Lectro was RIGHT--post1626--(climate related)

[ImTheCaptain]

alarmingly satirical

 

[BigTreeDeac]

Two snowflakes?

He is just putting placeholder posts on here, so we know he is still alive, while he painstakingly prepares all the sandwiches he is going to serve us idiotic sheep. Constructing that many sandwiches is just a Herculean effort when you get down to thinking about it. He has literally millions (probably closer to billions) of sandwiches to construct just to shove one in the face of every moron that thinks humans are involved in climate change. Hope everybody is getting prepared for Super Storm Sammich.

 

[KickballDeac]

I hope you all know this has a much wider impact than the environment. For instance,

Temperature of Coffee Expected to Rise Nine Degrees by End of 21st Century

WASHINGTON, DC—A report released by the Union of Concerned Dietitians stated that not only will the temperature of coffee increase by nearly nine degrees by the end of this century, but also that the rise is directly linked to human activity. "At this point, there is no way to reverse the trend, but we can slow it down," said UCD President Marilyn Presber, who blamed the rising temperature on corporate coffee "super-heaters" such as Starbucks, McDonald's, and Dunkin' Donuts, and added that if the public made a conscious effort to heat water short of its boiling point and pour "extremely chilled" milk into the beverage, the overall temperature increase could be delayed nearly 150 years. "If we don't make some sacrifices now, our children's children will be living in a world in which it will be virtually impossible to avoid having the inside of their mouths burned." However, many Americans remain skeptical of the coffee-heating issue, such as Tampa, FL coffee drinker Henry Giesen, 67, who calls it "a hoax perpetuated by the anti-caffeine lobby and the carbonated-beverage industry."

 

[pourdeac]

-Misrepresenting the link between warming and hurricanes.[9]"

What link? AR5 states, there is no established link. Page 127 of the current draft:

Confidence remains low for long-term (centennial) changes in tropical cyclone activity, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities. However since the 1970s, it is virtually certain that the frequency and intensity of storms in the North Atlantic has increased although the reasons for this increase are debated (see TFE.9). There is low confidence of large-scale trends in storminess over the last century and there is still insufficient evidence to determine whether robust trends exist in small-scale severe weather events such as hail or thunder storms.

They get into the details of why they say this in Chapter 10 (10-51)

Studies that directly attribute tropical cyclone activity changes to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission are lacking. Among many factors that may affect tropical cyclone activity, tropical SSTs have increased and this increase has been attributed at least in part to anthropogenic forcing (Gillett et al., 2008a). However, there are diverse views on the connection between tropical cyclone activity and SST (see Section 14.6.1 for details)

Love this part. It starts with "may affect" and then say it's been "attributed to CO2", which means someone thinks they may have found a link but it sounds more definitive. Then in the next sentence they start with all the confounding findings that go the other way, some of which are far more definitive (aerosols). More statements from AR5.

Globally, there is low confidence in any long term increases in tropical cyclone activity (Section 2.6.3) and we assess that there is low confidence in attributing global changes to any particular cause. In the North Atlantic region there is medium confidence that a reduction in aerosol forcing over the North Atlantic has contributed at least in part to the observed increase in tropical cyclone activity since the 1970s. There remains substantial disagreement on the relative importance of internal variability, greenhouse gas forcing, and aerosols for this observed trend. It remains uncertain whether past changes in tropical cyclone activity are outside the range of natural internal variability.

As with most aspects of this field, as the research moves forward, the assumed links vaporize.

The following is what they said about those cyclone events in the prior report (AR4)

Based on a range of [their climate] models, it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense, with larger peak wind speeds and more heavy precipitation associated with ongoing increases of tropical sea-surface temperatures.

In the earlier report they called it likely or in their "best estimate" >66% probability (their definition of "likely).

So to recap, they've gone from highly probable in 2007 to basically NO supporting data in 2013. The same thing happened with a few other extreme events like drought. This is the sort of thing critics like myself have been saying. The actual science is moving in my direction because there are lots and lots of possible natural explanations for all these climate observations other than CO2.

And keep in mind, these results from the climate scientists have not stopped lawmakers, the media, and believers claiming there is definitely a link between extreme weather and CO2.

 

[pourdeac]

Found the AR5 discussion on solar forcing.

Previously, I pointed out the near identical overlap between the Berylium isotope data and observed temperature changes which you can find here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation

Berylium isotope data is a proxy for solar variation. It maps almost perfectly to temperature change. If the changes in observed temperature are nearly identical to solar variation, how can you ignore that as the primary driver of temperature change??? It's impossible, yet that's what they did in 2001. Here is the solar forcing commentary from IPCC 3 (AR3) in 2001:

Other terrestrially based indicators of solar activity recorded by cosmogenic isotopes in tree-rings and ice-cores also show longer term modulation. However, direct solar proxies other than the sunspot number cover too short a period to reliably detect such a trend. Thus, it is not clear which proxy, if any, can be satisfactorily used to indicate past values of TSI.

The estimate for solar radiative forcing since 1750 of 0.3 Wm−2, shown in Figure 6.6, is based on the values in Figure 6.5 (taking the 11-year cycle minimum values in 1744 and 1996). Clearly the starting date of 1750 (chosen for the date of the pre- industrial atmosphere in Figure 6.6) is crucial here: a choice of 1700 would give values about twice as large; a choice of 1776 would give smaller values (particularly using the Hoyt and Schatten series). The range of 0.1 to 0.5 Wm−2 given in Figure 6.6 is based on the variability of the series, the differences between the reconstructions and uncertainties concerning stratospheric adjustment (see Section 6.11.2.1). However, because of the large uncertainty in the absolute value of TSI and the reconstruction methods our assessment of the “level of scientific understanding” is “very low”.

They completely duck the correlation. They call such solar proxies (isotopic data) "too short" which is BS. It's the longest one we have and these data are used to go back 1000s of years. They at least admit we have a very low "level of scientific understanding" of solar forcing That's what happens when you ignore solid data.

Now segue to 2013 and AR5.

The solar contribution to the record of global surface temperature change is dominated by the 11-year solar cycle, which can explain global temperature fluctuations up to approximately 0.1°C between minima and maxima (FAQ 5.1, Figure 1b). A long-term increasing trend in solar activity in the early 20th century may have augmented the warming recorded during this interval, together with internal variability, greenhouse gas increases and a hiatus in volcanism. However, it cannot explain the observed increase since the late 1970s, and there was even a slight decreasing trend of TSI from 1986 to 2008 (Chapters 8, 10).

Prior to 1870, when anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols were smaller, changes in solar and volcanic activity and internal variability played a more important role, although the specific contributions of these individual factors to global surface temperatures are less certain. Solar minima lasting several decades have often been associated with cold conditions. However, these periods are often also affected by volcanic eruptions, making it difficult to quantify the solar contribution.

Now all of the sudden, they are conceding that solar activity may have driven substantial warming in the 20th century prior to 1970, and not only that:

Second, information about the various magnetic features at the solar surface decreases back in time and must be deduced from proxies such as sunspot counts for the last 400 years and cosmogenic radionuclides (10Be and 14C) for the past Millennium (Muscheler et al., 2007; Delaygue and Bard, 2011) and the Holocene (Table 5.1) (Steinhilber et al., 2009; Vieira et al., 2011). 10Be and 14C records not only reflect solar activity, but also the geomagnetic field intensity and effects of their respective geochemical cycles and transport pathways (Pedro et al., 2011; Steinhilber et al., 2012).

They are suddenly extolling the virtues of looking at the isotopic data. They have to. The changes since 2001 can't be explained by greenhouse gases and scientists are catching on to the isotopic data and how well it correlates with temp changes.

So 10 years ago they were absolutely convinced that almost all 20th century warming was due to CO2 while admitting they knew little about solar activity. Now they are saying they can only make such a statement since the 1970s, which is when their solar satellites went up. The isotope data was not worthy, now suddenly it is. Complete backtrack. Their changes to what they believe using their words.

Again, the science is moving towards my viewpoint...and that of Linus Pauling.

 

[Lectro]

He is just putting placeholder posts on here, so we know he is still alive, while he painstakingly prepares all the sandwiches he is going to serve us idiotic sheep. Constructing that many sandwiches is just a Herculean effort when you get down to thinking about it. He has literally millions (probably closer to billions) of sandwiches to construct just to shove one in the face of every moron that thinks humans are involved in climate change. Hope everybody is getting prepared for Super Storm Sammich.

You are not kidding...it is a Herculean task. That's why ol'
Lec has enlisted the help of the pros at Castevens. Their experience hurling shit sandwiches at Wake faithful made it an easy hire.

Many thanks...

 

[pourdeac]

A couple of other points with the graphics so I can link back to it.

This is a graphic with reconstructed historical temperatures from this site

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison_png

The red was basically the accepted temperature trend before the Mann "hockey stick" graphs in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Amazingly, those are still included in this graphic after it was all discredited. They would be the light green and light orange lines that indicated warming temps before and after the Medieval warm period (noted as "warm period").

Here is the famous Mann "hockey stick" graph. Something very similar to this graph was the absolute dogma in AR3 (2001 IPCC) and AR4 (2007 IPCC) reports. Despite the red line in the first graph I posted, and other tree ring data that refuted the Mann data, the IPCC climate scientists adopted the Mann graph as the believed temperature record.

There is no medieval warm period in that graph, despite lots of worldwide evidence it occurred, which has just continued now that the hockey stick has been discredited. The reason that's important is because of natural climate variabilty. If there was no variability in temperatures before CO2 was emitted, which is what Mann supposedly showed, then any increase in temperature recently can not be from natural variation. All of it must be from human activity. AR3 goes into a long discussion of the Medieval Warm period, and even the Maunder Minimum which is ALSO eliminated by the hockey stick, and they claim it's just a regional phenomenon (Chapter 2, pages 133-136)...citing ONLY Mann and work done using similar "methodology"

Mann et al. (1998) and Jones et al. (1998) support the idea that the 15th to 19th centuries were the coldest of the millennium over the Northern Hemisphere overall. However, viewed hemispherically, the “Little Ice Age” can only be considered as a modest cooling of the Northern Hemisphere during this period of less than 1oC relative to late 20th century levels (Bradley and Jones, 1993; Jones et al., 1998; Mann et al., 1998; 1999; Crowley and Lowery, 2000)

As with the “Little Ice Age”, the posited “Medieval Warm Period” appears to have been less distinct, more moderate in amplitude, and somewhat different in timing at the hemispheric scale than is typically inferred for the conventionally-defined European epoch. The Northern Hemisphere mean temperature estimates of Jones et al. (1998), Mann et al. (1999), and Crowley and Lowery (2000) show temperatures from the 11th to 14th centuries to be about 0.2°C warmer than those from the 15th to 19th centuries, but rather below mid-20th century temperatures. The long-term hemispheric trend is best described as a modest and irregular cooling from AD 1000 to around 1850 to 1900, followed by an abrupt 20th century warming.

They attempted to eliminate all climate variability. All of it.

Scientifically, what they did was amazing. The red line in the first graph was the existing temperature reconstruction and shows there was substantial variability. That was what climate scientists believed prior to 1998 with high confidence. That data was completely ignored in AR3 (2001) and AR4 (2007), and instead their new assumption with high confidence was the Mann data (and other similar data) the hockey stick. That's NOT scientific is it? They obviously chose the Mann-like data because it backed what they believed, that man caused the entire problem.

And of course the Mann data (and all the others with similar "methodology") has been debunked and discredited. The red line in the first graph is the likely reconstructed temperature and in the recent report they had to completely backtrack on eliminating climate variability. This is what they now say (AR5, 5-5).

Continental-scale surface temperature reconstructions show, with high confidence, multidecadal intervals during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (950 to 1250) that were in some regions as warm as in the mid-20th century and in others as warm as in the late 20th century. With high confidence, these intervals were not as synchronous across seasons and regions as the warming since the mid-20th century. Based on the comparison between reconstructions and simulations, there is high confidence that not only external orbital, solar and volcanic forcing, but also internal variability, contributed substantially to the spatial pattern and timing of surface-temperature changes between the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age (1450 to 1850). [5.3.5.3, 5.5.1]

The bolded is HUGE. They are now admitting climate variability has occurred to match temperature changes observed in both the mid- and late-20th century. This is again a huge backtrack from the language they used in AR3 that I posted above, where they suggest it was just a North Atlantic issue. They had no choice but to admit they were wrong, and the critics correct., these critics who have been consistently called morons and dumb.

 

[bigdoublezero]

I'd like to explore the correlation of being a Buzz apologist/BuzzIN and a climate change skeptic.

 

[pourdeac]

One last thing...the solar proxy data.

If you look at the red line in the graph in my previous post, you will see the now re-accepted construction of historical temperatures. Now look at the 10Be and 14C data that maps with solar activity.

First the 10Be data.

Then the 14C data, the timeline is reversed with modern being on the left instead of the right and going backwards (with the times noted).

It is irrefutable that the solar proxy data matches the red line temperature data. Remember, in the AR3 report, the isotopic data was tossed because it didn't match the sunspot data, which is actually does to large degree. It was also not believed to match the historical temperature reconstruction...because they decided to go with the Mann-like data with high confidence, which has now been discredited, not the red-line where it's matches very closely. Think about that.

Now that they have gone back to believing the red line reconstruction, not only does that bring back climate variability, it also meant having to take the isotopic data seriously, which I noted in a prior post.

As soon as they had to take isotopic data seriously, then they had a big problem pinning warming all on man. The solar proxy data above (10Be and 14C) shows a rapid and fairly linear increase in solar output since 1900 that matches the temperature increase. The solar proxy data matches the older historical timeline in general (Medeival Warm period and Ice Age) so it's heavily involved in natural variability. If that's the case, then the entire 20th century warming could be solar (and in fact would be the most obvious explanation). It's irrefutable. That....and the 15 year hiatus they can't explain...is why they backtracked so much in AR5.

What is interesting is right as the climate scientists backtracked TOWARDS the critics, it got way louder that the critics were morons and idiots, culminating in the Reddit moderator banning critics from their boards. Typical.

 

[pourdeac]

I'd like to explore the correlation of being a Buzz apologist/BuzzIN and a climate change skeptic.

Maybe you should try asking the right question first because I've never been a Buzz apologist or BuzzIn, those are your misplaced labels....as is climate change skeptic because climate change occurs.

FWIW....and again.....I was the first person to pull up the historically bad rebounding record of Bz shortly after the first early season blowout loss in Year 1, data showing a huge glaring issue with his coaching, and have been a skeptic the entire time. But I was willing to give him the same chance I would give every other coach and let the results with a team of his players speak for themselves. And given the hole/scenario Wellman placed him in, I was willing to add a year to see that happen.

 

[bigdoublezero]

OK, there's one confirmed example. Lectro, time for you to chime in so we can talk about the correlation I'm proposing.

 

[Spot the Wonder]

The red was basically the accepted temperature trend before the Mann "hockey stick" graphs in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Amazingly, those are still included in this graphic after it was all discredited.

Here is the famous Mann "hockey stick" graph. Something very similar to this graph was the absolute dogma in AR3 (2001 IPCC) and AR4 (2007 IPCC) reports. Despite the red line in the first graph I posted, and other tree ring data that refuted the Mann data, the IPCC climate scientists adopted the Mann graph as the believed temperature record.


There is no medieval warm period in that graph, despite lots of worldwide evidence it occurred, which has just continued now that the hockey stick has been discredited.


And of course the Mann data (and all the others with similar "methodology") has been debunked and discredited.

In spite of the fact that you state it 3 or 4 times, Mann has never been discredited. He's correct.

 

[Lectro]

In spite of the fact that you state it 3 or 4 times, Mann has never been discredited. He's correct.

It has been widely and thoroughly discredited.

Much time has been spent investigating Mann's 'hockey stick', and a marvelous book has been written about its bogosity and the tangled web of Climategate scientists behind it. Two separate investigations by U.S. authorities eventually discredited this science to the point where the IPCC was forced to omit it from its 2007 report.

 

[bigdoublezero]

No, but Lectro, talk to us about Buzz for a bit.

 

[ThinkingWithMyDeac]

Have we all been had by a hoax? RJ please help us?

 

[Lectro]

German climate scientist and erstwhile IPCC stalwart, Hans Von Storch is changing his tune -- as have many other climate scientists over the last 4-5 years.

Der Spiegel

Scientists are puzzled as to why global warming has not risen in parallel with greenhouse gas emissions.
Climate experts have long predicted that temperatures would rise in parallel with greenhouse gas emissions. But, for 15 years, they haven't. In a SPIEGEL interview, meteorologist Hans von Storch discusses how this "puzzle" might force scientists to alter what could be "fundamentally wrong" models.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Storch, Germany has recently seen major flooding. Is global warming the culprit?

Storch: I'm not aware of any studies showing that floods happen more often today than in the past. I also just attended a hydrologists' conference in Koblenz, and none of the scientists there described such a finding.

SPIEGEL: But don't climate simulations for Germany's latitudes predict that, as temperatures rise, there will be less, not more, rain in the summers?

Storch: That only appears to be contradictory. We actually do expect there to be less total precipitation during the summer months. But there may be more extreme weather events, in which a great deal of rain falls from the sky within a short span of time. But since there has been only moderate global warming so far, climate change shouldn't be playing a major role in any case yet.

SPIEGEL: Would you say that people no longer reflexively attribute every severe weather event to global warming as much as they once did?

Storch: Yes, my impression is that there is less hysteria over the climate. There are certainly still people who almost ritualistically cry, "Stop thief! Climate change is at fault!" over any natural disaster. But people are now talking much more about the likely causes of flooding, such as land being paved over or the disappearance of natural flood zones -- and that's a good thing.

SPIEGEL: Will the greenhouse effect be an issue in the upcoming German parliamentary elections? Singer Marius Müller-Westernhagen is leading a celebrity initiative calling for the addition of climate protection as a national policy objective in the German constitution.

Storch: It's a strange idea. What state of the Earth's atmosphere do we want to protect, and in what way? And what might happen as a result? Are we going to declare war on China if the country emits too much CO2 into the air and thereby violates our constitution?

SPIEGEL: Yet it was climate researchers, with their apocalyptic warnings, who gave people these ideas in the first place.

Storch: Unfortunately, some scientists behave like preachers, delivering sermons to people. What this approach ignores is the fact that there are many threats in our world that must be weighed against one another. If I'm driving my car and find myself speeding toward an obstacle, I can't simple yank the wheel to the side without first checking to see if I'll instead be driving straight into a crowd of people. Climate researchers cannot and should not take this process of weighing different factors out of the hands of politics and society.

SPIEGEL: Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, outside Berlin, is currently Chancellor Angela Merkel's climate adviser. Why does she need one?

Storch: I've never been chancellor myself. But I do think it would be unwise of Merkel to listen to just a single scientist. Climate research is made up of far too many different voices for that. Personally, though, I don't believe the chancellor has delved deeply into the subject. If she had, she would know that there are other perspectives besides those held by her environmental policy administrators.

SPIEGEL: Just since the turn of the millennium, humanity has emitted another 400 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, yet temperatures haven't risen in nearly 15 years. What can explain this?

Storch: So far, no one has been able to provide a compelling answer to why climate change seems to be taking a break. We're facing a puzzle. Recent CO2 emissions have actually risen even more steeply than we feared. As a result, according to most climate models, we should have seen temperatures rise by around 0.25 degrees Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 10 years. That hasn't happened. In fact, the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) -- a value very close to zero. This is a serious scientific problem that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will have to confront when it presents its next Assessment Report late next year.

SPIEGEL: Do the computer models with which physicists simulate the future climate ever show the sort of long standstill in temperature change that we're observing right now?

Storch: Yes, but only extremely rarely. At my institute, we analyzed how often such a 15-year stagnation in global warming occurred in the simulations. The answer was: in under 2 percent of all the times we ran the simulation. In other words, over 98 percent of forecasts show CO2 emissions as high as we have had in recent years leading to more of a temperature increase.

SPIEGEL: How long will it still be possible to reconcile such a pause in global warming with established climate forecasts?

Storch: If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models. A 20-year pause in global warming does not occur in a single modeled scenario. But even today, we are finding it very difficult to reconcile actual temperature trends with our expectations.

SPIEGEL: What could be wrong with the models?

Storch: There are two conceivable explanations -- and neither is very pleasant for us. The first possibility is that less global warming is occurring than expected because greenhouse gases, especially CO2, have less of an effect than we have assumed. This wouldn't mean that there is no man-made greenhouse effect, but simply that our effect on climate events is not as great as we have believed. The other possibility is that, in our simulations, we have underestimated how much the climate fluctuates owing to natural causes.

SPIEGEL: That sounds quite embarrassing for your profession, if you have to go back and adjust your models to fit with reality…

Storch: Why? That's how the process of scientific discovery works. There is no last word in research, and that includes climate research. It's never the truth that we offer, but only our best possible approximation of reality. But that often gets forgotten in the way the public perceives and describes our work.

SPIEGEL: But it has been climate researchers themselves who have feigned a degree of certainty even though it doesn't actually exist. For example, the IPCC announced with 95 percent certainty that humans contribute to climate change.

Storch: And there are good reasons for that statement. We could no longer explain the considerable rise in global temperatures observed between the early 1970s and the late 1990s with natural causes. My team at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, in Hamburg, was able to provide evidence in 1995 of humans' influence on climate events. Of course, that evidence presupposed that we had correctly assessed the amount of natural climate fluctuation. Now that we have a new development, we may need to make adjustments.

SPIEGEL: In which areas do you need to improve the models?

Storch: Among other things, there is evidence that the oceans have absorbed more heat than we initially calculated. Temperatures at depths greater than 700 meters (2,300 feet) appear to have increased more than ever before. The only unfortunate thing is that our simulations failed to predict this effect.

SPIEGEL: That doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Storch: Certainly the greatest mistake of climate researchers has been giving the impression that they are declaring the definitive truth. The end result is foolishness along the lines of the climate protection brochures recently published by Germany's Federal Environmental Agency under the title "Sie erwärmt sich doch" ("The Earth is getting warmer"). Pamphlets like that aren't going to convince any skeptics. It's not a bad thing to make mistakes and have to correct them. The only thing that was bad was acting beforehand as if we were infallible. By doing so, we have gambled away the most important asset we have as scientists: the public's trust. We went through something similar with deforestation, too -- and then we didn't hear much about the topic for a long time.

SPIEGEL: Does this throw the entire theory of global warming into doubt?

Storch: I don't believe so. We still have compelling evidence of a man-made greenhouse effect. There is very little doubt about it. But if global warming continues to stagnate, doubts will obviously grow stronger.

SPIEGEL: Do scientists still predict that sea levels will rise?

Storch: In principle, yes. Unfortunately, though, our simulations aren't yet capable of showing whether and how fast ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica will melt -- and that is a very significant factor in how much sea levels will actually rise. For this reason, the IPCC's predictions have been conservative. And, considering the uncertainties, I think this is correct.

SPIEGEL: And how good are the long-term forecasts concerning temperature and precipitation?

Storch: Those are also still difficult. For example, according to the models, the Mediterranean region will grow drier all year round. At the moment, however, there is actually more rain there in the fall months than there used to be. We will need to observe further developments closely in the coming years. Temperature increases are also very much dependent on clouds, which can both amplify and mitigate the greenhouse effect. For as long as I've been working in this field, for over 30 years, there has unfortunately been very little progress made in the simulation of clouds.

SPIEGEL: Despite all these problem areas, do you still believe global warming will continue?

Storch: Yes, we are certainly going to see an increase of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) or more -- and by the end of this century, mind you. That's what my instinct tells me, since I don't know exactly how emission levels will develop. Other climate researchers might have a different instinct. Our models certainly include a great number of highly subjective assumptions. Natural science is also a social process, and one far more influenced by the spirit of the times than non-scientists can imagine. You can expect many more surprises.

SPIEGEL: What exactly are politicians supposed to do with such vague predictions?

Storch: Whether it ends up being one, two or three degrees, the exact figure is ultimately not the important thing. Quite apart from our climate simulations, there is a general societal consensus that we should be more conservative with fossil fuels. Also, the more serious effects of climate change won't affect us for at least 30 years. We have enough time to prepare ourselves.

SPIEGEL: In a SPIEGEL interview 10 years ago, you said, "We need to allay people's fear of climate change." You also said, "We'll manage this." At the time, you were harshly criticized for these comments. Do you still take such a laidback stance toward global warming?

Storch: Yes, I do. I was accused of believing it was unnecessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This is not the case. I simply meant that it is no longer possible in any case to completely prevent further warming, and thus it would be wise of us to prepare for the inevitable, for example by building higher ocean dikes. And I have the impression that I'm no longer quite as alone in having this opinion as I was then. The climate debate is no longer an all-or-nothing debate -- except perhaps in the case of colleagues such as a certain employee of Schellnhuber's, whose verbal attacks against anyone who expresses doubt continue to breathe new life into the climate change denial camp.

SPIEGEL: Are there findings related to global warming that worry you?

Storch: The potential acidification of the oceans due to CO2 entering them from the atmosphere. This is a phenomenon that seems sinister to me, perhaps in part because I understand too little about it. But if marine animals are no longer able to form shells and skeletons well, it will affect nutrient cycles in the oceans. And that certainly makes me nervous.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Storch, thank you for this interview.

Interview conducted by Olaf Stampf and Gerald Traufetter

Translated from the German by Ella Ornstein

 

[BarcaDeac]

Do you not know how to post a link or something? Does someone need to teach you?

 

[Lectro]

Do you not know how to post a link or something? Does someone need to teach you?

I guess I need a tutorial. I am using an I5 and the excerpts I have pasted look perfectly normal on my end. It should be a simple Q & A with Hans Von Storch from Der Spiegel.

Clearly, this is not what you are seeing?

 

[BarcaDeac]

the excerpts are fine, you just never cite your sources and provide a direct link

 

[WFU71]

He, and I, want to see the source for your quotes. It's not that hard to do