Climate Change – Happening or not?

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Climate Change – Happening or not?

  • Climate change is NOT happening

  • NATURAL climate change is happening

  • ANTHROPOGENIC (human caused) climate change is happening

  • DON'T KNOW if climate change is happening or not, and/or don’t know what might be causing it

  • OTHER --- Please explain in a reply to the thread


Results are only viewable after voting.
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ThirstyBarbarian

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There have been two recent threads in the News Feeds section that have generated a lot of posts related to climate change. The purpose of this poll is to find out how respondents feel about the most basic questions regarding climate change --- is it happening or not? And, if so, is it caused by human activity or not?

The threads that inspired the poll generated thousands of views, but only a handful of members actually posted. Perhaps more members will be willing to respond to the poll than were willing to join in the sometimes heated conversation in the previous threads. This poll is set up to be anonymous.

This thread is about a scientific question. This is NOT a thread about politics or policy. Please follow the forum rules: https://www.rocketryforum.com/showthread.php?13110-Rules-and-Guidelines

Keep your political views and policy opinions OUT of the discussion. Questioning people’s policy agenda, political motivations, financial interests, etc. is not a scientific argument. Focus your posts on scientific arguments for what you think about this scientific question --- data, evidence, theory, etc. The thread is not about what to do about climate change, if anything, or any of the related political or economic considerations --- it's only about whether climate change is happening. Please avoid the more controversial subjects and stick to the scientific question.

Mods, I'm posting this in News Feeds, where the original threads that inspired the poll are posted. If this is not the proper section. please move the poll.
 
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The climate is changing. The climate is always changing. The planet has been warming for ~12,000 years, when the glaciers started leaving St. Louis.
 
I think climate change is happening, and I think it is due to human activity --- human generated greenhouse gasses and deforestation.


  • There is solid scientific evidence that human activity has raised CO2 levels from about 280ppm in pre-indistrial times to about 400ppm today.
  • We know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere.
  • Theory predicts that as greenhouse gas levels rise in the atmosphere, more heat will be trapped in the climates system, global temperatures will rise, and the climates will change.
  • Global temperatures have been shown to be rising in ways that cannot be explained by other natural influences, which is consistent with the theory.

For me, that is enough scientific evidence to convince me that the climate is changing due to human activity.
 
The climate is changing. The climate is always changing. The planet has been warming for ~12,000 years, when the glaciers started leaving St. Louis.

Thanks for posting. You should register your opinion in the poll. There should be an option consistent with what you just said.
 
Yep! we knew about this in the 60's and 70's. How successful were we in raising the red flag? It's complex, but I don't miss pink toilet paper....
 
I ain't got no opinion, so I'll just keep it to myself.
 
Like any dynamic system, worldwide climate reacts to the variations in its inputs. Practically, it would be impossible to maintain a perfect balance with no change over time. Left to its own devices (i.e. prior to the advent of human civilization) cyclic changes took place resulting from these variations.

The historic record shows that the increase of gases in the atmosphere that are considered impacting the greenhouse effect has accelerated along with human population. This is especially true since the industrial revolution and the exploitation of fossil fuels, lumber and nature's other bounties.

Nature will and is reacting to this variation. We just may not be too happy with the short-term or long-term effects. The Earth will go on but there will be changes.
 
Trolling on the rocketry forum from the usual suspects...THAT's definitely happening


Sent from my iPhone using Rocketry Forum
 
My choice was OTHER. I believe natural climate change is happening and being assisted by humans, but certainly not caused by humans. Our impact on the overall solar, volcanic, water, climatic cycles is smaller than the media and vocal scientific communities would lead us to believe. As much as our collective human ego wants it to be, we are not the "center of the universe;" we are mere gnats in the scheme of things (James 4:14).
 
It's happening both naturally and from human influence, BUT it's happening at a much, much, much, much,much slower rate than much of the news coverage. The claims are enormously exaggerated!
 
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Humankind is SO hopelessly myopic and yet filled with hubris at the same time...

In the long history of Earth, the present climate (as it has been for the past few thousand years, and in a larger sense, the past few million years) is the aberration, not the norm...

Earth's climate has changed many times in its history. Heck the entire planet has changed completely from the atmosphere it started with-- we're breathing the waste products (oxygen) of countless eons of stromatolite and blue-green algae, which turned the planets atmosphere completely around from what it originally was. Heck, after the formation of the Moon, when it was in a much closer orbit than now, the tides were hundreds of feet high and surged thousands of miles inland twice a day, rapidly robbing the Earth of spin and imparting angular momentum to the Moon, causing it to move away and the tides to slowly reduce to current levels. Earth's magnetic field has collapsed and reversed multiple times in its history, causing untold changes to the atmosphere due to direct exposure to solar radiation and galactic cosmic radiation from space. It's possible Earth has even been struck by a gamma ray burst from space at some point in its past, and may well again.

For most of Earth's history, it's been much hotter than now. If you believe the Snowball Earth theory, that's been interrupted a time or two by massive ice ages. The fetid, steamy jungles of the Devonian and Carboniferous laid down massive coal seams the world relies upon for energy today, when it was much hotter (and wetter) than now. The planet heated up more and dried out as the Permian progressed, culminating in a mass extinction of the primitive reptiles and mammal-like reptiles, clearing the way for the dinosaurs.

The subsequent climate was somewhat cooler and much wetter during the Triassic, when the dinosaurs got their start. Still, it was hotter than today. The Jurassic and Cretaceous were hotter as well. The world has been slowly cooling down since then, until the series of Ice Ages of the fairly recent Tertiary, which of course spawned changes in the fauna again, favoring things like saber-tooth cats and mammoths, mastodons, and wooly rhinos over the previous fauna, things like terror birds, giant sloths, and giant armadillos...

The recent warm-up from the end of the last ice age when all those species went extinct would be considered quite anomalous to those creatures, but it created the mild conditions we've been accustomed to that allowed human civilization to develop and flourish beyond the hunter-gatherer stage. So, basically, we've been "living in a bubble" of unusually good weather on the planet, weather that is bound to change, and most certainly is changing.

Earth's history is incredibly rich, incredibly interesting, and has changed myriad times and ways over that long span of time... we're just a momentary "blip on the radar" that's recently come up. The continents have moved, come together and split apart, created supercontinents and super-oceans, in a plethora of combinations, numerous times throughout the past; volcanoes and meteor impacts and life itself have changed the atmosphere and the ocean and the circulation patterns of both combined with these other natural processes many times in the ancient past... and it is still going on today, just as it always has.

Of course humans must believe they are the ultimate problem and ultimate solution to things that are essentially out of their control. It's quite possible that we CONTRIBUTE to warming, but we're not the CAUSE of it, nor do we have the power to STOP it, or even significantly slow it down. If the Earth were a person, she'd be hot natured for most of her life-- she had the chills last night (the Ice Ages and recent cooler period of history we've enjoyed the last few thousand years) but now she's starting to feel better...

Sooner or later, the planet will change again... Another supervolcanic episode like the Deccan Traps or Siberian Traps with continent-size eruptions will release more "greenhouse gases" in a matter of days than we've dumped into the atmosphere over 200 years of industrialization. Heck it doesn't even take that... Pinatubo's eruption injected nearly as much as human activity has.

Only man's hubris makes him overestimate his importance and his capabilities to "control" such things... we're not nearly so important as we think we are...

Later! OL JR :)
 
The climate is changing. The climate is always changing. The planet has been warming for ~12,000 years, when the glaciers started leaving St. Louis.
YES!! That is my opinion on the dot. The temperature of the past has been a sine wave... Going up,,, then down,,,, then back up,,, and we are on the up part.
 
Like any dynamic system, worldwide climate reacts to the variations in its inputs. Practically, it would be impossible to maintain a perfect balance with no change over time. Left to its own devices (i.e. prior to the advent of human civilization) cyclic changes took place resulting from these variations.

The historic record shows that the increase of gases in the atmosphere that are considered impacting the greenhouse effect has accelerated along with human population. This is especially true since the industrial revolution and the exploitation of fossil fuels, lumber and nature's other bounties.

Nature will and is reacting to this variation. We just may not be too happy with the short-term or long-term effects. The Earth will go on but there will be changes.

Thanks for taking part. I agree with you. The climate has always been dynamic and changing, reacting to different inputs. But i think there is a lot of evidence that this time the major driver is human activity. I also agree that the Earth will go on, no matter what.
 
Trolling on the rocketry forum from the usual suspects...THAT's definitely happening


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My intention with this thread was NOT to troll on the issue. I know that the politics and policy arguments around the topic get heated and controversial, and that's where the trolling occurs. That's why I asked we keep the thread free of those topics --- an intentional attempt to keep the thread free of trolling. I think this is an interesting and important scientific question, worth talking about in a calm and rational way.
 
My choice was OTHER. I believe natural climate change is happening and being assisted by humans, but certainly not caused by humans. Our impact on the overall solar, volcanic, water, climatic cycles is smaller than the media and vocal scientific communities would lead us to believe. As much as our collective human ego wants it to be, we are not the "center of the universe;" we are mere gnats in the scheme of things (James 4:14).

It's happening both naturally and from human influence, BUT it's happening at a much, much, much, much,much slower rate than much of the news coverage. The claims are enormously exaggerated!

Thanks for participating in the poll.

I know that answers provided in the poll are not perfect, especially with regards to when your answer falls in between two answers. The poll feature of the forum is not set up for explaining nuances in the answers --- you have to keep the answer descriptions short when setting up the poll. This is how I would think of the answers:

Climate change is NOT happening. The climate now is pretty much the same as it was for the last 5,000 years. It is not currently changing significantly except for normal changes in weather that happen all the time. And the climate will be about the same for the next 5,000 years.

NATURAL climate change is happening. The climate is changing naturally, and human activities have little or nothing to do with it. The climate may change significantly in coming years, like it has in the past when ice ages began or ended. But it is a natural process, caused by natural influences such as solar variations and volcanoes. And this natural the climate change won’t be any more extreme or sudden than any other change that has happened in the last 500,000 years.

ANTHROPOGENIC (human caused) climate change is happening. The climate is changing, and human activities are causing it. Natural processes may also be contributing to climate change, but current climate change is primarily driven by human activities such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation that have overwhelmed the natural processes. This climate change is likely to be more extreme and rapid than anything that has happened for millions of years.

DON'T KNOW if climate change is happening or not, and/or don’t know what might be causing it. There is either not enough information available or another reason that I do not know.
 
Humankind is SO hopelessly myopic and yet filled with hubris at the same time...

In the long history of Earth, the present climate (as it has been for the past few thousand years, and in a larger sense, the past few million years) is the aberration, not the norm...

Earth's climate has changed many times in its history. Heck the entire planet has changed completely from the atmosphere it started with-- we're breathing the waste products (oxygen) of countless eons of stromatolite and blue-green algae, which turned the planets atmosphere completely around from what it originally was. Heck, after the formation of the Moon, when it was in a much closer orbit than now, the tides were hundreds of feet high and surged thousands of miles inland twice a day, rapidly robbing the Earth of spin and imparting angular momentum to the Moon, causing it to move away and the tides to slowly reduce to current levels. Earth's magnetic field has collapsed and reversed multiple times in its history, causing untold changes to the atmosphere due to direct exposure to solar radiation and galactic cosmic radiation from space. It's possible Earth has even been struck by a gamma ray burst from space at some point in its past, and may well again.

For most of Earth's history, it's been much hotter than now. If you believe the Snowball Earth theory, that's been interrupted a time or two by massive ice ages. The fetid, steamy jungles of the Devonian and Carboniferous laid down massive coal seams the world relies upon for energy today, when it was much hotter (and wetter) than now. The planet heated up more and dried out as the Permian progressed, culminating in a mass extinction of the primitive reptiles and mammal-like reptiles, clearing the way for the dinosaurs.

The subsequent climate was somewhat cooler and much wetter during the Triassic, when the dinosaurs got their start. Still, it was hotter than today. The Jurassic and Cretaceous were hotter as well. The world has been slowly cooling down since then, until the series of Ice Ages of the fairly recent Tertiary, which of course spawned changes in the fauna again, favoring things like saber-tooth cats and mammoths, mastodons, and wooly rhinos over the previous fauna, things like terror birds, giant sloths, and giant armadillos...

The recent warm-up from the end of the last ice age when all those species went extinct would be considered quite anomalous to those creatures, but it created the mild conditions we've been accustomed to that allowed human civilization to develop and flourish beyond the hunter-gatherer stage. So, basically, we've been "living in a bubble" of unusually good weather on the planet, weather that is bound to change, and most certainly is changing.

Earth's history is incredibly rich, incredibly interesting, and has changed myriad times and ways over that long span of time... we're just a momentary "blip on the radar" that's recently come up. The continents have moved, come together and split apart, created supercontinents and super-oceans, in a plethora of combinations, numerous times throughout the past; volcanoes and meteor impacts and life itself have changed the atmosphere and the ocean and the circulation patterns of both combined with these other natural processes many times in the ancient past... and it is still going on today, just as it always has.

Of course humans must believe they are the ultimate problem and ultimate solution to things that are essentially out of their control. It's quite possible that we CONTRIBUTE to warming, but we're not the CAUSE of it, nor do we have the power to STOP it, or even significantly slow it down. If the Earth were a person, she'd be hot natured for most of her life-- she had the chills last night (the Ice Ages and recent cooler period of history we've enjoyed the last few thousand years) but now she's starting to feel better...

Sooner or later, the planet will change again... Another supervolcanic episode like the Deccan Traps or Siberian Traps with continent-size eruptions will release more "greenhouse gases" in a matter of days than we've dumped into the atmosphere over 200 years of industrialization. Heck it doesn't even take that... Pinatubo's eruption injected nearly as much as human activity has.

Only man's hubris makes him overestimate his importance and his capabilities to "control" such things... we're not nearly so important as we think we are...

Later! OL JR :)

A well thought out and informative post, Luke. Thanks for participating.
 
There is no removing politics from this question because all recent science on the subject has been politically motivated. I voted "Don't Know" because I have read Michael Mann's source code and it was blatantly obvious that his methods were developed solely to "produce a graph that looks like I think it should". He destroyed the science of climatology and turned it into a mutual admiration society. I do not trust ANY scientific work that can trace its root back to ANYTHING Michael Mann has ever done, which basically eliminates all modern climatology. I do not know because the people I would trust to do such work are frauds and charlatans who are motivated by political ends and ego stroking rather than seeking the truth.

Anyone who claims to know what is happening to the climate, let alone determine the magnitude or root cause of any change that may be occuring based on the current state of the science is fooling themselves. The ONLY people who are doing research in this field are environmental activists and they are far too biased to be trusted to come to reasonable conclusions.
 
I have a Natgeo magazine from the late 70's saying we were causing global cooling. Now its global warming. then just climate change. Everything is changing. Shoot the moon is moving away from earth about 1 inch per year. But also man cant be stooped. The great lakes were almost killed off in the 70's.
Mr. Bob
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Review of the Scientific Method - Consensus versus Scientific determinations
The underlying methodology for modern scientific method is the statistical acceptance or rejection of the NULL hypothesis.

The NULL hypothesis states that any observed effect is no different than random variation. If you want to assign a special cause to this affect you attempt to collect data that allows you to REJECT the NULL hypothesis beyond a defined chance of error (confidence). Different applications have different levels of acceptable error, industry is about 0.05 (5% chance of error), health care 0.01, social sciences (0.2) etc. For those statistically inclined that is called the P-value. Any reputable study claiming a special cause of any effect will report the P-value supporting their conclusion.

In the example of AGW the NULL hypothesis is that any observed climates changes are random or due to natural causes. To reject this NULL hypothesis and assign man as a special cause requires data to support this rejection at a P-value suitably chosen.

To date, you will not find any peer reviewed paper that supports the rejection of the NULL hypothesis at any supportable statistical benchmark.

Being unable to statistically reject the NULL gives rise to all this "scientific concensus" bs. Climate scientists have to date been UNABLE to reject the NULL hypthosis that observed climate effects in the 20th century are no different than random climate variations over the long term. So the term "scientific consensus" was invented to try and confuse the masses to believe this is equivalent to scientific method derived conclusion.

It is not! Scientific consensus is a political term. It is not science. So to the OP, it is IMPOSSIBLE to have a non-political discussion of AGW.
 
There is no removing politics from this question because all recent science on the subject has been politically motivated. I voted "Don't Know" because I have read Michael Mann's source code and it was blatantly obvious that his methods were developed solely to "produce a graph that looks like I think it should". He destroyed the science of climatology and turned it into a mutual admiration society. I do not trust ANY scientific work that can trace its root back to ANYTHING Michael Mann has ever done, which basically eliminates all modern climatology. I do not know because the people I would trust to do such work are frauds and charlatans who are motivated by political ends and ego stroking rather than seeking the truth.

Anyone who claims to know what is happening to the climate, let alone determine the magnitude or root cause of any change that may be occuring based on the current state of the science is fooling themselves. The ONLY people who are doing research in this field are environmental activists and they are far too biased to be trusted to come to reasonable conclusions.

Thanks for participating; however, most of this is political talk and questioning people's motives and ethics, not scientific reasoning. This is the kind of post that has derailed the other threads, so I would ask that you and everyone else refrain from going there. Here is how you could have written your post to make your scientific point without questioning peoples motives:

I voted "Don't Know" because I have serious doubts about the data and methods used by climate scientists. I have read Michael Mann's source code and it was blatantly obvious that his methods were faulty. I do not trust ANY scientific work that uses Michael Mann's methods, which basically eliminates all modern climatology.

Anyone who claims to know what is happening to the climate, let alone determine the magnitude or root cause of any change that may be occuring based on the current state of the science is fooling themselves.

The reason I want to avoid posts like yours, is that it provokes someone else to respond in the same manner by questioning the motives of other people too (energy companies for example), and then the whole discourse devolves into a bunch of name-calling and finger pointing. Stick to scientific arguments. If you think someone is doing fraudulent science, it should be easy to point out the technical flaws in such bad science without bringing up the issue of their motivations, biases, political agendas, sources of financing, etc.
 
I voted "Other" because the polling software would not allow me to select both "NATURAL climate change is happening" and "ANTHROPOGENIC (human caused) climate change is happening".
 
The reason I want to avoid posts like yours, is that it provokes someone else to respond in the same manner by questioning the motives of other people too (energy companies for example), and then the whole discourse devolves into a bunch of name-calling and finger pointing. Stick to scientific arguments. If you think someone is doing fraudulent science, it should be easy to point out the technical flaws in such bad science without bringing up the issue of their motivations, biases, political agendas, sources of financing, etc.

With the current state of the science having a "scientific" discussion on climatology is akin to having a "scientific" discussion on the existence of God. Good luck with that, brother.
 
Review of the Scientific Method - Consensus versus Scientific determinations
The underlying methodology for modern scientific method is the statistical acceptance or rejection of the NULL hypothesis.

The NULL hypothesis states that any observed effect is no different than random variation. If you want to assign a special cause to this affect you attempt to collect data that allows you to REJECT the NULL hypothesis beyond a defined chance of error (confidence). Different applications have different levels of acceptable error, industry is about 0.05 (5% chance of error), health care 0.01, social sciences (0.2) etc. For those statistically inclined that is called the P-value. Any reputable study claiming a special cause of any effect will report the P-value supporting their conclusion.

In the example of AGW the NULL hypothesis is that any observed climates changes are random or due to natural causes. To reject this NULL hypothesis and assign man as a special cause requires data to support this rejection at a P-value suitably chosen.

To date, you will not find any peer reviewed paper that supports the rejection of the NULL hypothesis at any supportable statistical benchmark.

Being unable to statistically reject the NULL gives rise to all this "scientific concensus" bs. Climate scientists have to date been UNABLE to reject the NULL hypthosis that observed climate effects in the 20th century are no different than random climate variations over the long term. So the term "scientific consensus" was invented to try and confuse the masses to believe this is equivalent to scientific method derived conclusion.

It is not! Scientific consensus is a political term. It is not science. So to the OP, it is IMPOSSIBLE to have a non-political discussion of AGW.

Thanks for taking part in the thread. You were doing a great job of making a solid scientific argument for your point of view (until you got into your 5th and 6th paragraphs). Take out these 3 sentences and your would have a perfect scientific post that steers clear of politics:

Being unable to statistically reject the NULL gives rise to all this "scientific concensus" bs.

So the term "scientific consensus" was invented to try and confuse the masses to believe this is equivalent to scientific method derived conclusion.

It is not! Scientific consensus is a political term. It is not science. So to the OP, it is IMPOSSIBLE to have a non-political discussion of AGW.

Other than that, great job. Thanks again.
 
I voted "Other" because the polling software would not allow me to select both "NATURAL climate change is happening" and "ANTHROPOGENIC (human caused) climate change is happening".

Sorry about that. Did you see the post later in the thread where I tried to clarify? Would your answer be more like this:

NATURAL climate change is happening. The climate is changing naturally, and human activities have little or nothing to do with it. The climate may change significantly in coming years, like it has in the past when ice ages began or ended. But it is a natural process, caused by natural influences such as solar variations and volcanoes. And this natural the climate change won’t be any more extreme or sudden than any other change that has happened in the last 500,000 years.​

Or like this:

ANTHROPOGENIC (human caused) climate change is happening. The climate is changing, and human activities are causing it. Natural processes may also be contributing to climate change, but current climate change is primarily driven by human activities such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation that have overwhelmed the natural processes. This climate change is likely to be more extreme and rapid than anything that has happened for millions of years.

Thanks for participating.
 
With the current state of the science having a "scientific" discussion on climatology is akin to having a "scientific" discussion on the existence of God. Good luck with that, brother.

I agree it is not easy. But I think it has to do with the currents state of politics, not the current state of science. I think there is solid science, and it is possible to have a scientific discussion, but most discussions devolve into being more about politics than anything else, and science is brushed aside. It'll be interesting to see if this thread can keep on track...
 
Sorry about that. Did you see the post later in the thread where I tried to clarify? Would your answer be more like this:

NATURAL climate change is happening. The climate is changing naturally, and human activities have little or nothing to do with it. The climate may change significantly in coming years, like it has in the past when ice ages began or ended. But it is a natural process, caused by natural influences such as solar variations and volcanoes. And this natural the climate change won’t be any more extreme or sudden than any other change that has happened in the last 500,000 years.​

Or like this:

ANTHROPOGENIC (human caused) climate change is happening. The climate is changing, and human activities are causing it. Natural processes may also be contributing to climate change, but current climate change is primarily driven by human activities such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation that have overwhelmed the natural processes. This climate change is likely to be more extreme and rapid than anything that has happened for millions of years.

Thanks for participating.
I believe that the climate is changing, as it always has, and that the current climate change is a result of both natural and human causes. However, I can't agree with either of the clarifications since I don't know how much of the change is due to nature and how much is due to human causes. I can only say that the extremist on either side of the argument are both wrong. Climate change is not caused entirely by human sources, and it's not caused entirely by natural sources.
 
I believe that the climate is changing, as it always has, and that the current climate change is a result of both natural and human causes. However, I can't agree with either of the clarifications since I don't know how much of the change is due to nature and how much is due to human causes. I can only say that the extremist on either side of the argument are both wrong. Climate change is not caused entirely by human sources, and it's not caused entirely by natural sources.

Got it. I probably should have included one more option between these two, but I think most people will be able to pick one or the other that they agree with more. Thanks for clarifying your thoughts.
 
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