W/m2 of solar energy input to the Earth's energy budget.

That's a change of 0.5%. Doesn't sound like much, does it, but at 273 K that corresponds to about 1.5 degrees already. At the upper end of that and 300 K it's 2.5 degrees. Sure, it's simplistic and it's how to keep it quite that straightforward, but to see that number and be ignorant enough of the context to trivialise it and call it not a big deal is pretty disingenuous. Sure, a 2.5 K (or something like it) rise isn't going to bring the downfall of civilisation per se. But there's more to it than that. And, mind you, 2.5 K is at the lower end of IPCC projections, so there's evidently a lot more ground to cover than the simplistic numbers mentioned here.

>Sure, a 2.5 K (or something like it) rise isn't going to bring the downfall of civilisation per se.

well, it did it for Roman Empire - the Mediterranean climate became unsuitable for grain production while Europe north of Alps became drier and comfortable.

Height of the Caliphates ( at 969) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age coincides with the height of the temperature during middle ages. The caliphates were result of conquest by Arabs from Arabian Peninsula and the caliphates folded back with temperature dropping as the Little Ice Age was coming.

Add to that Vikings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_Age) whose reach was maximized during about the same time as Caliphates as North Atlantic was more comfortable for sailing in the small open drakars. They reached Greenland and established colony there (which disappeared with Little Ice Age). Vikings are the "Normans" as in Normandy - and we know the key role they played in the history of Western Europe. Vikings founded the Kievana Rus which because of their leadership was pretty strong expanding and aggressive state for hundreds of years, almost until Mongols. Thus the warmth of 1000+ years ago and resulting Vikings outreach were defining factors in shaping the foundation of Western Europe and Russia as we know it.

Getting back to our days - one can only speculate how political landscape of USA for example would change in the next decades when growing corn in Iowa and cattle in Texas would become economically impossible.

Who is trivializing anything? This is what is so bizarre about these discussions, and why I use the term "Warmist": because it identifies a nearly religious zeal on the part of some non-scientists who insist that anyone who does anything other than repeat the mantra "the science is settled; we must implement every imaginable solution except nuclear power" is somehow "trivializing" the issue.

I'm clearly on the record as being concerned about climate change and strongly in favour of implementing social policies (including carbon taxes) that will a) reduce GHG emissions and b) protect the most vulnerable, but because I don't quack like precisely the right kind of duck I'm routinely accused of somehow trivializing something, or being the enemy (this is not the first time I've had this kind of discussion, obviously). This is what you see from rival religions, not from scientists. I was involved in the 17 keV neutrino controversy, so I'm no stranger to scientific disagreement, and it simply doesn't have this strange dynamic.

If anyone is trivializing anything, it is Warmists trivializing physics. For example, why anyone would go from a 0.5% change in energy budget to a 0.5% change in absolute temperature is beyond me. Heating and temperature in the atmosphere are connected by complex and non-linear factors, which is one of the reasons we need to do modelling in the first place. Even in the simplest case of a black body the non-linear Stephan-Bolzmann law applies, not Newton's law of cooling (which is linear, but irrelevant to this case.)

So the argument you're making is not even wrong: it simply doesn't speak to the question of what the plausible effect of climate change on the Earth in general and humanity in particular will be.

This kind of argument just feeds the Denialist trolls who are doing so much damage to this discourse, because they will pick up on your errors and cry "hoax!" and other such nonsense rather than "honest, innocent and naive mistake", which in fairness what I think your error most likely is.

Finally, as I said above, I've had this kind of discussion before and it's never ended well, so I'm going to stop here and let you have the last word. Enjoy!

You aren't having a discussion. You are arrogantly dismissing discussion and proclaiming yourself not just right, but beyond reproach, while strawmanning your opposition.

How is it a strawman? GP said that a 0.5% increase in energy would correspond to a 0.5% increase in temperature. That's manifestly wrong.

No I didn't. I said that it's something like that from a 30,000 view. I even put being happy about a +/- 50% difference without a problem.

But if I put 1 energy into object x, at the simplest I'll get something about 1 temperature more if that object is in a vacuum, given enough time. Sure, it's never as simple as that, but that's all I was saying, plus/minus several dozen percent, from a bird's eye view. And greenhouse gases don't just trap incoming energy, but also serve to suppress black body radiation... and are 50% higher now than they were some centuries ago. So, point being, do I agree with you that black body radiation is the ultimate end to climate change? Absolutely. But I've just got to look over at Venus and the Sun to see how that dynamic plays out elsewhere and it's much hotter than 300 K.

Because this:

>it identifies a nearly religious zeal on the part of some non-scientists who insist that anyone who does anything other than repeat the mantra "the science is settled; we must implement every imaginable solution except nuclear power"

Is not a response to what was said. It is a response to a fantasy opponent that was made up.

I agree that global warming attracts religious types. As a result, it is generally hard to have a serious conversation about it. HN has a better ratio of science vs religion, luckily.

I'd deeply religious - and I concur.

Based on my experience, the debate about Global Warming is is mostly polemical.

In my opinion, a debate about measurable natural phenomena should be scientific - where a single verifiable fact trumps all previous consensus and conjecture.

What a lovely comment!

None of those graphs correspond with what the sun actually did over that time period. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation

The percentages don't change as the sun's output increases. 273K is slightly below freezing. ~290K is closer to the average earth temperature. Look up black body radiation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_radiation Radiation is T^4. If incoming energy increases by x temperature increase by x^(1/4). (1.001)^(1/4) = 1.00025. So 1.00025 * 290K = 290.0725K.

PS: This is of course a ridiculously simplified model but a 2.5k rise would take an increase of around ((290+2.5)/290) ^4 - 1 = 3.5%. The sun is no where near that unstable.

> The sun is no where near that unstable.

I didn't say the sun was - this calculation is past the point of radiation and already in Watt being received by Earth. And I'm pretty sure those Watt are linearly (edit: or at least somewhat like it, given enough time) related to temperature.

Edit: parent had a good point (which may or may not have been edited out) about how radiation from the sun - Black body radiation - is power to the fourth away from translating into temperature. Which, though, I don't think is too relevant here.

Sorry, had a bad edit. I am going to skip out on this discussion, but I really suggest you do some reading on Thermodynamics. It's complex and most people really mess up when talking about it.

If by that you mean that the outbound radiation of Earth will increase to provide negative feedback due to black-body radiation, then that's absolutely right. T^4 in fact, like you said. But if the greenhouse gas levels are coming up 50% higher than they ever were just a few hundred years ago... anyway, I shan't talk about it any more. It is too complex to do justice here.

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