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The Forum > Article Comments > A climate change text book for our peers > Comments

A climate change text book for our peers : Comments

By Graham Young, published 15/10/2013

Accepting expert opinion at face value is a failure of due diligence and dereliction of duty, constituting negligence in a public official.

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Peter: All your items are valid, and time will demonstrate whether we do stop burning fossil fuel etc.

But my post was not about emotion and belief.

It is a fact that there has been no previous episode where 100's millions of years of buried biomass has been burnt at all, let alone at the current rate (even if that slows down or stops before it is all burnt).

Therefore we don't have a comparable past event to compare or base our models on.

However our current knowledge of the way the earth works would suggest that this fast burning of stored biomass will have some effect. We just don't know enough to know what it is yet. (This is cold comfort both for those who argue for AGW and those who argue against it.)

Certainly we should continue research and refine existing models, but given we are dealing with an unprecedented event, it is to be expected that the models will be problematical. As time passes and events play out we will get a better handle on what is happening. I suspect that there will eventually be a paradigm shift when it becomes obvious. (I am old enough to remember when continental drift was a weirdo theory - then it became the fundamental basis of geology.
Posted by Cossomby, Thursday, 17 October 2013 11:08:10 PM
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Cossomby, “However our current knowledge of the way the earth works would suggest that this fast burning of stored biomass will have some effect. We just don't know enough to know what it is yet. (This is cold comfort both for those who argue for AGW and those who argue against it.)

Now it’s the best post on the thread Peter Lang.

Planet3
Posted by PLANET3, Friday, 18 October 2013 12:07:38 AM
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Peter Lang,

"(e.g. by 2050 they will have technologies that address the issues of CO2 concentrations and who knows what else)"

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Posted by Poirot, Friday, 18 October 2013 1:21:09 AM
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Poirot quotes Shelley's indictment of nihilistic hubris and hasn't the wit to realise that complaint is ideally laid against the alarmists who assume that mankind's puny offerings of CO2 can dominate nature.

I guess we can be grateful she has spared us Hardy and his stirring advocacy of the natural life and the misery of those who seek to exceed their station and standing as prescribed by Nature/God.

I've always thought AGW was a manifestation of misoneism with lashings of Ludditism thrown in for good measure. Poirot's commentary shows that.

Cossomby needs to take a Bex and have a good lie down. Or at least do a bit more research, starting with this:

http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-7-3.html

This is from IPCC and gives the combined totals of annual fluxes of CO2 from the ocean to the atmosphere and vice-versa from both natural [CO2] and human sources [ACO2].

Then look at Table 3 on page 22 of this Pdf. Again DOE’s quantities, not mine.

ftp://ftp.eia.doe.gov/pub/oiaf/1605/cdrom/pdf/ggrpt/057303.pdf

ACO2 annual flux is 8Gt out of 218.2 Gt CO2 flux or 3.67%; do the additions yourself; these are the IPCC's figures, not mine. From DOE we get information that 98.5% of ALL annual emissions of CO2/ACO2 are reabsorbed.

Now, given that this information is from official sources how can there be any other conclusion that the % of ACO2 in the remaining 1.5% accumulating CO2 is calculated by 3.67/100 x 1.5/100 = 0.000552? You can bend and twist 0.000552 anyway you like but that is the % of ACO2 remaining in the atmosphere from the annual flux figures from the IPCC and the DOE.

Yet Cossomby is in a lather about HUGE amounts of fossil fuels hereto buried and now revealed by unwise humans.
Posted by cohenite, Friday, 18 October 2013 7:37:16 AM
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Cossomby,

>” It is a fact that there has been no previous episode where 100's millions of years of buried biomass has been burnt at all, let alone at the current rate (even if that slows down or stops before it is all burnt).

Therefore we don't have a comparable past event to compare or base our models on.“

We have 500 million years of evidence to show there is nothing catastrophic about high CO2 concentrations. We’ve also had rapid warming an cooling events in the past – e.g. Younger Dryas. Cooling was very bad for life. During the rapid warming periods, life thrived. Life loves warmer and warming by struggles with colder and cooling.

Step 1 is to recognise there is negligible threat of catastrophic consequences - such as as James Hansen (‘oceans boiling off’) and Al Gore (6 m of sea level rise in a century).
- AR5, WG1, Table 12.4 seems to have taken the ‘dangerous’ out of AGW http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/uploads/WGIAR5_WGI-12Doc2b_FinalDraft_Chapter12.pdf

Step 2 is to recognise there are costs and benefits of GHG emissions. It is a cost vs benefit analysis. Global cooling would be very damaging, but warming is not so much and probably net beneficial up to ~2C. AGW will reduce the likelihood of cooling, which might occur without the AGW; given that we have been in a long term cooling trend for 50 million years, 10 million years, 1 million years and 8,000 years.
Posted by Peter Lang, Friday, 18 October 2013 7:58:13 AM
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