fayfreethinkers.com

Re human impact on the climate: Perhaps killing off big beasts in the pre-agri hunter-gatherer days had an impact, too.

Re definition of "plausible":
But Sav, "no-less-than-moderately questionably" overlooked does not mean he did overlook. The former is much weaker than the latter.

I will assert this: Darrel ignored the "seemingly or apparently" qualification in the definition. (As evidenced by e.g. his statement, "the more one is plausible (Mann) the more the other one is implausible (McKitrick). This works the same for the words probable and likely.") Whether he overlooked it, or saw it and chose not to acknowledge it, or was trying to pull a fast one to bamboozle readers, or some other, I don't really know. I prefer to assume that Darrel debates in good faith, and simply overlooked the qualifier.

The semantic dispute about "plausible" might be put this way:

Darrel opines that "plausible" is more similar to "likely": If Mann's hockey-stick theory is likely, the classic theory is unlikely.

I opine that "plausible" is more similar to "conceivable": If Mann's hockey-stick theory is merely conceivable, then the classic theory is also conceivable.

I think we would all agree that both the hockey stick theory and the classic theory are conceivable - neither contradicts the laws of the universe. I would think that most would agree that both theories are plausible - after all, the classic (big MWP) theory was around for many years until Mann98 suddenly became the rage. Pre-1998 climatologists were not stupid. The way I read the NAS panel, they are damning with faint praise the hockey stick. The hockey stick theory is merely plausible - not likely, not probable, but only plausible. It seems a politically correct hedge - they know which side their grants are buttered!

I like the way Guest thinks - in terms of incentives and the institutions supporting incentives. I think the same way, but in terms of property (rather than tax structures.) To me, the problem of pollution is largely a lack of property institutions and the resulting incentives. Pollution is a straightforward case of "tradegy of the commons" - the lack of well-defined "sticky" property rights. If "everyone" owns the village green, then it's individually rational to graze your animals on it, leading to overgrazing. If "everyone" owns the air or water, then it's individually rational to dump negative goods on it, leading to pollution.

Hogeye wrote: I will assert this: Darrel ignored the "seemingly or apparently" qualification in the definition.

DAR
Of course I didn't. I quoted the entire definition. And as I said with regard to the rest of the words they used to define: "I quoted them and am quite please to include them."

And here is another almost funny distortion. You bold the Seemingly or apparently in the definition, but conveniently stop the bold at the word the "seemingly or apparently" were directed at:

valid.

Jesus Christ, what is this, elementary school? How stupid do you think readers are?

So the standard definition gives us for plausible:

seemingly or apparently valid,

likely,

acceptable,

credible,

Mann should be and is vindicated by any of those monikers.

And the only reason I brought the dictionary out to thump you over the head with it in the first place was because you made the ridiculous assertion that it was an "erroneous equivocation" to compare or describe plausible as "likely."

I opine that "plausible" is more similar to "conceivable":

DAR
So it is true. You do have your own anarchist dictionary you use when stuck. Or perhaps you think you are Humpty Dumpty.

Does anyone doubt that if the panel had said that Mann's claim was not plausible, or implausible, or not likely, or apparently not valid, or not credible, Hogeye's struggle to understand and use a standard definition for this basic word would suddenly disappear? I don't.

D.
--------------------------
"This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence..."

Hogeye wrote:But Sav, "no-less-than-moderately questionably" overlooked does not mean he did overlook. The former is much weaker than the latter.

You clearly said that Darrel "apparently" overlooked the qualifiers. If your argument was that Darrel most likely overlooked the words, then you -- in practice, not merely in assertion -- used the word "apparently" to mean most likely.
If you renege and insist that it's not really that likely that Darrel overlooked the words, then what the hell point could you possibly be trying to make? "Darrel is wrong because he more than likely did not ignore the words I accuse him of wrongly ignoring"?

http://dict.die.net/apparently/
apparently
adv 1: from appearances alone; "irrigation often produces bumper
crops from apparently desert land"; "the child is
seemingly healthy but the doctor is concerned"; "had
been ostensibly frank as to his purpose while really
concealing it"-Thomas Hardy; "on the face of it the
problem seems minor" [syn: seemingly, ostensibly,
on the face of it]
2: unmistakably; "the answer is obviously wrong"; "she was in
bed and evidently in great pain"; "he was manifestly too
important to leave off the guest list"; "it is all
patently nonsense"; "she has apparently been living here
for some time"; "I thought he owned the property, but
apparently not"; "You are plainly wrong"; (`plain' is
often used informally for `plainly' as in "he is plain
stubborn") [syn: obviously, evidently, manifestly, patently,
plainly, plain]

Sav, I see the problem - the definition of "apparently." I'm using def 1: from appearances alone, seemingly, "on the face of it", whereas you are using def 2: unmistakably. I intended "Darrel apparently overlooked the hedge words" to say something about superficial appearance, not likelihood.

Darrel, I quoted your words that showed you ignoring "seemingly or apparently": to wit "the more one is plausible (Mann) the more the other one is implausible (McKitrick). This works the same for the words probable and likely."

You try to wiggle out by pretending that "seemingly and apparently" modifies only valid; it obviously modifies (valid, likely, or acceptable).

plau·si·ble   Pronunciation Key  (plôz-bl)
adj.
1 Seemingly or apparently valid, likely, or acceptable; credible: a plausible excuse.
2 Giving a deceptive impression of truth or reliability.
3 Disingenuously smooth; fast-talking

Note definition 2 and 3.

I think you are ill. So I am going to stop kicking for a while.

For some reason periodically the system "unlogs" me and I only notice when I re-read what I wrote and find that it has posted under "guest" - the accounting change and tax incentive comment was mine. It's almost scary that Hogeye likes it, since he's so against the government required to enforce it. Commons can only be protected by group action (government, of whatever size or level). Owning property may logically suggest protection (enlightened self-interest), but actuality has long shown that most self interest isn't enlightened.

Aside from which, water and air move without paying attention to who is supposed to own them - and carry pollutants from the polluter to those who haven't the power to stop him/her/it/them. It's hard enough to deal with the concept of "owning" land - you didn't make it and you can't take with you when you move - but water and air! The fights over water caused a whole lot of death, and the property laws in the western states are incredibly convoluted to prevent water wars from occurring again (faint hope if the glaciers totally go and the snowpack keeps getting smaller).

If you run a hog operation on "your" property and dump the excrement into "your" water, which then runs onto "my" property so polluted that I can't even live around it much less use it, I'd better have law and government to go to on this. Otherwise, I might turn into a "one-person, one-gun" libertarian and take out the polluting source (you, my upstream neighbor).

DAR
Amazing little article showing how a tiny bit of crap can grow into a giant snowball of error if you have enough people who, for whatever reason, want to keep pushing it around.

***
British Skeptic Debunked on Glacier Assertions

David Bellamy's inaccurate and selective figures on glacier shrinkage are a boon to climate change deniers

George Monbiot
The Guardian (UK), May 10, 2005

For the past three weeks, a set of figures has been working a hole in my mind. On April 16, New Scientist published a letter from the famous botanist David Bellamy. Many of the world's glaciers, he claimed, "are not shrinking but in fact are growing ... 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980". His letter was instantly taken up by climate change deniers. And it began to worry me. What if Bellamy was right?

He is a scientist, formerly a senior lecturer at the University of Durham. He knows, in other words, that you cannot credibly cite data unless it is well-sourced. Could it be that one of the main lines of evidence of the impact of global warming - the retreat of the world's glaciers - is wrong?

The question could scarcely be more important. If man-made climate change is happening, as the great majority of the world's climatologists claim, it could destroy the conditions that allow human beings to remain on the planet. The effort to cut greenhouse gases must come before everything else. This won't happen unless we can be confident that the science is right. Because Bellamy is president of the Conservation Foundation, the Wildlife Trusts, Plantlife International and the British Naturalists' Association, his statements carry a great deal of weight. When, for example, I challenged the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders over climate change, its spokesman cited Bellamy's position as a reason for remaining sceptical.

So last week I telephoned the World Glacier Monitoring Service and read out Bellamy's letter. I don't think the response would have been published in Nature, but it had the scientific virtue of clarity: "This is complete bullshit." A few hours later, they sent me an email: "Despite his scientific reputation, he makes all the mistakes that are possible." He had cited data that was simply false, he had failed to provide references, he had completely misunderstood the scientific context and neglected current scientific literature. The latest studies show unequivocally that most of the world's glaciers are retreating.

But I still couldn't put the question out of my mind. The figures that Bellamy cited must have come from somewhere. I emailed him to ask for his source. After several requests, he replied to me at the end of last week. The data, he said, came from a website called www.iceagenow.com. Iceagenow was constructed by a man called Robert W Felix to promote his self-published book about "the coming ice age". It claims that sea levels are falling, not rising; that the Asian tsunami was caused by the "ice age cycle"; and that "underwater volcanic activity - not human activity - is heating the seas".

Is Felix a climatologist, a volcanologist or an oceanographer? Er, none of the above. His biography describes him as a "former architect". His website is so bonkers that I thought at first it was a spoof. Sadly, he appears to believe what he says. But there, indeed, was all the material that Bellamy cited in his letter, including the figures - or something resembling the figures - he quoted. "Since 1980, there has been an advance of more than 55% of the 625 mountain glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring group in Zurich." The source, which Bellamy also cited in his email to me, was given as "the latest issue of 21st Century Science and Technology".

21st Century Science and Technology? It sounds impressive, until you discover that it is published by Lyndon LaRouche. Lyndon LaRouche is the American demagogue who in 1989 received a 15-year sentence for conspiracy, mail fraud and tax-code violations. He has claimed that the British royal family is running an international drugs syndicate, that Henry Kissinger is a communist agent, that the British government is controlled by Jewish bankers, and that modern science is a conspiracy against human potential.

It wasn't hard to find out that this is one of his vehicles: LaRouche is named on the front page of the magazine's website, and the edition Bellamy cites contains an article beginning: "We in LaRouche's Youth Movement find ourselves in combat with an old enemy that destroys human beings ... it is empiricism."

Oh well, at least there is a source for Bellamy's figures. But where did 21st Century Science and Technology get them from? It doesn't say. But I think we can make an informed guess, for the same data can be found all over the internet. They were first published online by Professor Fred Singer, one of the very few climate change deniers who has a vaguely relevant qualification (he is, or was, an environmental scientist). He posted them on his website, www.sepp.org, and they were then reproduced by the appropriately named junkscience.com, by the Cooler Heads Coalition, the US National Centre for Public Policy Research and countless others. They have even found their way into the Washington Post.

They are constantly quoted as evidence that man-made climate change is not happening. But where did they come from? Singer cites half a source: "A paper published in Science in 1989." Well, the paper might be 16 years old, but at least, and at last, there is one. Surely?

I went through every edition of Science published in 1989, both manually and electronically. Not only did it contain nothing resembling those figures, throughout that year there was no paper published in this journal about glacial advance or retreat.

So it wasn't looking too good for Bellamy, or Singer, or any of the deniers who have cited these figures. But there was still one mystery to clear up. While Bellamy's source claimed that 55% of 625 glaciers are advancing, Bellamy claimed that 555 of them - or 89% - are advancing. This figure appears to exist nowhere else. But on the standard English keyboard, 5 and % occupy the same key. If you try to hit %, but fail to press shift, you get 555, instead of 55%. This is the only explanation I can produce for his figure. When I challenged him, he admitted that there had been "a glitch of the electronics".

So, in Bellamy's poor typing, we have the basis for a whole new front in the war against climate science. The 555 figure is now being cited as definitive evidence that global warming is a "fraud", a "scam", a "lie". I phoned New Scientist to ask if Bellamy had requested a correction. He had not.

It is hard to convey just how selective you have to be to dismiss the evidence for climate change. You must climb over a mountain of evidence to pick up a crumb: a crumb which then disintegrates in the palm of your hand. You must ignore an entire canon of science, the statements of the world's most eminent scientific institutions, and thousands of papers published in the foremost scientific journals. You must, if you are David Bellamy, embrace instead the claims of an eccentric former architect, which are based on what appears to be a non-existent data set. And you must do all this while calling yourself a scientist.

www.monbiot.com
***

LINK

DAR
Note, Fred Singer is a prominent figure in the GW skeptic camp.

DAR
No need for alarm, it's just hundreds of billions of dollars worth of forests dying.

***
Cascades' reddened forests signal threat to humans

PAT RASMUSSEN
GUEST COLUMNIST

Signs that our local forests are stressed by global warming recently struck me while traveling over North Cascades passes in Washington state.

The forest is dying near the top on both east and west sides; trees are still partially green but turning red -- old trees, young trees, the forest itself. Tents, and campers, in the Lone Fir Campground were surrounded by these dying trees.

The same reddening trees can be seen hiking through the Glacier Peak Wilderness on the trail to Spider Meadow in the Chiwawa River watershed of the Wenatchee National Forest. People are reporting that forests are dying near Mt. Rainier, on Chinook and White passes and down to central Oregon.

Huge expanses of forest in central British Columbia have died and turned red. A friend living in the Quesnel River watershed of central British Columbia said, "It's all red, and next come the fires."

Millions of acres of lodgepole pine have been pushed over the mortality threshold by global warming. There is no longer suitable habitat for the trees that have been growing there.

In northern Canada, forests are showing signs of heat stress. Tracking forest changes between 1982 and 2003 using satellite data, Scott Goetz, an ecologist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, found that a wide swath of the northern forest was getting browner, not greener as he had expected. Goetz believes this is some of the first evidence that high latitude forests may be in decline following an initial growth spurt associated with warming.

A massive Alaska yellow cedar die-off on 500,000 acres of land in Southeast Alaska has been documented by the U.S. Forest Service. Scientists investigating the dramatic decline in yellow cedar eliminated all other possible causes except climate change. Yellow cedars live in the higher latitudes and altitudes of the coastal temperate rainforest from Alaska to the Olympic Peninsula. The trees that are dying have been living there for up to 1,000 years, in a climate conducive to life.

Forests have an upper heating limit that they can tolerate. When heating goes beyond that limit, trees and other plants go into a rest state, a kind of hibernation, where they rest until conditions might improve. In that state they do not convert carbon to oxygen. Further stressed, they die.

Forests created and maintain the planetary atmosphere. They are having a difficult time maintaining the conditions for life as it is known because humans have removed so many of them.

Now, as massive amounts of forest are dying and no longer convert carbon to oxygen, the conditions necessary for our life here are being lost. Which other forests are at or nearing that stress point from global warming?

As I look around, I see humans continuing life as usual, seemingly unaware that the planetary forests that make life possible are more and more stressed, pushed toward death, by our actions.

...

LINK

The forests are the greatest terrestrial recycler/sequesterer of CO2 - and yes, they are dying. Once dead they not only stop sequestering CO2, but they become highly flammable (...then the fires) - and burning trees release all the CO2 they've sequestered back into the atmosphere. The truly greatest recycler/sequesterer is the mass of blue-green algae in the oceans. Global warming, combined with industrial fishing technology, has been killing them off, too. We already have more CO2 in the atmosphere than has been for 650000 years. At what point will there be so much CO2 back in the atmosphere that mammals can no longer survive?

Barbara Fitzpatrick wrote: We already have more CO2 in the atmosphere than has been for 650000 years. At what point will there be so much CO2 back in the atmosphere that mammals can no longer survive?

DAR
The Friends of Science flick says we can have 5x or so more than today and everything is hunky dory. "C02, some call it pollution, we call it life..."

D.

When my older son was doing EMT training, he told me breathing is triggered by a need to get rid of CO2 rather than a demand for O2 - they had special training for dealing with miners and other folks whose bodies become accustomed to higher levels of CO2, because their bodies literally will not restart breathing without help under trauma conditions (electric shock or blow to the head). Doesn't sound like "life" to me - at least not for anything but tree ferns.

Published on Tuesday, September 5, 2006 by the Independent / UK

Ice Bubbles Reveal Biggest Rise in CO2 for 800,000 Years

by Steve Connor

The rapid rise in greenhouse gases over the past century is unprecedented in at least 800,000 years, according to a study of the oldest Antarctic ice core which highlights the reality of climate change.

Air bubbles trapped in ice for hundreds of thousands of years have revealed that humans are changing the composition of the atmosphere in a manner that has no known natural parallel.

Scientists at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in Cambridge have found there have been eight cycles of atmospheric change in the past 800,000 years when carbon dioxide and methane have risen to peak levels.

Each time, the world also experienced the relatively high temperatures associated with warm, inter-glacial periods, which were almost certainly linked with levels of carbon dioxide and possibly methane in the atmosphere.

However, existing levels of carbon dioxide and methane are far higher than anything seen during these earlier warm periods, said Eric Wolff of the BAS.

"Ice cores reveal the Earth's natural climate rhythm over the last 800,000 years. When carbon dioxide changed there was always an accompanying climate change," Dr Wolff said. "Over the past 200 years, human activity has increased carbon dioxide to well outside the natural range and we have no analogue for what will happen next.

"We have a no-analogue situation. We don't have anything in the past that we can measure directly," he added.

The ice core was drilled from a thick area of ice on Antarctica known as Dome C. The core is nearly 3.2km long and reaches to a depth where air bubbles became trapped in ice that formed 800,000 years ago.

"It's from those air bubbles that we know for sure that carbon dioxide has increased by about 35 per cent in the past 200 years. Before that 200 years, which is when man's been influencing the atmosphere, it was pretty steady to within 5 per cent," Dr Wolff said.

The core shows that carbon dioxide was always between 180 parts per million (ppm) and 300 ppm during the 800,000 years. However, now it is 380 ppm. Methane was never higher than 750 parts per billion (ppb) in this timescale, but now it stands at 1,780 ppb.

But the rate of change is even more dramatic, with increases in carbon dioxide never exceeding 30 ppm in 1,000 years -- and yet now carbon dioxide has risen by 30 ppm in the last 17 years.

"The rate of change is probably the most scary thing because it means that the Earth systems can't cope with it," Dr Wolff told the British Association meeting at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

"On such a crowded planet, we have little capacity to adapt to changes that are much faster than anything in human experience."
***

Bold mine.

LINK

The problem with points of "no return" is you never know where one is until you've passed it. Despair is very counterproductive, but I spend much time in that space these days.

That's an interesting article, but (like so many chicken little articles) makes the dubious assumption that greenhouse gasses cause global warming. Only if you accept that assumption would higher greenhouse gas concentration be of any major concern.

In fact, studies show that a rise in greenhouse gasses follows (not precedes) a rise in temperature - by up to 800 years. So if there is any causation, it is going the other way. And any causation at all is speculative - rising concentrations of greenhouse gasses and temperatures may both be effects of some other phenomena, e.g. elliptical orbits, sunspots, or whatever.

It is interesting to note what the article omits. It says there is now the highest concentration of greenhouse gasses in the last 800,000 years, and even notes temperatures can be gauged by looking at hydrogen isotopes, yet totally omits any claims about temperature. Which is not surprising since there have been many warmer periods in the last 800,000 years. A recent report by a National Academy of Science panel would only commit to the late 20th century being the warmest in 400 years, and admitted the possibility that the Medieval Warm period of 1000 years ago may have been hotter.

The article makes no attempt to explain why, if greenhouse gasses cause warming, those same ice bores don't show it to be warmest in the last 800,000 years. It is more propaganda than science, as it counts on the reader to fall for the erroneous causation assumption and conclude that the sky is falling.

Hogeye wrote: Only if you accept that assumption would higher greenhouse gas concentration be of any major concern.

DAR
That greenhouse gases are intimately connected with warming is only doubted by a few misinformed souls and those with an agenda which conflicts with the idea that people should organize collectively to deal with the coming and current rapid warming.

In fact, studies show that a rise in greenhouse gasses follows (not precedes) a rise in temperature - by up to 800 years.

DAR
That's a simplistic misleading distortion passed around by the GW deniers. Debunked many times on this forum. Yawn.

And any causation at all is speculative - rising concentrations of greenhouse gasses and temperatures may both be effects of some other phenomena, e.g. elliptical orbits, sunspots, or whatever.

DAR
Anything but what all the experts say it most likely is. You're just a contrarian.

The article makes no attempt to explain why, if greenhouse gasses cause warming, those same ice bores don't show it to be warmest in the last 800,000 years.

DAR
Because no one claims that greenhouse gasses must be the only cause of warming. Plus temperatures that long ago must be tentative as you should have learned by now after all of the flailing at the hockey stick.

D.
----------------------------
"The core shows that carbon dioxide was always between 180 parts per million (ppm) and 300 ppm during the 800,000 years. However, now it is 380 ppm. Methane was never higher than 750 parts per billion (ppb) in this timescale, but now it stands at 1,780 ppb.

But the rate of change is even more dramatic, with increases in carbon dioxide never exceeding 30 ppm in 1,000 years -- and yet now carbon dioxide has risen by 30 ppm in the last 17 years."
--article above

Relax. Any notion that this may be a cause for concern is purely speculative....

Darrel wrote:That greenhouse gases are intimately connected with warming is only doubted by a few misinformed souls and those with an agenda which conflicts with the idea that people should organize collectively to deal with the coming and current rapid warming.

Virtually no one disputes that greenhouse gasses are "intimately connected" (correlated) with warming. The dubious assumption that GW alarmists make is that greenhouse gasses cause global warming. The last part of your comment is just braindead ad hom, no different from someone saying that alarmists are misguided souls with a big government authoritarian "watermelon" agenda.

Hogeye> In fact, studies show that a rise in greenhouse gasses follows (not precedes) a rise in temperature - by up to 800 years.

Darrel> That's a simplistic misleading distortion passed around by the GW deniers. Debunked many times on this forum.

As a matter of fact, never debunked on this forum or anywhere else. The lag is shown by the same data and graph that Gore uses in his flick. Furthermore, your appellation "GW deniers" is a strawman - virtually no one denies global warming is occurring. What skeptics like me deny is 1) greenhouse gasses cause global warming (your following comment seems to indicate you agree) and 2) There is no reason to freak out with draconian authoritarian "remedies." Harm reduction is a better approach.

Darrel wrote:No one claims that greenhouse gasses must be the only cause of warming.

Yet the article gives the strong impression that greenhouse gasses will result in warming. But now we're getting somewhere: Why get all upset about higher greenhouse gas concentrations if you realize that it doesn't in itself cause global warming? Enjoy the CO2 fertilizer effect and mellow out.

Darrel wrote:No one claims that greenhouse gasses must be the only cause of warming.

Hogeye wrote: Yet the article gives the strong impression that greenhouse gasses will result in warming. But now we're getting somewhere: Why get all upset about higher greenhouse gas concentrations if you realize that it doesn't in itself cause global warming? Enjoy the CO2 fertilizer effect and mellow out.

DOUG
Hoggy, pay attention to the following information.

To say that something X can cause effect Y is NOT to say that Y can only be caused by X. For example, getting hit on the head with a hammer (with a great deal of force) causes pain, but that doesn't mean that getting hit on the head with a hammer is the ONLY thing that causes pain.


Also, to say that something X can cause effect Y is NOT to say that Y can only be caused by X OR that X causes Y under all circumstances. If you have your head anesthetized, you may not feel pain when hit with a hammer.

And once you know this about getting hit on the head with hammers, it would be odd to say "Why get all upset about getting hit on the head with hammers if you realize that it doesn't in itself cause pain?" or "Why get all upset about getting hit on the head with hammers if you realize that pain can be caused by other factors?"

So to say that greenhouse gases cause global warming is not to say that they must under all circumstances cause global warming (if other circumstances work to cool the planet then the warming effect might be nullified) OR that global warming can't happen any other way.

However, none of this means that greenhouse gases don't cause global warming under circumstances that we find today or in the last 800,000 years, for example.

Pay attention, Doug.

The article erroneously implies that higher concentrations of greenhouse gasses is a sufficient condition to cause global warming. This is as erroneous as saying that you driving to work will cause an automoblile accident. It may, in combination with numerous other factors, but to advocate the curtailment of automobile ownership on that basis is absurd.

A standard trick that many global warming alarmists use is to assume (or pretend to assume for the dumb masses) that higher concentrations of greenhouse gasses is a sufficent condition for global warming. That is equally absurd.

DAR
Flashback from above:

"DAR
That greenhouse gases are intimately connected with warming is only doubted by a few misinformed souls and those with an agenda which conflicts with the idea that people should organize collectively to deal with the coming and current rapid warming."

The hogie one with a very short memory responded:

"Virtually no one disputes that greenhouse gasses are "intimately connected" (correlated) with warming."

Is this the comment in the article that you say "erroneously implies that higher concentrations of greenhouse gasses is a sufficient condition to cause global warming."

Scientists at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in Cambridge have found there have been eight cycles of atmospheric change in the past 800,000 years when carbon dioxide and methane have risen to peak levels.

Each time, the world also experienced the relatively high temperatures associated with warm, inter-glacial periods, which were almost certainly linked with levels of carbon dioxide and possibly methane in the atmosphere.

However, existing levels of carbon dioxide and methane are far higher than anything seen during these earlier warm periods, said Eric Wolff of the BAS."

Reasonable people read this and see reason for concern. Why don't you? Not absolute enough?

D.
------------------------
"...some people get so dogmatic and unreasonable that you just have to ignore them. Bill is one of those people." --private email to me reminding me of what I already know.

Scientists See New Global Warming Threat
By Seth Borenstein
The Associated Press

Wednesday 06 September 2006

Washington - New research is raising concerns that global warming may be triggering a self-perpetuating climate time bomb trapped in once-frozen permafrost.

As the Earth warms, greenhouse gases once stuck in the long-frozen soil are bubbling into the atmosphere in much larger amounts than previously anticipated, according to a study in Thursday's journal Nature.

Methane trapped in a special type of permafrost is bubbling up at a rate five times faster than originally measured, the journal said.

Scientists are fretting about a global warming vicious cycle that had not been part of their already gloomy climate forecasts: Warming already under way thaws permafrost, soil that had been continuously frozen for thousands of years.

Thawed permafrost releases methane and carbon dioxide. Those gases reach the atmosphere and help trap heat on Earth in the greenhouse effect. The trapped heat thaws more permafrost, and so on.

"The higher the temperature gets, the more permafrost we melt, the more tendency it is to become a more vicious cycle," said Chris Field, director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "That's the thing that is scary about this whole thing. There are lots of mechanisms that tend to be self-perpetuating and relatively few that tends to shut it off."

The effect reported in Nature is seen mostly in Siberia, but also elsewhere, in a type of carbon-rich permafrost, flash frozen about 40,000 years ago. A new more accurate measuring technique was used on the bubbling methane, which is 23 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than the more prevalent carbon dioxide.

"The effects can be huge," said lead author Katey Walter of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. "It's coming out a lot and there's a lot more to come out."

Another study earlier this summer in the journal Science found that the amount of carbon trapped in this type of permafrost - called yedoma - is much more prevalent than originally thought and may be 100 times the amount of carbon released into the air each year by the burning of fossil fuels.

It won't all come out at once or even over several decades, but the methane and carbon dioxide will escape the soil if temperatures increase, scientists say.

The issue of methane and carbon dioxide released from permafrost has caused concern this summer among climate scientists and geologists. Specialists in Arctic climate are coming up with research plans to study the effect, which is not well understood or observed, said Robert Corell, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a group of 300 scientists.

"It's kind of like a slow-motion time bomb," said Ted Schuur, a professor of ecosystem ecology at the University of Florida and co-author of the Science study. "There's these big surprises out there that we don't even know about."

...

LINK