Claim: You need philosophy to see climate change

This topic deserves a little essay. (not sure on text flood rules mod, sorry if I’ve contravened one)
Excerpt from:
Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate
Murry Salby, Page 248
8.7 THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT
“/…/ The atmosphere’s optical depth depends on its composition through radiatively active species. As described in Sec. 1.2.4, several have increased steadily during the last two centuries, inclusive of anthropogentic contributions. Presented in Fig. 8.30 is an estimate of the respective increase in greenhouse warming of the Earth’s surface during the last two centuries, inferred from proxy records of composition (Sec. 1.6.2). Carbon dioxide is greatest, increasing downwelling LW radiation by ∼1.5 Wm−2. Methane, nitrous oxide, halocarbons, and ozone are comparatively rare. Yet, together, they introduce almost as much additional warming as CO2. Collectively, these anthropogenic gases represent additional warming of the Earth’s surface of about 3 Wm−2. For reference, the additional warming introduced by a doubling of CO2 is, from Figs. 8.30 and 1.14, seen to be ∼4 Wm−2.
Offsetting the increased greenhouse warming is increased cooling of the Earth’s surface by contemporaneous changes of aerosol. Entering the energy budget through albedo, those changes have likewise been inferred, somehow, from proxy records. Supported by surface changes, the inferred changes of aerosol represent an offset of about −1.5 Wm−2.
The residual, +1.5 Wm−2, represents net warming. It is about 0.5% of the 327 Wm−2 of overall downwelling LW radiation that warms the Earth’s surface (Fig. 1.32). The vast majority of that warming is contributed by water vapor. Together with cloud, it accounts for 98% of the greenhouse effect. How water vapor has changed in relation to changes of the comparatively minor anthropogenic species (Fig. 8.30) is not known.
The additional surface warming introduced by anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gases amounts to about 75% of that which would be introduced by a doubling of CO2. Arrhenius’ estimate of 5–6◦K for the accompanying increase of surface temperature (Sec. 1.2.4) then translates into ∼4◦K. Yet, the observed change of global-mean temperature since the mid nineteenth century is only about 1 ◦K (Sec. 1.6.1). The discrepancy points to changes of the Earth-atmosphere system (notably, involving the major absorbers, water vapor and cloud) that develop in response to imposed perturbations, like anthropogenic emission of CO2.”
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So, accordingly, the total effect (inferred) is given as +1.5 Wm−2 for a total global-mean temperature rise, since the nineteenth century, of only ~1 degree C.
Even though the total, “… anthropogenic gases represent additional warming of the Earth’s surface of about 3 Wm−2. …”, for 1.5 Wm−2 of that is apparently already being negated by a global dynamic responses, in the form of albedo rise (also inferred) because the rise in surface temperature has been much lower than the overly simplistic physical theory and ensuing papers had predicted.
So if I understand the implications of the reasoning above;
In effect Salby is pointing out that the temperature rise effect from the presently increased level of CO2 (anthropogenic sourcing or no, is irrelevant, just the level or rise , so don’t get your knickers in a twist) is approximately equal to the sum of all other anthropogenic GHG inputs. Which means that the total (alleged, sorry, ‘settled’) anthropogenic EFFECT on global mean temperatures, CURRENTLY, would be approximately the same as having doubled the CO2 level, right now, above 280 PPM (read his comment, that’s what it implies).
i.e. yet only 1 degree C rise in global mean temperature has been the result measured from that EFFECT of effectively doubling long wave radiative ‘reverberation’ (downwardness) in the atmosphere. Or rather, due to risen albedo less of it needed to escape the atmoshpere than theory had expected, because less of it got in, in the first place.
Which is another way of saying; if all the other GHG components (mentioned above) had remained constant, while the additional CO2 input doubled, above even its present level, we could expect dynamically, and in practice, an increase of global mean temperature to be only about ~1.5 degrees C above 19th century levels.
So only about +0.5 degree C above the global mean temperature, of 2015. That is what the pattern seems to describe.
Given this is below or only at most eequaling the warmest periods of global mean temperatures that we know of, during the past 10,000 years of proxy record, I struggle to call that a global environmental, nor human ‘calamity’. Not something to freak out about.
Well, unless you are a nervous neuortic dope, and your ‘philosophy’ is on the blink. So if your philosopy button isn’t working today, you’ll just have to face some basic facts and the proportions in context, and we’ll see what all the desperate climate ‘worry’ is about?
Such conditions as +1.5 C would of course continue to green and wet the planet, and aid the expansion of the biota and recovery of all species from prior cold and water stress, given a warmer atmoshere is more humid and a cooling atmoshere quickly becomes drier, due to less lattent heat of evaporation being released, and thus less rain falling (Sorry Cali, it may be about to get colder, so yet, you perhaps should forget philosopy, and actually worry if North America keep breaking cold records, like during the past 2 years).
And before you ask, yes, I think I can cope with the retreat of glaciers up mountain valleies, or them disappearing completely from some areas, I will not collapse into an emotional swoon, or crying myself to oblivion due to the tragedy of that.
So if warmers want to prance about pious high-minded smarminess, and cast mouthfuls of venom and dung at actual science publications, ice expansion reportage, and less hyperbolic and doom laden alarmist views of earth, they may wish to reflect on the fact that natural variability already matches or exceeds the in practice +1.5 C planetary eco-doom scenario. No ‘climate’, or rather, weather cycle cataclysm, to date.
In other words, even if AGW were correct, it simply doesn’t make almost any difference, except that the earth becomes even more habitable, more full of bounty, and more sufficient for virtually all species to thrive.
In fact, each previous time the planet got a bit warmish, for a bit longish, the Holocene proxy temperature record shows us that the global climate, rather than getting allegedly ‘worse’ (i.e. even warmer) it tended to plunge into a significant counter-balancing cool phase right after. i.e. to at or below the current global mean temperature, immediately after.
Given the same holocene record shows that for the past ~4,000 years earth has been sliding progressively toward a fall into the next ~125 K year glaciation cycle, it seems (to me) a global mean rise of ~1.5 degrees C would be a very welcome delay to that baked-in inevitable decline (which, as I pointed out, has been already occurring) into a much colder global mean temperature regime to come.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/greenland-ice-core-isotope-past-4000-yrs.png
Or this shows even better ~8,000 years of earth persistently cooling-down, from its interglacial peak temperatures:
http://climateaudit.org/2015/01/08/ground-truthing-marcott/?w=840&h=520
But one other ‘philosophical’ thing that tends to peeve me is this continual implied or else suggested assertion that humans are not natural animals. That we are not doing ‘natural’ things. That our behaviour and technology is not a normal part and aspect of the ‘natural environment’ of this planet. Or that human environmental adaptations, to utilise any available environmental niche (i.e. including urban, suburban and rural development, is not the 100% natural product of Earths entirely naturally developed primate ancestry, doing exactly what it natural evolution and interaction on this very planet, equipped it to naturally do.
When I look out my windows and insect screens at the urban concrete, power pole transformers, high-rise, lawn sprinklers, trucks, cars, ashpalt, jets and industrial areas of my city I in fact see a 100% natural environment! It is as valid, proper and natural an evolutionary response to this earth, as any other natural response of any other animals.
Survival of the fittest means some species get displaced by competition and may even go extinct, when one species can adapt far better than the others can. That’s evolution, that’s how we naturally got this way. It is not right or wrong, there are no value judgements, there is just what works best on this earth, and humans worked best on this earth. Hence earth made us this way. Every single thing we do is the natural product of the earth’s environmental pressure to adapt or die, which thus made us into the beings we are, and made us do what we do.
Via 100% natural technology and natural material properties, and using the entirely natural features of how the cosmos is observed to operate, via utilizing our natural brain tgha evolution provided us, we became super-adaptable, vastly more adaptable than anything else by a very wide margin.
As a result we were freed to make the environmental neich e we prefer, and it just happens to be cattle feed lots, supermarkets, urban centers, and icecream. A bird makes a nest, a panda claims and bamboo stand, a lion marks a territory. That is their niche. If we intrude, we are on their menu.
While humans pour concrete and make integrated circuits. Call me old fashioned but I prefer not to be on the menu of some other animal. I vastly prefer to be an educated, sentient, the apex omnivore. I always want the odds to be stacked in my favour, for survival and maintianence of my niche, when it comes to dinner time.
I do not apologise for it, and I do not feel bad or guilty about it.
That would be totally neurotic.
No UN weirdos, I am not going to eat insects out of neurotic enviroguilt, you’re wasting oxygen via respiration which could have been used to oxidise coal to power my stove so I can have a medium steak and caesar salad with chocolate-chip icecream for desert. So enjoy your bowl of crickets, you weirdos, except you won’t, because all of you parasitic phoney’s will be eating lobster and scallops instead. Right?
Yeah, that’s right.
But if you’re merely interested in cAGW, or just panicking brainlessly about AGW, due to your misanthropic disposed enviroguilt complex that you were taught, and then you submersed yourself in voluntarily, and you’re a bit psychologically deranged due to that, or to what your school ‘teacher’, or university ‘taught’ you, or else you may consider yourself a well-balanced and wholesome enlightened being, and just want to grow you armpit hairs a bit longer and hanker for living and smelling ala ‘naturale’ in a cave, or in a twig wigwam lean-too, or as nomadic hunter-gatherer, dominating the open grasslands with your awesome woven hand-basket – well, no one’s going to stop you.
Just don’t try to force your neurosis, developmental immaturity and general inability to face facts or cope with them, on others – enjoy your crickets, more steaks for me!
However, do first take note that indigenous people everywhere seem to totally love solid-state integrated circuit technologies, flushing toilets, potable water, modern medicine, clothing, automatic front-loading washing machines and soap in a box.
As much as they love the forest, too, they still immediately tend to alter their immediate surroundings, to produce a natural village and town environmental niche, that’s more conducive to humans, i.e. to their ease, plenty and group security in which to learn, thrive and adapt in order to exploit new opportunities and mobility, or to respond effectively to any competing life forms (micro, or macro).
This is our home planet.
The planet created us, it created our capacity to thrive on this planet, and no other, we are at home, and the more we make urban environemnts optimised for humans, the more at home we feel in our niche. Earth is 100% responsible for human urban centers developing, and turning us into a stunning super-adaptive creature, who like all other animals on earth, seeks to change their immediately surrounding to better suit their needs and activites. Bower birds do it, fish do it, corals do it, and humans do it. We are just so much naturally better at it than all the other life forms.
So the greatest UN-natural act would be to be derailed us from what we are, and what we can do, via a malevolent philosophy or ideology that sough to have us convinced to pretend to be what we’re not. As that would, and certainly does, cause humans great harm and impairment.
Our super-adaptability is always extended by technology, and that has allowed us to cooperatively extend our niche into every part of earth and to thrive almost everywhere we go.
The time is approaching when we will travel to and survive in and master, and then thrive within an infinite number of niches beyond or jewel home-planet, so we are going to need and to maximise our super-adaptability capacities, and the opportunities these natural technologies produced from observing and learning to use the natural functions and process of the natural world, and wider cosmos, as our niche.
If we do not continue to be super-adaptable, and more adaptable than at present, but fall into that pit of philosophical and ideological extremist despair and doom-ism we most certainly will fail to adapt and expand our environmental niche and habitation and thus will over time simply stagnate and also go extinct.
Yes, that is an option, but I prefer the opportunities that come from using our bvrian rather than become a prisoner or doomish slavish warped ideologies of failure and misanthropy. Any ideology that seeks to demoralise us and encourage us to be something other than what this planet quite naturally made us into, or for us to fail to express full human capacity at all times, in the way evolution made it possible for us to, is inimical to being exactly the success story of this planet that we are. Such an ideology should be ignored and tossed away, with all the other rubbish.
The only thing human beings need to do in order to succeed indefinitely is to be that stunning super-adaptive animal that evolution has made us, into and to extend upon that, without any hesitation, and zero sense of faisted fake ‘ecoguilt’ mania.
The entire AGW planetary warming ultra-whinge, and all of the alleged scientific pontificating surrounding it, is just another ideology-driven time wasting speed-bump. It waxes long about effectively nothing at all of any consequence, on a necessary path to being and doing more than we currently can, and dramatically extending our 100% natural environmental niche, to far, far beyond what and where it is, right now.
I wish I could live long enough to see it, as it’s going to be utterly mind-boggling to see what we’ll be able to do in coming centuries. We have emerged from weathered rock, created by aggregations of atoms, generated in stars. Why it does that, this aggregation has no idea.
But I like it!
And I would love to see how far we can get, I would love to see human skeletons become fossilised in the sediments of other planets around other stars, and not just this one. Who knows what we will do, or what we will discover, but we sure won’t find out if we do what the ecoguilt mongering ideologues adn UN IPCC suggest, and just roll-over and stagnate into oblivion, and try to use economics of energy that simply don;t and never will work, just to save a frog, or a skink, or some fish species? As all our opportunities are impaired and frittered away?
No, screw that, human beings should be exactly what they are and nothing else ever. We evolved to be super-adaptable omnivores that accept no obstacles or false limits to creating human optimised niches in every possible location. That is us, and we need to keep doing it and begin to move off this planet, as well.
If other animals and plants wish to live in our 100% natural human-optimised environmental niches of suburbia (adn not have us on the menu!), well fine, no problem, they are very welcome. But THEY must adapt to living with US.
And they have, and they do. The urban environments outside my SiO2 window are loaded with non-human life. Cross harbour ferries were dodging whales in Sydney harbour last week and no one even harpooned it! We no longer need whale oil as an energy supply. Our technology and adaptability has moved past preying on whales and the whales survived it. Hardly the end of the world.
But they may not have survived it, if we had not continued to adapt and be humans, even as we were harvesting their oil. The very reason why the world is abundantly supplied with top predators today, like sharks and crocodiles, is a result of the fact that the global environment is so amazingly healthy, and food is so abundant. It is abundant because the planet is warmer, it is wetter, it is greener, and higher CO2 is stimulating all plant life that feeds animals.
Just a few hours ago yet another surfer was attacked by a large shark:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-31/shark-activity-unprecedented-before-attack-on-surfer-evans-head/6661856
we have an oversupply of predators, and we are on their menu hwen we go where they are. and if they come where we are, they should be on our menu. Quid Pro Quo. No philosophy involved, just prosaic survival needs.
Because the temperature and CO2 rose when the Holocene period started, human civilisation and technology finally took hold and we were able to step back from fossil-record oblivion, and created the possibility of moving into a domain of eventual infinite resources (off planet) and growing environmental niche opportunities.
How any one can then [mis]construe +1.0 C to +1.5 C warming since the mid 19th century plus a biologically extremely favourable CO2 rise and the greening of the earth, as a desperate global ‘problem’ is beyond the realm of the intellect to account for. It is a sad quasi-religious biproduct of a warped misguided misanthropic ideology that pretends the grandiose title of “green environmentalism”. But which, for some extraordinarily bizarre reason, can’t face that obvious fact, the human urban, suburban and rural settings are all 100% natural and are also green environments of earth that were created by the most amazing creature the planet and its evolutionary development ever produced. A shopping mall is as much a part of the natural environment as the coral reef I swim on. Neither is more valid than the other as an environmental niche for life. But as a human, I do prefer the shopping center at dinner time, as I’m less likely to be on the menu (and I like Thai food more than coral polyps).
Yes, I’m going to the opposing extreme above to demonstrate logical counterpoint to dismal eco-dumb-ism, so that perhaps those infected with it become aware of how they’ve been duped,a nd then duped themselves away from what they really are, and do not have to appologise for. the shark that tried to eat that surfer today is not goign to feel appologetic about it.
This allegedly “green eco-friendly” ideology and its stunningly ignorant fixation on carbon, as a ‘pollutant’, or rather, as a boggieman, and human global civilisation as a planetary ‘calamity’, painting it as merely a “great extinction”, is the product of wilfully deranged people, who can not see the forest for the trees, and are in denial of what they really are, and how they came to be, and what they need to do from here.
Hence their ideology is one of dissipation and doomism, it’s what they will not actually ‘save us’ from, but are in fact intent on creating. The only reason why such people can eat and remain alive today is because other humans were true to themselves and decided to act exactly like humans. Unfortunately this also allowed the useless time-wasting whining misanthropic deranged feral greenie riff-raff to survive, and thrive, parasitically, too.
Banning an ideology is of course not the way, as censorship is always the producer of worse outcomes. But pointing out what green enviroguilt is and how prejudiced, biased and bent its ideology implicitly is, against human beings, should be called-out for the shameless sham and deliberate attempt to impair and damage all future human beings.
They seek to blacken and denigrate humanity and deny us our natural developmental and mental capacity to exhibit and express what we are and be what we are, just like any other natural animal does. When sharks harm surfers, do they construct a global campaign to reform sharks, or turn them into seaweed eaters? No, it’s the human’s fault for ending up on the menu, and a human should not defend itself or mitigate the hazard via threatening the shark’s range and survivability in return. Whatever.
Every eco-mistake humans have made, as a global civilisation, has been something we’ve learned from or are still learning from. We do not deserve opprobrium from the high an ideologically smarmy, as our super-adaptability implicitly requires that we will learn from experiences and adapt to all such errors, as a natural matter of course of getting better at super-adapting!
So where is the need for our ecoguilt?
A super-adaptable creature can not possibly be ‘guilty’ of anything! It is doing what it must, and simply being what it is! Just as the shark is being what it is, and just looking for a bite. Learning involves errors, and their self-correction. We are all learninf from this. Were is the need or justification for some butthole to try and condemn human beings, per-sec, and create ideologies of misanthropy and doom because, of orrdinary natural error making and self-correction to do things better? The whole thing eco-loons go on with is quite rediculous, and AGW is a complete nonsense.
The only thing that continually seeks to foist fake guilt on to us for things we have not done wrong, or even done at all, is religion! We’re innocent, we always have be, we can do not ‘wrong’, for there is no wrong in survival, except to become lunch. If we are true to what we are, we can not go ‘wrong’. We don’t need a philosophy, an ideology, a neo-religion of eco-doom saviours and prophets to tell us what to do, nor what we should be, nor to be tutored in ideological ‘rights’, from ideological ‘wrongs’. There is no such thing! We can not do right, or wrong, we can only do what we do, and it is evolutionary life processing that has made exactly what we are, the most correct thing for us to be. Let’s just be us, eh? Super adaptability means getting better and better at adapting, and continually opening up new environmental niche opportunites, for us, and for other animals.
Any ideology calling itself science, from an ideological bent, by definition most certainly is not science. All eco ideology that seeks to smear and diminish and impair or discourage humans from being what they are is our enemy, it should be seen for what it is, challenged where it pops up and the people peddling it encouraged to grow up, shut up or get lost.
In December this year in Paris, a congregation of such misanthropic malevolent ‘eco-friend’ parasites, are going to try to take another lunge at the global public purse, to steal more public money, and usurp more political power, and legislative law-making to oppress and dictate, using the totally hysterical false pretences of AGW warming (+1.5 C at the most) backed by make believe ideological pseudo-science within the physical global context of 18 years of flat global mean temperature trends, punctuated by weather cycles, around that mean level. We had 18 years of warmign from 1980 to 1998, the 18 years of almost no warming at all, and massive numbers of new coldest minimum records in north America since 2013. Hardly an AGW calamity. No ‘change’, and no crisis, but they plan to conjure up a thermal catastrophe, and pretend it’s “totally real”, except the data says its a phantom, constructe from the noise of weather cycles.
I’m not itererested in getting political. I also don’t want to get ideological, or philosophical, nor AGW-religious. I don’t wish to play in their pig-sty of rank propaganda at all.
Just stick to the known facts and explain how small to almost undetectable the alleged dramatic ‘change’ is. That it is weather cycles, and not ‘climate-change’ that is doing the changing here.
Then point out the massively beneficial aspects of such almost but not quite undetectable and imperceptible climate-changes over the past 150 years.
Just the facts – but all of them! No appologies for being what we are! As That approach always wins in the end. The facts and events will win the pubic over, and politicians that do not respond to the public, and to reality, will not survive election. Any policy, agreement, pledge or legislation can be overthrown, and tossed-out. Remember the case of Australia’s carbon tax. It was totally useless, impairing, ideological, counterproductive, so was rejected by the vast majority of people. Almost no one with a working brain wanted it. Their propaganda all failed. And the current Government would have been demolished if they didn’t deliver on carbon tax reversal. Anything politicians ‘agree’ to in december can be quickly reversed, so never accept the illusion of ‘inevitability’ that they are trying to conjure.
They will fail again.
If you steal from the public purse to harm our future potential in Paris you will be blamed for it and held responsible, and we will make sure the public understand all the facts and the heist you’ve tried to pull on them.

So, computers are climate? HAHAHA.