Why do liberals believe in global warming but not conservatives?

[bshole]

Give me a specific prediction by mainstream climate science that was inaccurate.

Should be easy for you since it happens time and time again.

Here is a new one. That seems a bit squishy (basically a 100% difference with the reduced number coming from new climate research). If the science is "settled" why do significant discrepancies like this crop up? This paper seems to demonstrate that the effects of the warming earth are not yet fully understood (or agreed on) and current predictions may change (and quite significantly) as new information/research occurs.

Recent studies have estimated that more than 70 percent of our planet will experience more drought as carbon dioxide levels quadruple from pre-industrial levels over about the next 100 years. But when researchers account for changes in plants' water needs, this falls to 37 percent, with bigger differences concentrated in certain regions.

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/C..._on_drought_than_previously_expected_999.html

 

[Paratus]

I am not getting this, if the imbalance is growing wouldn't that suggest the creation of more life (thus the greening of the earth over the past 50 years)? Could you give the physics behind this? I tried to investigate it and I honestly couldn't quite understand why an increased amount of trapped energy wouldn't result in more life rather than less life. A dumbed downed explanation would be immensely enlightening.

High level?

You are familiar with evolution. Species adapt to their environment and to changes in their environment. Those that don't die.

According to NASA the changes in climate are happening 10 to 20 times faster than the average ice age recovery.

Some species always die during significant changes in climate. The faster the change the less time to adapt. In addition humans will be putting pressure directly and indirectly in ways other than climate change and finally the basic change we are making, increasing CO2 is acidifying the ocean and causing significant die offs.

We are already in the midst of an extinction event. Now after the climate reaches a new warmer plateau, in centuries, there would likely be another explosion in diversity.

Now how would that help us, or our children or their children? How much would it cost us in time, money and lives to adapt?

The point isn't whether it would eventually increase the amount of life the question is how much does it impact us.

 

[Paratus]

Here is a new one. That seems a bit squishy (basically a 100% difference with the reduced number coming from new climate research). If the science is "settled" why do significant discrepancies like this crop up? This paper seems to demonstrate that the effects of the warming earth are not yet fully understood (or agreed on) and current predictions may change (and quite significantly) as new information/research occurs.



http://www.terradaily.com/reports/C..._on_drought_than_previously_expected_999.html

You're lucky the forums crashed and took my response with it. Because I would have had you in the crushing grip of reason

 

[OverVolt]

You're lucky the forums crashed and took my response with it. Because I would have had you in the crushing grip of reason

It actually made me laugh... im so sorry, but it actually did.

 

[agent00f]

How much heat is absorbed by the landmass of the planet at the interface between the ocean and seafloor if the ocean has increased in temperature outside of equilibrium?

Believe me no such data exists. Generally speaking under Oceanic pressures the Ocean floor is always 4C. I'm sure there are parts of the ocean floor above that and as ocean temperature increases there is going to be some of that heat going into the crust. The equator hot spots increase and the seafloor coldspots decrease. More heat will transfer into the seafloor. I feel this is moot because of how large of a heatsink that is. Ocean floor temperature data is laughable at best.

The forum reset ate my post, so in short you're basically arguing a community of people with physics phds cannot figure out a thermodynamics 101 thermal gradient, and that someone without the benefit of even that level of edu is going to show them up with this great discovery. If you play around with the applicable diff eqs of several thousand ft of water (and if that's too hard, there are simplified discrete eqs), you'll find that the two ends are rather decoupled, instead of some magic heatsink theory. Regrettably that'll never happen for obvious reasons.

 

[Paratus]

It actually made me laugh... im so sorry, but it actually did.

Well it was suppose to be funny!

(Plus I always knew you would laugh in the face of reason )

 

[lopri]

Climate change is thermodynamic models. Physics gives zero shits whether people believe it or not.

Are you saying actions are separated from beliefs?

 

[agent00f]

Are you saying actions are separated from beliefs?

I'm saying the physical reality that the models approximate will happen regardless of who believes it or not.

 

[Paratus]

Here is a new one. That seems a bit squishy (basically a 100% difference with the reduced number coming from new climate research). If the science is "settled" why do significant discrepancies like this crop up? This paper seems to demonstrate that the effects of the warming earth are not yet fully understood (or agreed on) and current predictions may change (and quite significantly) as new information/research occurs.



http://www.terradaily.com/reports/C..._on_drought_than_previously_expected_999.html

Ok so I'll try and quickly answer again.

Going into this I have a few questions I want to answer:

• Is this a well supported study?
• Does it significantly change current climate theory?
• Should we be surprised if new research changes our understanding of climate change

This quickly led me to two other questions.

First off, did you do any research of your own on this subject or did you just go with whatever this article said?

Because I had to jump through a lot of links to actually find out anything about this study. Which led me to the second question.

Second how much do you trust that site?

While some of the articles look ok some do not. When I get that feeling I generally check the "About Us". Only this site doesn't have a link to About Us. Interestingly Google finds an About Us link for TerraDaily. Only it goes to a page with more stories and nothing about the site despite the URL saying About Us.

http://www.terradaily.com/m/About_Us.html

Couple this with the lack of author names on articles (staff authors), failing to even link the study the article is about and this website seems very sketchy.

Just for you though I went and searched for the actual study. I found a page from the University of Washington detailing the study with several of the same sentences used by TerraDaily.

http://www.washington.edu/news/2016...ater-use-affects-long-term-drought-estimates/

This has some more information about what the study did. Plus it has a link to the actual study. Which TerraDaily mentioned but didn't bother to link.

http://m.pnas.org/content/113/36/10019.abstract

Abstract:

Rising atmospheric CO2 will make Earth warmer, and many studies have inferred that this warming will cause droughts to become more widespread and severe. However, rising atmospheric CO2 also modifies stomatal conductance and plant water use, processes that are often are overlooked in impact analysis. We find that plant physiological responses to CO2 reduce predictions of future drought stress, and that this reduction is captured by using plant-centric rather than atmosphere-centric metrics from Earth system models (ESMs). The atmosphere-centric Palmer Drought Severity Index predicts future increases in drought stress for more than 70% of global land area. This area drops to 37% with the use of precipitation minus evapotranspiration (P-E), a measure that represents the water flux available to downstream ecosystems and humans. The two metrics yield consistent estimates of increasing stress in regions where precipitation decreases are more robust (southern North America, northeastern South America, and southern Europe). The metrics produce diverging estimates elsewhere, with P-E predicting decreasing stress across temperate Asia and central Africa. The differing sensitivity of drought metrics to radiative and physiological aspects of increasing CO2 partly explains the divergent estimates of future drought reported in recent studies. Further, use of ESM output in offline models may double-count plant feedbacks on relative humidity and other surface variables, leading to overestimates of future stress. The use of drought metrics that account for the response of plant transpiration to changing CO2, including direct use of P-E and soil moisture from ESMs, is needed to reduce uncertainties in future assessment.

So the study shows that the Palmer Drought Severity Index, an atmospheric model, can overestimate the severity of a drought in certain regions, when compared to precipitation minus evapotranspiration models that take into account the decreasing water needs of plants at higher CO2 levels.

Effectively they say drought frequency increases will still occur but severity will be reduced in many areas from previous predictions using the PDSI.

The University of Washington article also said that many climate models have already been updated with this new P-E model.

The PDSI was developed and used since the 60's. Wiki says many climate scientists use it.

I decided to see if and how the IPCC used it.
https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-3-2.html

The previous AR4 report from 2007 mentions its use:

As precipitation maps tend to be spotty, overall trends in precipitation are indicated by the Palmer Drought Severity Index (see Figure 1), which is a measure of soil moisture using precipitation and crude estimates of changes in evaporation.

So my takeaway from this is the PDSI was and is used by climate scientists for climate predictions but that they knew it was "crude" meaning large uncertainty and further science was needed to reduce that uncertainty. Which is exactly what this study does.

Now back to our original questions.

Is this a well supported study? The authors are from respected universities and they published in I believe a respected journal. So yes

Does it significantly change current climate theory? No this study supports:

• Current theory of man-made CO2 induced warming,
• No changes to current predictions of sea level rise,
• No changes to the current prediction of increasing frequency of high precipitation events
• The current prediction of increasing frequency of droughts
• It does change the location and severity of those droughts.

Should we be surprised if new research changes our understanding of climate change? No this is how science works. This was a known area of uncertainty and further research has reduced that uncertainty. Climate models are already taking that into account.


If you were expecting climate modeling to be done once and be correct for all time then I suggest going back to church because that's the only place you will find "unchanging truth"

You should expect changes to severity, location, timing, and frequency of the negative and (any positive) aspects of climate change as more research is done. This is where most of the uncertainty is.

What you won't see is any of that research fundamentally changing the settled underlying science.