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Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Hot Stuff

If you are interested in the current state of climate science I strongly recommend the 2005 Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate report on Radiative Forcing. It is available online here in openbook format. The discussion in the press of climate change is very misleading, and even reading the executive summary of this report provides an insight on what the real scientists are investigating and weaknesses of our current models.

The report looks at energy inputs (solar) plus various occurrences on earth that affect what happens to that energy when it encounters the atmosphere. One of the important ways in which our current models are deficient is in taking account of pollution control measures and land usage. The changes in climate associated with deforestation in Asia may be quite large, as probably is the effect of direct burning of fossil fuel for cooking, etc. I found this interesting:

While industrialized societies are commonly viewed as being the huge climate criminals, it is industrialized societies who can generate the wealth and technology to eliminate some highly negative climate effects of a large human population. Another problem is that some of our pollution control measures may be removing cooling effects (some aerosols in the atmosphere do cool climate) from the equation, thus inducing more heating:

And finally, the sun is currently hot but expected to cool down a bit, which introduces a possible negative temperature effect. However predicting the sun's activity is dicey at best:

You may consider this post my gift to nerds everywhere.


Comments:
eh... that's all old news. You are soooooo behind.

The thing that people really need to know is - We really have no idea what will happen with changing the atmospheric fractionals. Most likely something will happen (that's just the nature of changing equilibriums). It comes down to whether you like the status quo or are willing to roll the dice.
 
No, this was just released.

The point of this study (aside from the interesting science) is that we are rolling the dice in more than one way and should try to get our models to reflect those factors.

It's a long report, but interesting.
 
the concepts have been out there for a long time. Some of the data has been available for a long time. This is just newly released in this outlet.
 
Well, all of this is aggregated research. The suggested modelling goals are the point of this report.

The truth is that all sorts of studies are constantly being released that directly contradict the sober scientific side of climate research (which this report is about). It is almost as if we have two scientific "parties" discussing this stuff instead of scientists.

Maybe we do.
 
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