Potemkin wrote:1] It doesn’t matter if it’s a ‘technical term’ or not - in this context, it is misleading. Technical terminology is freely invented by the experts in order to avoid misleading people. In this context, the word ‘glacial’ should have been added in front of it to avoid misunderstandings, as @Truth To Power pointed out.
2] Oh, and @Truth To Power is presenting cogent arguments in this thread. I don’t always agree with him, but he’s not a troll. You need to engage with him instead of just dismissing him.
1] I agreed that it is confusing. What more do you think I need to do? I'm not going to try to make the experts add the word glacial as you propose.
2] He seems to think that his say so is evidence. With all due respect, the say so of anyone on line, including me, is not evidence.
I have engaged with him many times and he just chooses to believe what he wants to believe.
He didn't have much to say that was clear and/or provided some evidence.
E.g., he said that my link didn't say what i said it said. But, I have no idea what he thinks I said or what he thinks the link said that is different from what he thinks I said. Therefore, I can't really respond to his point here.
E.g., he said, "...and no methane event occurred because there were no vast glaciers melting and uncovering dead and rotting organic material." 1st, if the methane came from where he said, that doesn't mean there was no methane event. 2nd, he provided no evidence for where he got the idea that it came from the ground where glaciers had just melted and exposed. 3rd, ISTM, that after 90,000 years under slowly moving ice 2 miles thick, that the ground might often be bed rock and not dirt.
E.g., He wrote, "Wrong again. It was warmer during the Holocene Optimum following the Younger Dryas, and no significant methane increase occurred." He just asserted this. He must know that many here have provided evidence that it was not warmer in the Holocene Optimum and even if he was somehow correct, that still is not evidence that there is no methane event now. Also, the Younger Dryas was a cold snap of about 1000 years that happened in very limited areas (N. America and W. Europe) after the end of the last glacial. So, the methane event may have happened before the Younger Dryas and not after.
Also, he does not think things through enough. E.g., He wrote, "Please give an example of infrastructure that would have to be rebuilt to accommodate a temperature increase that is a tiny fraction of the increase from dawn to afternoon, let alone from winter to summer." He does not grok that it is not the new average temps that will require rebuilding infrastructure. It is the new extremes in temp, both hotter and colder, that require rebuilding it. An example of colder is Texas in the winter a few years ago that got frozen and lost power for days. An example of hotter temps might be electric power high voltage lines that may sag and break from the heat softening the copper in the wires or causing forest fires somehow. Another example is roads washed away by floods, so they may need to be moved away from the rivers to higher ground with new higher and longer bridges.
Then he asks for
credible empirical evidence about the future, when his definition of credible empirical evidence excludes all predictions about the future because' it can't be empirical. He does this by asking, "If there were any credible empirical evidence that sea level -- which has been rising at roughly the same rate for thousands of years -- could be increased by CO2, that is."
Also, my experts reject his claim that, "which [i.e. sea level] has been rising at roughly the same rate for thousands of years " is totally false. It had been quite stable for thousands of years and it is speeding up in the last few years. A fact that undermines his claim for long-term sea-level rise, is that many ancient ports are now miles inland, like Carthage. This is a result of massive soil erosion moving soil to the shallow water near the ports. There are many such ports. Others, like Alexandria, are still close to the sea level they had in ancient times.
He just makes things up, IMHP.
Edit to add a dew min.later.
He also does not grok that both weather and climate are complex systems with many feedbacks. This makes them Chaotic, in the sense of conforming to the generalities of the new Chaos Math. In Chaos Math a tiny change can be the difference between a moon being ejected from orbiting its planet and it staying in orbit for another 100K years. It is the butterfly effect.
So, he seems to implicitly assume that all small changes in anything in the climate will always result in a small change in the climate. Chaos Math has
proved that this is not always true. We are seeing an example of this already. The jet stream has become much more wavy. Climate scientists have shown that this is or can be the result of temperature changes from GHG in the air. He says that it is not proven with empirical evidence. But, it is happening and this is an example of how Choas Mah can make a complex system behave.
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