Question for climate change skeptics - does this essay summarize your position?

I'll answer this because I have always been a climate change skeptic, but I don't feel this summarizes my position very well at all.

While I agree with most of what Laughlin says, he has mostly missed the point on climate change. I am not particularly worried about how AGW will affect the Earth a million years from now; I think it's much more important to consider how things are changing over the next century or two. He mostly avoids that discussion, as do many "skeptics" that I hear on YA. Frankly, I know that the Earth has undergone vast changes on the geologic time scale, that is not in question; what is important is to understand the magnitude of the changes that are occurring on the time scale of a few human lifetimes. We all know that the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide, and what we release will probably eventually be sequestered away in limestone or some other sink, but it's also clear that is not happening fast enough to stop the CO2 level in the atmosphere from going up. If it were, then the Keeling Curve would not be concave upward.

I also find Laughlin's anthropomorphizing physical processes very odd for a physicist. For example, he says

"Were the earth determined to freeze Canada again, for example, it’s difficult to imagine doing anything except selling your real estate in Canada. If it decides to melt Greenland, it might be best to unload your property in Bangladesh. "

I'm sorry, but the Earth is a physical system governed by the laws of physics, it does not "decide" to do anything.

Factually, I think it is more in agreement with our (proponent) position. There is much opinion and this, as well as having a “do nothing” slant, does seem a little bizarre at times; as pegminer says, anthropormophising the planet, but factually, it’s just saying much of what we have always known and which is uncontested. The only significant omission that I spotted was that the warming oceans will become less effective at absorbing CO2; eventually becoming net emitters if the warming continues.

Contrast this with the “skeptic” view(s); there is much here which we accept but which is regularly denied by many of those who do not accept AGW; ocean acidification, the problem of overpopulation, it even accepts CO2 as a greenhouse gas!

Regarding the section you have highlighted; I disagree! Statistics are sufficient to settle the question of anthropogenic vs natural effects. Admittedly, we may need a few more years, or decades of data to settle some questions, but in principle, statistics can do it! As for the line <<“The geologic record suggests that climate ought not to concern us too much when we’re gazing into the energy future, not because it’s unimportant, but because it’s beyond our power to control”>> that’s garbage. We are affecting the environment and, in principle, can control what we are doing. I would agree that we couldn’t do much about a mega-volcano or asteroid strike, but these are very rare events. Most natural climate change occurs so slowly as to be almost irrelevant to the AGW problem.

To sum up, all this is saying is that the earth will be alright, regardless of what we do; again, this is uncontested. What we are concerned with, is change in the environment that we, and all life, have evolved to live in.

It doesn’t matter that it won’t be catastrophic for the earth as a planet; the only concern is, will it be catastrophic for us?

The part of the essay is thoughtful, but I see some definite problems. He is correct that forecasting is difficult, but now, there is strong evidence that warming is occurring - globally cryosphere is diminished and continues to shrink, the mean global temperature of the ocean has increased as has sea level, so has air temps. We can determine a significant long-term trend now. Scientists are now looking at changes in the variance of climate measure and have started to notice that the probability of rare events seems to have increased (needs more work). We can see many more weather observations that are consistent with AGW now - 15 years after Laughlin wrote this.

He is obviously correct that the oscillation are a big part o the weather - but is he sure they are not associated with climate? A lot of work is underway to determine this relationship. It is unlikely that the oscillations are separate from climate especially if they are important for determining weather. Climate is a statistical measure of weather, so if the oscillations affect weather, they affect climate.

The geological record does not include any instance in which humans have burn very large amounts of fossil fuels. That is why you can't count only on the fossil record to predict - this periods is unprecedented.

His concluding remarks are proving incorrect as time passes and have a false premise that we can look at past climates in which human influence was minimal to infer what the impact of human influence will be (if you want to take it that far). Maybe it is more that humans have to little influence to affect climate as is evident by the fossil record (which does not include any period like the current). This is a opinion based on what he knew then. He may re-evaluate these remarks given what we know now.

short term, terrorism is the bigger risk. long term, AGW is. Your grandchildren's grandchildren will possibly no longer care what we did or did no longer do approximately terrorism, different than as a historic interest. yet what we do, or do no longer do, approximately AGW could desire to easily nevertheless be affecting them.

Well, what he claims may very well be true. You don't need research to know that global warming is real. The bible says the world wil be destroyed by fire, global warming. The real issue is can it be stopped? Gonna be like boxing with one's shadow and wondering why you got knocked out.

I am generally in agreement with him. My thinking is very similar. When he stated a few things, I thought to myself that he probably isn't a geologist though clearly he has a good understanding.

For example he said:

<<<The earth plans to dissolve the bulk of this carbon dioxide into its oceans in about a millennium, leaving the concentration in the atmosphere slightly higher than today’s. Over tens of millennia after that, or perhaps hundreds, it will then slowly transfer the excess carbon dioxide into its rocks, eventually returning levels in the sea and air to what they were before humans arrived on the scene. The process will take an eternity from the human perspective, but it will be only a brief instant of geologic time.>>>

It may be that the ocean is capable of absorbing nearly all of our CO2. I know that there is a general acceptance of ice core data and stability of CO2 at 280 ppmV but there is good evidence that isn't necessarily so. He claims it might take tens or hundreds of millenia to transfer the excess carbon dioxide into rocks. My problem with that sentence is that this is an ongoing process. Lets say you have a large aquarium and it is warm on one end and cold on the other. If you dump salt into the warm end and it eventually becomes saturated and salt begins to precipitate on the cold end. If you then change the rate of salt entering the hot water, the salt precipitating out on the cold end (representing carbonates) would increase. In other words, the rate of precipitation of carbonates may be affected by the rate of CO2 entering the ocean. Obviously increasing acidity will also affect (slow) the precipitation. The ocean is a complex system with some parts with a net absorbtion of CO2 and some parts releasing it and some parts dissolving carbonates and some parts precipitating it. I haven't seen any study that leads me to believe it would necessarily take tens of thousands of years to remove the "excess" carbon.

You know Why do you waste our time with this BS. I am sure he is a good GEOLOGIST but is not a climatologist.

There are NO climate science skeptics within miles of this website, and never were. Lots of half-or-less informed deniers of science PRETENDING to be skeptics, but for actual skeptics see here: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/timeline.htm

http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200602/bac...

(and please stop repeating the same old crapola about "skeptics" when you mean Exxon-Mobil and Koch tools).

In the absence of such non-existent contributors, I'll feel free to answer your "question" myself:

You have "come across"...?? !!

What a hoot!

More likely, still reeling from recent criticisms of your most-holy-and-exalted Exxon Mobil, you've been scouring back archives of WattsUp for stale but not recently exhumed anti-science trickeries and deceits: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/25/seven-eminen...

Robert Laughlin is a Nobel Prize winning Stanford University physicist. His writings have as much "similarity" to your copy-and-pasted anti-science here as the works of William Shakespeare do to a deodorant ad in National Enquirer. Why Laughlin handed (inadvertently or otherwise) Watts and his dupes and fellow science-hating con men a few anti-science one-liners, in the form of cherry-pickable tangents to a otherwise unobjectionable article on geology, which is anyway well outside his field of expertise, is anyone's guess. But it has less significance and credibility to climate science than did (to the subjects of race and heredity) the more extensive extraneous rhetoric from this other Nobel Prize winning Stanford physics prof:. http://www.amazon.com/Broken-Genius-William-Shockl...

They also leave out facts like cloud cover , The jet streams and ocean currents in their

faulty computer models

It must be a relief to you to find someone else who is both educated and willing to ignore objective reality in favor of believing things they find comforting because of politically motivated emotional biases.