Many recent threads and responses to articles have started of well, then sadly degenerated. I suspect this is due to the fact that on the one hand OLO is meeting its objectives to draw opinion and stimulate debate, whilst on the other hand, provoking passionate defense of particular views.

I would have thought that with so much intellectual muscle and research capacity, we might have seen some changes to personal views. It seems however, that we actually take the first punch, return to our corners, and then come out “swinging”.

I’m just as guilty of this however, as a result of some of the OLO’s; I do feel closer to making a change in my opinion on a number of topics. Unfortunately, as a self declared realist, I close up in response to some of the entrenched ideological warfare that takes place.

So, if I were to stick my head on the block and say, “this is what it would take to change my mind” (on any particular topic), what sort of response might I expect? And would anyone else be prepared to nominate what it would take to change their minds?

So here goes. As and agnostic (I prefer this expression to the more offensively used “Denier” or “Skeptic”) on the subject of AGW, I admit to being closer to getting off the fence. I was brought to the realization of this imminent “flash of lightning on the road to Damascus” by Q&A on another thread.

There we have it, I’ve said it, and I’ve come close to coming out of the closet on AGW.
So what now?

Firstly I fully expect to be pilloried from both sides. Secondly, I have to state
“What it would take to change my mind”.

As discussed with Q&A, I do not want any journalistic commentary or opinion pieces, nothing from Al Gore or the IPCC. Happy with Climate Research results, Universities Research and anything that represents the scientific community, however, not comfortable with any results where the raw data has been removed.

Dear spindoc,

What would it take to change my mind?

I guess it would be someone whose knowledge
of the topic impressed me.

It would be someone who could open up for me a better
understanding of the topic at hand. It would be someone
who offered solutions, not just stated
the problems.

In the case of climate change - it would be someone
like Emeritus Professor Tor Hundloe who in his book,
"From Buddha to Bono: Seeking Sustainability,"
"opens up the world to anyone wanting to better
understand how we got into this mess - and how to get
out of it."

As the author points out, "We today should have a lower
material standard of living so that people tomorrow
will be able to have a standard of living at all..."

Hey spindoc,

Several years ago I remember asking a group of teenagers I was delivering a talk to just how many believed the drought was caused by GW, all put up their hands. I responded by saying that although GW might possibly have heightened the drought's severity there was probably little chance or evidence it was the direct cause.

I had been able to show local rainfall data going back 150 years that exhibits trends that are nearly as severe as the one we are experiencing now.

That being said I certainly have expected a strong and credible response from our government if only because of the 'precautionary principle' i.e. if our scientists are right we are in deep trouble so if something can be done to mitigate it lets do it to the best of our ability.

But I have recently taken a few more steps into the GW camp and I put it down to a number of factors, one is this summers 47.9C degrees as a record temp in a bayside Victorian town about 20kms away from us, assessment of the arguments from the negative, OLO forum discussions have influenced, but ultimately the number of predictions, some made nearly 2 decades ago, about GW that are coming to fruition is fast becoming the real clincher for me.

For me the talk about long-term trends needing to be viewed over thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years are entirely valid but the amount of CO2 and its equivalent gases we have been pumping into the atmosphere are real and accelerating so changes may well be being experienced within our lifetimes. If those changes repeatedly match predictions and can be experienced on a local level then at what point should one make the jump off the fence? Does it take a 50 degree day even though statistically it too could be explained away?

As unscientific as it may well be, what we personally experience probably has the greatest influence in changing our minds.

While I am to some extent still quite cautious, the parachute is strapped on.

I understand your view spindoc, but surely we all change our mind?
I have been forced to eat a large serving of humble pie, here, because I did just that.
Gday Horus, on the issue of saying sorry I once focused on the issue as a cash cow, and said no way we should.
I got it wrong , was wrong, by the time Rudd said sorry I had changed back and had nothing but support for him on that great day.
However a side issue may exist here, when people disagree with others, quite often they truly think the other fails to under stand the issue.
Or is unable to do so, or agrees but just wants to fight.
In debate all views have a right to be heard, and right may be a split hair away from wrong.
We can be wrong and others right, we may even change our mind.

In a general way, there are very few issues upon which I am immovable. I've changed my mind about issues when empirical truth has been presented; when someone has approached an issue from an angle I've never considered; when anecdotal evidence has been overwhelming and when I myself have gone through an experience I had never encountered before.

For all these reasons there have been issues brought up in this forum which have caused me to change my mind, which is why, I expect, I keep changing my mind about coming back to it when I think I've had enough.

Specifically on global warming? I'm still anchored to the fence. csteele said he was being lured off by personal experience and I think many Australians would agree.

However, being in the Northern hemisphere I personally haven't encountered such things. In fact last winter was the coldest on record where I currently am and snow fell in many areas that have never had recorded snowfalls before. This winter, while not quite so cold, has been the longest anyone remembers. It is April now and we are still wearing thermal undies and using heaters which are usually dispensed with by the beginning of March.

I recently returned from places in SE Asia where no difference at all in weather have occurred since the days when I used to live there myself.

Guess I am confined to my perch a little longer yet.

It is astonishing that a debate over global warming continues when it goes without saying that without the health and well-being of the planetary host there would be no life as we know it. Yet we persist in subjecting this planet to one environmental catastrophe after another, as if we were owners of an inanimate property, who could deal with it as we pleased.

Perhaps our planetary host is asking: “Where on your industrial journey are my rivers, oceans, forests or one inch of my earth which has not been poisoned by the hand of man? Why do you speak of the sciences? Are you not influenced by observation – the state of the physical world?”

Many men have always known through observation and deductive reasoning, that a planetary universal intelligence has existed in order to prevent all matter from decaying into chaos.

Yet egotistical man continues believing that consciousness is the exclusive domain of human beings against this background which is, I think, both petty and small minded. How absurd to suggest that, out of thirteen billion years of evolutionary history, consciousness only emerged with the development of homo-sapiens.

Man remains persistent in his belief that he has dominion over the planet (and all its inhabitants) and only he will decide its fate! We shall see just how influential puny man is when Planet Earth, in her heated wrath, throws us a few more tsunamis, earthquakes and raging fires.

In geological time, I think our day in the sun, as the leading "intellectual" force on this planet, is just about over due to our pathogenic thought processes which has created the reality. Hopefully, our planetary host will spare a few of our enlightened breeding pairs in the evolutionary shift.

Like Romany, I am still perched on the fence on the issue of AGW. Most of us accept that human activity has created problems in our environments world-wide, but how are we ordinary laypeople to know just what impact we have had on GW. Statistics are bandied about by both sides of the debate and the consensus is that Australia's man-made contribution to greenhouse gases is just over 1%. This is a separate issue to global warming as a natural cycle.

I am highly sceptical of the ETS or Carbon Reduction Scheme because it fails on many levels mostly in it's goal to reduce emissions by failing to rein in the emitters.

Secondly if AGW is minimal then the whole idea of an ETS becomes a revenue raising or profit raising exercise in which the poor will be the greatest losers. It seems madness to implement an ETS and then sell coal to China. It is like watching an episode of the three stooges when everyone is running about hitting themselves and each other over the head. It looks busy and productive but nothing is actually happening.

There have always been very good reasons to seek renewable energy sources, pollution or chemical free options and sustainable lifestyles prior to the huge debate surrounding AGW/GW.

As far as changing minds well it would have to take strong new evidence based on solid science. Sometimes the evidence does not come out strongly one way or the other until it is too late.

There is nothing wrong with reducing emissions even if the impetus is global warming. With ever-growing populations and exploitation of natural resources, sustainability was always going to be a growing issue.

For interest, just recently I read an article that showed in the US fish were contaminated with prescriptions medicines like Prozac and concerns were raised about Canberra's own water supply.

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/national/national/general/chemical-sewage-causes-fish-to-flounder/1479073.aspx

Logging of old growth forests is continuing throughout the world, pollution and pesticide residues are having greater effects. These are the issues we should also be addressing as part of the whole environmental debate.

What would it take to change my mind?

1. Reliable, authoritative evidence.

2. Rational, logical argument.

3. Passionate but reasonable presentation of evidence and argument.

4. Reliable, authoritative evidence.

In that order, on any topic.

Well said CJ. I echo your well thought requirements.

As for AGW, I'm pretty much of a mind with Romany and Pelican that:

1. We have polluted much of our environment.
2. We are still systematically destroying old growth forest.
3. We continue to exploit/waste and remain dependent upon fossil fuels.
4. A tax called "carbon" is just a money raising scheme that doesn't do a single thing to address the above 3 points.
5. The majority of AGW 'sceptics' rarely address any of the above issues (except for the carbon tax).

While I am not so much as sitting on the fence of AGW as I am leaning towards the belief that whatever we do has consequences, I am waiting to hear that we (world wide government and business) are actually going to work towards a clean sustainable economy and environment irrespective of GW.

BTW I do not believe for a nanosecond that the "market will solve itself" as the market has caused much of the above problems due to demand and supply, and that humans do not always act responsibly - in other words we do need government restraints on the so-called 'free' market.

Now that the dust has settled on the G20 mass-debate, I probably shouldn't hold my breath.

CJ MORGAN, FRACTELLE

Almost everyone, even our old friend BOAZ, believes they hold their opinions for rational reasons.

My experience is that the amount of EMOTION people have invested in a point of view has at least as much to do with their resistance to changing their minds as any rational argument.

Few people of course will put it that way. They will invent apparently rational reasons for rejecting evidence that contradicts their favoured point of view while finding reasons to believe any evidence that appears to support their position. Consider the way Holocaust deniers find reasons to disbelieve eye-witness accounts. I once knew a fellow who was both a Holocaust denier and a passionate believer in UFOs. His mental gymnastics were quite startling.

Before you feel too superior CJ MORGAN, I can think of quite a few issues that would press your emotional buttons and where you would refuse to change your mind no matter what evidence was presented. I'm sure you could think of ways of returning the favour.

In the end we are all fallible human beings. None of us is entirely rational.

<< I can think of quite a few issues that would press your emotional buttons and where you would refuse to change your mind no matter what evidence was presented. >>

Name one, STEVENLMEYER.

What does it take to make an institution change its mind?

It seemed like an elegant solution to a severe medical condition. When a sudden arterial blockage occurs the heart starts beating wildly – and futilely. To conserve limited blood oxygen doctors administer beta blocks to slow the heart.

In theory it should have helped patients suffering a heart attack. It turns out that in practice administering beta blockers in this situation does more harm than good.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/the-ideology-of-health-care/?em

There was probably no way of knowing in advance that treating victims of arterial blockage with beta blockers was going to turn out to do more harm than good. At very least people might have expected it would do no harm even if it did no good. But sometimes the world does not conform to our "models."

The question is, should it have taken so long to discover that the administration of beta blockers was likely to be harmful?

And if you think the beta blocker debate is an isolated case, consider this story, also from the NY Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/health/06brod.htm

Should you have that quadruple bypass surgery?

Spindoc, my ears were burning.

I have modified my views on a number of topics I am not expert in. Mostly I look and learn but sometimes comment on stuff I am familiar with.

The following lists some of the data sets you may be interested in, enjoy! If you use any raw data, it would be good to let me know how you conduct any time series analysis e.g. how you correct/calibrate for earth's bumps and wobbles.

Surface temperatures:

NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

National Climate Data Centre
http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/anomalies/index.php

Hadley Centre/Climate Research Unit
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/#datdow

European Climate Assessment & Dataset Network
http://eca.knmi.nl/

Good for data prior to 1880
http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ndp041/ndp041.html.

Satellite-based atmospheric temperature estimates:

Remote Sensing Systems
http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_description.html

University of Alabama at Huntsville
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/

University of Washington/RSS
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/fu-mt-rss-monthly-anom.txt

University of Maryland
http://www.atmos.umd.edu/~kostya/CCSP/

Sea Ice:
Hadley Centre/Climate Research Unit
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadisst/data/download.html

National Snow and Ice Data Centre
http://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/

Sea ice extent from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm

Sea Level:

Sea level site of the University of Colorado
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/results.php

Also try the various satellite sites at NASA

Snow Cover:

Global snow lab
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/index.php

Total Solar Irradiance (TSI):

Satellite data
ftp://ftp.pmodwrc.ch/pub/data/irradiance/composite/DataPlots/

http://www.acrim.com/Data Products.htm

http://remotesensing.oma.be/solarconstant/sarr/SARR.txt

paleoclimatology reconstruction

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/climate_forcing/solar_variability/lean2000_irradiance.txt

Greenhouse Gases:

Mauna Loa
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.html

World data centre for greenhouse gases

http://gaw.kishou.go.jp/wdcgg/

Daily/hourly CO2 levels
ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/in-situ/


Data Archiving Pages:

Earth System Research Laboratory/Climate Data Centre
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/data/gridded/

Data centre for other paleo stuff
http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/data.html

Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/

NOAA/NWS Climate Prediction Centre
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/MD_index.shtml


Do a search at BOM
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/

Good for look see:

Netherlands Meteorology Institute
http://climexp.knmi.nl/start.cgi?someone@somewhere

NOAA
http://dapper.pmel.noaa.gov/dchart/

Argo itself
http://www.usgodae.org/argo/argo.html

Computer Model Results:

You don’t want IPCC, here it is anyway
http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/ipcc/about_ipcc.php

Let me know if you have trouble with any of the links
qanda

The ETS and the Carbon Reduction Scheme will fail and is further evidence that successive governments remain captured by industry.

Mass fish and bird kills continue around the planet, above natural rates. According to eminent palaeontologist, Leakey, 30,000 species of animals, plants and insects are becoming extinct each year.

With regard to rivers and oceans, can someone show me one which has not been seriously contaminated by the hand of man?

The Swan and Canning Rivers in WA are all but finished. The Murray River remediation is costing millions to remove pollution. The Sydney Harbour remains contaminated by dioxins – the remediation process a joke.

The Arctic Inuits are the most contaminated on the planet - a result of their marine diet. Ocean dead zones have drastically increased and indigenous people around the world have had their rivers, lands and crops trashed by mining companies from developed countries.

Salinity and desertification in Australia and beyond are encroaching on once fertile lands. The deserts, I think, will win!

Yet the chatter continues on about global warming. “Rational, logical argument?” Am I missing something here or is the GW debate merely a distraction and delay strategy?

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/04/05/2535188.htm

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2006/04/10/1612273.htm

http://www.thewest.com.au/default.aspx?MenuID=77&ContentID=125819

http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,25263513-948,00.html

http://www.peopleandplanet.net/doc.php?id=2145

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/12/17/2448553.htm

Q&A provided an impressive list of great sites to visit, thanks. Well worth working through if anyone has the time. Thank you all.

So, did I get the Eureka Moment? Absolutely! Many of the sites I’d already researched, however, there was one in particular I’d visited before but missed what I was looking for. It was at the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre. http://cdiac.ornl.gov/

Let me explain. I accept there are anomalies in Global Mean Surface Temperature (see BOM), one circa 1940 and from 1970 to 1997. I accept the increase in Atmospheric Carbon Concentrations 1800 to 2000. Scary stuff.

Atmospheric Carbon is increasing (see CDIAC), 280 ppm in 1550, 316 by 1959, 360 by 1993 and 371 by 2000, no argument here. However, there is no correlation whatsoever between the two sets of factual research data. AC increased 22.5% 1750 to 1984 and by 6.8% 1994 to 2008. Absolutely no correlation with warming?

So, what I needed to break the nexus was total Fossil Fuel Combustion data from 1500 to 2000, and there it was. Total FFC 1850 to 1990 is 270 x 10 pwr9 tc (cubic metric tons). But get this, 124 x 10 pwr9 tc or 42% of total FFC is from LUC (Land Use Changes) As at 1998 data, the per annum FFC is 6.4 x 10 pwr9 tc, however, 2.1 x 10 pwr9 is from LUC.

Question, if since 1850 we have grown FFC from .5 to 6.4 x 10 pwr9 tc p.a., an increase by a factor of 12.8, why has the atmospheric carbon only grown by a factor of less than .3?

The answer is that our biosphere has been dealing with the rest, big time. I’m off the fence, AGW exists.

Now I’m absolutely terrified our governments are meddling with symptoms, the .3 factor. Our main problem is quantifying the Global Carbon Mixing/Cycling which is 12.8 times more important. The ETS is not a solution; it is an unsustainable and ineffective diversion

Fellow OLO’ers, you have a convert, please be gentle with me.

:-)

Romany, I understand. At the time, my sister in Dorset UK phoned me and said it was snowing on the beach ... something she has never seen there in 50+ years! Also (at the same time) my son was in Germany at the time of the Economic Forum in Davos. He is a keen snow-boarder but unfortunately, he had to travel 150km out of his way to find snow! The locals thought it "perplexing".

Meanwhile back in Malaysia, my extended family (and 50,000 others) were evacuated from their town because they were experiencing the worst floods in the area on record!

Extreme weather events are chaotic, and are expected as more energy is put into the climate system. Climate on the other hand, is weather statistically 'smoothed' over longer time frames - typically 30 yrs. Statistically, the trend is still up.

We can't blame any one chaotic weather event on climate change. We can say with a high level of confidence that the frequency (and intensity) of these weather events will increase - and they are.

Global warming does not mean every successive year is warmer than the previous (some will be colder) - there are still natural variations at play. Anthropogenic global warming does mean that human activity superimposes itself (e.g. green house gases) on natural climatic variation.

Thanks for the cdiac link spindoc. The page on this site that has interested me in the past is the table of current ghg concentrations and the increased radiative forcing of each over pre-industrial concentrations. When I look at the table I wonder why scientists dont use a CO2 equivalent, as increases in other ghgs contribute a radiative forcing of just over 75% that of the increased CO2.

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/pns/current_ghg.html

What would change my mind? The clincher for me is sea level rise. I see the sea as a thermometer, rising when the earth warms and falling when the earth cools. Should sea level trend become a falling trend I could not justify AGW; should it keep rising at an accelerating rate, I could not justify otherwise. Sea level rise increasing 15 to 30 fold over a rate which has remained stable for three millennia is hard for me to dismiss as noise.

Fester, the oceans are a huge heat sink and their warming is different to that of the “earth”. The ‘inertia’ in the oceans can mean that even if the ‘atmosphere’ cools tomorrow, the response from the oceans can take years. But I agree if sea levels begin to fall (and they aren’t) then you could kiss AGW bye-bye.

I stated in my “what it would take to change my mind”, that I was searching for any uncontested research from original sources. At that time I had only two, one was the global surface temperature findings GW, and the other was the atmospheric carbon concentrations (ACC). Since there is still no correlation between the two, a third issue had to be in play, this turned out to be the total fossil fuel consumed (FFC). In order to remove any misunderstandings, total FFC statistics still do not correlate at all with anything to do with the GW or ACC.

However, it is rather like identifying “black holes”, whilst they cannot be observed or understood, their effects on other “observables” can. We must likewise accept that scientists admit that the complexity of our biosphere is “the single largest factor limiting our understanding”

The third piece of “observable evidence” was the FFC statistics, whilst having no direct scientific correlation with GW or ACC’s, they do point directly to the other observable, that total FFC had increased by 1,280% since 1850. Astonishingly, the residual ACC’s have increased by only 30%. Regardless of any potential negative impact on warming, direct or indirect, the biosphere is clearly now working 12.8 times harder. The only issue we need to address is how to make it even more efficient.

It seems the biggest obstacle to resolving the problem is the global howling of distorted rhetoric from ill informed, over emotional reactionaries, and the consequential politicization of the issues.

Meanwhile, objective scientists have insulated themselves from these phenomena and are working quietly on practical solutions.

Freeman Dyson’s work (CSIRO) concludes that an increase in biomass in soil of just 100th of an inch across the total worldwide arable land would stabilize current ACC’s.

John Martin’s research (NASA, “Dumping Iron”) shows that 1KG of iron produces 5,000 to 20,000 kilo’s of Phyloplankton. He famously commented, “Give me ship load of iron and I’ll give you an ice age.”

ETS remains a dangerous political joke, a Tax that plays with symptoms, and misses causes

I am warmed by your dialogue, Spindoc.

I hope you will be able to pass the pay-wall at Nature:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7229/full/nature07716.html

If not, the following summarises what Pollard et al have found, concerning geo-engineering by iron fertilisation of our oceans.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090128183744.htm

As to Freeman Dyson ... I'm sitting on the fence :-)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?_r=2&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all

He is a special octogenarian though.

Q&A, I believe our species will continue to apply science and engineering to solve major threats. In mentioning some of the research going on, I have absolutely none of the skills needed to determine if any of these will be part of a solution however; I do wonder why our media, politicians, some scientists and advocacy groups are so easily distracted.

Can’t remember who said it, but I remember the quote, “What we humans seek to avoid, we create” Don’t that just about say it all.

Thanks and catch you on another thread.

qanda

<the oceans are a huge heat sink and their warming is different to that of the “earth”>

Yes, but when you hear about global temperatures, you hear about that minute heat sink, the atmosphere. As such, it is subject to much larger variation.