Goodbye, Paris

[DHBirr]

Well, now the President decrees Yes, he IS pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement.  
The article explains there are reasons it won't be quite that easy; according to one framework, he wouldn't be able to legally start shutting down U.S. cooperation until late 2020 (by which time we may hope he's been thrown out).  Still, the United States now has more in common on this issue with Syria than with any other country.
According to another article I saw, Exxon/Mobil, BP, and Shell — the petroleum companies, for Heaven's sake — recommended staying in the Agreement.  Instead, the President chose to go with the opinion of Steve Bannon, who isn't openly and officially an American Nazi.

I'm really freakin' tired of this sort of "winning."
-----
Big Brother is watching you.  And damn, you are so bloody BORING.

[Inquisitive Raven]

Y'know, when the guys you'd think stand to benefit the most from a plan tell you it's a bad plan, it's a bad plan.

[Labster]

Yet another example of Donald Trump playing checkers while everyone else is playing chess.  A day when 10+ heads of state issue statements that they are "disappointed" in your actions does not mean that they are mad because they lost a deal they were "winning".  It is the diplomatic equivalent of "Diplomacy, motherfucker.  Do you speak it?"  There's no renegotiating a deal with 200 parties to make it better, when you were the one that got all of the exceptions in the first place, America.
So it is today that the title of "Leader of the Free World" passes to Emmanuel Macron.  Because this is what happens when the U.S. and U.K. refuse to act as global leaders -- someone else will enter the vacuum.  So let's issue a warm congratulations to Macron, Angela Merkel, and Xi Jinping in becoming the new titans of global diplomatic affairs.
-- ∇×V

[Matrix Dragon]

And some of the Liberal party down here are trying to convince the PM to go 'well, maybe Trump had the right idea'. God fucking dammit.

[Labster]

Matrix Dragon wrote:

---

And some of the Liberal party down here are trying to convince the PM to go 'well, maybe Trump had the right idea'. God fucking dammit.

I'd like to say, "well, we'll always have Paris."  But it looks like that's a no.
At this point, Trump has officially "disappointed" the leaders of:

1. United Kingdom
   
2. France
   
3. Germany
   
4. Italy
   
5. Belgium
   
6. Denmark
   
7. Sweden
   
8. Norway
   
9. Finland
   
10. Iceland
    
11. Marshall Islands
    
12. Fiji
    
13. New Zealand
    
14. United Nations
    
15. Apple, Inc.
    
16. Facebook
    
17. Microsoft
    
18. Tesla
    

And received official government "regret" from:

• Japan
  
• Australia
  

And supporting Trump:

• Poland (woooo clean coal!)
  

And three U.S. states created a pro-climate group, which led to seven other states asking for membership.  Keep in mind that Trump only made the announcement 14 hours ago.
It's hard to overstate the magnitude of this unforced error.  Like it wasn't even a hard policy, each country gets to set its own methods to reach the goals, and there was no enforcement mechanism.  So the only result is to make every other country mad at the US and not trust that we'll keep our agreements.  It's Trump telling the world to go fuck themselves, with a nice long address explaining how everyone was out to get the world's richest country.  In diplomacy, trust is the most valuable commodity.  How much of that do we have left?
-- ∇×V

[robkelk]

Adding to the big list:

19. Canada
20. The United Nations
21. Coca-Cola
22. 3M
23. Dow Chemical
24. Procter & Gamble
EDIT:
25. Pittsburg

In diplomacy, trust is the most valuable commodity. How much of that do we have left?

Substantially less than you had last week... and, with that announcement, China is now positioned to take the role of leader of the free world away from the USA.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[LynnInDenver]

I think one of the goals of manipulating the election to get Orange Head in is being accomplished; The United States of America will have greatly reduced, if not eliminated, political clout on the international stage by the time this is all over.
--

"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor

[Skyfire2020]

I've said it before, and I'll say it many times in the future. If the USA doesn't appreciate Donald Trump, send him to Britian. Trump would do more for the UK every single day than May or Corbyn could ever hope to achieve in a lifetime of political correctness.

The whole world knows Climate Change is a hoax but they would rather take the kick backs from Al Gore rather than stand up for the poor and elderly who will freeze to death this winter because of the pointless energy taxes. Trump could have taken his share of the blood money but he kept his promise instead.

As for the idea that Trump should care what the elitists think. I don't know how the U.S. works but I expect the UK politicians to serve the UK. The opinions of the UN and other globalists are irrelevant. If they want to set UK policy, they are free to stand for election like everyone else. Sadly all the UK have got to chose from is May the Soros puppet and Corbyn the Putin puppet.

The fact that Trump isn't spending his time at bilderberg with the globalists is a bonus. I just wish he had had the courage to move the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem and really upset the so-called elite (which sadly includes the majority of UK politicians and TV presenters especially at the BBC)

Mark

[Labster]

Skyfire 2020: It's OK to have opinions on this board, but not to tell outright lies and pass it off as fact.  I keep trying to read what you wrote as sarcasm, and I'm not getting it.
-- ∇×V

[Matrix Dragon]

Climate change is a hoax? And a conspiracy? I'll be honest, I've never been able to buy either one of those claims. It's the sort of conspiracy that would require global efforts on an insane scale, given the way it's always been presented to the public. This isn't like anti-vaxxers, whose entire movement is based off a handful of claims from one bastard that was proven to be taking bribes to produce falsified data, followed by lots of screaming. It's hundreds, thousands of studies, decades of recorded evidence, entire organisations who have a proven track record of reliability, and countless very smart people that have spent their entire lives learning and discovering how the world works in ways that may occasionally seem like black magic to us less educated fools.

And I'll be honest Skyfire, claiming the world is taking kickbacks from Al Gore is one of those claims that never makes much sense. The man has profited quite a bit from his environmental campaigns, yes, but even in the climate change industry, he's nowhere near as big as people think. Partly because of how he has profited has left him seen as more of a businessman than a a true advocate for change, actually. And I don't think he's got the money to pay off all but two of the worlds nations into joining the Paris Accords (And Nicaragua didn't sign because they didn't think it went far enough)

[robkelk]

... Climate Change is a hoax ...

Bullshit.

The average temperature around the world rose a half-degree Celsius between 1900 and 1980. It rose another half-degree Celsius between 1980 and 2000. It rose yet another half-degree Celsius between 2000 and 2015. This is historical fact.

Climate change exists.

You appear to have drunk the kool-aid served up by people who would lose money if they admit the truth that what they are doing is bad for their children and grandchildren.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Skyfire2020]

I'll start by explaining what I understand as global warming theory

http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/ ... sed-to-ask.

Does anyone dispute this as the currently accepted theory? If not then I'll explain why I have problems with it.

What is the highest ever temperature in the billions of years of earth history (I'll be generous and only count the years after the existence of liquid water) Was it more than 4C higher than today's temperature? The web sites I've read (all the links are at the end of the article) say it was much much hotter (20c+) but if you can show otherwise then please do so.

It is historical fact that Oxygen was a trace gas until plants and microbes started producing more. I was taught in school that early earth had lots of C02 and very little O2. The C02 caused lots of plants who used up lots of C02 and produced lots of 02. The fall in Co2 hurt plants, but the rise in O2 created animals who used O2 and produced C02 and so started the great oxygen cycle.

What was the Co2 level at the time? My websites say CO2 levels were much higher (5x) at the time but again if you can prove otherwise let me know.

I have looked at the arguments for climate change and against climate change. I'm generalising but the pro climate change sites are based on computer models of what they think will happen whilst the anti climate change sites looked at what happened in the past and how they don't match the computer models. Now perhaps there is a good reason all the predictions based on these computer models have been proven wrong (No snow in UK after 2000, Ice free arctic in 2013 are just 2 examples) but why should I trust the people who got the predictions wrong over the people who correctly said that the predictions were wrong. And if the failed predictions weren't based on computer models but were unscientific scare stories designed to bounce people into signing up to climate change then why should I trust the people who lied then to tell the truth now?

Finally my local council arranged 3 climate change marches in the early 2000's. Every one of them was cancelled at least once because of snow. Strangely enough they stopped arranging them after that. I'm no devout church goer but you don't need to be Moses to hear God's laughter at the idea that mankind controls the weather.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Featu ... /page3.php
http://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... tmosphere/
http://earthsky.org/earth/whats-hottest ... -ever-been
http://www.livescience.com/44330-jurass ... oxide.html
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/04/ ... de-levels/
http://arizonadailyindependent.com/201 ... tic-ocean/
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/11/2000-f ... om-the-uk/
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/arctic-sea-ice/
http://www.freecriticalthinking.org/cli ... ing-theory
http://sciencespeak.com/MissingSignature.pdf

Perhaps every site above is fake. Perhaps the science I was taught at school was wrong. Perhaps the press only published the most unlikely climate change predictions. Perhaps. Perhaps not

I have read the arguments on both sides and compared them with the real world. It is now 2017. You still can't sail to the North Pole without an icebreaker (if at all) and it still snows in the UK. how many global warming scientists correctly predicted that this would still be the case? I bet it wasn't 95%.

Do you want a world where scientific theories are compared to real world measurements even if they are an inconvenient truth, or do you want a world where Galileo faces trial for disagreeing with the powers that be.

Mark

[Black Aeronaut]

Look. You don't want to go back that far when looking at climate.

Why?

Because WE DIDN'T EVOLVE IN THOSE CONDITIONS.

I mean, really. 20 degrees CELSIUS hotter than what we normally experience now. Nowhere on Earth gets that ungodly hot now.

Carbon-Dioxide and Methane are known greenhouse gasses. It is scientifically proven that the mass release of these gasses are increasing the temperature retention of our atmosphere. But we have the ability to 'control the thermostat' as it were.

You want to cite things like fluctuations of our sun's output? Great! Wonderful! THAT'S ALL THE MORE REASON TO GET THIS SHIT UNDER CONTROL. Because we need to be able to at least control the factors that we CAN control in the first place.

[robkelk]

Items that BA has already replied to are snipped.

...
I have looked at the arguments for climate change and against climate change. I'm generalising but the pro climate change sites are based on computer models of what they think will happen whilst the anti climate change sites looked at what happened in the past and how they don't match the computer models. Now perhaps there is a good reason all the predictions based on these computer models have been proven wrong

Such as "reporters did not understand what the scientists were telling them and reported what they thought they heard in a sensationalist manner in order to get people to read their articles and adverts."

(No snow in UK after 2000, Ice free arctic in 2013 are just 2 examples)

As they say on Wikipedia, "citation needed".

but why should I trust the people who got the predictions wrong over the people who correctly said that the predictions were wrong. And if the failed predictions weren't based on computer models but were unscientific scare stories designed to bounce people into signing up to climate change then why should I trust the people who lied then to tell the truth now?

Good question: Why should you trust the reporters?

Finally my local council arranged 3 climate change marches in the early 2000's. Every one of them was cancelled at least once because of snow. Strangely enough they stopped arranging them after that. I'm no devout church goer but you don't need to be Moses to hear God's laughter at the idea that mankind controls the weather.

Living in Canada, I can tell you with historical evidence to back me up that if the temperature in the winter is too low, snow does not fall. Getting increased snowfall in mid-winter is a sign that temperatures are rising.

And if you want to invoke God, then I ask that She appears and speaks for Herself.

(links snipped - perhaps your interpretations of their contents might be mistaken?)

I have read the arguments on both sides and compared them with the real world. It is now 2017. You still can't sail to the North Pole without an icebreaker (if at all)

You can, however, sail the Northwest Passage without an icebreaker. Franklin's expedition could not.

Arctic natives are seeing fantastic beasts for which their languages have no words (such as what we call the "black fly"), because the environment is on average getting warm enough to support the lives of those beasts.

Waiting for the North Pole itself to become ice-free instead of taking action now is like waiting for invading troops to break down the door of 10 Downing Street instead of driving them off while they're still in the Channel - in either case, that's far too late to start taking action.

and it still snows in the UK. how many global warming scientists correctly predicted that this would still be the case? I bet it wasn't 95%.

I suspect the percentage of climatologists who did not make those two specific claims was higher than 95%, yes. That doesn't make climate change any less real.

Do you want a world where scientific theories are compared to real world measurements even if they are an inconvenient truth, or do you want a world where Galileo faces trial for disagreeing with the powers that be.

Are the real-world measurements being cherry-picked to support a particular bias, or is all of the data being examined? If you only look at one study, you get cases like the anti-vaxxers.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[LynnInDenver]

We've started getting things like snow in MAY in Denver here. And the snowfall stuff... let's just say the past 10 years have been increasingly unpredictable as to whether or not we'll get city-closing snowstorms and snow lingering in more than the shadows; Denver is one of those places that 99% of the time, you have to get 12+ inches of fall in one storm for there to still be snow everywhere but the pavement outside of a day or two, and I've seen it sticking around sometimes a lot more lately. And over the past 10 years, the "close the city" snowstorms have been getting more frequent.

Also, we've just had our most damaging hail storm early last month; one of our malls is closed until potentially Black Friday, one of my favorite pizza places is closed for the foreseeable future, both from the roofs being basically destroyed, and warmer air temperatures are actually part of what allows hail to form in the first place. Most of the previous severe damage hailstorms I can recall (I've been here 35 years this coming November) were limited to windows and car bodywork in dealership lots.

I think part of the problem, ultimately, is the idea that "climate change reactions are going to keep these industries closed", when the reality is generally much more complex than that; some of those industries (and their workers who don't feel like they should adapt to a changing world) that are arguing AGAINST climate change being a thing are industries that have other factors against them, or are against competing industries that just have so many advantages over them that they are eating their breakfast, lunch AND DINNER, and going back in time and wiping away the environmental laws they claim hamstrung them actually won't change the overall picture of the present of their industry anyway.
--

"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor

[Labster]

Hi everyone!
I just thought you should know that you have a meteorologist here.  I did some of my graduate study looking into climatology, and I've read a lot of literature on climate change.  I'm a programmer now so I'm a bit out of date -- roughly 10 years -- but the consensus on climate change hasn't really changed in that time, because, of course, we had all decided that it was a real thing back in the 1980s.  But if you do need to know something or want some evidence interpreted, I'd be happy to help out.

What is the highest ever temperature in the billions of years of earth
history (I'll be generous and only count the years after the existence
of liquid water) Was it more than 4C higher than today's temperature?
The web sites I've read (all the links are at the end of the article)
say it was much much hotter (20c+) but if you can show otherwise then
please do so.

The greenhouse effect keeps Earth's atmosphere about 30K warmer that it would be without greenhouse gasses, putting our global average for the 20th century around 15°C.  (Your #1 greenhouse gas: water.) It was significantly hotter in the Cretaceous -- maybe 4-5K warmer, but we've had a long cooling period since the Miocene due to a lot of factors.  For instance, this is about when Australia separated from Antarctica, causing the southern continent to be thermally isolated from the rest of the world.  It's a giant ice-colored reflector now, as you're aware, which helps keep the whole world colder.
As far as the highest ever temperature?  Well, there's the Hadean era, in which there were a lot of lava flows as the Earth's initial crust formed.  Due to the large amount of molten rock everywhere and dense atmosphere, surface temps were around 230°C, even in the oceans.  Jones was there, you can ask her about it.

It is historical fact that Oxygen was a trace gas until plants and
microbes started producing more. I was taught in school that early
earth had lots of C02 and very little O2. The C02 caused lots of plants
who used up lots of C02 and produced lots of 02. The fall in Co2 hurt
plants, but the rise in O2 created animals who used O2 and produced C02
and so started the great oxygen cycle.

What was the Co2 level at the time? My websites say CO2 levels were
much higher (5x) at the time but again if you can prove otherwise let me
know.

Uh, I don't even know, but there were times that CO2 were thousands of hectopascals higher.  Which is to say entire atmospheres worth.  There were also times the O2 levels reached 35%, which is in the spontaneous combustion region with our current pressure.  We do not really want to go back to either of these extremes.
The fall in CO2 did not really hurt plants in the long run, because, of course, plants need O2 to burn sugar just like everyone else.  In the short run, a lot of organisms died of oxygen poisoning.  Life eventually got very good at keeping oxygen away from important things like cell nuclei (eat your antioxidants people!), but some archaea remain that are still prone to oxygen poisoning.  Like your botulism or deep sea bacteria.

I have read the arguments on both sides and compared them with the real
world. It is now 2017. You still can't sail to the North Pole without
an icebreaker (if at all) and it still snows in the UK. how many global
warming scientists correctly predicted that this would still be the
case? I bet it wasn't 95%.

Nope, it was 100%.  Geez, it's like you think we're all terrible at our job, when we're totally not.  Outside of the alarmists who aren't really climate scientists, no one really thought we'd have a fully melted Arctic Ocean by now.   We thought we might have a seasonally ice-free north pole, which is not saying that not to take an icebreaker, because the Arctic remains super-treacherous.  But by the end of this century, I'd put money on Santa's Workshop ending up in the drink.  Most predictions have been for 2050 or 2100, and you're not treating scientists fairly when you take them out of context and apply them to today.
And no one thought we wouldn't have snow in the mid-latitudes.  The atmospheric conditions are built on waves -- gravity waves and Rossby waves, primarily.  So what happens when you add more energy to a wave?  The median value increases, but so does the amplitude.  The peaks grow farther apart, which means you have more energy available means having more fuel for large storms.   And heck, it still snows on Kilimanjaro?  No one actually seriously thought that we would have no snow in the U.K., which is far closer to the pole.  What might be possible: a snow-free month, or season.  But the whole idea about climate change is that in terms of the atmosphere, the extremes matter the most, and we will have more extremes.  (In the ocean, the median matters, because gravity, but that's another story).

We've started getting things like snow in MAY in Denver here. And the
snowfall stuff... let's just say the past 10 years have been
increasingly unpredictable as to whether or not we'll get city-closing
snowstorms and snow lingering in more than the shadows; ...

This whole story speaks to the point above: increasing extreme events.  Increasing unpredictability is a part of that, because extremes are harder to predict, and weather models are of course calibrated against past data.

I think part of the problem, ultimately, is the idea that "climate
change reactions are going to keep these industries closed", when the
reality is generally much more complex than that; some of those
industries (and their workers who don't feel like they should adapt to a
changing world) that are arguing AGAINST climate change being a thing
are industries that have other factors against them, or are against
competing industries that just have so many advantages over them that
they are eating their breakfast, lunch AND DINNER, and going back in
time and wiping away the environmental laws they claim hamstrung them
actually won't change the overall picture of the present of their
industry anyway.

Well, the coal industry is in it's death throes, and it's entirely for economic reasons.  Natural gas, solar, and wind are all cheaper than coal.  All of these industries receive government subsidies in the U.S., so it's not like it's unfair competition.  No one wants to live next to a coal power plant, either.  So there's no future for coal outside of metallurgical purposes.

Because WE DIDN'T EVOLVE IN THOSE CONDITIONS.

I mean, really. 20 degrees CELSIUS hotter than what we normally
experience now. Nowhere on Earth gets that ungodly hot
now.

Well, um, places get pretty hot.  My father is from Yuma, so
I'd know.  But the majority of warming should happen in the high
latitudes.  Most regions around the equator will simply evaporate more
water to cool the surface.
We didn't evolve in those conditions isn't a strong argument against anthropogenic climate change IMO.   No, the Persian Gulf won't be uninhabitable by the end of the century. 
We currently live on the equator and on a pole.  We're gonna survive
somehow.  But the rapid change in climate has only previously happened
from other somewhat disastrous occurrences, like getting hit by a huge
freaking asteroid or the Deccan Traps erupting.  On a geological time
scale this is a full-scale disaster.  The amount of degrees of change is
pretty trivial.  The speed with which it's happening is not.  This is
mass extinction territory, and it's already happening.
The main
point about climate change is that everyone talks about the
climatologists.  But that's not where the proof comes from.  It comes
from the tens of thousands of papers from fields like ecology, agronomy,
enology, oceanography, soil science, hydrology, veterinary science,
biology, medicine, chemistry, and physics.  And I keep hearing about
this as a con, and I'm like what?  A con played by literally
millions of scientists in hundreds of countries where we're all sucking
the teat of Al Gore and decreasing government funding.  Like go ahead
and hold this view, skyfire2020, but realize that it's not based in
anything that could be considered reality.
Science is refuted all
of the time, and people are praised for disproving others.  But to say
that anthropogenic global warming is not happening and is not
dangerous?  That an extraordinary claim, which thus required
extraordinary evidence.  Not any of the "scientists didn't account for
X" arguments, because every time I hear one of those, I know for a fact
that we have accounted for X for decades.  Y'all are welcome to
criticize us, but do the research first please instead of assuming
you're smarter than people who literally do this for a living.

Finally my local council arranged 3 climate change marches in the early
2000's. Every one of them was cancelled at least once because of snow.
Strangely enough they stopped arranging them after that. I'm no devout
church goer but you don't need to be Moses to hear God's laughter at
the idea that mankind controls the weather.

But God explicitly handed control over this to us (as tenants):

Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and
let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over
the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move
along the ground.'

And if you want to invoke God, then I ask that She appears and speaks for Herself.

Sure thing, man.

The nations were angry; and your wrath has come. The time has come
for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and
your saints and those who reverence your name, both small and great —
and for destroying those who destroy the earth.

This is what I stand for.  I mean please, actually read the Bible before making these arguments.  God has given us great powers, he made us in his image.  Even if our powers are a pale reflection of the divine, for sure we can influence the whole world.  We have covered it in wires and steel and glass and asphalt.  2.7% of the world's land is urban.  We have built a great storehouse to keep us safe, but in the process we are despoiling and destroying the Earth, and living against God's law.  The time has come to put a stop to that, before it is too late.
-- ∇×V

[Black Aeronaut]

vorticity wrote:

---

Black Aeronaut wrote:

---

Because WE DIDN'T EVOLVE IN THOSE CONDITIONS.

I mean, really. 20 degrees CELSIUS hotter than what we normally
experience now. Nowhere on Earth gets that ungodly hot
now.

Well, um, places get pretty hot.  My father is from Yuma, so
I'd know.  But the majority of warming should happen in the high
latitudes.  Most regions around the equator will simply evaporate more
water to cool the surface.
We didn't evolve in those conditions isn't a strong argument against anthropogenic climate change IMO.   No, the Persian Gulf won't be uninhabitable by the end of the century.  

My apologies.  I got the idea of 'average temperature' stuck in my head as a localized thing.  As you folks know, the city of San Antonio has a much higher average than the rest of the world in general.  See, the rest of the world's average is at about 15c.  But in San Antonio?  Try 20.4c.  And then the idea of that yearly average temperature jumping to 40c?  That's quite frightening, to be honest.
http://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/sa ... 200/2017/1
You see, you have to keep in mind that that's an AVERAGE temperature.  And while 40c doesn't sound all that horrible, you're still not seeing all the highs and lows that go into that average.  Our yearly average high temperature is a very comfy 26.6c.  But again, that's also an average that's taking all the highest daily temperature readings for both Summer and Winter and everything in between.

The average high readings here in the months of July and August is 34.8c.  Raise your average temperatures by 20c?  Shit starts to get scary now.  Places on Earth where it actually gets that hot don't happen to have much in the way of flora or fauna.  Or water.

Now, I'll gladly admit that I'm just spitballing here, but I don't believe that I'm terribly far off the mark, either.  Because of geography and thousands of other tiny factors, some places will get a lot hotter than others.  But here?  In my home?  I don't think we're gonna be one of the paradises left in the wake of a 20c warm up.

Vorticity, please feel free to correct me if needs be.

[Labster]

I can't recall anyone thinking of a +20K warmup.  A warmup to 20°C, from the roughly 15°C average Holocene temp, is possible, if only in one of the Bad End scenarios.  If that doesn't sound too bad, remember that this includes night as well.  Just five degrees in 100 years is pretty apocalyptic, insofar as we don't have fossil records of temperature swings that fast outside of global disasters.
Also there's that phrase, "the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed".  There are going to be places that get 10K of warming.  There are going to be places that get 0 warming, or slight cooling.  For large parts of Canada and Siberia, I'd say 10K warming is more likely than not.
-- ∇×V

[Skyfire2020]

I've always said that I wasn't convinced by Global Warming because the physical evidence I saw didn't match the headlines. I doubt I will ever be truely convinced until I personally experience it myself, but I accept unconditionally the eyewitness testimonies given here.

Its getting late this side of the pond and I can't find the wording I want so I'll cut this short. I'm not going to donate money to climate change anytime soon but I apologise for doubting the opinions of people here. You are over there and you saw what I didn't. That is more valid than any website.

Mark

[robkelk]

Thank you, Mark. It takes a big person to admit his ideas might not be correct; I respect you for that.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Matrix Dragon]

I'd also like to compliment you on being willing to provide links to reasons for your opinions, and be willing to debate them at all. Climate Change is one of those topics where too many people these days go 'well I'm right so you're obviously wrong, lalala', so this is refreshing on its own.

And on the weather front down here in Australia, I don't think it's been able to make up it's mind for more than a day or two at a time for about a month now. Periods like this are becoming disturbingly common... and occasionally wet. And right now, cold. I'm waiting to see if we get snow in my region this year...

[Skyfire2020]

I've had a bit of time to think about what I want to say so hopefully this will make sense.

Firstly thank you for everyone who gave the detailed replies. I will be honest and say I just expected a link to the IPCC website. The fact everyone here took the time to explain things is impressive. I asked for people to explain why I was wrong and you all did so in detail and politely.

it won't surprise anyone to learn that my web tastes are the conspiracy end of the web. Ghosts, psychics, government coverups etcetera. Probably 3/4 of what I read is flat wrong, the other 1/4 has a basis in truth and perhaps 1 in 1000 websites is entirely correct The question is always in judging which article falls in which category. There is a line between gullible and open minded and another between being blinkered and being loyal to a cause. I aim to stay the right side of the lines but I probably get things wrong as much as I get things right.

My view of science is that it is fine as far as it goes but if we could travel to the year 5000 and bring back a text book there would be numerous laws and theories in subjects we don't even have names for yet.

I tend to put more belief in peoples actual experiences over scientific theory. That means putting more weight on a youtube video of someone saying they they were pushed whilst alone inside an haunted hotel room, than a website stating that all ghost sightings are hallucinations. Which is fine if the person speaking is being truthful and wasn't drunk at the time. It also means that when people here say they have personally experienced climate change, then I accept that personal account over a conspiracy website that disagrees.

My views are weird but I do try to be fair to all sides (although that may just mean being consistently wrong on all sides).

Thanks again

Mark

[Labster]

OK, I do want to say a few things that weaken what I've said so far.  There are papers out there from reputable scientists that suggest things won't be so bad.  Either that the ocean's uptake of CO2 will increase, or cloud feedbacks will be more negative, etc.  There are a lot of things where we've had to make guesses, er, I mean parameterizations.
But it's not the whole story, and it never has been.  The reason we run ensemble models is that we know things are guesses, so we build a range of likely results -- which are, in general, reflected in the IPCC report.  There are some things which are not knowable, like future CO2/CH4/NH3/O3/chlorofluorocarbon emissions and pollution beyond the next couple of years.
I'm also going to say that anthropogenic global warming may not be bad for the human race.  The heating that happened as the Pleistocene transitioned to the Holocene seemed to work out pretty well for humans, allowing them to expand out of Africa and into the mid-latitudes.  This might allow us to do the same for higher latitudes, like Canada.  But the key problem here is that it's too fast.  Anything approaching the speed with which we are changing the world corresponds to mass extinction events in the fossil record.  We have issues getting that below 500 years or so, so we don't know if a century of high temps with a return to "normal" wouldn't be so "bad".  But it's not good.
And the main problem with geoengineering experiments like this on Earth is that right now we only got one of 'em.  There's no backup plan.  The science on greenhouse gasses themselves is well known.  Anything volatile with 3+ atoms can be a greenhouse gas, due to the additional rotational quantum states you can get.  Water is the #1 greenhouse gas, but
the atmosphere is already fully opaque in light bands that water
blocks. So it's the trace gasses that matter.  There's a good amount of CO2 already out there, so it's one of the weakest GGs -- what you're doing is mainly growing the spectral bands out a little bit, trapping just a bit more infrared light in the atmosphere.  Methane is much stronger, because it blocks on nearly empty bands.  CFCs block a lot and are very important to stop, but thankfully we already did that for the unrelated ozone hole problem.  HCFCs aren't quite as bad, and they have a much shorter residence time in the atmosphere.

I tend to put more belief in peoples actual experiences over scientific theory.

So yeah, we're telling you that quantum chemistry is causing global change.  I mean, that's hard to accept as fact, unless you've done the experiments, or read the papers, or generally trust scientists.  But it's the same process that led to the great discoveries of the last century.
And the other, deeper problem is that you're waiting for people's actual experiences, but humans aren't good at experiencing things that happen over 20+ years.  The first problem is change blindness, where you don't notice things that changing because they're so subtle, but build up over a long time.  It's like how you don't really notice your child growing up, but one day they're moving out and your baby is leaving you forever.  The harder part is for even longer changes, that happen on scales outside of human lifetimes.  None of us here remember what weather was like before the industrial revolution.  We don't have actual experiences of it, so how can we say it's changed?  So we rely on the data and the proxies.  The giant sequoias?  They remember what it was like.  But asking trees for their experience doesn't work, so we use tree rings, ocean sediments, and other proxy data.
It's a major part of Buddhism that one life typically isn't enough to experience all of the things you need to reach enlightenment.  And experience of life can show us illusion as much as truth.  Now, Christians have a cheat code here, in that God is merciful and graceful, and extends truth and peace to those despite their life, their sin, their karma. (OMG HAX!) All I'm really saying here is that a major point of religion is to get us to imagine greater perspectives than any human life can cover.
-- ∇×V

[Bob Schroeck]

One interesting bit of anecdotal data regarding global warming -- the first I ever came across, in fact, way back in the 80s before climate change was on the cultural radar -- was an off-handed mention somewhere that about two to three hundred years ago, it looked like the earth was about to enter another ice age. (In fact, the period is actually called "The Little Ice Age".) The specific example given was British winters depicted in the works of Charles Dickens -- deadly, frigid blizzard-strewn morasses of ice and snow that don't look anything like the relatively mild winters Great Britain gets today. (Most fellow Americans I've spoken to about it who have no other experience of England than "A Christmas Carol" and Downton Abbey seem to think that the Dickens-standard winter is just what England gets -- with at least one person I spoke to pointing out that England is roughly at the same latitude as Siberia. I find it oddly amusing that Americans seem to know more about what England's climate was like two centuries ago than today.)

Anyway, in the piece I was reading -- and I wish I could remember what it was, but it's just too long ago no -- the writer made an off-handed suggestion that the Little Ice Age was actually a Big Ice Age that had been staved off just in time by greenhousing caused by smoke and other pollutants emitted by the burgeoning Industrial Revolution. I remember thinking something to the effect of "wow, that's interesting and pretty lucky for us" (and to my shame not extrapolating to "but we're putting out lots more pollution now than 18th-century England... what's that gonna do?" To his shame, the writer didn't extrapolate, either).

I understand that the idea of pollution as the sole mitigator of the Little Ice Age isn't the most likely explanation any more, if it ever was. But it does seem to have played a part, in addition to solar cycles and whatnot.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Labster]

You mentioned Downton Abbey, which started filming right around when the volcano in Iceland was erupting.  So in the first bits of film they did, they had a period sky to shoot in -- no contrails, no aircraft, only clouds and few of them.  All of the flights had been grounded for safety.  Maggie Smith told the cast that this was the kind of sky they would have seen back in 1910.  Not many people remember a sky before there were jets and contrails, but we see a little bit of the environmental change every day.
Contrails, or condensation trails, or chemtrails lol, are in fact one of the things humans do which warm the planet.  Just a little, but it's measurable.  In the upper atmosphere, ice condensation nuclei are rare, so adding a source of water vapor up there makes a big difference into whether clouds form or not.  And high, ice crystal clouds are mostly transparent to visible light, but absorb strongly in the infrared.  In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, we actually did notice a decrease in temperature over the U.S. related to change in the radiation balance, because there were no planes in the sky over half the continent.
We're closer to the ice age part of the cycle than the warm part, if you look at the Pleistocene history from ice and ocean cores.  But the solar constant has been pretty constant lately, despite a brief dip in sunlight in the 60s.  The 1940s were also cold, presumably due to stuff blowing up, adding aerosols while then going on to not use energy.  There was some brief discussion about a new ice age starting into the 1970s, which is always one of those embarrassing moments for the field.
One of the new ice age theories which is particularly fascinating has to deal with the Gulf Stream.  The Gulf Stream transfers a large amount of heat northward, and is largely responsible for the U.K. not feeling like Siberia.  As detailed in the first five minutes of the "film" The Day After Tomorrow, before it completely goes off the rails, the decrease in North Atlantic salinity from glacial meltwater shuts down the thermohaline circulation that powers the Gulf Stream.  And the thing is, it actually happened before.  The pulse of fresh water from Lake Ojibway and Lake Agassiz is the most probable cause of a temporary cooldown for 300 years.  Anyway that movie was super-fun to watch with my mesoscale meteorology class.
I don't think the thermohaline shutdown would happen again now, because the radiative forcing is just too large.  Which is my way of saying that despite any possible events like Greenland sliding into the sea, I feel like the thermo part would prove larger than the haline part.
-- ∇×V