Slashdot Mirror
Consensus on Global Warming
FredFnord writes "Well, here's an interesting one: the fine folks at Science Magazine have done an analysis of the last ten years' published scientific articles (articles from crank or non-peer-reviewed publications were not counted) on the subject of global climate change. The results themselves are interesting, but the most remarkable part was that, of the 928 papers they found, 75% accepted that global warming was caused by human activities, either explicitly or implicitly. 25% made no mention either way. And not a single paper asserted otherwise." JamesBell submits this article by a geologist which suggests that the Earth is in serious, imminent, unavoidable danger.
So Should I be Running climate prediction.net on my P4 Prescott or not?
I just don't get why this is news to some people, but unfortunately it is.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
(BTW, that 'fine fellow' at Science Magazine happens to be a woman :-))
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Soon, it will be China and India that you're pointing fingers at, and not the US (or Europe).[1]
So... Then what?
And uh, is this news? Does anyone credible seriously disagree that emissions from human activity are at least in part contributing factors? Or is this another jab at boogiemen that don't exist? There's nothing "remarkable" about these so-called findings.
Also, the "Earth" isn't in danger. Yes, I know this distinction is splitting hairs, but what's in danger is Earth's inhabitants. Our actions are not going to alter a several billion year old rock.
[1] Don't feed me the per capita shit. China will be a far, far greater polluter in this realm, per capita or no. Further, the economic empowerment of the Chinese people will eventually drive them to a level of concern about the well-being of the environment, so, in a way, their accelerated economic development is a good thing, politically and environmentally. Incidentally, China has proven they can reduce greenhouse emissions, even while growing economically (1, 2)...but the point is, they're still on an upward trend. And they've got a lot more people who will begin to thirst for energy-hungry luxuries.
the Bush administration affirmed that it would not do any steps towards preserving the environment if there would even be a remote chance that a single American might be temporarily inconvenience in doing so...
The official EPA Global Warming website is located at: www.epa.gov/globalwarming/
Mars Emerging from Ice Age, Data Suggest
e _031208.html
By SPACE.com
posted: 03:00 pm ET
08 December 2003
Scientists have suspected in recent years that Mars might be undergoing some sort of global warming. New data points to the possibility it is emerging from an ice age.
full story at http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_ice-ag
Now what are we going to DO about it?
You are not the customer.
Regardless, the final paragraph of the article begs a very interesting question:The begged question is Will it be bad or will it be good? Wouldn't warmer climates provide more arable land? What I get out of this is "We dont know what it means, but it looks like at least SOME climate changes are caused by man".
...just keep gas cheap and interest rates at all time lows. God will come save us if this turns out to a problem, be it global catastropy or the end of no money down, 90 day same as cash financing on 72" plasma tv's.
Earth is in serious, imminent, unavoidable danger ? You gotta be kidding. What they mean is that human beings on Earth are in serious, unavoidable danger.
The planet has seen worse, it will just route around us and be fine with it.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
JamesBell submits this article by a geologist which suggests that the Earth is in serious, imminent, unavoidable danger.
*sigh* When will people ever get it? The planet is fine. It's the people that are screwed!
Global warming will cause the earth to explode? Oh wait, you mean people (and possibly much of the life on earth) could be in danger. I doubt global warming will make much of a difference to the planet itself, except possibly to allow it to make more room for heat resistant lifeforms :-)
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
> "Earth is in serious, imminent, unavoidable danger."
;)
The sky is not falling yet
From the article:
The American Meteorological Society (6), the American Geophysical Union (7), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling (8).The American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysica Union? What a bunch of communists. They are just trying to destroy our way of life. They don't want me to live my life the way I want. Now, where did I park my Ford Explorer? I gotta run and buy a pack of smokes...
I, for one, welcome our sun-tanned, beachfront-dwelling overlords from Iowa.
[George W. Bush]: "All them scientists don't know nuthin. Ain't that right Andy boy?"
[Andrew Card]: "Yessir, that is absolutely correct sir. Don't know nuthin."
[George W. Bush]: "Ain't that right Scott towell?"
[Scott McClellan]: "Right in every way sir!"
[George W. Bush]: "Ain't that right Colonoscopy?"
[Colin Powell]: "I gotta get out of here."
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
JamesBell submits this article by a geologist which suggests that the Earth is in serious, imminent, unavoidable danger.
Well, if it's unavoidable, then switching to renewable recourses won't do a damn thing!
So no consensus is valid as a scientific argument.
First Century News:
Scientifics reach a consensum: The earth is the center of the universe
I think the reason this is news is because the Bush administration is still trying to pretend that this is not proven science... that it's just a theory that can be ignored. They want to ignore it because it's inconvenient for their business cronies, and those business cronies fund party activities and candidates' re-elections. I don't think there will be any changes on this front until this administration is out of office, no matter how much evidence is presented. It's quite unfortunate.
-- Gargonia
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn.
Oh come now, you panicky Chicken Littles in lab coats!
We can just hide in our SUVs. They have heated seats.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
I assume that by 'global warming' and 'climate change' the articles are referring to the current climate as compared to years ago. A beefy computer and [now] commonly available weather data, and it's pretty clear.
I'm more interested on a consensus that the climate change will continue changing. From what I understand, that is the area under more debate, and frankly the area which will influence humanity more.
Oh, come on. Class out the peer-reviewed journals you don't like as "crank" and publish a research that says "Journals I like agree with me".
That's life in the more controversial sciences. Everyday business in economics, you learn to keep your ears up.
The Global Warming issue reminds me of big Tobacco. Deny , Deny , Deny. Years from now their will be no doubt that our habbits accelerated Global warming.
And the US supports the principles of Kyoto, but does NOT support the exemption of countries termed "developing", like China.
I'll be dead by the time any of this happens. What incentive is there for me to really care? Honestly? I know it's a problem, but how do you get people to care about it, when 1. They'll be dead by the time this happens and 2. There are more pressing concerns to deal with (bills, life, etc.)?
I don't respond to AC's.
Despite all the hoopla, the USA is not the greatest danger to the environment. We Americans are making steady progress. Note that Honda is technically an American automobile company since Honda does more than 50% of its manufacturing in the USA.
The greatest threat to the environment is China. The Chinese have been overwhelmingly burning coal. Coal horribly pollutes the environment and unloads tons of radioactive material into the air.
Given the current rate of pollution in China, once it reaches Singapore's level of economic development, the level of pollution in China will exceed that in the USA. India is equally horrible.
How many were rejected from the peer review process which suggested or concluded otherwise? More to the point (and obviously, this cannot be known) how many were never submitted for peer review in the first place because of concern over the backlash?
Most US science funding in climate and solar research comes from the federal govt (in geological and oceanic research sizable amounts can come from private groups). When politicians don't want to look like they're anti-environment they screen funding to make sure it's not going to go to "enemies of the planet" (I kid you not, that's the phrase).
How can a survey of peer reviewed journals be a valid source of data when people are afraid to publish "the wrong results"?
Perhaps global warming is caused by adult white male toenail clippings, but I'm pretty sure we have no reasonable way of finding that out right now.
Don't published papers go through peer review before being published? I imagine the following reviews... "This paper claims that humans are not at fault for the global warming. It lacks conclusive evidence, and it clearly contradicts 500 papers (some partial list is provided) on this subject. I recommend to reject this paper unless revised."
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
...is being suckered into accepting the neutral "Climate Change" euphemism, which downplays its significance. I wonder who started that trend?...Hmm...
Power to the Peaceful
Global Warming is a Myth
It seems just about every article I read about global warming tends to show a plot from about 1200 or 1400 A.D. to present showing average global temperature. In this plot there are several distinctive sharp increases and decreases in various 50 year periods. The greatest increase is shown between 1950-2000, and tends to be about 50% larger than the next biggest increase.
Perhaps I'm reading articles that are too oriented toward the layman (probably the case), but I never see a reasonable explanation of how the graph is relevant given that it shows several other warming trends that carry 2/3 the magnitude of the current one. I've always looked at these graphs and read them as "we're in a warming trend that is slightly greater than the ones we've had in the past millennium." This has always been a sticking point for me with global warming, though I'm genuinely open to learning more.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
I just read an interview with Michael Crichton about the chicken little behaviors. it was a promo for his book, State of Fear.
c ar ing.html
The article started off with an ominous warning about climate change from the 1970s about...global cooling. The article title was "Let's stop scaring ourselves."
The link below doesn't work yet.
http://archive.parade.com/2004/1205/1205_stop_s
Another amusing article by him is "Aliens Cause Global Warming"
http://www.ccfassociation.org/crichton2.htm
I'm sure scientists today have learned lots of lessons from the mistakes of scientists of yesteryear. Right.
No, it means real jokes are ignored, and any articles by people who may or may not agree with you that aren't in peer-reviewed journals are ignored as well. Dissenting opinions could be voiced.
I'm not denying Global Warning exists, but I'm not 100% convinced, either. All I'm asking is, are the naysayers of today more likely to be true 'cranks', or are they more likely to be people who espouse views not in keeping with what their peers believe?
Just asking questions. No reason to get all excited.
http://www.lomborg.com/books.htm Or any of the following reviews or responses in Nature and Science?
http://www.lomborg.com/critique.htm
Oh right, those don't count because refuting environmental destruction claims isn't politically correct! Look, I don't agree with much of what Bjorn says, but the point is he compiled some statistics, came to some conclusions, and was then ostracized by the political machine for being "irresponsible" for advocating what a very liberal Euro nation dubbed "wreckless science". The critique of his science (that wasn't much of that) was second to the smear campaign leveled against him for being irresponsible. His work didn't "count" I guess in however cooked up his stupid statistic also.
This is the same thing John Stewart was talking about during his CNN Crossfire talk, we're so right or left now we can't have an honest debate about real issues, which we really need. No papers are published because its career death because a very liberal academia has decided anyone going against this trend is scum, without even looking at the science. Nature would not accept a paper from someone that claimed otherwise, but this is a debate we really need to have folks.
Jeff
I don't have too many years under my belt (less than 50), but every year has gotten hotter and hotter and less snow. 10 years ago we had blizzards constantly, last year we maybe had 2 days of snow. That could just be a natural variance in temperature between seasons, but it seems to go hand in hand with all this talk about global warming.
Hasn't the climate been drastically changing for millions of years... were we the cause of that too? Isn't it just possible the one ultimate source of all our energy (aka the Sun) is responsible for the warming trends just as it has been for all of measurable history? What wonderful arrogance that our blink of an eye existence could cause such global changes... Hate to break it to you.. but industrial emissions have only been around for a 100 years or so... which is not even a blip on the radar in the geologic time that such changes are measured.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
Now the key is to figure out where the least expensive land is that is currently about 202 meters above sea level so I can have beachfront property to retire on. I wonder if I can get a good deal on a submerged English castle to ship over to move onto said property?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I'm not really surprised. Hell, I've witnessed it myself! I don't have the statistics, but I hope someone can bring them up - the average temperature in Finland has rised [I]dramatically[/I] in recent years. We don't even have decent winters here in southern Finland anymore. Please, if you can dig up some statistics, give us a link! This is interesting!
Now, there's a solution I can get behind (no, I'm not joking). Nuclear energy, pursued with a strong eye towards safety and security, would be a step forward in terms of our efficiency and use of energy.
Bankrupting the industrialized nations of the world for an unproven solution isn't.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
Mankind and most of the animals are, but not earth.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"Save the Earth??? The Earth is fine! The people are f**ked." - George Carlin
I don't understand why scientists insist on saying the Earth is in danger. The Earth doesn't care, it's a rock. Maybe if they start saying The Human Race is in "serious, imminent, unavoidable danger" people might pay attention.
No, probably not.
-AlPhAbEt
to the drawing board.
We won't destroy the earth (unless we physically blew it up). What will probably happen is that life (probably not ours) will adapt to the new warmer or colder climate and go on. After all, not all life on earth thrives due to an oxygen rich 72 degree atmosphere. Some life flourishes in places that are deadly to us humans.
"The Day After Romorrow?"
Is that the version with Scooby and the gang?
Either global warming is real, scientists take it as a given, or scientists are afraid to do research that would contravene conventional wisdom.
The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong.
Although my bet is on #1, the thoughts of #2, scientific complacency, or #3, scientific political correctness are actually more scary.
Just to be clear - #2 and #3 are 99-1 longshots in my humble opinion.
The bottom line - assume we are the cause of the problem and look to find solutions, but at the same time, if someone does good, solid research that shows this assumption is wrong, publish it.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
From the climate simulation studies I have seen, Canada would be one of the very few places on earth that would actually benefit from global warming. Much of the northern territories would become viable for farming, and the northern passage explorers have dreamed about for centuries between east and west would become a reality, effectively making the Panama canal obsolete if it warmed up enough to permit year round traffic.
On the other hand, Africa gets totally screwed - the sahara expands to cover 80% of the continent, most of it is uninhabitable and some island states like the Maldives get flooded out and cease to exist.
My rights don't need management.
If global warming is truly human caused, how could sea levels have been highest during the Cretaceous Period, millions of years before mankind?
Couldn't this be part of a natural cycle? If so, I doubt that humans can do much of anything either way about global climate change.
No self-respecting geologist would ever claim that the earth is in danger of anything short of a truly enormous bolide (comet/meteor). We can do nothing to harm the earth; we can only make it inhospitable for various life forms. Even these changes are temporary, fleeting alterations on a planet that has survived much much worse.
Having now read the article in question, 25% of the articles listed both human activity and paleological activity as possible causes... It is still surprising to me that only 1 in 4 bothered to include alternative polution sources...
PDF Warning!
The Day After Tomorrow Looks Pretty Darn Cold! So Let's Get Busy and Find Some More Oil!
Clearly, this is just a bias of the Liberal Medi....err....Liberal Scientific Conspiracy.
Worst ... troll ... ever.
.: Max Romantschuk
I've never seen an explanation to this question of mine: If we have only be keeping quality temperature records for the last 100-200 years, and only been taking quality temperature records all over the planet for the last few decades (uninhabited poles, jungles) how in the world can you reach the conclusion that the earth is warming? More less it is warming because it caused by humans?! I know fossil records can be used to -ESTIMATE- temperatures based on the temperature, but how exact can this be? Is it possible that the earth fluctuates temperature in a 3000 year cycle and we are just freaking out over something we don't understand (imagine that)? I accept the possibility of global warming by humans, but where is the proof?
"Unfair is one nation producing over 25% of global CO2 emissions ..."
"...and produce 31% of the worlds output." Conveniently, you forgot this part. Seems a common oversight.
So Veizer and Shaviv in GSA Today wasn't peer-reviewed?
Maybe Mr Bush should have learn to read science papers or maybe acccept views based on facts different from his onw?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
global cooling again. in the 70's they thought the world would freeze over, someone make up their mind
I rather like this 'Global Warming' thing.
SAILING MISHAP
I love how lately on Slashdot anything a particular individual doesn't agree with has become "groupthink". As though that somehow makes it invalid. Has it occurred to you that maybe the consensus has been reached because global warming is a real problem, and that the evidience is overwhelmingly in support of humanity being a major factor?
Indeed. Without taking sides, there is some possibility that a paper that argued, let's assume convincingly, that either global warming was not occurring, or that some factor other than human activity was clearly driving it, simply could not get published in the peer-reviewed literature. The fact that everyone "knows" something does not necessarily make it true. OTOH, most of the time that's actually the way to bet.
"Crank journals" were never mentioned in the article. Any journal listed in the ISI was up for inclusion in the search. One would assume that crank publications and publications not subject to peer review are not in that database. But regardless, your accusations of manipulating the sample are unwarranted.
And it's not like journals are little political diatribes. They often contain contrary conclusions; physicists have been known to spar on paper in journals about various topics. Cosmology journals are a big source of controversy, mostly because everything changes every other month with new data.
At the risk of being labeled a troll. There are only a few ways that can convincingly prove a scientific theory: 1) carefully done experiments where all the extra parameters are kept constant, which is impossible in this case, or 2) either analytical derivation or computational simulation from "first principles" (also can't be achieved despite all the progress in HPC).
Studies that I'm aware of either show that there is a historical correlation between CO2 levels and temperature (no control for other sources that change climate) or ad-hoc models that are made to fit past data and then used to extrapolate into the future (approach has been tried before for stock market prediction without much success).
It's just very hard to prove human influence on climate.
Having said this, I think it's a very good idea to try find a better source of energy than oil and gas.
Really? I wonder. How are you going to get accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal if they all are saying the same thing? (I.E. -- all your "peers" have different opinions on the subject than you.)
Not one dissention among them doesn't necessarily mean they are all right. It can easily mean they refused publication of anything not in line with the mainstream.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Well no-duh. They already know that the earth climate goes in a cycle. They have proof of that. There's nothing to argue.
They also don't really argue that we, the people, have an impact. That's because they know its true, we do impact the cycle. We cause it to accelerate
I'm not a doctor, but I play one in bed.
That's not an example of group think. Leaping to the conclusion that all of global warming is caused by human activity is. As is the concept that direct interference would do good instead of further harm.
I read the following quote from the article and sorta freaked out:
"The consequences of such a sea level rise would be calamitous, comparable (and perhaps including as a consequence) a global war. Unlike a world war, though, civilization cannot get back to normal afterwards, as much of the landscape will have been drowned, effectively forever. We consider the threat to be imminent, the timescale of the global changes seeming likely to include the lifespans of our children."
If we really are just the smartest monkeys (and it looks like we are) then it stands to reason that we are nowhere near intelligent enough as a species to manage a global ecosystem and sustain economic growth at the same time. I'm a believer in the idea that everybody, even the great leaders of yore, were fallable humans with specific talents so we can't assume that they'll just take care of it. I hope this article is a wakeup call because I'm sure as hell not having kids until someone comes up with a plan. Not having kids is bad for the economy though and the economy runs on hydrocarbons so maybe that's a good thing.
Maybe that international consortium of countries pursuing fusion will pull their thumbs out when a big chunk of the coldest continent slides into the ocean. Hopefully there aren't giant tsunamis in its wake when it does finally happen. Maybe this is why Bush is inexplicably dumping so much money into NASA.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
All this amounts to is a temporary (perhaps couple of centuries) spike on the graph until the buffering system equilibrates. While the interim results may be moderately dramatic for people, along with those species we haven't killed off already, it won't have a whit of impact on "the Earth" or the flora and fauna that will take advantage of new niches.
KeS
I grepped for occurrences of the word "years" in the article linked in the above text, but didn't manage to find the bit where it tells you how soon this serious "danger" will actually affect us. I'd prefer not to actually read the article, instead could someone (who has read it) tell me if it indeed tells us this, and if so, when is it?
The Bush Administration rejects the Kyoto protocols, whether for good reasons or not, and then refuses to do anything else about global warming.
Bullshit.
14 Nations to Participate in Plan to Reduce Methane
This is largely driven by the US and it includes India and China. It'll have the same greenhouse effect as removing 7% of US fleet of cars from the road and it costs next to nothing.
Just because Bush doesn't sign up to a program with name recognition, doesn't mean the US government isn't doing anything.
Blaze a trail to the New World
A better solution would be for all the companies to list the chemicals they release into the environment, and also to list the chemicals they need to purchase. Whenever the two lists match, there's the opportunity to reduce costs at the same time as helping to protect the environment.
One example is the carbon dioxide scrubbers on coal power stations in the UK. Collecting all the soot and ash led to the recycling of tin, which could be sold onto other companies. The downside was that this led to the closure of tin mines in Cornwall.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Good thing everyone posting on this article pointed out it was people that were in trouble not earth.
/.
/. can be sometimes. Why not just fill up the whole page with GNAA posts?
Wow, you are all so smart. You should all be given medals for focusing on one word and not making any effort to comment on the actual article itself. Comment after fucking comment about how "people" are in trouble not "earth". Well, thanks a fucking lot I think I figured that out quite well after the first 40 posts repeating just that.
What really kills me is the same lame asshats making these posts bitch about dupes posted on
It just blows my mind how fucking retarded
"At first, we thought it was just another snake cult."
I agree that the scientific community has a history of being affected by groupthink and politics.
But, this is the scientific process. That community has come up with most of the innovations of the last few centuries, including the computer and networks you're reading this on. They can be and sometimes are wrong. But betting against them is not a smart bet. Especially with life as we know it on the line.
Books generally don't count since they are not filtered though peer review. The one you link to, "The Skeptical Environmentalist" has the distinction of generating some peer discussion in scientific magazines. The only problem is that the discussion has been unilaterally negative. At least he did get some arguments started, so hats off to him. But if he's serious about changing scientific opinion, he should (and maybe has) submit to peer reviewed papers. They may not be published, but that's where the true battle is waged.
-Ryan C.
Just because everybody is saying it, doesn't make it true.
But okay, I'm the last person to deny global warming is upon us. Other than some US folks still not convinced or thinking it's not that big a problem (or simply putting their head in the sand), global warming is observed, and the only question is about how much of it is the result of human activities, and how much by natural causes. Oh yeah, and what to do about it.
For the rest: nothing to see here.
According to some, the 'analysis' was slanted to support the desired results (notice footnote #9 and wonder who decides if a paper is 'about climate change'). For more (and other fun reading) visit: http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/content/120604.shtml
It's pretty vain of us (as humans) to think that we are single-handedly responsible for the deterioration of our atmosphere. In fact, the truth is it would likely be deteriorating on it's own just as fast, even if we weren't here. I'm not referring to the vast number of belching cattle that would terrorize the planet if we weren't here to subjugate them, though they are a small part of the equation. A very small part, just as humans and automobiles are. The truth is, there are plenty of natural events taking place every single day that release more pollution than all the automobiles and factories that exist, or have ever existed. Let's look at just one example: Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii. It's one of the many volcanos in that region alone that errupt frequently, nice show, spews lava, etc. Only sometime in the mid 80's it decided to just start continuously dumping about 2000 TONS of sulfur dioxide out, PER DAY. Somehow I don't think my old truck, even with it's crappy milage, could ever hold a candle to that.
How did this get modded insightful? "science" has several centuries of established methodology behind it. Truly stupid argument!
I notice very few of the comments on here have anything to do with the science. It's all a bunch of political arguing. This really tells me global warming is much more about political ideology than any actual science. Considering an earlier report showed 80% of college professors were liberal, the 75% number here sounds just about right.
like they did with ATHLONS
Well, let me be one of the 0% that chimes in with my opinion.
Why exactly are humans soley responsible for global warming? Hasn't the planet been warming up for the past 50,000 years? We were in an ice age at one time, were we not? How do we know that this warming cycle is not due to some earthly cycle that occurs once every X thousand years? We simply haven't been around long enough to collect enough data to determine whether we are responsible or not.
I've read some articles that show that humans are only 1% responsible for global warming and that the other 99% is due to natural causes. Humans are awefully arrogant to think that they alone can destroy the planet through pollution. Mother nature has quite the track record for polluting itself for the past few million years. Anyone take a look at Mt St Helens when it blew in the 80's? It blasted more toxins and pollutants into the atmosphere than mankind has since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Interesting conclusions, and they seem entirely valid. One thing I was wondering just last week, though: Astronomers point to a period of reduced solar activity (sunspots, flares, etc.) about four hundred years ago and say that this accounts for a "mini-Ice Age" experienced in Europe at the time. That is, without the flares sending huge amounts of radiation towards earth as they normally do, the quiet period on the sun lowered our temperatures significantly during that 80-100 year period (in the 1600s). No one is quite sure why that happened, nor can they predict when it might happen again, though at least a couple people have suggested something like a 400-year cycle, which would be some point in the next decade.
So the interesting question will be: How will our human-generated global warming (which they didn't have during the Maunder minimum four hundred years ago) affect the climate if temperatures already drop due to lower solar activity? Just something random (and hopefully interesting) to contemplate.
It is interesting how these guys prioritize. I happen to share thier priorities to a certain extent. Others are taking the tack that our economic survival is more important. I think both are paramount. We cannot give up our freedoms and we certainly don't want to give up our cities. So we need a solution that allows us to keep both.
It's been a while since I've read any academic journal, but, as I recall, the ones I read were filled differing points of view. And, those differing points of view were frequently attacked in subsequent "response" articles. Some of the attacks were so harsh, they came close to being personal.
So, having different opinions appear in peer-reviewed articles is a rather regular occurrence.
The world-averaged temperature could remain unchanged by cooling some regions and warming others, and both things could be difficult in terms of crop adjustment, etc. And there is a lot of concern about water as well as heat; think drought.
The expanded phrase also includes the "climate of weather", i.e. the slowly varying statistics of the quickly varying fields. For example, we ask whether the weather would be more stormy in the future.
I've never heard it said that climate change is a euphemism ... to folks like me who work in this field, it's a more encompassing phrase.
This can be done quite easily. (Well, "easily" meaning there are no theoretical challenges.) It's just that you end up investing more energy in the process than you produce though annihilation. See your average particle accelerator for example.
I write in my journal
Bush didn't "pull out of" anything. Why YOUR revisionist history, Anonymous Coward?
The US is a Kyoto signatory, but "On June 25, 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol was to be negotiated, the U.S. Senate passed by a 95-0 vote the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98), which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States". Disregarding the Senate Resolution, on November 12, 1998, Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the protocol. Aware of the Senate's view of the protocol, the Clinton Administration never submitted the protocol for ratification."
All of this happened under Clinton.
So, sorry, but your bullshit post is just that.
Well, I HOPE you aren't anyways.
Yes, groupthinking like 2+2=4 and the earth is round, is just sooo bad.
How are mathematical statements and established facts groupthink? Groupthink is belief in an opinion or hypothesis because it is the most popular one. There is consensus based on scientific observation of climate data that global temperatures are rising along with atomspheric CO2 levels. There is actual evidence of this.
The evidence pointing to the CAUSE of global warming isn't so solid. All we know for sure is that CO2 and other greenhouse gases are heating up the planet. The impact of human activity on CO2 levels may be negligable for all we konw. One major volcanic eruption, for example, can pump out more climate-altering emissions in days than all of humanity could do for years. The observations in this article do not present any evidence at all, they just demonstrate that scientists who write papers happen to have come to a consensus that human CO2 emissions have an impact on global warming. Being there is not SOLID, DIRECT proof of that one might say it is "group think"...scientists have succumbed to "group think " before...
The article itself makes a good statement:
The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it.
Science isn't always right. One thing is for sure though, reducing CO2 emissions due to the burning of fossil fuels might not stop global warming for sure, but it certainly can't make the problem worse. And besides that, it is probalby wise to conserve the worlds biggest NON-renewable resource, much of which happens to be unfortunately located in politically unstable countries where mentally unstable terrorists like to hide.
No, groupthinking like pi= 3 and the Earth is flat.
I write in my journal
It's a great thing we have such a fearless, balls-to-the wall Strong Leader in the White House, someone who's not afraid to make the tough decisions.
Who do we start bombing? Maybe we can bomb hurricanes?
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
the volcanos.
Baloney. Vested reviewers would prevent publication.
I'd just like to reply to all the detractors of Kyoto and to doing anything constructive about this problem.
It is true that there are doubts about what the effects are going to be, but why in God's name are you advocating taking the risk!??
If the sea level rises by even 1 metre 100 million people will be homeless!!!
Now you've seen the way the stock markets react when oil goes up by a dollar US a barrel, well that's peanuts to what this is going to do. The last thing we need with a ballooning world population is less land.
Get it into your heads, global warming mightn't end the world but it can certainly end Western Civillization.
Back whatever plan of action you can, for you own sake. and for God's sake, wake up...soon.
"Laugh while you can a-monkey boy!" - Dr Emilio Lizardo
Maybe this is just a nitpick, but people tend to overestimate the importance of humans and our impact on the planet. The issue here is our own survival. The opening of the article lays it out plainly:
Global climate change is increasingly recognised as the key threat to the continued development - and even survival - of humanity.
Exactly. The Earth will go on spinning and evolving new land masses and creatures as it has done for billions of years, no matter what we do to it, short of actually blowing it to pieces. Even massive global nuclear contamination would fade away eventually, becoming a mere hiccup on a geological time scale. Our activities might destroy a lot of species in addition to ourselves, but in planetary history mass extinctions are routine non-events.
What motivates my concern is not that we need to preserve this or that for its own sake, but that we want to maintain a pleasant world to live in. For some people that might include spotted owls and obscure mud lizards, for others not. I think the environmental movement might get more attention from the people who make the decisions if they give up on the sacred earth-spirit thing and focus on the fact that nobody wants to think of their great grandchildren living in shelters and subsisting on hydroponic fungi.
Seems like they only put any particular paper into a single category. A paper supports anthropogenic climate change, or opposes it, or is about something else. But what if the paper says that climate change is due to a combination of factors: partially anthropogenic and partially natural? IIUC that's what most people believe, with argument about how much of each. But the article doesn't indicate how such papers are counted. It seems like this should have been the first thing they thought of when they wrote the methodology. That it gets no mention is IMO suspicious.
The climate change debate has become corrupted by politics, media, and money,' he said. 'It's a sad story. You have scientists making meaningless or ambiguous statements about climate change they are then taken by advocates to the media who translate the statements into alarmist declarations. You then have politicians who respond to all of this by giving scientists more money. Agreement on anything is taken to infer agreement on everything. So if you make a statement that you agree that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, you agree the world's coming to an end, because carbon dioxide is destroying the atmosphere. You have to believe the world's coming to an end, there's no variable here. It's not true.
The key to improving the science of climate change lies in altering the way scientists are funded.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
Of course, 600 years ago a "peer review" would call you a crank for saying the world was round.
There is human influence on the climate. The harder question to answer is to what degree and how fast? Most of the global simulations have some pretty fatal flaws. Some do not account for the oceans ability to hold heat very well. Others do not take into account how changing currents in the deep levels of the oceans will affect upper currents. Heck, the GFS[NOAA's main forecast model] had a 30 degree miss on the weather in New England this past weekend three days out. Computer modeling is not the be all end all.
This is not to say that nothing needs to be done. I think there is a bit of Chicken Little in the research community. Especially the ones who know that fear brings them more funding.
Some have stated Kyoto was a "start." In international treaties, there are no such things as starts. Once you get a bad treaty, you tend to be stuck with the damn thign forever because the other countries feel like they did what they needed to do. That is politics. You can not accept a bad treaty like Kyoto. It had major flaws and would have been a band aide on a monster gash.
Is the administration doing enough, hell no? However, Kyoto flat out sucked as a treaty goes. It had been rendered as nothing but a way for third world countries to make money by selling their pollution rights. It was full BS.
Obviously you've never read a peer-reviewed journal in your life and have no idea what you're talking about. Or maybe you don't understand what the point of "peer review" is. The whole point is to debate, critique, and attack each others research.
The data showing the hockeystick temperature rise, on which all of this global warming hysteria is based, has been shown to be wrong.
_ muller101504.asp?p=1
The consensus is therefore based on flawed data.
The original writers have also admitted to flaws in the data.
Good article on this
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/10/wo
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Hopefully someone has said it already, but:
It doesn't matter what the consensus is... only what the data says.
It's all aliens anyway. Or, to be more serious, go Read Crichton's essay on the subject.
Right or wrong, political or otherwise, consensus is what economists, journalists, and politicians do, not what scientists do. Scientists do science and to hell with the "consensus" opinion.
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
Have you ever READ a peer-reviewed journal? On ANY subject? If you had, you would already know that opposing points of view are encouraged and that many of the articles in said journal ATTACK other articles that appeared both in that journal and in other, related journals.
Actually TFA doesn't say anything about eliminating "crank" articles; they just excluded non peer-reviewed ones. It's unfortunate that the submitter used that sort of language.
And as someone who works in science and has had papers rejected by peer review, I basically have faith that the system works. Of course you'll have occasional abuses, but my experience has been that most review comments are helpful and give rise to a better finished product and more appropriate publication. Just because a paper goes against the stream doesn't mean that it's reject outright. The data and methods are probably scrutinized more closely, but they will eventually get published if they hold up. There exists for every paper that gets written a journal willing to publish it.
Why spread panic about a problem that isn't confirmed or denied. The Bush administration isn't preaching about how a meteor could hit the earth or how the earth's core could explode, why should it preach about global warming.
We have absolutely no evidence that it's not a normal process.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I am sincerely highly skeptical of the role of androgenic CO2 in global warming. Man can affect local climate, but it is hubris to automatically assume we can affect something as large as the world.
What Saddam did was in the middle of war; we are prepared at any time to fire nuclear missles at other countries, which just might be a bit worse on the environment than Saddam's oil fires. FYI when Saddam asked the US about invading Kuwait, Bush Senior's administration told him they had no opinion on the matter. Not that I'm defending him, but I can see how he might have been a bit bitter on his way out of Kuwait.
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
Of course, the gulf stream might restart once the north had frozen over, starting the cycle over again.
Bottom line - it's very difficult predicting the results of global warming. Climate has all sorts of cataclysmic tipping points, most of which we surely do not understand.
I doubt global warming will be enough to kill off humanity, though it might thin the herd a bit. Our children will adapt and move on. It won't even come down to Kevin Costner drinking his own urine.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Here is an interesting discussion given by the Alfred P. Sloan professor of Atmospheric Sciences Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences Massachusetts Institute of Technology...Richard S. Lindzen entitled: CLIMATE ALARM - Where Does it Come From?
It may help to explain why most "scientists" agree in this topic.
http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/264.pdf
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
Excellent article on "the increasingly uneasy relationship between hard science and public policy."
Bring on that CO2 baby, and whip out the Coppertone!
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
What I have done is run dynamic solubility/ionic equilibria models, that these show changes in atmospheric CO2 match the changes in temperature.
I woke up to 32F this morning just 20 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, Snow was just a few miles north of me. November has been very chilly here as well with January not looking much better with a good chance of snow for us.
Global warming my hairy ass! I'm sure we could all use a few degrees of warming here and there even if it were true. Folks we're coming OUT of an Ice Age! IMHO, I think it's mostly from all that hot air from those 928 blow hard academic types presenting their papers.
... you can safely remain ignorant of anything you'd like. It appears you are immune to being persuaded by facts.
The ice-core trends of temperature and greenhouse gases match so precisely that there has been room for doubt as to what is cause and what is effect. Thus, could the temperature changes be driving CO2/methane levels in the atmosphere (by altering patterns of global biomass production and storage, say) rather than the other way around? If this was true, then the currently increasing levels of CO2 and methane need not give rise to significant global warming: they would be a consequence, rather than a cause.
If you understand what this is saying, the meaning is clear. They don't know if CO2 is causing global warming or if it is caused by global warming. This kind of puts a different spin on the remainder of the article. If you don't know if you are treating a cause or an effect, the whole matter is kind of pointless.
Clearly, if you assume that (a) humans are the cause of increased CO2 in the atmosphere and (b) increased CO2 will doom the planet and kill millions (if not billions) of people, then some real changes need to be made right now. It is clear that the referenced article isn't thinking about individual automobiles as "the whole problem", but fixed-site industrial energy use.
This is something that most of the global warming activists seem to miss. I have yet to see a ranking that says something like:
Should such a chart be published, reviewed and verified this would present a clear call to action - eliminate cars, utterly and completely. However, what if the chart looked more like:
It would be far, far different and there would be no clear-cut "call to action". Would anyone seriously propose that we give up farming?
Not having this kind of explanation of sources, it is extremely difficult to judge who to kill and who to save. Turning off the heat for North American and Europe would certainly save a lot of CO2, but it would likely kill as many people as Bangladesh being underwater. Similarly, taking away everyone's car in the USA would eliminate some CO2 (how much?), but it would surely kill some significant number of people that didn't get to a doctor or a hospital.
Do you see the point here? If the situation is as bad as some would like us to believe, then we are at the juncture of having to make the kinds of decisions along the lines of "Who do we kill?" Do you really blame the US Government for not wanting to get behind any plan that results in the deaths of thousands of people? At this point in time, no decision is the same as not killing those people because the water isn't rising yet. Until it does, it is highly unlikely that decisions are going to be made which can be clearly traced to any sort of mass death. You can make what you like of that - I'm sure some will say that it is better if the mass death occurs elsewhere than the US and it isn't old fat white people that are doing the dying. However, no matter where you live, your government is unlikely to make any decision that leads to mass death, anywhere, even when the alternative (no decision) has the potential of mass death.
I think that to some extent this might be missing the point. I don't think anyone (cranks aside) questions whether the release of greenhouse gases causes global warming. The fundamental question is about how much of an effect human activity will have over other, natural factors, and what outcome that activity will have. There is a significant amount of disagreement on this point, and what to do about it as an insurance policy. Saying "Humans contribute to global warming" is not nearly enough.
So, he's a profit, then. God is getting pissed, and she's gonna punish us unless we clean up our act.
--LWM
It's so simple. A child could do it...,. ....
A quote relevant to this headline:
Claiming most scientists believe in global warming and that none claim that it definitely will not happen completely misses the point. "Opponents" of global warming are not arguing that it is definitely not going to happen, but rather that the current information is insufficient to make the statements many have been making on the subject.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Let's put things into perspective here. Do you want to know who the top polluter of 2004 was?
It wasn't automobines.
It wasn't factories.
It wasn't even hot air from all the political rhetoric we've had to face this year.
The top polluter of 2004 was... Mount Saint Helens.
Really makes you stop and think, doesn't it?
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Earth is in serious, imminent, unavoidable danger.
Earth is fine. It's HUMANS who might be in serious, imminent, unavoidable danger.
This sig is part of your complete breakfast.
I think the general consensus is that climate change is inevitable, but that humans are making it happen sooner than it would, if we just let nature run its course.
Your commentary about the herds of cattle is laughable -- cows exist because of mankind, they have practically no survival skills and wouldn't be here without us.
You mention a natural source of sulfur dioxide, which is implicated in acid rain but not so much in global warming. Is there an equivalent natural mechanism to make irrelevant the levels of CO2 or NOx emissions we are producing? And could there be a "sink" for natural emissions, yet no equivalent mitigating factor on the man-made side to offset all our output?
I'm not sure who else you could "blame" for the degradation of the atmosphere. When, due to a century of steelmaking, the snow turns brown in Pittsburgh, then they clean up their act and the snow turns white again, are you suggesting there's no correlation between those events? Last I checked there aren't any steel mills in the wild.
"The results themselves are interesting, but the most remarkable part was that, of the 928 papers they found, 75% accepted that global warming was caused by human activities, either explicitly or implicitly. 25% made no mention either way. And not a single paper asserted otherwise." JamesBell submits this article by a geologist which suggests that the Earth is in serious, imminent, unavoidable danger."
/.'s favorite staple topics, but this is totally bogus.
Funny how Michael Crichton doesn't seem to think so... And you'll be hard pressed to find an author who does as much factual research on the subjects he writes about. Not saying his word is gospel, just dispelling the myth that there are no disscenting theroies or that propganda we're regularly fed is beyond question. So much so that I won't even bother linking the articles that measure the sun as heating up or the profound peaks and vallies the Earth's climate rolls through again. I know this is one of
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Most scientists are not dispassionate observers of the truth and the media exploits them for their own agenda. Take a hint from author Michael Crichton and take everything you read with a grain of salt.
What I would like to see studied and addressed is an issue that I haven't seen anyone touch as of yet. Namely, that we know the global climate has changed dramatically and rapidly in the past, and how do we know that that is not what is occuring now. We've had ice ages where the glaciers extended down into what is now the continental US. We've also had extemely warm periods, such as when a good portion of the US was under a sea. How do we know that we're not simply entering another hotter period in our planet's history? If anyone knows of a study that has addressed this, please post information about it, as I would be very interrested to read it.
If there was a 60/40, 75/25, or 80/20 split I'd take the news better...
No dissenting opinion at all?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Scientists these days are no more ethical than Used Car Dealers or Politicians. They go where the money is. And there's no money in proving that humans aren't causing Global Warming. And there are no publications that will give ink to alternative theories. Scientists get their funding from grants. Mainly from the government, but from NGOs as well. The money says, "Prove that humans are causing Global Warming". Yes, the money talks. And the scientists listen. Moral of the story: Don't trust a scientist any more than you would trust a poltician or used car dealer.
After the most recent Slashdot story I actually steeled myself to do something about it. I re-read the whole story at Threshold 2 to gather UIDs of people who might help. The idea is to build a list of myths and authoritative answers to them. For example, the old line that the sun's getting hotter, and that this explains global warming, comes up over & over again. Many, very patient! and knowledgable people posted to that story with excellent refutations of such nonsense.
I'm going to put my plaintext mail address in this comment, that's how serious I am about this! You can even help if you believe that Climate Change is hippie nonsense trotted out by pseudo scientists who just want more funding!!
What I am looking for:
If you have violent objections to the idea that global warming is a bad thing, please email me at the address below describing why you think this. As you will see if you hit 'see the rest of this comment', the existing list - which were collected from a single Slashdot story - is already pretty long, so this isn't so vital.
If you can help knock down such gibberish- if you have posted with a calm, well-argued and ideally knowledgable or carefully referenced refutation of a wild claim - please email me and make yourself known; I will get in touch in the next few days.
If you want to subscribe me to lots of spam lists, don't bother; Gmail are very good at spam filtering, you'll get yourself blacklisted when I hit 'report spam' and you won't be helping your cause one little bit.
If you can help, mail me at:
username: imipak; domain (at): gmail.com
Here's the list I collected from the last Slashdot climate change story, only a few days ago, about "why anthropogenic climate change is a myth". Read it and weep.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
The Earth will be just fine. It will go on evolving as it has for billions of years. We humans, however, may not be so fortunate if we don't change our habits. As George Carlin once said, "the Earth will shake us off like a bad cold".
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
I'm sick and tired of the truth, too. I wish I had the same kind of sand that you have. It must be comfortable to put your head into.
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
articles from crank or non-peer-reviewed publications were not counted
This is the very reason why the layperson does not take this seriously.
When sources that disagree with the researchers are ridiculed, the people that are inclined to believe those sources lose interest in the research.
Instead of saying that "Research institute X has found Y, but their model is incorrect because they didn't factor in Z", these people are pretending that the other research doesn't exist. They need to get the support of lay people if they want their research to be taken seriously outside of academia.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
There are many articles in peer reviewd journals, by scientist who do not agree with the idea that humanity is causing global warming. That the author, in her report, can not find, nor report on any of these dissenting view brings the credibility of the study into question. As she did not publish her methodology, nor include sources further casts a shadow over the validity of this report.
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somewhat i fear that related to climate change they will follow the sentence like "we are at the edge of the abyss, but we will take a step forward"
Kyoto will do nothing to actually save us, but it WILL cause a huge amount of resources to be consumed.
What resources? How?
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
Essay Claiming 'Scientific Consensus' for Global Warming is Ridiculed
"A one-hundred-percent record of 'scientific consensus' on anthropogenic climate change would be a sensational finding indeed. In fact, such a total result would be even more remarkable than any 'consensus' ever achieved in Soviet-style elections," Peiser noted sarcastically."
No effect AND destroy the environment you say!?!? I bet you also have faith that Republicans are for "small government" and that tax cuts stimulate the economy.
Of course, 600 years ago a "peer review" would call you a crank for saying the world was round.
Your view of scientific knowledge of 600 years ago is somewhat lacking. It was well established in the year 500BCE that that the earth was indeed round, and was belived to have a size roughly to the actual size of the Earth. (The error came from assuming a perfect sphere.) Even in the year 1400 round earthers were the norm. Columbus wasn't some visionary. He just was a politcally connected sailor.
JamesBell submits this article by a geologist which suggests that the Earth is in serious, imminent, unavoidable danger.
So does his brother Art Bell.
I think he always pronounces it "nucular" in public addresses. "Nucular" is an incorrect but very common pronounciation of "nuclear"; as this dictionary entry explains, it's common because so many other terms (circular, spectacular, molecular, ocular, vascular) end with a "-ular" sound, whereas "-lear" is comparatively unfamiliar.
An analogous word would be "minuscule", very commonly misspelled as "miniscule", because so many familiar words begin with "mini-".
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
....in Canada, Global warming is A Good Thing
If I remember correctly, it was the ancient Greek scientist Erastothenes who managed to correctly estimate the circumpherence to within a few miles.
Please provide experimental evidence that supports evolutionary theory. It sounds nice, and makes sense, but until testing it produces evidence showing its correctness, it is just another theory.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
Nobody debates global warming.
The debate is centered over a number of things.
First of all, the earth is coming out of an ice age. In geologic terms, the ice ages were yesterday, and the day before it was hot and sunny. Right now, we're in spring after the ice age, and it's hard to predict if we've reached summer or not, but we know it's not as hot as it was before the winter.
We haven't been observing long enough to be able to make any conclusion about what's going on in geological terms.
What we do know is that humans are contributing to the polution and were not before. Scientists are mixed on how much the contribution matters, and not long ago, were predicting that there would be ice ages (the theory before global warming).
Kyoto makes sense to a point for a number of reasons unrelated to global warming, and as I said nobody is debating either that warming is occurring nor that humans contribute to it. The debate is largely over how much of it is natural and how much is not.
However, Kyoto doesn't apply to many countries, and this is where the Senate took exception, and it's not been resolved.
Kyoto does nobody any good if all the poluters move to third world countries exempt from the treaty. It won't cut polution, and it will hurt the economy.
That, right there, is why the Senate rejected it, and I believe it is a reasonable and correct decision personally.
It's a global problem. If member countries are still allowed to deal with countries that can produce things without obeying the treaty, then the polution will just move off shore, to those locations, and the global problem will remain.
If your code is acting bloated, and is running rather slow, it's likely and predicted that some loops you will unroll.
I saw this article on the front page and wondered to myself if there would be yet another stream of comments denying that there is evidence of climate change or that it could have any deletarious impact. Of course there was.
I am a scientist, not working directly on how anthropogenic activities are effecting the atmosphere but on what the predicted effects may have on vegetation.
As a scientist I look at all the available evidence for a question and come to some conclusion based on that evidence. There is no other sensible way to make a decisison. Where the evidence is lacking, I would try and do some work that would provide evidence one way or another.
Virtually all available evidence points to anthropogenic emmisions causing climate change and there is plenty of evidence as to what those changes may be and what the effects of those changes on the biosphere may be.
Consequently, what I wonder about the, extremely predictable, Slashdot response to an article such as this is whether it reflects the attitude of the US or whether it reflects the attiude of the predominently young, middle-class and technical readership of Slashdot?
Either way, I'm fearful of the general ignorance and lack of logical thought.
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
I am pretty convinced that global warming is happening, as it did frequently in the geologic past. However, I am not convinced that it is going to be universally harmful. Climate will change, getting worse in some places and better in others. I have half a mind to invest in arctic ocean beachfront property in Nunavik Canada :-) Ships will be passing by soon. And it may become a great fishing and swimming spot. The vast Canadian plains to the south will become rich farmland as the western US becomes desert.
What's amazing to me is that these scientists conveniently ignore the fact that the Earth's climate was warm enough during a period of time in history, where the ice receeded enough to form a land-bridge between Asia and North America.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. You've got that backwards. The Bering land bridge between Asia and Alaska formed because the Earth had grown cold enough that enough water was trapped up in glaciers that the water level receded, allowing the people to walk across the land below today's sea level. That was a likely drop of about 300 feet.
What's the explaination for that, since most of these scientists believe that we were just a bunch of monkeys during that time
We evolved from a common ancestor to monkeys. Humans didn't fully evolve into their current form until about 100,000 to 150,000 years ago. The Bering bridge last emerged above water about 70,000 years ago.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
The oil/automotive industry and "Bush's EPA" do not publish scientific journals, which goes immediately to the heart of the parent posters assertion that most journals won't even give dissenting opinion the time of day. Anyone who has been around 'scientists' knows that its not about the science. Its about the politics and the money.
Even if Kyoto was signed and enforced today, it's just a pebble in the (rising) ocean of what's needed to prevent massive climate changes.
I don't think this means the end of humanity, but we're probably looking at the death of 10's to 100's of millions through flooding, starvation and most probably civil conflict caused by shrinking land resources.
So it's now time to start looking at what we might do in terms of food production, flood protection and mass migration strategies. Is building cities underwater an option? How can we save the species from countries that will be completely submerged? It's time to start this conversation, because nobody's listening to the warnings.
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
This result isn't very interesting, much less newsworthy.
The first problem is that the primary source material for most academic papers is - other academic papers. There is a strong Andy Warhol effect in academia: once a paper is referenced by enough papers, it becomes standard practice to reference that paper. It becomes famous simply for being famous. Regardless of the papers' actual merit, a small but ideologically homogeneous set of original texts can easily spawn an entire cottage industry of follow-ons.
Secondly, who are the "peers" who review these papers? By what standard do they decide what gets published and what doesn't? The belief that someone who claims to be a scientist is only interested in the truth is, to be polite, extraordinarily naive.
One man's religion is another man's belly-laugh. - LL
If Kyoto is 100% BS, why didn't the Bush administration propose something better? Instead of pretending certainty of global warming being false (as opposed to claiming uncertainty, which might get some far-fetch support unlike total denial).
Oh, right. Bush. Political donations from oil companies. Rats. It's the fault of the soft money loophole thingy again. It's a good candidate to the source of all evil. (-;
Microsoft is pure dog-ma. FreeBSD is pure cat-ma.
Don't get me wrong. I am not saying that scientists are any different than most human beings. Individual scientists can succumb to greed, lust for fame, etc and, occasionally, will get away with publishing intentionally erroneous data. Usually when this happens, especially in an area where so many scientists are working (like climate change), their lies will be uncovered and they will be ruined (ex: cold fusion, etc).
The article being discussed here states that the vast majority of hundreds of studies on the subject have all come to the same conclusions: global warming is both real and anthropogenic. I suggest that the groundswell of /. opinion that all these researchers are wrong/lying is due to the rather unfortunate consequences of the truth. We will have to face the facts that our climate may change. Maybe for Canadians, this will be a good thing. For ocean algae and those in the lower lattitudes it will most certainly be bad.
Society invests a huge amount of money in scientific research each year, and does so in a way that ensures maximum objectivity and honesty on the part of the researchers. Averaged over time and sufficient numbers of studies, science usually hits pretty close to the mark. Therefore, to all those doubting, suck it up and deal with the damage we've done. Don't blame the messenger if you dont like the message.
Oddly enough I found that article comforting. If you don't know your past you don't know your future kind of feel.
Their suggestion to implement civil nuclear power is quite a shock at the end though. To me it seems a gamble between local / global risks. Carbonization - grow a plant today!
UBU
One of my meteorology professors debunked this myth, of which I believe him. The earth's climate has always cyclically gone from warm to cold. It's just a matter of time until we start the turn to an "ice age."
This is similar to observations made by Michael Crichton during a lecture at Caltech. http://mitosyfraudes.8k.com/Calen4/consensus.html Bascially he says the science behind global warming is dubious at best.
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
If there had been at least *some* articles pushing the opposite perspective, I would have faith that the scientific machinery is working as intended, with people pursuing multiple and opposing theories to find the real answer.
But the fact that there is *not one single* opposing viewpoint makes the whole idea of consensus sound a bit specious. I can't take seriously a scientific debate in which there is only one side of the matter being discussed.
(1) there has never been any doubt that human activities contribute to global warming. The only point of contention is wether an alteration of our current activities would cause a significant change in the rate of global warming, and wether, if this is the case, we should attempt to do so.
(2)Consensus has nothing to do with truth... unless you subscribe to the WOD view of the universe, in which case we could fix all our problems by believing at them really hard.
Good to know that human foolishness is once again aligned in a predictable direction, though.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
From my chemistry classes....
What happens when you run an arc through air?
The smell of ozone
The same is happening in the upper atmosphere
The UV strikes ordinary O2, splitting it in two, and
giving the individual atoms energy. These individual
oxygen atoms than combine with more 02 molecules to
form ozone. The ozone either breaks down in time, or absorbs some more UV, and breaks apart again. The real defense against UV is the O2, NOT the 03!
Now if I could only remember a source to cite this from....
Terrible is the fall of the mighty, for their pain is great to behold [Personal Quote(TM)]
Science is founded upon doubt--constantly challenging existing theories in search of physical truth. Considering most predictions concerning the earth's climate are based on poorly performing computer models, current theories are far from conclusive. Check out Patrick Michaels http://www.cato.org/people/michaels.html.
Let me get this straight. You think the solution to nuclear waste is to dump it into the sun, and you expect me to believe your arguments are intelligent? I am laughing way too hard. I'm pro-nuke, but I would prefer sanity when trying to make the case for it.
If I could put nuclear waste into orbit cheaply, I certainly would not want to dump it into the sun. I might decide I want it back for all of the good stuff in it and it would be much harder to get.
Much more likely would be to process and vitrify it (turn it into glass) and store it here on earth. Who knows, I might even be able to discover a way to cook off the nuclear reactions much more quickly, rendering the materials safe.
BTW, Fusion would create new radioactive by-products, massiive amounts of waste heat, but still would be more environmentally friendly than burning coal.
By asking this question you raise doubt about the quality of the work without actually presenting evidence that only a minority of the scientists do serious work on this. But if you are driving an SUV a statement like that might seem insightful even though it's completely void of information.
what wonderfully circular logic. don't question an article for its lack of information, as doing so is devoid of information. wow.
When are people going to rise up and say "Screw you and your worthless money!! You can't use it when the planet is dead!" and just take over? ...that said, I drive my Jeep Cherokee to work and back every day with no sign of changing... not like I have any alternatives though.
Sorry, I was using hyperbole with an incorrect date. However the date is not really pertinent to my point. Simple point is that a scientific consensus has not always been the most accurate thing in the world. However, I am not disputing global warming. Only some of the extreme conclusions based on the information available.
Now is the time to act. I do not feel that extreme rhetoric helps the cause, though.
..."meme".
Here's a url for a news item with one scientist claiming their research ignored numerious peer reviewed and published items not suportive of global warming! www.cnsnews.com//ViewNation.asp?Page=\Nation\archi ve\200412\NAT20041207a.html
People who go into hysterics about how the earth is in danger and the apocalypse is upon us because of all of us horrible people with our nasty machines really annoy me.
What arrogance!
Human beings have existed for only a few hundred thousand years in any recognizable form. We will probably only exist for a few hundred thousand more in any recognizable form. To the Earth, which is over four billion years old and which has survived cataclysm after cataclysm, including impacts which caused almost every single species on the planet to go extinct within a several-year timeframe, we're NOTHING. We're a weird little blip in time.
A few million years from now, there won't be any trace we ever existed. The continents will have shifted, our buildings will have been ground into dust by erosion, and whatever species takes our place will be studying our fossils, wondering what we were like.
GET OVER YOURSELVES. Even if we totally fuck up everything, in a few million years it'll all be right back to normal. We have no power whatsoever to ruin things in any permanant way. We just flatter ourselves that we're powerful.
In reality, we're nothing; we came from nothing, and we will return to nothing. So it isn't the EARTH that we should be worried about; the Earth doesn't care WHAT we do, it's just a big, immortal, unkillable rock.
Worry instead about whether we're fucking things up for OURSELVES. Because THAT, my dears, is the REAL issue.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Benny Peiser, a senior lecturer in Social Anthropology & Sport Sociology at Liverpool John Moores University and the editor of of CCNet (Cambridge Conference Network) webzine, labeled Oreskes' essay a disturbing article.
"Whatever happened to the countless research papers published in the last ten years in peer-reviewed journals that show that temperatures were generally higher during the Medieval Warm Period than today, that solar variability is most likely to be the key driver of any significant climate change and that the methods used in climate modeling are highly questionable?" Peiser asked.
"Given the countless papers published in the peer-reviewed literature over the last ten years that implicitly or explicitly disagree with the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, one can only conclude that all of these were simply excluded from the [Science Magazine] review. That's how it arrived at a 100 percent consensus!" he added.
According to Peiser, Oreskes' assertion that there is a 100 percent consensus about the issue is not backed by science.
"Even [former Soviet dictator Joseph] Stalin himself did not take consensus politics to such extremes," Peiser explained. "In the Soviet Union the official 'participation rate' was never higher than 98-99 percent.
"So how did the results published in Science achieve a 100 percent level of conformity? Regrettably, the article does not include any reference to the [unpublished?] study itself, let alone the methodology on which the research was based. This makes it difficult to check how Oreskes arrived at the truly miraculous results," he added.
There's no time to stop for gas, we're already late.
Energy efficiency is great, but it's not going to be the solution to global warming. What's likely to happen is that the cost savings from energy efficiency will result in more economic growth that, you guessed it, results in more energy use.
Reducing energy usage substantially will require fundamental changes to the Western, and particularly the American, way of life. Swapping your current SUV for a hybrid ain't enough. Housing will have to be rebuilt from the ground up. It'll have to be much smaller, and air conditioning will have to be reduced substantially. Private swimming pools will likely have to go. Consumer goods will have to be more expensive to be energy-efficient, and not nearly as luxurious - that room-sized fridge-freezer combo will have to go, as will that wall-sized plasma TV. Plane travel will have to become rarer - as well as chewing fuel, apparently contrails do have a not insubstantial effect on global warming.
And the above will all be pretty much in vain - because China and India will continue to grow quickly and burn lots of coal in the process.
In my view, the only practical solution is to find ways of getting energy that don't cause global warming. And we need to do something fairly dramatic right now. And nuclear is the only feasible option for that something.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
http://accesstoenergy.com/
Our government has recently enacted a Clean Air Act AND a Healthy Forests Initiative, so we can expect this whole global warming issue to resolve itself in a few months.
Share and rate p
The Earth is decidedly NOT in "serious, imminent danger". The planet is going to be just fine for quite a while, as far as anyone can tell. Get it right. Life on Earth might have a hard time adjusting to rapid climate change, but that's happened before, and life (and, yes, the planet Earth itself) has continued to exist. The REAL question (as the discussion appears to notice) is how much of this climate change do we have control over, and what should we be doing to keep ourselves out of trouble?
Time for rampant hedonism and fornication. We're all doomed.
Can we get an exact date on the doom? I want to start the bacchanalia about a week before, so as to optimize my avoidance of consequences.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Simple point is that a scientific consensus has not always been the most accurate thing in the world.
Simple point is, that science in the way we know it today is a thing developed during the 19th century. Before it there was knowledge, there was lots of speculation and there was no separation between hypothesis, theory and fact.
Even the great scientist of the late 17th and early 18th century, Isaac Newton, was more interested in alchemic experiments and metaphysical speculation than in the Physics and Mathematics where he laid the fundamentations for today's Calculus and Mechanics.
Today's scientific consensus is still lacking, and it is no replacement for a thoroughly tested theory. But it is the best thing we can get, if said theory is still missing. Just because it's not perfect you shouldn't just throw it away.
The atmosphere is being continually scrubbed by rain and low-altitude clouds. Once that water hits ocean, soil or river reactions get very complex, but generally pH increases, binding the CO2 tighter in solution.
this criticism is pretty slack. it ignores the point of Crichton's diatribe - that being concensus is often used when there's no hard supporting science - in favour of a rib jab. E=mc2 is a quantifiable equation, as is the distance to the sun, and the effect of malnutrition. human affect on the environment, on the other hand, is not honestly quantifiable as the historical data is severely lacking in context. regardless of the simple fact that i'd look sideways at any scientist that claims we're not affecting the global climate, i'd probably look *down* on a scientist that claims it's proven.
does that dismiss human affect on climate change? absolutely not, but there are people who believe that questioning an absolute certainty of it does dismiss it. they're wrong, they're arrogant, and they're not learning from history.
You have your doubts about gravitation too, then? mt
mt
Your view of scientific knowledge of 600 years ago is somewhat lacking. It was well established in the year 500BCE that that the earth was indeed round, and was belived to have a size roughly to the actual size of the Earth. (The error came from assuming a perfect sphere.) Even in the year 1400 round earthers were the norm. Columbus wasn't some visionary. He just was a politcally connected sailor.
While some people held the idea that the earth was round. Columbus shouldn't be written off as a 'politically connected sailor'. Spain, after all was the last country he lobbied! He was a cartographer before he was a sailor! While most well-read Europeans probably felt the earth was round no one could easily deny the that earth is flat. It made more sense and was infinatly easier to believe.
The guy is a professor of Statistics for Political "Science". Not exactly a great background for commenting on paleoclimatology or geochemistry or environmental biology or any of the other specialized disciplines he asserts have somehow gotten it totally wrong.
...
(E.O. Wilson's decades of field work? Useless stupidity - how could he learn anything by staring at ants all those years? He should have spent his time productively misrepresenting other peoples work, like Lomborg.)
So it's no surprise his work's not popular with people who actually do science - he doesn't seem to care what is actually going on with the biosphere.
His political and monetary success, however, does at least put the lie to the old saw that "those that can't do, teach"
hehe, i can't tell if you're jokey or not. the grandparent talks about misuse of begging the question, and you zing him for begging the question? bravo, sir!
This is a classic one. Take a group of people with widely divided opinions on an issue. Take the point you want to prove, stated in a sufficiently broad manner. Take the inverse of that point.
Now, divide the group into people who support your point and people who support the inverse, without asking them directly, but rather based on reading related things which they have written.
The fallacy here is that most of them actually haven't stated an opinion on your point at all - you have excluded the middle possibility that the response might be "no comment", and redistributed this group between the extreme cases. It's not actually in "How to lie with statistics" but it could have been.
Most of these papers say things like "Here is an interesting correlation that I found". These are valuable scientific papers, but it must be understood that correlation does not imply a connection. It merely implies that there is something here worth investigating and explaining. Most of the people who wrote those papers are fully aware of this and were not stating an opinion on what was going on - they were just offering something interesting that they discovered. History teaches us that correlations in the physical sciences are occasionally connections but more commonly they are things which we don't understand at all.
You can't prove anything outside a laboratory. (Or more accurately, it's not proof unless it's possible to replicate in a laboratory by anybody with the right tools).
You can argue all day about what you want people to do (personally, I don't care), but you're going to have to do it without proof. Because there isn't any, and we can't pack a solar system into a laboratory to investigate it.
Jesus told Bush it's all part of the Rapture, so don't worry about it.
Does anybody know how the global emissions from volcanos compare to human emissions?
I'm not be trying to be a troll or anything -- I actually don't know and am curious.
There's something odd about this article. Here's what I noticed:
1. They don't list how many different authors generated the 928 papers. It could be that the same group of scientist are generating a lot of material that is naturally reaching the same conclusion.
2. Why did they select "climate change" as the keywords? What did other keywords yield? For example, "greenhouse gaseses" or "global warming".
3. The footnote #9 seems to indicate some degree of subjectivity:
"The first year for which the database consistently published abstracts was 1993. Some abstracts were deleted from our analysis because, although the authors had put 'climate change' in their key words, the paper was not about climate change."
This also would lead one to believe that the keyword process is not accurate and could be potentially missing many abstracts. If the authors have keyworded unrelated papers with "climate change", how are you certain that all related papers were keyworded with "climate change?". This leads back to point #1. If there are many of the same authors creating similar content, then it follows they are more likely to use the same keywords when they create their documents. Likewise, if different authors are creating many dissenting documents, then they could be using different keywords.
4. Why was just the ISI database searched? This study could be used just as easily to prove that the ISI database has a bias towards papers that favor the human involvement in climate chang theory.
I don't know whether or not human activities are causing the earth to warm, but I don't think we can draw any conclusions from this. To me, this article doesn't exactly look like science.
> Au contraire, there is a hell of a lot of money up for grabs for any
> 'scientist' who wants to 'disprove' global warming.
Not really. But even if you found some funding (probably from a corp) to do some research in a 'forbidden' direction, try getting your conclusions published in a peer reviewed journal. Won't happen. And of course after that you will be blacklisted so you can change careers because you will never be accepted as a 'real scientist' again, because all 'real scientists' believe in Global Warming about like Christians believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus.
> The question here is not a political one.
I'll give you that one. Politics gets into it, but at core, Global Warming is religion. If the weather warms somewhere, it is Global Warming at work. If it cools off, well that is Global Warming also. (Yes, they have theology already in the can for that one, I have seen it in action.)
> What's controversial about this issue?
By asking that question it is clear no rational discourse is possible with you, you too are a religious zealot. Hopefully others reading this thread are less invested in the theory to reject all discussion out of hand on the issue. I'll not reguritate the other side here, that is what Google is for. Suffice to say that despite twenty years of vigorous politically correct intellectual supression there are still a few intellectually independent souls standing up and shouting that you guys are full of it.
Are they right? Not really sure myself, but they do make some good points, enough that calls to close discussion and move on to dismantling Western Civilivation in response to a -potential threat- is somewhat rash in my humble opinion.
Then if one is politically aware, one notices that the loudest voices in the Global Warming crowd also want to dismantle Western Civilivation for any of a dozen other totally unrelated reasons, a little more suspicion is justified.
Then add in the Russians just ratified Kyoto so of course the drums are beating like mad for us to be 'reasonable' and sign on and the timing is just SO convienient. Politics and Religion aligned is almost never a good thing, and that is exactly what we have here.
Democrat delenda est
This seems to me a matter of managing risk - for example:
Risk : The sea-level will rise 8 meters (~25ft) in the next 100 years.
Likeliehood : say 1% within 100 years;
Cost : Hundred's of low-lying cities flooded; huge tracts of arable land sterilised leading to inadequate food production; fresh water supplies contaminated for billions of people; Deaths of 1-5 billion people (another guess depending upon when).
If we assume the risk of occurrence over the next 100 years is only 1%, and that the consequences are so calamitous, then they cannot be ignored. The risk managers are our governments; without government action, our collective response to the identified risk is just "hope a lot" and I don't think that's good enough.
Are these models mathematical approximations based on the assumption that a small-scale system (room full of CO2 with a heat lamp type thing) behaves in the same manner as large scale system (atmosphere full of CO2 with a giant ball of nuclear fusion shining on it type thing)? And what specific assumptions were made regarding the larger system?
The word "model" makes me a bit uncomfortable, here, because it conjures up images of computer climate modelling, which seems to skip all the steps between dimensional analysis and entering data points. Would be good to know what empirically verified data you're working with, so I'm not stuck with this impression.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
We do not inherit the world from our parents; we borrow it from our children - American Indian Proverb
Nobody writes papers of the sort "global warming, yes or no?" in scientific journals. They write papers like, um, these. (result of a search for papers with abstract including the words "climate change" in J. Clim. in 2003-2004)
Despite what you hear on Slashdot comments and in the press, very large and imminent anthropogenic climate change is not controversial within the relevant sciences. The question for the public to consider is only whether Michael Crichton and the Wall Street Journal editorial page know more about this subject than the membership of AGU and AMS and AAAS and NAS and pretty much every similar group worldwide.
mt
Any time you see every scientist agree...
All scientists agree that the Earth is round.
All scientists agree that the sun is made up of Hydrogen.
All scientists agree that gravity pulls things down.
All scientists agree that smoking is bad for you.
All scientists agree that splitting the atom will produce energy.
Why is it that when all scientists agree that human activity is having an effect on Global Climate, all of a sudden your hear all these people begin to doubt them. Claiming that all that these scientists care about is their funding is ludicrous, because many of them will get funding either way. Of course, those that are really into money, like Bjorn Lomborg, will actually argue against the mounting evidence. In exchange they'll get huge grants from industries whose profits might be diminished by scientific enquiry. And those who doubt only when scientists challenge their love for their SUVs, like ostriches, will be happy to put their heads back in the sand and say: see, there's a couple of scientists who say that Global Climate change isn't happening. They must be right!
Personally, I'd rather not take the chance. If Global Warming has only a 10% chance of being true, then the odds are still way too high, because the consequences are catastrophic.
So, in response to you, I say that if every scientist agrees (or at least no scientist disagrees) that Global Climate Change threatens us, then we should be very concerned. We should fund their studies, and if we find out that they misused the funds or overstated the threat in order to get more money, we can always cut that funding. In other words, unlike the most catastrophic scenarios linked to Global Warming, it's a reversible mistake.
Better safe than sorry, especially when the future of humanity is at stake.
Reminder: find a new sig
Any time you see every scientist agree (or at least no scientist disagree) on a very controversial topic, be very suspicious.
Mhmmm, you must be one of those people that think that the evolution of the species is just one theory among many, right?
sigh...
No sig for the moment.
This global warning crap has taken on a religious cult status. It is freakin obvious that the earth is warming up. It has been doing so for 10,000 years and it is still colder than it was when the dinosaurs roamed.
It is probably going to get much hotter still - get used to it.
Oh well, what the hell...
Unlike Christianity, science is not a religion. The "truth" is based on the basis of observation and data. If someone had compelling data that say North American deforestation was a natural process and not due to the timber and pulp industries cutting of trees and conversion of that land to agriculture, industry, and mini-marts, it would be published. In this case as in the case of global warming there is compelling evidence that there are human factors.
If scientists cannot agree whether mean temperatures will rise by 3 degrees or 5 degrees, it is not particularly fair to dismiss their theories outright.
Sound policy in my opinion would be to immediatly consider at least the easier reductions in our emissions. It certainly won't harm anything. In the decades when some were in denial of the harmful effects of smoking would it have been unhealthy to quit?
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
In the 1400s any reasonably educated man knew the earth was round. That includes the others monarchs Columbus contacted. Columbus was ridiculed because an earth with a circumference of 40000 km and Asia stretching a maximum of 10000 km to the east would mean certain death from starvation and lack of drinking water somewhere in a very big ocean. Fortunately for Columbus, he hit the Americas before running out of food.
"This seems to be a problem with the "chicken little's" of global warming. They report predictions that are easily dismissed as "so what?" ... It's not like even the most extreme activist is predicting Waterworld or anything.
OK, so my personal opinions are not as "so what? But there is a valid point to these objections."
Maybe not Waterworld, but (extreme activists aside) some fairly conservative scientific models are predicting that large areas of inhabitable land will no longer be so in the next century. (Hint: don't buy land in Florida) As an example I live in a city which is already running out of water (Sydney, Australia), the computer models predict that in 70 years time rainfall will only be 40% or current levels (that is I think the worst case scenario, at least I hope it is). At the same time temperatures are going to (are already) soaring. We are seriously considering desalination plants down here. I think invading Canada would be more cost-effective, but anyway ...
I sure hope that these predicitions are wrong, but here in Australia, hardly anyone whose job it is to investigate this hasa any doubt that global warming is already upon us. From the CSIRO Atmopheric Division, to the Insurance Industry, the Fire Service and even our conservative government, climate change (nor even its anthropogenic nature, simply isn't a matter of controversy. The only controversy is whether to sign Kyoto or not, which our government won't, despite claiming to meet our Kyoto goals (and the excuse we get isn't "China," its the "it doesn't go far enough" line).
I find all this talk about the "chicken little's" (sic), the scientific conspiracy (from others, not you), etc to be extremely surreal. Let alone an argument that because the climate has never been static it's just cool that we actively make Earth's atmosphere resemble Venus'! I mean, do you guys all live too far north of the equator, a different planet, or what?
The time for fart-arsing around about "legitimate philosophical questions" passed about 10 years ago. Right now the questions are how are we going to 1) Stop the burning of fossil fuels (which IMHO means going nuclear) and 2) Deal with the effects of climatic change that are already with us.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
..CFC's were found to be an ozone depleting gas at exactly the same time that the patents ran out; requiring entire industries to switch to a recently patented, more expensive, less inert alternative.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
"In other news, 75% of the owners of McDonald's franchises believe that including McDonald's in your diet is not a bad idea. The other 25% had no opinion but that may be because they didn't stop munching on their Big Mac.
This is not surprising at all. Very few human beings bite the hands that feed them and scientists are human--those in academia are especially human and especially political. They're not going to be out there proving that global warming isn't happening or that it is a natural phenomenon when doing so, in sufficient numbers, will guarantee that funding will dry up on the topic and they'll have to find another research gravy train.
This also doesn't consider how many studies may have been done, submitted for publishing, and rejected. This could be just as much a political condemnation on those that decide whether or not a study is worthy of being published as it is any comment on the validity of global warming and/or its possible human sources.
Any time you see every scientist agree (or at least no scientist disagree) on a very controversial topic, be very suspicious.
"
And your basically saying "I have no credible proof of my side of the agrument, so it must mean all the credible proof is magically hidden from us".
There as much money to be maid refuting global warming (Halberton and the auto-industry would dearly love to see a credible study refuting climate change) as there are supporting global warming.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I suspect it's going to be tough for them to avoid growing emissions as they continue to grow economically, now that they've done the easy stuff - at least, without using a lot of nuclear power.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Not really. But even if you found some funding (probably from a corp) to do some research in a 'forbidden' direction, try getting your conclusions published in a peer reviewed journal. Won't happen.
It won't get published for reasons such as poor methodology, maths etc. Not because you view is 'forbidden' or not politically correct. You are simply suffering under a conspiracy theory view of Science if you believe otherwise. In fact, while perhaps not in Science, oil-industry funded research, and some not funded by the oil industry, which argues against the consensus of climate change, has been published. It's rare, true, but this rarity is because the bulk of the evidence points in the opposite direction, not because of some grand conspiracy aimed at ensuring funding for climatic research.
> What's controversial about this issue? By asking that question it is clear no rational discourse is possible with you, you too are a religious zealot.
I'm neither religious, not a zealot, and it's called a rhetorical question. I'm asking (as should be clear from the rest of the passage), "where does the controversy here come from?" My point is that there is little scientifc controversy. The controversy is largely injected at the political level.
Hopefully others reading this thread are less invested in the theory to reject all discussion out of hand on the issue.
Again, I'm not going to reject out of hand any discussion based on evidence and a scientific understanding of that evidence out of hand. Quite the opposite, I genuinely hope that we are all wrong! I hope to wake up tomorrow and that it was all a bad dream, a mass delusions of the world scientific community caused by some faulty maths somewhere down the line. And you know why I hope this? It's because, at our current state of knowledge, the conclusion that we are headed for a very nasty time climatically is ineluctable and because I have children. But I'm not going to stick my head in the sand on this one.
[I]f one is politically aware, one notices that the loudest voices in the Global Warming crowd also want to dismantle Western Civilivation
I consider myself fairly politically aware, but I'm quite unable to see how shifting from oil to uranium amounts to a dismantling of Western Civilization. Perhaps you can clear that one up for me? Again the opposite is true, it's through technological advance alone that we are going to beat this one. We have to move away from this C19th energy source.
> Unlike Christianity, science is not a religion.
No, but all too many 'scientists' are Gaians or worse. And it isn't ALL scientists, just the ones who spout this stuff like it was settled fact. Of course they are the only voices you will hear in the mainstream press. Or the scientific papers, because disenting voices can't make it past peer review and scientists being generally above average in intelligence know this so would tend to not bother attempting to publish a career ending paper.
> If scientists cannot agree whether mean temperatures will rise by 3
> degrees or 5 degrees, it is not particularly fair to dismiss their
> theories outright.
Yes it is. Because unless their predictions can follow reality fairly close one can't believe their CONCLUSIONS as to cause. If the earth is warming because it is SUPPOSED to be warming, say due to the documented increase in sunspot activity being related to increased solar output, then Kyoto means destroying our economy just to boost the self esteem of a few hippy freaks.
> Sound policy in my opinion would be to immediatly consider at least
> the easier reductions in our emissions.
Why? Under what authority do you lay claim to dictate how me and others live our lives? If a proven danger to thee, me and everyone exists, then yes our government then has a duty to act in the common defense as provided for in the Constituition. But until the threat is at LEAST as proven as Saddam's threat was; please piss off and stop trying to run everyone else's life.
> It certainly won't harm anything.
Unless you happen to be one of the ones who loses their livelihood in the economic chaos that signing Kyoto would bring.
> In the decades when some were in denial of the harmful effects of
> smoking would it have been unhealthy to quit?
The data on smoking was pretty damned clear. The Tobacco industry was forced to keep up a front on the issue because they realized what the trial lawyers were trying to do... what they DID do eventually. There ain't too many people alive today who didn't (or shouldn't have) know that smoking was bad for you when they lit their first one. Bad example.
Democrat delenda est
You might want to think of someone other than yourself for a change. Our children and our children's children maybe...
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
If I remember correctly, it was the ancient Greek scientist Erastothenes who managed to correctly estimate the circumpherence to within a few miles.
Using the well in Alexandria that on one day of the year the sun shone directly into.
Like Bush could pronounce "Colonoscopy". As if.
fish and pipes
an interesting statistic would be how many articles were rejected
Your argument is ridiculous. If scientists really behaved in the way that is projected onto them, you'd find more of them willing to stake their reputation on lucrative and silly ideas like missile defense.
Any time you see every scientist agree (or at least no scientist disagree) on a very controversial topic, be very suspicious.
Now there's critical thinking. Disinterested observers can't be trusted if those with vested interests publicly disagree with them.
I think we should make a huge fusion reactor 93 million miles from earth so it won't pollute anything here. It could light about half the world at a time, too. It could provide more than enough power for the earth for the next 4 billion years at least.
I knew that was coming when I posted it. That's why my original post was written "Any time you see every scientist agree on a very controversial topic, be very suspicious." The issues you mentioned are not controversial.
Convenient quoting on your part. Usually indicative of an agenda.
Why is it that when all scientists agree that human activity is having an effect on Global Climate, all of a sudden your hear all these people begin to doubt them.
If all scientists truly agreed that human activity is having an effect on global climate (lower case is fine) then I don't think you'd have a lot of people doubting them (not just beginning, we've doubted them for a long time!). The fact is that all scientists do not agree this is true. The only thing this article proves is that the collection of articles they selected from the subset of scientific literature that they deemed worthy of reviewing supports their conclusion. You don't even have to be a scientist to recognize just how hokey the whole basis for this article is.
Claiming that all that these scientists care about is their funding is ludicrous
I'm not claiming it's the only thing they care about. But you're naive if you think it doesn't enter their mind.
Oh really? Who is going to fund research proving that global warming is not real. Industry, that's about it. So they'll be quickly labeled an industry stooge by their colleagues (just as you did in your message) and their standing in the community will go down. Not because they're wrong but because they're going against the grain.
And those that would (or would have) funded research to prove that global warming is not ocurring has already done that. We know that there is a lot of doubt regarding global warming. Anyone with an open mind and critical thinking skills can recognize that there is more than reasonable doubt as to the accuracy of the predictions of the pro-global warming crowd. As their models become "more accurate" their predictions of natural calamities slowly become less and less severe. And they spend more time engaging in gloom and doom and explaining why the satellite record doesn't confirm their predictions than actually getting real science done.
In exchange they'll get huge grants from industries whose profits might be diminished by scientific enquiry.
Or by "junk science." Take your pick of terms.
Personally, I'd rather not take the chance. If Global Warming has only a 10% chance of being true, then the odds are still way too high, because the consequences are catastrophic.
Sorry, that's extremism talking. If there is a 10% chance of it being true and it's going to cost a trillion dollars worldwide to fix the problem then we had better be avoiding at least $10 trillion worth of damage. If not then it was not a worthwhile investment. It may be cheaper to just move the people that live too close to the ocean than to try to keep the ocean from rising and pay a little more in insurance for the supposedly more frequent severe storms.
Not to mention no-one really knows what the consequences of global warming is if it's true. All we have are models created by scientists that find themselves, quite frankly, in a position of power and public importance that scientists would not normally find themselves.
So, in response to you, I say that if every scientist agrees (or at least no scientist disagrees) that Global Climate Change threatens us, then we should be very concerned.
goddamn cows
Our understanding of gravity is not complete. There is still research being done.I nertia& Gravity1.htm
http://www.mrelativity.net/InertiaGravity/
It is possible that the gravitational force could be foud to be a subset of another force, so maybe gravity as its own entity doesn't exist.
http://arxiv.org/html/physics/9908024
I am in agreement with the grandparent. It is worry some that little research seems to be done on alternative theories.
University of Leicester geologist Jan Zalasiewicz heads a group of eminent geologists which has just published a paper in The Guardian
1) The Guardian is not a peer-reviewed journal.
2) The Guardian is notorious for it Left-leaning political views.
These changes did not lead to catastrophic global extinctions of the earth's biota.
3) The extent of extinctions in those periods of significant climate change can only be estimated roughly, based on the small fraction of plants and animals that were in the special conditions necessary for fossilization to occur.
4) The phrase, "catastrophic global extinctions" leaves unanswered how widespread the extinctions are believed to have been in those eras.
5) Is the geological group prepared to claim that current climate changes would lead to "catastrophic global extinctions," and, if so, how solid is the evidence for such a claim?
The extensive animal and plant communities of the past, undisrupted by human development, could adapt to the changes by migrating, or by shrinking or expanding populations.
6) Animal and plant communities certainly have retained the option of changing their populations.
In shrinking animal populations, of course, there is an excess of deaths over births, by starvation or predation. Our current human population, faced with comparable climate change, will have a similar choice, and there is now little room for migration.
7) Humans occupy a very small fraction of the entire Planet.
8) Human adaptibility gives humanity virtually unlimited migration opportunities.
the longest Antarctic ice-core record yet obtained shows that the warm phase before that, a little less than half a million years ago, lasted some 30,000 years. That long interglacial episode is thought to be the best model for our current warm phase, because of the similarity of the earth's alignment vis-à-vis the sun's rays. On these grounds, therefore, even without human intervention, another 20 000 years of warmth may be expected.
9) Climate change (global or local) is not understood well-enough for reliable, direct extrapolations from a single historical data point.
That the earth has been shown to recover eventually is philosophically comforting, but will be of no practical help to many hundreds of human generations.
10) Of course, Earth is not harmed by climate change, and Dr. Zalasiewicz surely must know that. Such a comment is a sloppy-slip more commonly seen from environmental alarmists.
So how much can sea level rise in a world where, say, the levels of CO2 are at twice pre-industrial levels and where global temperatures are between 2 and 5 degrees higher? We cannot predict this precisely, but sea level rises of a few to several tens of metres would not be geologically unusual.
11) The only way to know how far sea levels would rise per atmospheric change is to make careful measurements of sea level changes against atmospheric changes, controlling for other variables. Appeals to what has happened in other circumstances are mere idle speculation.
Even at today's slightly elevated temperatures, with a rise of around half a degree centigrade, mountain glaciers are receding significantly, as also seem to be, locally, the margins of the ice in Greenland and Antarctica. The Greenland icecap is vulnerable, and its loss would mean a sea level rise of some 7 metres... This would accord with geological evidence indicating past ice-sheet collapses, releasing 'iceberg armadas' and causing sea level rises of several metres in a decade.
12) Noteably, the article presents absolutely no measured change in sea levels.
The threat to humanity is clear: such a disappearance of living space (with some 100 million people living within less than 1 metre a
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
We're not arguing global warming in this thread. We're arguing whether or not all scientists really agree with it.
There as much money to be maid refuting global warming (Halberton and the auto-industry would dearly love to see a credible study refuting climate change) as there are supporting global warming.
See above in this thread. They've funded their studies and there is reasonable doubt as to global warming. More studies from the same industries probably isn't going to sway public opinion since everyone cynically believes that if an industry funded it it's automatically suspect whereas if someone else (including environmental organizations) funded it them it's somehow pure and untainted. Likewise scientists that publish papers on global warming are looked upon as progressive while those that question it would be ridiculed as industry stooges, etc. and have their credibility questioned.
Hmm, I wonder which path they're going to choose?
> You are simply suffering under a conspiracy theory view of Science if
> you believe otherwise.
Ignore the political biases of the Global Warming crowd, ignore everything but blatent self interest, and unless you want to be laughed at you must admit that scientists are human and subject to act in their self interest. At this point in the game, if someone DID debunk Global Warming and managed to get published, how many climatologists would still have careers since every last one of them has staked their professional reputations on this theory being fact? No, at this point is is illogical to expect reason from the scientists on this issue. Religion clouded their judgement and now they are in too deep to even consider whether they were wrong.
> Again, I'm not going to reject out of hand any discussion based on
> evidence and a scientific understanding of that evidence out of hand.
Ok, then consider these items:
1. Sunspot activity has been increasing over most of the 20th century. If Mr. Sun is responsible it is natural climate change.
2. To the best of my knowledge, No computer models exists that can be loaded with 1900 and then allowed to run and produce the 20th century without a lot of unexplained fudge factors to make it come out right. No model exists which has been allowed to run into the future and then checked with what actually happened a decade later has produced a match.
3. Very few records of long term tempratures exist where the measuring station is not now inside a urban heat dome.
Taken together, just those three items means we can't say with confidence the temp is actually currently rising globally, and even if it is we can't say whether our actions are responsible. And we can't make any sort of meaningful predictions as to how much it might go up, whether other forces will act to accelerate or moderate any rise, etc. Basically all we CAN say is global and regional tempratures change over time and they may or may not be changing now.
Yes there is also a lot of very compelling evidence on the other side, but not enough to call the matter settled, and in my opinion not enough to justify preemtive war against ourselves that will certainly cause massive social and economic harm.
> I'm quite unable to see how shifting from oil to uranium amounts to a
> dismantling of Western Civilization.
Why not call for Fusion power while you are at it. Too many (so called) Scientists are just as religiously opposed to anything related to the N word to seriously consider it as an option. To get a paniced retreat from fossil fuels would require the Global Warming zealots to be in political ascendence and that means they would say no to more reactors.
I'd say build reactors to get us away from depending on Middle Eastern Oil, and that argument is equally valid whether Global Warming is real, natural, wrong or an outright hoax. And if the Earth does start warming we can always just orbit some mylar sheets and block a fraction of a percent of the Sun until we rebalance, problems we create by being overly clever primates we can probably fix the same way, especially ones that operate over such a long time horizon.
Democrat delenda est
There you go again, implying that only those that question global warming could be influenced by vested interests. That's just plain naive.
Step 2: Along with a number of solar power satellites at the Earth-Moon L4 and L5 points, build solar parasols at the Earth-Sun L1 point. Make enough of them to block 1-2% of the solar flux.
Step 3: Profit!
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Are you utterly clueless? Have you seen the Los Angeles skyline, or worse Mexico City? Decreasing emissions is beneficial whether or not they cause global warming. The first thing the government should be thinking about is the health of the people, not the economy.
Time makes more converts than reason
Having followed the topic as an interested lay-person for the last 20 years, I find it the need to refute attempted dismissals of climate change hypothesis hard to comprehend. However, the point of the exercise is to build a solid list of such refutations. I have a fwe dozen things listed in various bokomarks files, but clearly what's needed is a systematic lists of properly sourced and justified sources.
At some point it'll probably come down to *toc-toc-toc* these scientists are all crazy!" on the part of the nay-sayers. At that point I suspect we'll have to resort to simply shrugging and saying "well if you're not going to accept the science that makes your computers run, models atomic reactions to 1x10^20th degree of accuracy, etc etc (pick your favourite metric) - you might as well be arguing that an invsible Snarg Monster is reading everything you type over your shoulder - ie., the arguments are beyond the arena of rational debate and may therefore be dismissed as unscientific, irrational etc etc. The difference is that *after* this exercise, I'll be able to point nay-sayers to chapter and verse before insulting them ;)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
- Scientists think about funding, but pushing an agenda to acheive funding is ultimately a career-limiting move when the political pendulum shifts, as it has in recent years. And as with most things, the scientific ego supercedes the need to seek acceptance through funding - scientists will push theories they believe in, and try to swing funding their way, not vice versa.
- Have you actually read any of the literature regarding climate change? It doesn't sound like it - you don't see much politicizing in peer-reviewed journals. Certainly the exacting of personal/institutional spats occurs, but the literature certainly doesn't read the way you imply it does.
- I don't think stating that no scientific paper reviewed discounts anthropomorphic climate change will have a chilling effect on climate research: scientists are well aware that correlation is not the same as causation, after all. When reliable evidence that supports the theory that climate change occurs independent of human activity surfaces, it will be published. When reliable evidence that supports the theory that climate change occurs because of human activity, it will also be published. Until then, we'll continue to study the mechanisms behind climate change and look for links. It's just that simple.
- The Science article merely states that the bulk of peer-reviewed literature allows for the possibility of anthropogenic climate change, nothing more. Anything you read into it sounds more like your agenda than anything else.
Anyways, take it as you will - I doubt seriously you're prepared to think critically about this topic. But making blanket statements accusing scientists of massive malfeasance to further a political agenda that counters your own smacks more of conspiracy theory than a reasoned argument, and it certainly doesn't impress the average scientific Slashdot reader.But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
The climate is changing and the planet is getting warmer. So what if Antartica melts! Say that global warming will cost the USA 100 billion dollars in property damage. That's chump change compared to some of the money we're blowing now. Now, look at the benefits, longer growing season, more frequent rain in some parts of the country. It could turn out that the benefits of global warming outweigh the cost. Rather than trying to somehow "undo" all of our modifications to the planetary eco-system, the USA should learn how to control them, so we can arbitrarily alter global climate as suits its strategic needs.
This is my sig.
The best site on this I'm aware of is Spencer Weart's history:
The Discovery of Global Warming.
A quarter-million words on why scientists know that the climate is changing, and how they know that we humans are the main cause.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Kyoto and most global warming advocates are not primarily concerned with the emissions that cloud the L.A. or Mexico City skyline. They're concerned about CO2 which is invisible and not poisonous.
The first thing the government should be thinking about is the health of the people, not the economy.
There is no evidence that CO2 negatively impacts the health of the people. I think if CO2 were linked to human health you'd find far less opposition to the proposition of reducing it.
The solution to the global problems of energy, pollution, food, etc. is fewer people. Malthus was right, advances in technology over the past 150 years or so have simply forestalled what is otherwise inevitable.
Even if there is some end run around Malthus's predictions, we don't know what it is today. Therefore, population reduction is still the quickest available solution today.
Finally, if each North American / Western European consumes X times what people in other parts of the world consume, logically the first thing to stop is the movement of people into the areas of North American / Western Europe (i.e., stop creating new North Americans / Western Europeans).
> Are you utterly clueless? Have you seen the Los Angeles skyline, or
> worse Mexico City?
Not with my own eyes, but that is just one of the myriad reasons I choose NOT to live in a major urban area. We don't need the almighty hand of the State to make our decisions for us.
> Decreasing emissions is beneficial whether or not they cause global
> warming.
Agreed. But make the arguments on those grounds if you want me to agree instead of this chicken little stuff about the world ending unless we ratify Kyoto that passes for rational discourse in the mainstream press. And then be willing to go with the one solution that will work; build modern (as in safe) nuke plants. Yes we should be working on hybrid cars (but admit they ain't ready for prime time yet) wind power, etc. Over the next twenty to thirty years the only tech that can supply the world's energy needs is the power of the atom. We have learned a lot from the earlier designs and can now build plants that are as close to foolproof as anything mortal humans can ever do.
And while we wait on those plants to get built (and the decade of lawsuits and other legal roadblocks from the Greens) drill in the freaking ANWAR for more domestic oil so we don't depend on Middle Eastern despots for our economic wellbeing. It IS a nature area so exact firm promises from the petro industry to leave the land like they found it (and actually enforce it) but drill. Believe me, Caribo won't know the oil isn't under their feet anymore.
Democrat delenda est
Are you an atmospheric scientist? Your sentence "When reliable evidence that supports the theory that climate change occurs independent of human activity surfaces, it will be published" is rather unfortunate. 99.999% of the data that climatologists are comparing the last humdred years of climate change against records pre-human history.
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
See above in this thread. They've funded their studies and there is reasonable doubt as to global warming. More studies from the same industries probably isn't going to sway public opinion since everyone cynically believes that if an industry funded it it's automatically suspect whereas if someone else (including environmental organizations) funded it them it's somehow pure and untainted. Likewise scientists that publish papers on global warming are looked upon as progressive while those that question it would be ridiculed as industry stooges, etc. and have their credibility questioned.
Hmm, I wonder which path they're going to choose?
All the same, Where is yoru evidence? In pure numbers, the number of climate vents have increased, so there is no doubt the climate is changing.
As for scientific peer pressure, if you have enough proof to back up a claim, you write a paper. There as much push to be "revolutionary" and "counter intuitive" as there is to be "conformist" and "pro status qou". And the global warming front was the monority opinion till a decade ago. You using scarecrow arguements, where is yoru evidence? no change in climate? Take a look at the number of hurricanes this year? is that just random data noise? no. do the stats. Something is wrong, and the argument "well the scientists are being pressure to support veiw X" is idiotic.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I'm not a scientist but have had some experience dealing with them. I have, however, had lots of experience dealing with human beings. All scientists that I've met have, thus far, been human.
Scientists think about funding, but pushing an agenda to acheive funding is ultimately a career-limiting move when the political pendulum shifts, as it has in recent years. And as with most things, the scientific ego supercedes the need to seek acceptance through funding - scientists will push theories they believe in, and try to swing funding their way, not vice versa.
"Career-limiting move" is what a scientist would be engaging in today by trying to publish research that proved global warming was not happening or was not significantly human-induced. That's even more the case after Science has published an article which is basically telling the public (and scientists) "Think twice about publishing your anti-global warming research because everyone disagrees with you."
Have you actually read any of the literature regarding climate change? It doesn't sound like it - you don't see much politicizing in peer-reviewed journals.
I'm not suggesting that there are blatant politics in the articles themselves. I'm suggesting that global warming is inherently political. If we accept that global warming is real and that it is significantly human-induced we must consider that proposals such as Kyoto should be implemented which would have an unprecedented impact on the national and worldwide economy. Any paper that supports the idea of human-induced global warming is effectively forwarding that political agenda. At no time in human history have scientists had so much influence on politics as global warming scientists do today.
I don't think stating that no scientific paper reviewed discounts anthropomorphic climate change will have a chilling effect on climate research: scientists are well aware that correlation is not the same as causation, after all.
So why the hell did Science publish this silly article that proves nothing?
When reliable evidence that supports the theory that climate change occurs independent of human activity surfaces, it will be published.
We already know that climate change occurs independent of human activity. Or are we to believe that the climate was static until we humans started messing things up?
The Science article merely states that the bulk of peer-reviewed literature allows for the possibility of anthropogenic climate change, nothing more.
Actually, the Science article states that the bulk of peer-reviewed literatures claims an antropogenic source of climate change. 25% didn't dispute it, but 75% outright advocated for that position. In their sample of peer-reviewed literature, anyway... of the literature that was actually published, anyway...
Anyways, take it as you will - I doubt seriously you're prepared to think critically about this topic.
Sure I am. Althought right now we aren't really discussing global warming but whether every scientist agrees with it. That's what the Science article implies and it's just silly.
But making blanket statements accusing scientists of massive malfeasance to further a political agenda that counters your own smacks more of conspiracy theory than a reasoned argument, and it certainly doesn't impress the average scientific Slashdot reader.
The average scientific reader of Slashdot? Hahaha.
Check Lomborg's book... http://www.lomborg.com/books.htm And various commentaries.
You'd need a LOT of hydrogen to start with, and if you did have that much on hand, you wouldn't need a reactor in the first place. :-)
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Are you an atmospheric scientist?
:) It's a lame thing to do, what I did, and I immediately regretted it after clicking 'submit' but there you go...
:)
This is the part where I say "why yes, yes I am." But you probably knew that was coming...
Your sentence "When reliable evidence that supports the theory that climate change occurs independent of human activity surfaces, it will be published" is rather unfortunate.
Read it again, then. It doesn't mean what you think it means. It means, when reliable evidence supporting the theory that climate change is unaffected by human activity, it will be published. No such paper has been published, to my knowledge. Neither has a paper definitively demonstrating a human impact on climate change been published, for that matter, but I've made my point.
99.999% of the data that climatologists are comparing the last humdred years of climate change against records pre-human history.
That sentence doesn't even parse. If you're referring to the fact that climatologists use paleoclimate data in their analyses, yes, I'm well aware of that fact. And I'm also well aware that climatologists study climate change during periods where no human activity existed. What is germaine to this discussion is that climatologists are studying potential human impacts on current climate change, which is what most people mean by 'global warming theory.' No paper stating that climate change is wholly unaffected by human activity exists, to my knowledge. Papers that address climate change prior to human activity obviously don't include potential human impacts - is this what you were trying to say?
Anyways, I probably should have just let this thread pass on by - I've had this discussion dozens of times on Slashdot, but people would rather be left to their own devices than discuss the issues with someone who might know a thing or two about the subject. Examine the current state of political discourse by way of example.
But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
There you go again,
What are you talking about? That was my first post in the thread.
implying that only those that question global warming could be influenced by vested interests. That's just plain naive.
I said no such thing. There are vested interests on both sides, but one side has a noticeable lack of scientists and neutral observers.
Ignore the political biases of the Global Warming crowd, ignore everything but blatent self interest, and unless you want to be laughed at you must admit that scientists are human and subject to act in their self interest.
I started off by arguing that self-interest would lead scientists from accepting the much more lucrative funding which is available to the skeptics. In any case you cleary are indulging a consipracy view here, which leaves little room for sane discussion, so next topic.
Sunspot activityYou really believe this isn't (has been) incorporated into the models?
No computer models exists that can be loaded with 1900 and then allowed to run and produce the 20th century.Two things. 1. Agree, computer models are just complex models. I'm unconvinced that the specific predictions being made will come to pass. On the other hand, it is beyond doubt that singificantly altering the constitution of the atmosphere will have climatic implications. It is also beyond doubt that climatic changes, which are not inconsistent with theoretical predictions are being observed. You need also to remember the geological record.
2. Your statement seems to indicate that you are confusing a model with a simulation.
Very few records of long term tempratures exist where the measuring station is not now inside a urban heat dome.A valid argument in 1989, but no longer in 2004. You will find peer reviewed papers from this era pointing that out (which argues against your conspiracy theory). In the meantime the instrumental record has been corrected for this effect. There's no longer any doubt about warming. Nowadays even the most extremist skeptic only argues about the anthropogenic nature thereof.
Why not call for Fusion power while you are at it.Simple. It's not a proven technology (or any technology). I might as well called for solar, wind etc. power. But you haven't answered my question, which was "how does moving from oil to uranium amount to a dismantling of Western Civilization?"
Being overly clever primates we can probably fix the same way, especially ones that operate over such a long time horizon.Yes, but what about immediate time problems like global warming? We think we are overly clever primates, but the very fact that we are still arguing about whether a problem exists, rather than getting on and fixing it would seem to evidence the opposite.
If you "must read" this 30 year old journalistic fluff, you should also read William Connelley's summary of the 70's ice age scare.
mt
All scientists that I've met have, thus far, been human.
:)
:)
:) But laugh if you will.
:)
Man, could I show you a thing or two, then...
"Think twice about publishing your anti-global warming research because everyone disagrees with you."
Again, you're not reading the literature. Plenty of people win their spurs from publishing theories that dispute anthropogenic climate changes, or by positing hypotheses that negate any warming that might occur. Google for the 'Iris Hypothesis' by Richard Lindzen - makes for great reading, and even better back-and-forth literature articles. FWIW, not even Lindzen out-and-out discounts global warming, but he obviously doesn't think much of it, and he's done just fine from publishing his research.
At no time in human history have scientists had so much influence on politics as global warming scientists do today.
Yeah, because everybody signed that Kyoto Accord and put it into action, right? C'mon - your statement is ludicrous and you know it. Scientists have little influence on politics unless they've found a way to blow people up.
So why the hell did Science publish this silly article that proves nothing?
To sell ads, maybe? To encourage further discussion from the scientists that suspect that global warming is hooey but haven't found proof yet? To keep the thing interesting? Scientists read dozens of new articles every month, and a little light entertainment is sometimes just what the doctor ordered.
We already know that climate change occurs independent of human activity. Or are we to believe that the climate was static until we humans started messing things up?
No, no, no, read that carefully now. What I said was no paper has been published which posits that climate change is (as in, is now) independent of human activity. Certainly before humans existed, climate change was independent of human activity. The global warming debate boils down to whether or not this is still the case. Stop playing semantics.
Althought right now we aren't really discussing global warming but whether every scientist agrees with it.
Again, that's not what the Science article says. I know plenty of scientists who are skeptical about anthropogenic climate change (I myself have reservations about the magnitude of any human impact) but, that doesn't mean that we don't agree that global warming is a possibility. Why? Because nobody's proven otherwise. Neither do we necessarily believe that global warming must exist (which is what you think the Science article claims) because again, nobody's demonstrated the link past a first-order radiative affect.
The average scientific reader of Slashdot? Hahaha.
You should have gleaned this by now, but I mean what I write when I write it, because I try to write carefully. I didn't say the average scientific reader of Slashdot, I said the average scientific Slashdot reader. The former puts the emphasis on 'reader of Slashdot' while the latter puts the emphasis on 'scientific'. There's plenty of scientists who read Slashdot, and more often than not, we wonder why we even bother when we read the comments. No doubt some other scientist is out there rolling their eyes at my charging at windmills, but hey, this is what I do after a few whiskey sours.
Anyways, this is a tempest in a teapot - the Science article merely states that there exists a scientific consensus that global warming hasn't been disproven. Perhaps their angle is suspect, but nothing else, and I wouldn't get all hot and bothered about it if I were you.
But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
i remember seeing nova from the late 70s narrated by spock that talked about the next ice age coming soon to a city near you. does this mean i should trade in my parka for some shorts w/ palm trees on them?
always mosh clockwise
Most people don't feel like spending green on being green. They'd rather have a plasma TV set.
I bought a $1300 fridge that runs on $40 of electricity a year. Extra insulation, new design, better motors, whathaveyou.
Now the payback period on that is almost ten years. Worthwhile as the fridge should last at least that long. But in the meantime I've lost opportunity on that money and I don't have a plasma tv set.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Since I don't feel like finding another post to attach this to, here's a response to a couple of other points:
1) Forget the whole theory that global warming is simply an artifact of urban heat islands. We fixed that particular problem with the data in the early 1990s. The urban heat island effect is without a doubt the best-understood phenomenon in climatology, and even with the effects removed climate is still warming.
2) Sunspot activity doesn't explain most of the climate change story either. It's part of the story, but definitely not all of it. If you want to check out a paper on the subject, I suggest the following (I know its a few years old, but the findings haven't changed subsantially since this paper):
Cedric Bertrand, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, Potential Role of Solar Variability as an Agent for Climate Change, Climatic Change, Volume 43, Issue 2, October 1999, Pages 387 - 411
note: I'm not telling you to believe the paper. Just to read it. If you understand enough about what's going on to do so, please feel free to poke holes in it. That's part of science.
Incorrect.
"The best microwave sounding unit estimate of average global temperature change in the lower troposphere for 1979-98 is an increase of 0.06C per decade. The error associated with this estimate is ±0.11C. " (Source) In other words, the temperature change could be as much as +0.17C per decade or it could be as little as -0.05C per decade! Even "corrected" for instrument readings the satellite record is showing virtually no significant warming and may even be showing cooling. That, to me, is doubt.
What was the conclusion from a panel that analyzed the difference between the surface and instrument record? According to the same link they determined that the increase in surface temperature is real (which wasn't the question but I guess they felt it necessary to reaffirm their position), that even though the highly accurate satellites disagree that this does not invalidate the surface record (interesting conclusion), that adjustments to satellite data have reduced the difference between the two records but there is still serious discrepancy, and finally came up with a "possible" explanation that lets both the satellite record and the surface record be right without reconciling the two. Basically they said that maybe the troposhere warmed slower than the surface. So rather than reject the surface record as inaccurate they basically raised a hypothetical possibility of why the satellite record doesn't agree. Or, perhaps, they should have considered the very real possibility that the surface record is just wrong.
In any case, most weather doesn't happen on the surface of the earth but a little bit higher. For questions of analyzing global warming the satellite record is still the better choice of datasets. Of course you still don't see much mention of that in the literature because it doesn't allow for as much scaremongering and, if the error is on the lower side of the data point, actually invalidates global warming over what has been often called the "hottest decade" in recent history.
That's why my original post was written "Any time you see every scientist agree on a very controversial topic, be very suspicious." The issues you mentioned are not controversial.
They were at some point - and like Global Climate Change, they were met with suspicion. In any case, whether or not a subject is controversial is irrelevant to the scientific process - what matters is whether it's true or not. Though when "every scientist agree" upon a topic it can hardly be called controversial, now, can it?
Convenient quoting on your part. Usually indicative of an agenda.
Nah, I was baiting ya. And you took it hook, line and sinker.
If all scientists truly agreed that human activity is having an effect on global climate (lower case is fine) then I don't think you'd have a lot of people doubting them (not just beginning, we've doubted them for a long time!). The fact is that all scientists do not agree this is true.
I'm sorry, but you just claimed the contrary to say that we should be suspicious of self-interest on the scientists' part. Contradicting yourself so quickly?
The fact is that all scientists do not agree this is true.
True. Only the vast majority.
The only thing this article proves is that the collection of articles they selected from the subset of scientific literature that they deemed worthy of reviewing supports their conclusion.
You're welcome to find an equally representative subset supporting the opposite thesis. Oh, right.
Oh really? Who is going to fund research proving that global warming is not real. Industry, that's about it. So they'll be quickly labeled an industry stooge by their colleagues (just as you did in your message) and their standing in the community will go down. Not because they're wrong but because they're going against the grain.
That's one way of putting it. Another way is that it's easy to make a lot of money with a science degree if you provide for hokey science and claim you're going "against the grain." You know, like those scientists hired by the tobacco industry to write papers on how smoking didn't cause lung cancer. That used to be controversial, you know. Now it isn't.
And they spend more time engaging in gloom and doom and explaining why the satellite record doesn't confirm their predictions than actually getting real science done.
Satellite record...I guess you're referring to the controversy earlier this year about how some satellite data tended to disprove Global Warming Models? Yeah, I remember that. You know what? The scientist who authored the original report has come out with new interpretation of the satellite data that, in fact, corroborates the observed warming on the ground.
When I said "In exchange they'll get huge grants from industries whose profits might be diminished by scientific enquiry," you replied: Or by "junk science." Take your pick of terms.
More bull. Junk science won't damage an industry, because all the industry has to do is prove that it's junk science. That's the thing with science, see? Because of the empiric model, junk science is pretty easy to disprove. Which is why scietific papers are usually published in peer-revied journals, so that other people can verify them.
Sorry, that's extremism talking. If there is a 10% chance of it being true and it's going to cost a trillion dollars worldwide to fix the problem then we had better be avoiding at least $10 trillion worth of damage.
Some damage to the environment (like lost biodiversity) is irreversible, how much is that worth? How much is worth most of Florida? How much are polar bears worth? How much is stopping desertification worth?
You're the extremist if this is really the only way you see this. You advocate extreme ROI. Fortunately, you represent a small minority (like all extremists), so there
Reminder: find a new sig
On Friday, December 3, 2004, the weather reports said that Saturday would be 67 degrees and partly cloudy. Sunday would have a 70% chance of rain. Saturday morning, I woke up to rain dumping down, and it rained all day and into the night. Sunday was a nice, beautiful day in the mid-60's. These guys can't even get the weather right for the next two days, but they want me to believe their climage change models and make drastic changes that will negatively affect us economically and lower our lifestyle! Amazing.
Wow, the professor just vaporized Scott Peterson.
Reminder: find a new sig
...because the consequences are catastrophic...
All scientists once believed the Earth was flat, was supported on pillars or carried by Atlas etc.
Besides, exactly why is global warming so terrible? The ocean rising is a bunch of BS. First of all, if the north polar ice all melts the seas won't rise an inch since that ice is floating and thereby displacing the water already. The ice melting on the land would raise the oceans IF the added water could not be held in the now warmer atmosphere. Warm air can hold immense quantities of water, as any huricane demonstrates.
At one time there were tropical plants and animals in the arctic areas of this planet. Growing bananas in Siberia wouldn't be so bad now would it? If the Earth became as warm as it was when the fossil fuels we now burn were made, what would be so bad about that?
Warm blooded creatures have an internal temperature in the range of 95-105 deg F because that is where the reactions of life proceed at optimum. If the average temperature of the Earth approached this range, life here would positively explode in abundance. When the Earth was warm like this, the oceans were actually several hundred feet lower than they are today. Most of the continental shelves were dry land.
So even IF global warming is true and IF this warming is due to man's activity, so what? The deserts of the Earth would disappear and vast frozen wastelands could support agriculture and an unimagined proliferation of wildlife.
Such extreme warming would only happen over a long period of time, (centuries or longer) giving living things, including man plenty of time to adjust.
All theory is gray
Who's going to make that claim? Of course human activity must effect the climate. Heck, a fly farting is going to have some effect on the climate. The question is whether we are anything but dust in the cogs of the environmental machine? Or are we grains of salt? Or are we rocks or even small boulders? I tend to believe that we're probably dust or maybe small grains of salt.
Before we invest so much money on analyzing the human impact on global climate change I think we should spend a heck of a lot more time and money understanding natural climate change. I personally think that clouds and the sun contribute to global climate change by absolutely staggering proportions compared to human activity.
Don't get your panties in a knot, I was referring to "you" collectively to those that are towing the global warming line.
I said no such thing. There are vested interests on both sides, but one side has a noticeable lack of scientists and neutral observers.
So there are vested interests behind the neutral observers and scientists? Just how neutral and scientific are these people supposed to be when they are backed by vested interests? That's kind of like expecting a Microsoft employee to be vocally supporting Linux. There might be a few but they're the exception, not the rule.
First of all, if the north polar ice all melts the seas won't rise an inch since that ice is floating and thereby displacing the water already.
May I remind you that the Earth has two poles, but that only one is floating?
What's the problem with Global Warming? I guess you don't live near the equator...I'd respond to you more fully, but as you can see I'm already busy smacking some sense into another enviroskeptic. There's only so much bad faith I can handle at a time.
I suggest you read Mr_Matt's posts instead. Maybe you'll learn a bit more about the many problems that follow in the wake of Global Climate Change.
Reminder: find a new sig
"yet you yourself are following these scientists (have have just as much data against them as with them) as though they are you own personal Saviour."
Please see the Science article I referenced in another posting. You'll see that this statement is false. Multiple independent studies have shown that humans are having an impact on the climate, and there seems to be wide agreement among scientists. Hell, even the EPA has a website up about it.
"The last ice age, volcanoes, and the billions of years that this planet has been in existence, yet some scientists using an incredibly short span of history believe they can suddenly prognosticate what impact we humans are having on a planet whose age is so large a number that we can scarcely wrap our minds around it say we're suddenly about to impact it more than all of the previous time combined".
Oh, the planet will balance itself and recover eventually. We just may manage to impact our environment enough so that it won't be very livable for us!
But hey, relax, kick back with a beer, and enjoy your oceanfront property in Kiribati!
You moran! grow a brain
Meh.
Who's going to make that claim? Of course human activity must effect the climate. ...and this is all scientists are saying, which is why Science wrote an article detailing the fact that nobody's written the hypothetical paper I forwarded. We're starting to see eye-to-eye now - this is a rare event on Slashdot; maybe I should print this. :)
:)
Heck, a fly farting is going to have some effect on the climate.
Careful, now: climate != weather. The question you ask is the same question we ask - what influence does human activity have on climate change? The question presupposes a scientific consensus on anthropogenic effects (i.e. that they exists) and now the question is: what is the magnitude? This is, again, what the Science article is talking about.
Before we invest so much money on analyzing the human impact on global climate change I think we should spend a heck of a lot more time and money understanding natural climate change.
It's a good idea, but the two are now part of the same system, obeying the same physical processes. The atmosphere does not distinguish between human and natural activity - it reacts to energy forcing without regard to the source of said energy.
I personally think that clouds and the sun contribute to global climate change by absolutely staggering proportions compared to human activity.
Maybe so, but what of effects of human activity which influences cloud amount and type? If you're serious about this, I can send you plenty of literature references addressing this very topic. Cloud-radiative feedback is a major field of research right now, and it's been demonstrated that human activity has a decidedly marked impact on clouds. It's not necessarily all about CO2, after all.
But like I said, this is the first time in quite a while that a global-warming thread I've jumped on on Slashdot didn't turn into a rampant flame-fest. You're obviously someone I've underestimated, and I apologize for earlier snarkiness. Perhaps cogent discussion on the Internet isn't quite dead yet.
But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
...mean temperatures will rise by 3 degrees or 5 degrees...
Big deal. There is evidence that the whole Earth was once at least 40deg F warmer than it is today and at the same time the oceans were much lower, so that most of today's continental shelves were dry land. At that time there were no deserts and the now frozen northern and southern wastelands teemed with life at least as abundant as in the tropics of today.
So bring on the warm, it would be nice never to have to shovel snow again, have your car spin out and crash on an icy road, cut down and chop firewood or pay a monstrous heating bill. If I could warm the Earth like that, I'd do it tonight.
All theory is gray
(i.e. that they exists)
:)
Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?
But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
Wow, that's an impressive wall you've constructed around your mind to avoid confronting the truth.
First you start with "There you go again, implying that only those that question global warming could be influenced by vested interests. That's just plain naive." So I'm reading this, and I figure I'll be conciliatory, and grant that, yeah, even though that's not what I said, it's a big world, billions of people, lots of vested interests in it, so I'm sure there are at least some vested interests to be found on both sides of any issue, even a severely lopsided issue like this one where all the scientists in the world are on one side. I don't want to appear "naive", you know.
But that was a mistake, because then you shift right into "gotcha" mode: "So there are vested interests behind the neutral observers and scientists? Just how neutral and scientific are these people supposed to be when they are backed by vested interests? That's kind of like expecting a Microsoft employee to be vocally supporting Linux."
You guys are like unsinkable rubber ducks.
Whatever the merits of the argument, you're asking people to try to prove a negative, aren't you?
Typically the way these things work is that you come up with a hypothesis, gather some data, look for a mechanism and do some statistics. If the stats are amazing you can get by with asserting a causative effect without a mechanism, but if they're not you have to stick with correlation.
So far, we have a theory, some short-term data, and some signs of correlation. That Slashdotters are throwing out alternate unproven theories doesn't change the process - they can be safely ignored.
That they are driven to even try fits with Dr. Lindzen's observations on the media's love affair with the story. I mean, "End of the World," now that sells papers!
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Scientific debate is good but there are two possible reasons why something is in very high agreement:
The first option is unlikely, and in this instance, wrong! There are several noted studies that "show" that global warming is not really all that bad, is normal, or that there just isn't enough evidence to support it at this time. Unfortunately for them, these guys are the ones who really are paid for their opinions by oil companies and their subsidiaries. Google this to find what I'm talking about or attend a presidential press conference.
However, funding for the ones mentioned in this study does come from many different sources for the people that are finding there is evidence that we are now in global warming. Again, Google if you want to find the different organizations involved.
So, when you have an agreement on the meaning of given evidence from many sources that use good, sound, scientific reasoning to come to their results, you have what must be viewed as a high likelihood that the conclusions reached are correct.
In other words, since it isn't essentially one source/industry paying for the results; since the opposing viewpoint is paid essentially by one industry and frequently is viewed by suspicion by the academic review process, the only option left with any high degree of certainty is...
2 - They're coming to the same conclusion because that conclusion is correct!
It helps that good science is impossed but I'm sure someone will point out how nearly unanimous scientific agreement has been wrong in the past. So I'll just say that it is highly likely but not certain that we are experiencing global warming / greenhouse effect right now.
If you don't feel that's the case, go out and smoke a few gross of cigarettes for many years and find out if, indeed, cigarettes don't cause health problems such as cancer. Same type of argument exists there too.
> Au contraire, there is a hell of a lot of money up for grabs for any
> 'scientist' who wants to 'disprove' global warming.
Not really. But even if you found some funding (probably from a corp) to do some research in a 'forbidden' direction, try getting your conclusions published in a peer reviewed journal. Won't happen. And of course after that you will be blacklisted so you can change careers because you will never be accepted as a 'real scientist' again, because all 'real scientists' believe in Global Warming about like Christians believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus.
The difference here is that no Christian wants to question the accepted truths of the establishment, but every scientist dreams of proving that the entire establishment is out to lunch (yes this is a generalisation).
> What's controversial about this issue?
By asking that question it is clear no rational discourse is possible with you, you too are a religious zealot. Hopefully others reading this thread are less invested in the theory to reject all discussion out of hand on the issue. I'll not reguritate the other side here, that is what Google is for. Suffice to say that despite twenty years of vigorous politically correct intellectual supression there are still a few intellectually independent souls standing up and shouting that you guys are full of it.
Not all discourse is accurate discourse, that is what this article is about they have scientific consensus here, there must still be debate (this they say too) and they may still be wrong but there currently isn't any controversy with a scientific basis.
Are they right? Not really sure myself, but they do make some good points, enough that calls to close discussion and move on to dismantling Western Civilivation in response to a -potential threat- is somewhat rash in my humble opinion.
This is one thing that always gets me, if we make the right call all is fine of cource but consider the two scenerios where we choose wrong. Consider the possibility that we're wrong about global warming and do nothing, we probably lose a few hundred billions (yeah I'm pulling those numbers out of a certain orfice) and rush along some new energy sources that we were going to need anyways (fossil fuels are going to run out). Now scientists are pretty embaressed and will take a long time to be trusted again, economic damage will be significant but nothing too catastrophic.
Now consider the possibility that global warming is right (this article suggests that some kind of climate change is very probable) and we do nothing. Mass flooding in some areas, mass droughts in others, huge ecological damage (mass extinction), and of course economic damage orders of magnitude higher than anything that a false global warming scare would have cost.
Don't think of this as a "should we do something or not" think of it as a "should we turn left or right", go left and you have some definate but substancial costs, go right and you have maybe nothing, but probably far more costs than you ever would have gotten if you went left, and then you might have to turn back and go left anyway. This is way there isn't much controversy, because it's kind of a no-brainer.
Then if one is politically aware, one notices that the loudest voices in the Global Warming crowd also want to dismantle Western Civilivation for any of a dozen other totally unrelated reasons, a little more suspicion is justified.
The loudest voices are always extremists, that's the case in any group, just note that no the other side almost all the voices have a much greater economic vested interest in the matter (think big oil).
I stole this Sig
<I>All scientists agree that splitting the atom will produce energy.</I>
Only atoms larger than Helium.
Actually, there are plenty of "scientists", like those at the "Greening Earth Society", who deny the Greenhouse, and anyway it'll be better, and besides, it isn't their fault. Those are the people on the take - from the coal, oil, gas and other Greenhouse industries. Stop joining the denial that's killing our species, destroying our civilization. It's hard enough to fix without dragging all you noisy coincidence theorists along with us.
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make install -not war
Like I said, I haven't had a huge amount of experience with them. Mostly with electrical engineers and a lot of them might not be human, too. :)
Again, you're not reading the literature. Plenty of people win their spurs from publishing theories that dispute anthropogenic climate changes, or by positing hypotheses that negate any warming that might occur.
Ok, so based on that should we assume that the Science article wasn't just useless but also just plain wrong? Or perhaps Science just reduced its sample set to a universe that matches what they wanted to write in the article?
Yeah, because everybody signed that Kyoto Accord and put it into action, right? C'mon - your statement is ludicrous and you know it. Scientists have little influence on politics unless they've found a way to blow people up.
Apparently most of the world has signed Kyoto and they originally hoped that the U.S. would too--that's quite a bit of influence for scientists. Scientists that find new ways to blow people up don't influence politics they just give politicians the means to enforce the whims of the politicians. Perhaps the climate scientists haven't influenced U.S. politicians into passing Kyoto, but they have influenced quite a few other countries and even some U.S. political moves are harder now that every third word has to be environment and a given plans' impact on it.
Me: So why the hell did Science publish this silly article that proves nothing?
You: To sell ads, maybe?
So at least we agree that scientists aren't immune to selfish motives.
To encourage further discussion from the scientists that suspect that global warming is hooey but haven't found proof yet?
To enocurage them? Do you really think this is going to encourage a scientist to publish his or her paper questioning global warming? It's going to hinder it. Many might just prefer not to go against their entire field. Others that may have been considering publishing might hold off and do even more research because they want to be dang sure they're right before opening themselves up to ridicule. Either way this seems to me to be something that would have a chilling effect, not an encouraging one.
To keep the thing interesting? Scientists read dozens of new articles every month, and a little light entertainment is sometimes just what the doctor ordered. :)
Entertainment? Anything wrong with the comics or Michael Moore? This is the kind of sensationalist nonsense that gets picked up by the mainstream press completely out of context and reported as "All scientists now agree with global warming." That's a disservice being performed by Science.
No, no, no, read that carefully now. What I said was no paper has been published which posits that climate change is (as in, is now) independent of human activity.
Actually what you said was "When reliable evidence that supports the theory that climate change occurs independent of human activity surfaces, it will be published." CLimate change does occur independent of human activity. Period. Perhaps you meant to write "When reliable evidence that supports the theory that current climate change is occuring independently of human activity surfaces, it will be published." But that's not what you wrote.
Certainly before humans existed, climate change was independent of human activity. The global warming debate boils down to whether or not this is still the case. Stop playing semantics.
Oh, please. I replied to what you wrote. You mistyped and now are complaining that I'm playing semantics. Fine, we'll move on. But I'm not the only one that read what you wrote the exact way I did.
Again, that's not what the Science article says.
But that is what the Science article says. Obviously we can (and
The article you are referring to says Mt St Helens polluted more than any *single* factory in Washington State. You seem to be implying that it polluted more than all the factories in the world combined. In fact the article points out that human produced pollution is about 100 times greater than all the volcanoes in the world combined.
Not only are you not an atmospheric scientist, you don't understand chaos, though that doesn't stop your farting in the wind. Chaotic equilibrium, like climate, demonstrates statistically stable states, in which actions are dampened in negative feedback, except when the overall system is stressed, or an unusually unstable interstitial state is entered. After that tipping point, a new stable equilibrium is reached, which can be very different from the original one. A single straw breaks the camel's back.
There's not a lot we can do about the large natural processes that compose most climate dynamics. We wouldn't want to, either - the ecosphere evolved a stable balance with us included, not to mention the disastrous effects human meddling has so far shown, conscious or not. Nor need we - the natural equilibrium is largely self-correcting, and we're at home in it. But the recent human straws that are breaking the camel's back need to be understood, because we *can* control them, and we need to, in light of this overwhelming consensus of scientists, among whom the Greenhouse is not so "controversial" - because they are the experts, not ostriches in the public, the media, or polluter industries.
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make install -not war
OK, while this might suggest that there is some bias within the scientific community toward the global warming hypothesis, it *definitely* proves that there is UNVBELIEVABLE bias in the political and opinion communities against the global warming hypothesis.
While perhaps there hasn't been enough good research done on the counter hypothesis, the people loudly claiming that there is NO good evidence for global warming and that there are mountains of evidence against it are either A) lying through their teeth or B) swallowing blatantly biased (non-reviewed) sources without critically appraising them.
There is legitimate reason to doubt the claims (especially the most alarmist claims) of the global warming crowd. However, there is also a whole lot of reason to think this is at least a small to medium long term problem, and possibly a severe one. I'm not an expert on Kyoto, so I won't make any claims on that one, but there are certainly reasonable steps that can be taken to reduce CO2 emissions with minimal economic impact, and we should be actively researching replacement technologies for the worst offenders.
It isn't reasonable to shut down any major industries or force immediate and possibly harmful change on the developing world because of somewhat questionable science. It is also increadibly unreasonable to ignore the mounting evidence that this is something of a problem.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Wow. My post got 3 insightfuls, 1 interesting, 3 overrated, and 1 troll. So that's 4 positive and 4 negative mods for one post. Interesting. Does this mean 50% of the /. populous chooses to ignore the influence politics has on science?
If "everybody" is just a bunch of Slashdotters clacking their keyboards, consensus has no bearing on truth. When thousands of scientists, in their specialties, have 75% consensus, with the rest not committed, that's how we tell that something is most probably true. How do *you* tell if something scientific is true, that you're not experiencing directly and immediately? Why do you trust the *other* scientific conclusions that don't set off your personal denial field?
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make install -not war
If global warming is indeed caused by man, then the environmentalists who oppose nuclear power (i.e., most environmentalists, but not all) are more to blame than anyone else. Check out some Amazing Facts About Nuclear Power.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
Apparently most of the world has signed Kyoto and they originally hoped that the U.S. would too
We did sign Kyoto, but didn't ratify it. And the rest of the world hasn't put it into action - it's a paper tiger, a theoretical political agreement. I stand by my assertion that scientists have no real sway, at least in the field of climate politics. There are far too many other obfuscations that must be dealt with before politicians are willing to look at the friggin' data. Your previous analysis of the cost-benefit of dealing with climate change is one such obfuscation - there has to be a magic dollar amount before it's worth dealing with, which gives politicians essentially unlimited wiggle room in dealing with what the magic number is.
At least we agree that scientists aren't immune to selfish motives.
Science is more of a trade rag than a scientific journal - think of it as a coffee-shop discussion for people who number their underwear sets. As such, it's the perfect place for controversial (and yes, entertaining, but maybe not like you think of entertainment) commentary that doesn't belong in the 'pure' literature.
Fine, we'll move on. But I'm not the only one that read what you wrote the exact way I did.
My original statement stands - nobody's said that climate change occurs (as in, present tense) independent of human activity. I did not say 'has now, or ever has occurred. If you and others have problem reading tenses in English, I'm not to blame.
But that is what the Science article says.
See my reply in the other thread - I think we're past this bit now.
So, no, they didn't come out and say "all scientists agree with human induced global warming." But the layman (and the mainstream media) could probably be forgiven for getting that impression from the article.
Herein lies the problem of public discourse about science in general - you obviously took it a different way, and it took a conversation with someone who reads Science as Part Of A Balanced Daily Dead-Tree Diet to change your position. They *could* be forgiven, but I grow tired of doing so - why can't people just read articles and not push their political views on the analysis therein?
But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
You seem to be of the opinion that refuting nonsense will somehow help. It won't.
First, I agree that there's a lot of gibberish here, on both sides of the argument. But those who believe in the nonsense (some of what you posted, for example) aren't the type to be convince by refutations of that nonsense. So on this score, the effort is wasted.
Second, and most importantly in my mind, is that you don't prove a thing by refuting objections to that thing.
Here's why I don't buy global warming: It's insufficiently proven. You want to make me buy into it? Then PROVE it. That's all there is to it. You can spend all day showing links between this and that, and you can spend all night showing correlations and such. But until you actually provide some form of testable science, then I'm not going to buy your little theory.
Most science like, say, physics, attempts to describe reality as best it can. From this you can make predictions and then see if your theories bear out. From this, you can say that the theory is correct, or useful, or good. Longer term experimentation may modify the data and thus refine the theory and such.
But the whole climate change debacle fails this test. It's making predictions, however these predictions are tending to be of the gloom and doom variety and so you get people wanting to enact MASSIVE changes to prevent this sort of thing. Well, that's fine and understandable, but the problem is that you haven't shown your theories to be correct yet.
It's like a chain letter type of science. 30 people forwarded the letter and are not rich and powerful, while Joe Blow didn't and now lives in a van down by the river.
Show your theory is correct. Show it to the common man. Explain every little detail if you have to. Dumb it down if necessary. People accept Einstein's Relativity as being more or less true when they couldn't grasp the math for the life of them. But it's been explained and dumbed down and make simpler to get the word to the masses.
If I'm going to shoulder some form of monetary burden to fix this climate problem that is being whined about, then I damn well need to understand it. That's all there is to it. Explain it to me. In enough detail to convince me. I don't expect to have to go learn a hell of a lot of climatology to understand that a thing needs to be done, but I do need some explanation why.
Because very simply, that has not been done. You're asking the general non-scientific public to pay for change and this sort of pseudo-science you get back is a REACTION to the lack of understanding of the original theories and problems in the first place.
Refuting the objections themselves is not going to work because they aren't based on logic in the first place. They're based on lack of understanding of the original problem.
Take a few years making Discovery channel specials that explain the whole system in detail and watch those objections disappear. Then we can talk about taking action based on the theory.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I stand corrected. After re-reading, I would say that of course human activity affects climate change. Is the concept of the "butterfly effect" still considered valid by the scientific community?
I was in fact trying to say that papers addressing pre-human climate change don't include human impacts.
It is certainly a fact that there is a larger amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to human activity and that a greenhouse effect can occur. Given the significant variability of the earth's climate before human activity became significant, wouldn't it be fair to say that we can't make an informed judgment about the good or bad effects of human CO2 generation relative to Earth's climate in the future?
In your opinion is the movement to limit CO2 generation a good thing or a bad thing?
Thanks for responding to my post.
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
but at core, Global Warming is religion
You are using a conspiracy theory to argue against a scientific theory. You may be right but your arguments are less than rigorous.
I would like to see some actual scientific rebuttal of the available evidence for global warming (and there is some, Ice cores, melting glaciers etc. Also there is no doubt that CO2 levels are much higher).
Fight science with science. Not just a conspiracy theory.
All scientists agree that splitting the atom will produce energy.
Stanza:
Only atoms larger than Helium.
Of course you meant to say Iron.
Other than these sorts of controlled experiments it is 'just a theory' supported by observation (but not direct experimentation) that the forces which effec an atomic clock in a fast mover also cause the various observations of uncontrolled (by humans) processess.
Seems to me likewise you could 'prove' climate change by showing the effect in a laboratory.
Eg if adding green house gasses to a system which is heated by the sun (or a radiant heat source producing the same wavelengths as the sun) causes temperatures in the system to rise, global warming is as proven as relativity, given the limits of our ability to demonstrate large scale processes within controlled environments...
To the best of my knowledge, No computer models exists that can be loaded with 1900 and then allowed to run and produce the 20th century without a lot of unexplained fudge factors to make it come out right. No model exists which has been allowed to run into the future and then checked with what actually happened a decade later has produced a match.
Are there any models that don't predict warming?
Is the concept of the "butterfly effect" still considered valid by the scientific community?
:)
The butterfly effect is more related to chaotic processes in numerical weather prediction models - climate modelling specifically avoids chaotic behavior whenever possible. Remember that climate research is a very different animal than weather research - climate modelling seeks to find long-term trends that average over seasonal trends and such.
I was in fact trying to say that papers addressing pre-human climate change don't include human impacts.
Thanks - you're not the only one having problems typing tonight. Apologies if I came off harshly - it's been a long day.
It is certainly a fact that there is a larger amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to human activity and that a greenhouse effect can occur. Given the significant variability of the earth's climate before human activity became significant, wouldn't it be fair to say that we can't make an informed judgment about the good or bad effects of human CO2 generation relative to Earth's climate in the future?
Well, the impact of CO2 warming is more complicated than just the radiative forcing issue - various feedbacks (which are poorly understood at present) complicate the issue. It would be entirely correct to state that given the significant variability in the climate record that we cannot at this time make an definitive judgement about anthropogenic climate forcing. This is, of course, not the same thing as saying that 'global warming does not exist.' It merely states that we are unsure as to the magnitude of human impact on the natural climate system, among other things.
In your opinion is the movement to limit CO2 generation a good thing or a bad thing?
Given that we are essentially running an uncontrolled experiment on a climate system whose mechanisms we do not understand, I tend to take a more conservative approach. As a friend stated, 'why pee in the pool?' In terms of sociopolitical arguments, reduction of CO2 emission would necessitate a transfer to alternative energy strategies which would reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources (read, the Middle East.) With a determined scientific effort backed by political will, I can't see why this would be a bad thing, although as stated in the IPCC report, it wouldn't do much with regard to global warming. But there exist viable solutions to the CO2 reduction problem that would be beneficial for our country to explore.
But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
Putting 100 million people's homes under water is probably not good.
Definitely worth a read: http://www.lomborg.com/ for a solid statistical analysis of environment trends. Also I don't think the mathematical analysis underlying the classic global warming curve stands up to analysis. Just because a whole lot of people believe something doesn't mean it is true.
> What's controversial about this issue?
By asking that question it is clear no rational discourse is possible with you, you too are a religious zealot. Hopefully others reading this thread are less invested in the theory to reject all discussion out of hand on the issue. I'll not reguritate the other side here, that is what Google is for. Suffice to say that despite twenty years of vigorous politically correct intellectual supression there are still a few intellectually independent souls standing up and shouting that you guys are full of it.
Also, there are still a few intellectually independent souls standing up and shouting that the theory of evolution is full of it.
At my job I have the opportunity to see humanity at its best (or worst depending on your perspective). From what I've seen, Mother Earth would be much better off without us.
Humans are not the only form of life on this planet and if our actions drive us to extinction, we should consider it evolution.
First to be pedantic most of the things on that list are fully testable. Global warming is not.
Second, while I agree with you about the fact that even if the risk of global warming is low we shouldn't take that risk, I am very alarmed by the easy dismissal of non peer reviewed and crank journals/articles. Now admitedly non peer reviewed journals are less reliable, and cranks are often wrong, but at the same time the definition of a crank is someone who doesn't believe in what everyone else believes to be true, so by eliminating cranks you can easily eliminate all dissention on this subject.
Again I personally believe in global warming and am pretty sure that at the very least humans aren't making it any better, but statically these numbers mean nothing since anyone who disagrees is for one reason or another not counted. There have been a lot of ranks who have turned out to be right as well as a lot which have turned out to be wrong, but if we discount them then we're seriously into group think territory.
Tomorrow's forecast: not the same as today.
Thursday's forecast: different than that.
Friday's forecast: Even more different than a naked guy sitting in front of a piano.
Someone had to do it.
> Au contraire, there is a hell of a lot of money up for grabs for any
> 'scientist' who wants to 'disprove' global warming.
Not really. But even if you found some funding (probably from a corp) to do some research in a 'forbidden' direction, try getting your conclusions published in a peer reviewed journal. Won't happen. And of course after that you will be blacklisted so you can change careers because you will never be accepted as a 'real scientist' again, because all 'real scientists' believe in Global Warming about like Christians believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus.
Much of the available funding for research and journal publication comes from US govt. agencies, notably the "Defense" department.
I guess we need to wait until George gets around to putting Right-thinking scientists in charge of these agencies.
If Global Warming has only a 10% chance of being true, then the odds are still way too high, because the consequences are catastrophic.
Catastrophic? - How do you (or anyone else) know that?
It is an undiputed fact that the Earths climate has been wildly different at different times through the eras and life always managed to survive.
It is also a fact that man is the most adaptable living creature ever discovered; we've been able to live everywhere on this planets surface, plus in the air, under the water and even in space and on the moon. We as a species will survive any climate change given enough warning to adapt (using technology if nessesary).
Now IMHO instead of blindly trying to return the climate state to the level of 'the good old days' we should rather accept the changes (which still may be natural, and which in any case has happened naturally before and may again) and begin the adaption process. The sooner the better.
Sure, things will be different but it doesn't mean it'll be worse (or catastrophic), and it might even be a change for the better in way we cannot imagine at the moment (due to lack of data).
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Didn't I see this in a movie or two?
I believe in global warming. Fact: the earth is getting hotter -- by 0.5 degrees C on average, as of 100 years ago. Fact: the insular nature of certain types of gas causes greater heat retention. Fact: many of those gases are produced en masse by human industry.
... that is, I'm willing to accept the lack of scientific evidence because I believe that reduction of pollutants is good policy.
These things are all true. There's no doubt about any of them. How can our dumping tons and tons of pollutants into the atmosphere be anything but bad?
But to say that I believe in global warming is very different from saying that it's true. Let me underscore this: I consider myself an environmentalist. I don't drive a car as a lifestyle choice, I have told people that I won't own a motor vehicle unless it's zero emmissions (ie, electric), and I intend to stand by that decision.
But the truth is, while believing in global warming is all well and good, the evidence for it is largely circumstancial. All the things I said in the first paragraph are true; that is, the change in temperature over the last 100 years and the change in emmission of greenhouse gasses over the same period are in what statisticians call "positive correlation". What this means, essentially, is that if you take the data points and graph them on orthogonal axes, the slope of the resulting linear fit will be positive.
But correlation is not causation, even if it seems likely. Obviously, two completely unrelated things can be positively correlated: take the last home game in Washington DC before an election thingee that came up on Slashdot a while ago. Obviously, the outcome of a US presidential election and a football game don't have anything to do with each other, and yet, they seem to, by virtue of positive correlation.
Now, it gets a bit more difficult to keep your head on straight when two related data sets are positively correlated. But unless you can quantify the relationship, you have not established causality. This may seem like nit-picking, and in a way it is. Remember, I believe in global warming, and I believe that the reduction of greenhouse gases produced worldwide is good policy.
But, and this is important, global warming fails the science test. An increase in 0.5 degrees, average, over the last 100 years is frightening, but doing the same measurement in the 1930s reveals a net cooling effect! What gives?
What gives is that we don't know how climate change operates. I think that causality is reasonable
But I don't believe that we should sacrifice the quality of science to achieve political ends. Global warming, as far as science is concerned, is bunk -- just like acid rain, second hand smoke, and nuclear winter. Good policy, bad science. No one wants acid rain, no one wants second hand smoke, and no one wants a nuclear holocaust -- and by the same token, no one wants global warming. So it makes sense to me to institute preventive measures and policies to protect against these undesirable outcomes.
But when you start spouting pseudoscience, or implying that the two page digested soundbite in Newsweek on the subject is representative of proper scientific methodology, you start losing my support.
Protect the earth, yes. Protect the integrity of science, yes. I guess I'm just the only environmentalist I know that feels that the ends (reduced pollution) don't justify the means (cheapening of science), even if I believe firmly in those ends (firmly enough to deny myself the convenience of a car, even if it means a two hour commute by bus and metro that would otherwise take 20 minutes).
Worry when the business press starts writing articles (free reg req.) about ways to profit from global warming.
From the Dec. 13, 2004 issue:
Denver businessman Pat Broe, owner of the subarctic port of Churchill, Canada, stands poised to profit from polar trade. Why? The ice is melting.
Geez, if THAT isn't a pot claiming another is a kettle.
Just exactly WHY do you think all that smog hangs over Los Angeles? Might the mountains on one side, incoming ocean wind on the other and temperature inversion have something to do with it?
Nah, can't be, that would make scientific sense and would invalidate your emotion. Can't have that, can we?
A thousand scientists say the sky is falling. It must be true!
If it weren't for global warming, the Earth wouldn't have come out of the last ice age 12,000 years ago and raised the sea level a few hundred feet. Global warming keeps the Earth from becoming one big iceball. And if it weren't for human additions to global warming, we wouldn't be able to drill for oil in the Arctic in the coming decade or two. Gotta have gas for my Ford Expedition even if I have to pay $1.65 or more a gallon for it. And if the sea rises some more who really needs Holland and a bunch of dykes anyway? Let them all move to Germania or Belgium. They'll probably freeze anyway when the melting polar and Greenland ice disrupts the Gulf Stream and prevents warm water from getting to Europe.
It sounds more convincing than say a thousand chicken little say the sky is falling. I've heard the scientific boys cry wolf one to many times and I don't care any more. They like the Cassandra reporters are ignored. I've read enough to be convinced that humans have added to global warming. But beating people over the head with arguments like this only serve to alienate those who need to be persuaded. Arguments from authority can be effective but 99 time out of a 100 they aren't.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Were you asking from actual curiosity or trying to change his point in an attempt to disprove it?
The point was there are too many unknown actors and too many variables to make lon-term models of weather.
We can't make accurate models which predict how individuals act, only groups in repetitive situations. How many more aqctors are internal to the environment than people?
For that matter, have you ever noticed how ridiculous comments about the hottest/coldest/windest/whateverest day on record are when truly accurate weather readings have only existed for about 50 years, if even that? If the Earth is truly millions of years old, those claims are as ridiculous as measuring an entire year's worth of weather based on one day.
I, for one, AM old enough to remember all the gloom and doom about the Earth getting colder and an ice age coming. That was in the mid-70s and, yes, it's true that the same groups which scream America must turn off its economy are the asme ones who were telling us we'd all freeze to death.
Why don't these global warming zealots ever explain the effect of the cooling Earth itself has on the gases which surround it or how much rain and the oceans filter those gases?
All scientists once believed the Earth was flat, was supported on pillars or carried by Atlas etc.
Ah, I see your problem. You are confusing "scientists" with "religious nuts". The former base their theories on observations and critical thinking while the latter just go on wonky rants for no reason whatsoever.
sigs are hazardous to your health
There are no humans living in the air, or under water, or in space. We occasionally go there for brief periods of time but we cannot yet remain there on a permanent basis.
There has been little or no development towards permanent habitation of the skies. There may have been a little more hope for permanent habitation of the seas but we appear to be moving towards increased robotization of subsea activities rather than placing people there to oversee things.
Perhaps the international space station will help us develop technology for permanent habitation of space - who knows - but we're certainly not there yet.
sigs are hazardous to your health
Ignore the political biases of the Global Warming crowd, ignore everything but blatent self interest, and unless you want to be laughed at you must admit that scientists are human and subject to act in their self interest. At this point in the game, if someone DID debunk Global Warming and managed to get published, how many climatologists would still have careers since every last one of them has staked their professional reputations on this theory being fact? No, at this point is is illogical to expect reason from the scientists on this issue. Religion clouded their judgement and now they are in too deep to even consider whether they were wrong.
This exact argument can be used against _any_ well established scientific theory and if it had any significant amount of truth to it, it would seriously impede the progress of science from faulty theories to more correct theories. Yet, Newton's model of physics got suitably debunked by scientists mysteriously not afraid of losing their funding or destroying their careers. Bohr's model of the atom got suitably debunked by scientists mysteriously not afraid of losing their funding or destroying their careers.
What you seem unable to grasp is the fact that the scientific community values progress and the search for truth above just about anything else. An erroneous view simply isn't going to survive long in that kind of an environment once a superior view is presented.
In fact, if an established climatologist were to successfully disprove global warming, he would make such a name and such a career for himself so as to rival the likes of Einstein and Hawking in recognition. What self-centered, career-climbing, funding-driven scientist would pass up such an opportunity? And yet, they don't publish any such material - because they haven't actually found it.
sigs are hazardous to your health
They clearly didn't bother to poll Slashdot. Had they consulted the thinkers here, they would have found their results to be roughly reversed.
This was always the prediction, too. (Just to really rub it in. .
-That once the stubborn denial finally broke down under the weight of objective reality, that the wishful-thinkers, unwilling to give up their positions of studied arrogance, would turn around and provide us with such wonderfully mature (and wildly inaccurate) epithets as, "It's still the Environmentalists fault because they oppose nuclear power!" and "Well, that's good, because now the world will have better growing seasons!"
--All of which boils down to, "Yeah? Well, so what? I'm STILL better than you! (Even though you were right.)"
I find it interesting that looney toon psychopaths like Nixon's G. Gordon Liddy hold similar views on global warming. What does that say?
-FL
is that all these are consensus despite the evidence, global warming is a consensus because of the evidence.
You don't specify a country, so I assume you have an internationalist outlook :-)
Obviously a civil nuclear programme needs to be rolled out world wide, This includes the OPEC countries, since they will be out of oil sometime in the future. It also includes countries that have no native energy supplies and wish to advance to the same state as their neighbours.
So we should be promoting nuclear programmes in Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Burma, Palestine amongst others.
Since you take it upon yourself to evaluate xscientific merit, you have probably heard of the concept of falsifiability and realise its importance. Name some other crackpot idea that the arguments in your post could not be used to support.
Insightful my ass.
sudo ergo sum
No, but all too many 'scientists' are Gaians or worse.
Some scientists in the environmental areas do subscribe to the Gaia Hypothesis, but even that has many levels. At it's most basic it means treating the whole ecosystem as a macro-organism. It doesn't mean you think the Earth is one living creature, or you are some tree-hugging hippy, just because some of those people believe in the more extreme end of the hypothesis.
Of course they are the only voices you will hear in the mainstream press.
You must have missed that whole Slashdot thread based on a Wired article, about how media's desire to show both sides of the argument in cases like global warming meant they had to hunt around for people on the "humans have no effect side". The mainstream press was out there looking for these guys, but all they could find was people in the pay of companies. The whole thing was about how they got a disproportionately large amount of media coverage in the name of balanced reporting.
Or the scientific papers, because dissenting voices can't make it past peer review and scientists being generally above average in intelligence know this so would tend to not bother attempting to publish a career ending paper.
Proving the rest of the scientific community wrong is about the best career move you can make. Scientific history is full of examples, indeed, the whole scientific process relies on it. Science establishes a consensus, until there is sufficient evidence against it,
If nobody brought up anything against the current scientific consensus, science would never move anywhere. Your tinfoil hat ideas about how science work just undermine your whole credibility.
If a proven danger to thee, me and everyone exists, then yes our government then has a duty to act in the common defence as provided for in the Constitution.
It would be nice if life always gave us all the information we need before making a decision. Sometimes though, it doesn't. You have to try and assess the risks, and potential consequences, if you wait too long for proof, it will be too late.
Unless you happen to be one of the ones who loses their livelihood in the economic chaos that signing Kyoto would bring.
Because all those other countries that signed up are head straight for economic chaos, right? Kyoto has flaws, but those aren't an excuse for doing nothing because you don't want to upset big business. It looks to the rest of the world like the US Government isn't just showing some scepticism, which would be no bad thing, but sticking its fingers in its ears and going 'la la la' to the topic. As irrationally opposed to the concept as these fiendish "worse than Gaian" types whose danger you highlight for us.
I had never heard of OSIM and I have been interested in climate science for a long time. I have heard of "The Union of Concerned Scientists" many times and they seem like an independent group of sceptics on just about anything. They claim that OISM is a front and a fraud (my summary), they also have a roundup of some other "prominent sceptic organisations". I spent 2 minutes to google OISM climate funding and select one link from the 251 (mostly negative) articles. I went a bit further ( google "Arthur B. Robinson" fund ) another couple of minutes I find that "Frederick Seitz" (see below) was heavily involved in the tabacoo industries fraudulent junk-science(surprise,surprise).
You YELL A SUBJECT LINE but offer nothing more than a bunch of signatures obtained by deception. Then accuse the aurthors of fixing the results to obtain a fudiciary benifit. You really have to ask yourself why you have swolled the political crap to the point where you are yelling, posting fradulent petitions and sigining of your post with a character assination. Or maybe you are a paid A/C activist, since it is hard to imagine someone who can so easily be duped.
Relevant section on OISM from this link follows...
The Marshall Institute co-sponsored with the OISM a deceptive campaign -- known as the Petition Project -- to undermine and discredit the scientific authority of the IPCC and to oppose the Kyoto Protocol. Early in the spring of 1998, thousands of scientists around the country received a mass mailing urging them to sign a petition calling on the government to reject the Kyoto Protocol. The petition was accompanied by other pieces including an article formatted to mimic the journal of the National Academy of Sciences. Subsequent research revealed that the article had not been peer-reviewed, nor published, nor even accepted for publication in that journal and the Academy released a strong statement disclaiming any connection to this effort and reaffirming the reality of climate change. The Petition resurfaced in 2001.
Spin: There is no scientific basis for claims about global warming. IPCC is a hoax. Kyoto is flawed.
Funding: Petition was funded by private sources.
Affiliated Individuals:Arthur B. Robinson, Sallie L. Baliunas, Frederick Seitz
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It should read OISM.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
So Clinton was beholden to the same people? The current administration is not the first to reject Kyoto.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
It did not take long. These people are spending up big on climate FUD. One notable among the names associated with the FUD is Frederick Seitz who was responsible for $45M in tabacoo research. Another A/C...wonders if A/C's are paid to be stupid?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Global warming is old, small news.
Americans are going to have to wait for some big shock to "get" their real news.
The critical confusion, which corporations love, is that people equate "US Corporate interests" with "American public interests".
"We're all americans", they keep telling us.
The reality is, corporate profit is loyal to no nation, no name, and nobody - except their own profits. And gladly sell off the US public more every day, as seen with exporting jobs, bankrupting people with misleading loans and insurances, and clogging up people's brains with distractions and worthless products. Then psychiatric "medicines" if they're start losing it.
Believe a corporation's word or agenda and accept their salary, information, or product, at your own peril, and that of your community, city, and people. Loyal to you, or humanity they aren't. When profits are threatened, they'll change stories and pay nicely to willing corrupt politicians, Feds and Marines to ruin anyone's life much before we realize what our "bad luck" is all about.
Think I'm paranoid? Go seriously investigate what really goes on in Washington. Talk to some lawyers or secretaries and translators who worked there. Never mind the lobbyists. Look for the police files, murders, child prostitution, sex favors, drugs, etc. See who is profiting. See your board members, directors, and CXO's. See our big corporate employers.
There ain't no "government" - it's an illusion, we're all on our own, and we ain't talking.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
"..Are they right? Not really sure myself, but they do make some good points, enough that calls to close discussion and move on to dismantling Western Civilivation in response to a -potential threat- is somewhat rash in my humble opinion..."
And what part of Western Civilization do you deem worth saving? Be honest and state that you're afraid your own life might have to change. I've got news for you; it will change whether you like it or not.
This is pretty offensive. Research is not a "gravy train": it's something we do because it's stimulating, challenging and interesting. Scientists don't want to spend their lives working on ideas that they know are wrong.
That's not to say that they we are never wrong, and many of the greatest leaps in our understanding came about when someone went against the general consensus. However, what you're suggesting is that scientists are wilfully suppressing the truth because it's in their own personal interest.
There is an excellent response to this point later in the thread, by someone involved in scientific publishing.
Why? The subject is only controversial because (if true) it means we have to make some painful changes to our lifestyles. Just because that's hard to swallow doesn't make it a conspiracy by the scientific community.
Scientists think a LOT about funding, esp. those in academic circles (yes, there are scientists outside academic circles). When funding gets cut off or reduced, the submissions to acquire new funding increases of course BUT ALSO the reasonings for that funding is adapted to the current political environment.
You state the previous poster hadn't read the breadth of literature. Frankly, I doubt you have either, or at least literature from both sides of the aisle, no matter how ridiculous.
More importantly, I highly doubt you ever sat on a funding review board. Or in a lab where funding was drastically cut. If you had, you'll see the scientists change their views very quickly. If they do not, they don't work.
Your talk about the recent political changes affecting science--sorry, that smacks of partiality. Why? Because it always clearly was. Science is and has always had political ties, from warfare to social policy, even raw economics. Alchemists, gold. Chemistry, weaponry. Physics, bombs and sonar. Clearly, an agenda is set not only in practicality but funding as well.
No politicizing in peer-review journals? Are you freakin kidding me? Maybe you were trying to limit this to the papers themselves, but that's not what you said. The journals themselves clearly do not. To me, this shows clearly you are nutcase that has lost all sense of impartiality in understanding your own profession, mistake or not. Nearly every substantial peer-review journal have letters to the editor. Many have commentary by established members on the hot article of that issue. Read them. You'll see the slants.
Furthermore, read the background of many of the reviewers. Many have big time slants. What becomes the prominant emphasis or puts one article over the top of another in order or what goes bold on the cover easily matches the expertise of the reviewers, not the value or worth of the papers themselves.
Then again, you'd like to say the Science article doesn't really say much and should be read in a vacuum. Sorry, it reeks, if only for the bad timing to Kyoto.
While geographic and weather conditions trap the smog, there is little excuse for generating it in the first place, and stopping or reducing produciton its the only effective way or reducing smog.
This doesnt neccisarily mean cutting back on energy use, it just means mandating cleaner exhausts and chimneys.
I dont like nuclear power - there is a reason people largely stopped building nuclear power plants,
After mining the fuel, refining it, using it, seperation and reclamtion, reuse, and SAFE dispoasal of waste, your spending allmost energy as you are extracting, its only economical if you have a nuclear weapons program, and guess what, the US aint building nukes anymore.
Not only are hybrid cars ready, theyre quite nice, and cheap to run.
also, the alaskan tundra is notoriosly delacate, and
Caribou
An add to that - if you want to read more papers, try this Google Scholar search list.
If global warming is anthropogenic, what can we do to prevent/ameliorate the situation? Is there some way we can hold people responsible for their actions today so that they do not get away with passing the buck? If someone is peddling bad science (anyone on either side) and having a dispropotionate impact on public opinion, how would one correct this? Essentially, instead of arguing whether or not global warming is man made, what can we do about it? AS a slashdot reader I do not think I can single handedly ratify the Kyoto protocol. But there must still be something we can do.
"We fixed that particular problem with the data in the early 1990s."
Most of the differences between the surface and satellite measurements over land come from a few limited areas (other than the areas that are largely missing from the surface record but cooling in the satellite record), and are almost certainly due to urban warming in those areas, or systematic measurement errors. That means that most of the supposed warming since 1979 in the surface record is probably spurious.
Equally, John Daley pointed out a few years back that one of the most commonly used weather stations in Australia for proving 'global warming' had warmed not because the temperature had increased, but because a bush had grown up nearby which largely blocked out a cool wind which used to blow on it. How do you 'correct' for errors like that in the surface record?
Not to mention that many of the 'global warming' scarers are still using the seawater temperature measurement data which was proven to be pretty much garbage several years ago. Using garbage data for 75% of the planet's surface is not going to give you good results.
Rebuild natural massive carbon sinks like plankton, sea algae, and rainforests
That's still eye-wash, the bio-mass is going to go where? Most likely it will decay into Methane, and CO2 inside of 50 years and have to be re-removed; my 21 billion tons of CO2 assumes that the carbon would not be recycled back into the atmosphere and would get us back to 1850 levels in 30-50 years. A world population of 6.4 people means everybody would have to take 3 tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and sequester it someplace permantly every year for 30 years.
North America even tho has significantly increased forest coverage, can't compete against slash-and -burn agriculture in Africa and South America. In Sub-Sahara Aferica almost every scrap of burnable wood has been burnt for fuel. throwing your daily newspaper into the landfill wouldn't be enough!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
"I'm not a scientist "
That pretty much says it all.
"The average scientific reader of Slashdot? Hahaha."
This may surprise you but some people who read this site actually do work in various scientific disciplines. Unlike you apparently. Go back under your bridge troll.
Firstly I agree with the idea behind the quote: essentially that being in a minority does not necessarilly make you wrong.
Problem is, without the benefit of hindsight, how do we seperate the geniuses ahead of their time from the plain wrong ?
Mike-"Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future?"
As far a climate science goes Mike has not got a clue, ref: title of post.
Mike-"And make financial investments based on that prediction?"
Investment based on prediction would mean reversing the tried and true US policy of making predictions based on investments. Both sides of the Clinton/Bush thread show that "not one US job" will be sacraficed. (Nothing but a pile of straw there)
The USC are known as a die hard sceptics organisation, here is thier take on climate FUD .
Mike-"Has everybody lost their minds?"
Frederick Seitz certainly has.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Reading slashdot regularely for one year now, something strikes me. As an european, I never saw anybody during the last two years doubting humans activities on climate change. I saw a general consensus in scientifics, politics and public opinion in Europe and especially in France where I live (examples: a famous parisian museum "La cite des sciences" made a big event called Climax about climate change, there are TV spots about energy comsuption by a french state agency etc...) So when I saw (some) slashdot comments, sites like these http://globalwarming.org/ and US policy, I wonder how can a so big gap exists. Can you help me?
>Not really
Don't be naive. There are a lot of very rich people who wish to ignore global warming.
>But even if you found some funding (probably from >a corp) to do some research in a 'forbidden' >direction
Well, I'm a biologist, so I hear this line of argument from the creationists constantly. It's just untrue. Scientists love papers which tell them accepted wisdom is wrong. At heart, science is applied cynicism. Hearing how "it's all wrong" appeals to this side.
>Politics gets into it, but at core, Global >Warming is religion.
The notion that we can keep on using enormous quantities of carbon fuels and that everything will be okay is a religion. And, like many religions, it's self-delusional.
>By asking that question it is clear no rational >discourse is possible with you, you too are a >religious zealot
This is daft. If I say "gravity is not controversial" this does not make me a zealot.
Look, global warming is there, is happening, and it's going to get worse. Of this, there is little doubt. What is in doubt is scale, how much it's going to change, and what effects this will cause. Of this, we have much poorer knowledge. The problem is that by the time we find out it will already be late in the day, and will we already suffer the consequences.
Phil
" Of course, 600 years ago a "peer review" would call you a crank for saying the world was round."
No. That would be "heretic", not crank and those with an education (or a ship) knew that the world was round, it was only a question of how large it was.
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
I live in Detroit, Michigan. I remember that back when I was a child, that by December 7th, we used to have large piles of snow all over the place. Yesterday, we had a torrential downpour that ten years ago would have been a blizzard.
I would rather have the blizzard then the springtime downpour in the beginning of December. Just as I am certain that the people in Florida would have rather had their two to three low-level hurricanes, instead of the significant number of very powerful hurricanes.
Both of the above examples can be attributed to an alteration of Global Weather patterns, due to the general warming of the globe. If there is a method by which we can slow down and even reverse that process, it is imperative that we do so in order to protect life as we know it.
Since there is a preponderance of evidence showing that human activities have assisted in speeding up the natural process of global warming, we need to look into ways to minimize our impact on the natural global warming process and work hard on potential methods that could help us rollback the natural process of global warming.
If that involves building Carbon Dioxide 'Scrubbers' that are both stationary and mobile within the atmosphere, we should look into that. (It's been a while since I have read about this idea and what I read had some merit.) If it means we coat cities with foliage in order to cut down on the amount of ambient heat that cities hold for periods of time far greater then natural foliage does, then we need to look into that as well. Both of these proposed ideas are potentially huge job creation opportunities that can fuel tremendous economic growth.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
At one point every scientist believed that the world was flat. Strangely it turned out they were wrong.
Yes, indeed, the sky IS falling. That little chicken was correct. Who knew?
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
There's pieces of work that I could have done badly, but chose the right and honest way, not the cheapskate "fuck 'em, that will do".
Scientists are human, but in many cases are more interested in a search for the truth - that's their motivation.
Not everyone does things just for the money.
We survive all over the world by adapting our envionment to best suit us. More land without sea levels rising and flooding and destroying will benifit us etc. Now I am by no means authoritive on this subject at all, but it seems to me that we are surving well as it is now, so surely we want to adapt our situation to enable our survival, i.e. avoid global warming. The argument comes down to will we be better off with a pre or post global warming enviornment, and it seems to be the general concencus is pre.
It was never implemented under Clinton either. Bush did nothing to take the process back from any previous level, nor did anyone "pull out" of anything, regardless of what the title of your CORPWATCH!&@^%!&%# article says. It was never ratified under Clinton, never was binding over the US, and was never "pulled out" of. Clinton had THREE YEARS to implement it, and did nothing more than Bush has done.
So fuck off, and nice try.
At one point every scientist believed that the world was flat.
I don't think you'll find a time where every scientist agreed that the world was flat. For one, if they did not follow the empirical method they can hardly be said to be scientists. Meanwhile in other cultures than Medieval Europe the Earth was often considered to be round, something that is easily verifiable if you travel by sea.
The reality is that the church was the strongest proponent of the flat Earth/Earth-centric models, and it was never exactly a hotbed of scientific thought.
Reminder: find a new sig
So are you proposing that these methods fail to find the truth in all of science, or is it some specific combination of factors which makes them fail in climate research?
I don't think the first case makes much sense, considering the successes which science has achieved. For the second case I think you would have to provide some evidence. It's not clear to me why the same method should work in e.g. physics, but totally fail in climate research. Sure, some scientists are driven by selfish motives, but science seems to overcome this in other areas. What would cause it to fail just in this field?
Turkey oil. CWT's biomass reactor is 85% efficient in turning agricultural (and other) waste into barrels of fuel oil. America's agricultural waste could totally replace imported petro fuels. And simultaneously reduce the amount of wasted land in landfill, which also reduces the Greenhouse gases that are wasted in that slower composition. Unlike other sustainable energy carriers, their fuel can also be refined to plastic and other petro products.
--
make install -not war
My models are much less ambitious than climate modelling which I have very little idea of how anyone would even start other than finite-element, and the rules better be right. My models are simple proven stead-state flow models used to design chemical plants. I pour X amount of rain in with Y amount of air containing Z CO2 at temperature T and watch what comes out.
I haven't tried to model the greenhouse effect, and I'd be very leery of getting the boundary conditions and transfer rules correct.
Except that global warming isn't a matter of belief at all, it's a matter of a mountain of evidence for it and no credible evidence to the coutrary, whereas there is absolutely no tangible evidence of the virgin birth of Jesus, and quite a bit of evidence that Saul of Tarsus invented the whole thing decades after Jesus died in order to convert pagan goddess worshipers to "Judaism".
Math is not a matter of belief. Does your computer stop working if you stop believing in it? Okay, bad example.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
The issues you mentioned are not controversial.
...
Maybe not now, but in their time
ISTR Galileo having a pretty rough time about something that we now know to be true.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Science has been an evolving situation for centuries. Ultimately, the science done in the 17th through 19th centuries was much purer then it is today.
I do have a strong belief that the peer review system has been corrupted by pecuniary interests. Corrupted enough to discard it? No, but enough that I find it just as important to find out who funded the research as the actual results. In Global Warming, the most radical warnings tend to come from groups who are strongest on protecting the enviroment. The weakest findings come from those funded by coal and oil interests. Obviously the truth is somewhere in the middle.
The nature of science today is that it is interest driven. If you have been hired by a certain group, you are going to be predisposed to interpet the findings in a way that is more agreeable with your funding source.
We are still in the dark ages when it comes to climate forecasting. Hence some of my comparison to centuries ago. We do not have the skill, data or computing power needed to properly simulate future climate. CO2 emmisions do need to be cut. More money needs to be put forward to better technology. It is going to take government intervention to accomplish this; but it must be an appropriatly measured response. I am not personally sold that the danger is as dire as some are saying. I think the atmosphere is more dynamic and flexible then others say it is. However, I think caution is in order and the action must be taken now. I am certainly not dismissing anything. I just take a cynical view on a lot of todays science.
or pay a monstrous heating bill.
The good news: you won't be paying a huge heating bill.
The bad news: wait til you see your air conditioning bill.
Enjoy your 140 degree summers!
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
Who the hell modded that +5, Insightful?!
The response to the first statement is simply paranoia. If you do a careful study with data that implies that global warming is not happening, or that it's not caused by humans, there's no evidence you won't be able to get it published. You will of course need convincing data, that will be the hard part.
The religious zealots are the ones who insist that atmospheric C02 can increase forever without causing any global warming.
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Consensus has nothing to do with truth
Consensus does not affect the truth, but that's completely irrelevant. Consensus is the best way that we all, as a group, can best figure out what the truth is. What other mechanism do you propose?
Any time you see every scientist agree on a very controversial topic, be very suspicious.
It can't be a controversy if they all agree, now can it?
"the future of humanity is at stake."
Don't exagerate. I know of no global warming scenario that predicts the extinction of humanity.
Wonderfull, you quote his saying "future", and you claim he said "extinction". Neat.
You can't take the sky from me...
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Do you have any proof of this? Any reason to believe this? Any slight indication EXCEPT that he doesn't reach your conclusion?
He's been hotly debated in Denmark, including many attacks which were more aimed at his homosexuality than the matter at hand.
If he had gotten money from Exxon, I think someone other than you would have found out.
Please stop making up facts. Thanks
Wow, you're american aren't you?
Surface warming over the last century or more has been observed at thousands of stations lying on a continuum from urban to very, very remote (I work in Siberia. I should know.) In addition, a vast array of proxy data including sea, lake, and river ice duration and extent (my own area of specialty) corroborate these temperature records. Saying that a bush growing in Australia has lead to the entire theory of global climate change is patently ridiculous.
Oh, and as a previous poster suggested, do a search on Google Scholar. You'll find many, many papers on changes in global sea surface temperature using both in situ and a variety of satellite data sets that are widely accepted by the scientific community as valid.
If you want to debate the anthropogenic influence on global climate change, go ahead. While I personally accept the evidence that a subsantial portion of this change is human-induced, arguments can be made to the contrary. Saying that the globe isn't warming up (and yes, there are a few areas that are cooling, such as eastern Canada) at this point is simply not a viable argument.
HAha,ok, so you are a brainwashed american. That's too funny. hahaha, as proven a threat as saddam??? ahhahaa lol rofl!!! You're an insignificant collection of cells on a tiny world in a huge universe and yet you think you're the most important thing ever. Once you look past your toes, maybe you'll realize there's a whole world out there, populated by other-selves.
Not really. But even if you found some funding (probably from a corp) to do some research in a 'forbidden' direction, try getting your conclusions published in a peer reviewed journal. Won't happen. And of course after that you will be blacklisted so you can change careers because you will never be accepted as a 'real scientist' again, because all 'real scientists' believe in Global Warming about like Christians believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus.
Critics of global warming would like us to believe that global warming is some sort of scientific orthodoxy that stifles opposing views. They are able to sell this notion because most people don't follow the scientific literature, and are unaware of how the current consensus on the topic has gradually evolved over many years based upon many lines of evidence.
In reality, there is no single theory that dictates that global warming must occur, nor is there some dominant scientific authority who is heavily invested in the theory, like some of the notorious scientific orthodoxies of the past.
Scientists did not set out to prove global warming. Global warming arose out of climate simulations combined with historical data suggesting that there has been a general warming trend over recent decades. Initially, the simulations were pretty rough, with highly variable results from lab to lab, and the climate data was spotty, and a lot of scientists were very skeptical. Note that there is no single climate simulation that everybody uses. Simulators typically don't trust anybody else's model. All make slightly different assumptions. But as the simulations have been refined to take account of possible confounding effects, and as researchers have come up with a variety of clever ways to obtain additional data over past climate trends, the data and the different simulations have gradually converged, and the skeptics have been mostly won over
So at the present time, there is indeed a rather strong scientific consensus among independent researchers that global warming is real, and that CO2 emissions by man are a significant factor. These days, the critics are pretty much all associated with groups that stand to lose financially from the kinds of measures that would need to be taken to reduce global warming.
There is of course, still room for debate as to the correct action, and there are those who accept global warming but are critical of Kyoto. But any sensible debate must start by accepting the fact that there is a reasonable and rational scientific consensus that human CO2 emissions are contributing to global warming.
"Any time you see every scientist agree on a very controversial topic, be very suspicious."
Controversy: A dispute, usually an expression of opposing views on a matter that cannot be conclusively settled one way or another.
If every scientist agrees, it's not really controversial, is it?
--If 50,000 people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
That would be the NORTH polar icecap -- as it's floating on water -- it wouldn't raise the sea level (just lower it's salinity).
The SOUTH polar icecap is resting on land... if THAT melts, it drains in to sea raising the sea-level. Do your same experiment, but hold the icecube above the water and let it melt. As it drips in to the glass, as you would expect, the level rises.
A paper isn't a scientist saying something, it's his research saying something.
Science is making the democratic fallacy - if you have a pain, you usually see a doctor, not have a group of people vote on the diagnosis.
I AM curious if the late 1970's journals were just as unanimous about the certain to be upcoming Ice Age.
If there is an existing bias in the Journals' review boards that reject anything that doesn't tow the party line on apocalyptic global warming, of course no such articles will be published regardless of the quality of the argument.
Scientists are not the new holy priesthood who have no biases (or needs for funding - though a lot of the scientific apocalyptic talk does sound like a televangelist - global warming is coming! contribute now!). There are some honest ones, but others who are political and follow scientific fads and fashions. They are human too.
IF you read history (does anyone, even here?) Plate Tectonics was contraversial and was a quack theory when it was proposed in 1905 - it is considered the correct explanation today.
How much pollution did Mt. St. Helens just inject into the atmosphere? How much chlorine did Mt Pinatubo inject into the ozone layer - oh, but those are good little chlorine molecules, not like the bad CFCs that sink into the soil, and are digested by bacteria, but can make ozone swoon and decompose 60 miles away...
Correleations may or may not be meaningful.
Causation - in the strict scientific sense - requires some strictness to prove.
-
1) There is clear evidence of global climate
changes when humans were not present.
-
2) There is clear evidence of global climate
changes when humans are present.
-
3) All of our global climate is directly related
to the output of energy from the Sun.
-
4) There is clear evidence that the Sun's energy
output is variable.
What does that add up to? It adds up to a 100% chance that the global climate will change radically whether or not we do anything! So we really have only two choices:Option A: Develop the science and technology to completely control the weather/climate everywhere on the planet.
Option B: Develop the science and technology that allows humans to survive when the planet is frozen as well as when it is hot.
The entire "Global Warming" debate is focussed on getting us to "Option A". The starting element being to have the global population regulate the proportion of certain gasses that are emitted by our day to day activities. I can only assume they will move on to giant fans or perhaps massive ocean moving water pumps to attempt to balance heatload around the planet.
Option B requires no new science (hence it isn't interesting to scientists looking for grants, its just an engineering problem.) and consequently it gets no coverage at all.
Face it folks, this planet is a documented deathtrap. It has killed off more flora and fauna over the last 4.5 billion years than you can imagine and we're next. Lets let the planet do its thing and get hotter and colder and focus on either digging in and surviving those changes or getting off this rock into an environment we built and we control.
My nightmare is that we invest literally trillions of euros/dollars what-have-you trying to control the weather, only to have some factor that changed the weather a million years ago do it again. And we all die. But collectively, the billions waiting outside the pearly gates can look to each other and say "At least it wasn't our fault."
--Chuck
The earth is getting warmer and there is nothing you can do.
Why don't we start with something easy, like changing tomorrows weather.
The earth is an oblate spheroid
The sun is made of hydrogen and a significant amount of helium plus lots of other things
Gravity from the Moon pulls things "up".
I'll give you the one on smoking.
Energy is only produced from splitting atoms with an atomic weight greater than Iron's (Fe).
I am a "scientist". Prove me wrong.
There was a nice article in LeMonde about a month ago on research done in France that attributed global warming to solar irradiance changes. There are lots of folks who are not convinced that human activity is a fault.
Why doesn't anybody care about methane levels?
...You are confusing "scientists" with "religious nuts"....
Before a few hundred years ago the "religious nuts" as you call them, the scientists, or scientific philosophers as they were called then, were one and the same. Based on their observations the Earth appeared flat and therefore that is what was considered to be true by most of them.
Certain "religious nuts" who were in communication with the Creator God who IS, got it right, whereas the ones who depended on observations alone got it wrong for a long long time.
God tells us in Isaiah 40:22 that the earth is not flat like the scientists of Isaiah's day thought, but is circular. Indeed the Hebrew word chwug (pronounced --> khoog) literally means spherical, like an orange or apple. It was 1700 years later that a Greek mathematician named Erathenes proved that the earth must be spherical.
None the myths about what supports the Earth that abounded in the ancient world are found in the Word of God. Man has always had very imaginative ideas about the foundation of the Earth. Some believed that it rested on elephants or on the backs of turtles. The Greeks believed that Atlas was the one who carried the Earth on his shoulders. In the book of Job, the oldest book of the Bible we are told:
Job 26:7 He spreads out the northern skies over empty space; he suspends the earth over nothing.
Before Darwin, and his contemporaries, such as Newton, Faraday, Pascal, Galileo and many others were devout Christians who believed in an orderly and precise Creator God whose works could and should be explored by man. Therefore we could give Him greater honor and stand in awe of Him and be benefited by what He has given to us.
All theory is gray
...Enjoy your 140 degree summers!...
It's more like I'd enjoy 85 to 95 deg F summers, uniformly, all over the Earth, including the poles.
All theory is gray
Don't mind me, I just feel like trolling.
"All scientists agree that the Earth is round."
Depends on how strict your definition of "round" is.
"All scientists agree that the sun is made up of Hydrogen."
Which fuses into... more hydrogen? Pop quiz: how did helium get its name?
"All scientists agree that gravity pulls things down."
Some are still looking into the possibility of a negative mass "charge."
"All scientists agree that smoking is bad for you."
Including marajuana?
"All scientists agree that splitting the atom will produce energy."
Only for certain atoms. If splitting helium into hydrogen also produced a net energy output, the sun would be violating the laws of thermodynamics.
You should try it sometime. 100 million is the number of people who live within 1 meter of sea level. It's in the article. Sea levels vary with CO2 levels. It's in the article. Modest increases of CO2 - less than the current increase - have led to several meters rise in sea levels. It's in the article.
Advocating doing nothing and continuing to go down in flames needs more justification than the incoherent rantings of some painkiller addict.
I'll skip the political aspects because debating politics, especially online, is akin to pissing in the wind. However, everything I've read about the new crop of hybrids (like the '04 Civic and the '05 Accord and Escape) has suggested that they are most definitely ready for prime-time. The Accord hybrid has, according to Car and Driver, better acceleration numbers than the V-6 model (to say nothing of the 4-banger), and gets far better mileage both in the EPA ratings and in the real world. And, of course, spews far less tailpipe junk.
If there is a 10% chance of it being true and it's going to cost a trillion dollars worldwide to fix the problem then we had better be avoiding at least $10 trillion worth of damage.
You don't get it, do you?
There is no "fixing" what will happen if the worst happens, no matter how much money you throw at it. The sea will rise high enough to drown most coastal cities, including NYC, probably Washington DC, probably London, an awful lot of Japan....are you starting to get the picture? At the very least, this will cause massive social upheaval as hundreds of millions of people have to move further inland--or, in the cases of places like Japan, simply emigrate. More likely, millions of people will die.
And I don't really see how application of even all the world's money will solve the resulting chaos and destruction as land becomes much more valuable, and people seek to claim it by any means necessary. At the worst case, we could literally be talking the end of civilization as we know it--and the rise of whoever can grab most land fastest. Naturally, that is worst case, and not terribly likely.
But you can't talk about this problem in terms of cost. It doesn't matter how much it costs to fix it before it happens, because the cost of not fixing it is, effectively, infinite.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
It's always funny to read remarks from people who assume that everyone in the world is exactly like them.
'I would sell my soul for grants, and lie to everyone and pretend there are dangers when there aren't, just for a little money. Pity I'm not cut out to be a scientist. But obviously since I would, then EVERY SINGLE CREDIBLE SCIENTIST would, since everyone else in the world is just as dishonest at the core as I am.'
Right? Right?
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Catastrophic? - How do you (or anyone else) know that?
Any longterm change in climate is catastrophic
Maybe not for you or me but for a lot of other people and a lot of other lifeforms.
It is an undiputed fact that the Earths climate has been wildly different at different times through the eras and life always managed to survive.
Life, yes, not all life. How much of the life present during the jurassic is still around today? Humanity may not survive because we as a species is so high up in the food chain and such species are usually the ones who fare the worst during a change. Life will probalby survive for billions of years here on Earth but it might not be intelligent life.
It is also a fact that man is the most adaptable living creature ever discovered; we've been able to live everywhere on this planets surface, plus in the air, under the water and even in space and on the moon. We as a species will survive any climate change given enough warning to adapt (using technology if nessesary).
Errm, perphaps you should've asked someone like me who do research in evolution before making such a clam as "fact". Being adaptable is nowhere near being able to create gear that helps us cope with a specific environment. True adation takes time, a lot of time. Way more time than we have in a lot of lifetimes, try kilo- and megayears.
Now IMHO instead of blindly trying to return the climate state to the level of 'the good old days' we should rather accept the changes (which still may be natural, and which in any case has happened naturally before and may again) and begin the adaption process. The sooner the better.
Perhaps we should ask some dinos about the best way to go about it. Oh yeah right... Again history teaches nothing. Whatever happends, don't blindly assume that we're the ones coming out on top.
Sure, things will be different but it doesn't mean it'll be worse (or catastrophic), and it might even be a change for the better in way we cannot imagine at the moment (due to lack of data).
Yeah, the grass might be greener but what if it isn't. Can you and your thinkalike buddies fix it them so the rest of us is ok? Are you prepared to take the risk? Of course you are because you think you'll be long gone by then so you don't have to pay the price.
Life is what happened when Good Intentions met Harsh Reality (the brother of the more infamous Chaos).
well, its pretty clear that you belog ins some sort of bizarro religion (even if it is a religion of one) and worthermore are superparanoid... if you want to talk about economic damage resulting from Kyoto you shoudl also be prepared to quantify how much it would be, where it woudl come from and why - and not just repeat slogans.
The problem is that when earth was 40F warmer, life everywhere except in Arctic was dead. You are confusing that period with a far colder one if you claim "no deserts".
Can you please demonstrate your utter lack of knowledge of the topic a bit less eloquently? Because if you go on like this, everybody will just laugh and pay you no attention, hence no argument. So basicly -
* 1) sunspot activity or numbers don't equate to increased solar output
* 2) has not been true for several years now
* 3) has not been true since.. oh abou 50s and does not have a trend towards becoming so
so in summary, you are just a crackpot winding yourself on slashdot
So what you are trying to say is that you neither understood the measurement nor what the error bars show?
1) There is clear evidence of global climate changes when humans were not present.
2) There is clear evidence of global climate changes when humans are present.
What you fail to mention is that, barring catastrophic events such as asteroid or comet strikes, the evidence of Global Climate Change when humans were not present shows a slow, gradual change. The changes we are now witnessing, however, are happening at a dramatically faster pace. As it happens, this small detail makes the rest of your otherwise silly argument irrelevant. Sorry.
Reminder: find a new sig
Oh, wait, none of that happened. So why are you claiming that scientists are close-minded?
There are a few things that are known beyond any principled denial:
- Earth is roughly 50 degrees F warmer than a body with its absorptive characteristics would be at our distance from the Sun, absent other influences. (Venus is an extreme example.) This proves the greenhouse effect.
- The greenhouse effect is due to a number of gases in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide.
- Adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, particularly non-condensible ones, will have a warming effect on the Earth.
Now, you can have principled disputes about the interactions of mechanisms at work (greenhouse vs. reflective clouds), but you cannot deny that increasing the concentration of the most important non-condensible greenhouse gas by a large fraction is certain to do something. I see you dismissing the entire concept as religious dogma; it appears to me that your dismissal is itself dogma, like the political attempt to dismiss evolution from biology classes.You also engage in non-sequiturs.
You are using a claim of economic damage to deny a scientific conclusion which suggests a need for action. Well, gee, if I posit a scientific conclusion about the way that cholera and typhoid are spread it might suggest a need for billions of dollars of investment in water treatment systems! Our budgets are too tight, so by your "reasoning" my conclusion has to be wrong.Or maybe it's time for you to realize that the world isn't always as you like it. In other words, grow up.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
What's your point, except for the obvious (and annoying) nit-picking?
Yes, there are some people who don't believe that greenhouse gas emissions do not have an impact on global climate changes. There's quite a few that hang out on Slashdot, it seems. But the point is that there is many, many more that believe that, in fact, they do. Until there is convincing evidence either way, basic prudence tells me that I should act as if the much bigger group is right. If they turn out to be wrong, well then we'll just have wasted a bit of money - no more than we would have on a couple of wars, and somehow we manage to recover from those. But if they turn out to be right, and we didn't follow their advice...well, you get the idea.
The military spends billions on "contingency plans", preparing for attacks that may never come. I don't see any of you complaining about this...
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Hey, what do you know, nit-picker #2...thanks for your totally useless post. At least you began by admitting you were trolling...
Reminder: find a new sig
Look, I believe that ozone depletion is cause by Cl - Fl molecules in the upper atmosphere. The evidence is there. Its been presented and I can read it and make a decision.
/. readers feel the same way.
There isn't anything even close for global warming being caused by human activity. If someone showed me any/some evidence that I found convincing, I might change my mind. Telling me that someone else found the evidence convincing just doesn't cut it. Apparently a lot of other
Despite the opinion you may have formed to this point, I am not a fool. If I saw evidence that there was some chance of human activity causing a global climatic cataclysm, I'd be in favor of some changes.
But, I might say, "lets plant more trees". Or "lets dump Iron Sulfate out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean" (which starts a chain reaction that causes very large amounts of CO2 to be consumed and sink to the bottom of the ocean, where it's not in the atmosphere anymore and won't be for a very long time). And, I might say "lets worry about methane in the atmosphere and do something about it. (The greenhouse effect due to methane is much greater than due to CO2)" Then, after seeing if these things have effect I might even say we have to cut down on emissions. But, when I look at cost/benefit, the last item is just not at the top of the list.
Show me the evidence. Don't put words in other people's mouth. That is my point.
There isn't anything even close for global warming being caused by human activity. If someone showed me any/some evidence that I found convincing, I might change my mind.
/. readers feel the same way.
Well, the first step would be to ask what kind of evidence you'll find convincing. One thing that we do know, is that there there is an observable warming at ground level, which has now been corroborated by the same satellite evidence that enviroskeptic trumpeted in the spring, saying it proved their position was right. We do not know for sure that human warming is responsible, however it hasn't been disproven either. The basic fact that we don't know for sure is argument enough to devote a lot more money into climate research. If it turns out that humans don't really have much of an impact on climate, fine. We'll learn that the unprecedented warming we're seeing today is a freak occurence of mother nature, and we'll happily go on burning fossil fuels, releasing all these new greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. (yes, new - all those hydrocarbons have been imprisoned in the earth, out of for atmospheric circulation, for millions of years).
Telling me that someone else found the evidence convincing just doesn't cut it.
I agree. Without seeing convincing evidence that human activity is not responsible for the measureable warming, I'm not ready to take the risk releasing increasing quantities of greenhouse gases in the air. And don't try to claim that "you can't prove a negative". I'm sorry, but the stakes are too high, the burden of proof here is on the enviroskeptics.
Apparently a lot of other
Good for them - though they still have to prove to me that human activity isn't involving in the current global warming. Anyway, looking at the messages in the thread, as well as the overall moderation, I'd say that there are ate least as many Slashdotters who don't agree with the enviroskeptic. But since you claim to be a scientist you should pursue the discussion with Mr_Matt instead - he's the atmospheric scientist here, after all.
But, I might say, "lets plant more trees". Or "lets dump Iron Sulfate out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean" (which starts a chain reaction that causes very large amounts of CO2 to be consumed and sink to the bottom of the ocean, where it's not in the atmosphere anymore and won't be for a very long time). And, I might say "lets worry about methane in the atmosphere and do something about it. (The greenhouse effect due to methane is much greater than due to CO2)"
I agree with you about methane - the huge cattle farms release a lot of this in the air, though I suspect that CO2 still has bigger impact due to volume. As far as planting trees is concerned, this would certainly help, however the tree planting techniques we have today are woefull inadequate. While tree harvesting has become extremely efficient through the use of heavy machinery, tree planting is still done by hand (due to the delicate nature of the operation, it's trickier and costlier to mechanize). It's hard, grueling work, and it doesn't pay that much. We'd be hard pressed to embark on the massive planting effort you suggest. The iron sulfate idea is intriguing, though I'd be curious to hear about the effect on marine life.
Then, after seeing if these things have effect I might even say we have to cut down on emissions. But, when I look at cost/benefit, the last item is just not at the top of the list.
You know something that really ticks me off? It's that everyone but the US has agreed on Kyoto. Only in the richest country of the world do we find so so many people bitching about how much it would cost. Everywhere else in the world, China, Russia, Europe, Canada, the rich and the poor, everyone has agreed. The problem is that it's not only America's atmosphere - it everyone's. So everyone has their word to say.
The U.S. should be targeted with economic sanctions by
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a little over 500 years ago EVERYONE thought the world was flat, didn't make it true.
Not everyone did. Just most europeans (thanks, Christianity!).
Hasn't the planet been for millions of years and gone through many ice ages? Isn't it natural to assume that at some point it got warmer in between those ice ages?
If we were in an ice age I wouldn't be too worried about global warming. The problem is that the last ice age ended 10,000 years ago. We are in an interglacial phase, it's not supposed to get warmer like this.
We have what 100 or so years of weather data?
Actually we can go back a lot further than 100 years by checking the ice caps at various depths.
The Earth was here long before us and will be here long after us.
Yeah, the idea is to make sure we're here for the longest time possible.
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My two points are that the "global warming alarmists" are wasting innocent people's hard earned money by trying to get them to buy into the fact that they will figure out a way to control the weather (and if they were up front about that agenda they would get sacked.) And two that there is indisputable proof that if we were to abandon this planet today its climate will shift, so why shouldn't we just accept that and deal with it? Three billion dollars to reduce emissions from vehicles this year and 133 people die of heatstroke in europe because the temperature swing was abnormal? Three billion dollars could get everyone in italy an airconditioner and a tank of propane to run it.
Next thing you know there will be the "global magnetic crisis". The north and south poles are wandering, and they may even switch to opposite ends of the planet! This change has been accelerating over the last 100 years, it MUST be due to something people are doing.
Can we stop sacrificing innocent people in the quest to appease the weather gods? It didn't work for the Mayans and it won't work today.
--Chuck
Nor can your really say that "all" scientists agree on this.
My point is mainly one of lack of information climate models are improving, but for them to truely be correct they will far more data then is availible at this time.
Mostly they would need a control case to compare the effects with. So we need to build another earth without humans on it.
So we need to get meglomanical mouse to construct some sort of Chia Earth
On the contrary, a number of the papers that study things like ice cores in the antartic are worried because climate shifts were, in a geological sense, very rapid. Don't you even read this stuff?
"Very rapid" in a geological sense is still slower than the change we are seeing today. In any case, I'd like if you could provide some links to some of those papers you speak of. And since there's a few nit-pickers on the thread, I'll add that it's spelled the "Antarctic".
My two points are that the "global warming alarmists" are wasting innocent people's hard earned money by trying to get them to buy into the fact that they will figure out a way to control the weather
Straw man argument. Strike one!
Next thing you know there will be the "global magnetic crisis". The north and south poles are wandering, and they may even switch to opposite ends of the planet! This change has been accelerating over the last 100 years, it MUST be due to something people are doing.
Don't be silly. We know that human activity isn't responsible for magnetical pole switching, and that the switching is unlikely to affect us very much (though it might affect electrical devices somewhat).
Gee, two straw man arguments in a row...can we hope for strike three?
Can we stop sacrificing innocent people in the quest to appease the weather gods? It didn't work for the Mayans and it won't work today.
And you're out! Wow, do you really believe you'll convince anyone to follow your minority viewpoint with such logical fallacies?
Reminder: find a new sig
Actually, CO2 is poisonous. You can asphyxiate while still having significantly more oxygen than carbon dioxide in your lungs.
Luckily, CO2 saturation is only around 700 ppm... up from 300 ppm fifty years ago. (As measured on a mountanside on Hawaii; in a city it'll be rather higher.) Even if you feel the long-term health effects of carbon dioxide are uncertain, or hope nature will compensate (look! A wacky Gaian!) it is only sensible to reduce release until it is provably safe.
In the '50s, the US government wanted to use nuclear bombs for mining and construction applications. (The first was to be a harbour in Alaska.) They argued that the side-effects of spreading radio-active dust were purely theoretical... which remained true, for a few years. If wacky left-wing protesters hadn't stopped them, there would be a lot more deformed children in the US and elsewhere today.
If mother earth would be so much better off without us, feel free to set a noble example, and go jump off a bridge.
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Can you? Or your thinkalike buddies?
Even if I grant that global warming is occurring, do you have a shred of proof that things like the Kyoto Protocol will result in a net benefit to the welfare of most people? Ever hear of unintended consequences?
Poverty kills, and if there is one thing we can take as near certain based on experience, it is that collectivist prescriptions from the watermelon Left will result in increased poverty and misery.
Too much Law; not enough Order.
...life everywhere except in Arctic was dead...
There is no evidence that life in the now tropical areas was EVER dead. There is plenty of evidence that the ENTIRE planet was UNIFORMLY warm, from pole to pole and the tropics were no hotter than they are today. A warm water saturated atmosphere will distribute the solar energy the Earth receives very well. Especially the upper atmosphere, now very cold was warm then. Water is also a very good shield for high energy radiation from the sun and other extraterrestrial sources. That is one reason water is used in nuclear reactors as a moderator.
Pure water vapor is lighter than either oxygen or nitrogen. It tends to rise until it reaches the colder part of the atmosphere where it condenses around the dust particles and precipitates out again.
If the atmosphere, especially the upper part above 7 or so miles is warm, then the condensation will not take place. Also, barring a catastrophic event such as a large volcanic eruption or a large meteor strike, the upper part of the atmosphere is relatively free of particles around which droplets can form. It is this warm layer of almost pure water vapor that distributes warmth and keeps more of the sun's heat from escaping into space. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but pure water vapor even more so, because water, gaseous or liquid, holds a huge amount of latent heat. We know that large bodies of water moderate the climate around them. A large body of water, equivalent to about 200-300 feet of ocean volume in the upper atmosphere would have a world wide effect. There is evidence that the oceans were about that much lower in the past.
All theory is gray
Here is the quote, from the article that is linked in the story, that you apparently didn't bother to read:
Lessons from the deep past
An alternative approach is to look for examples in more ancient earth history, of similar phenomena to the present: that is, of sudden, massive outbursts of greenhouse gases into a world that is already warm. At least two have been identified, in the Toarcian epoch of the Jurassic Period, some 180 million years ago, and in the early Eocene Epoch, around 55 million years ago.
In both of these, the influx of greenhouse gases has been demonstrated by changes in the ratios of carbon isotopes within fossils. The isotopes themselves do not say whether mainly CO2 or methane was involved, but plausible scenarios suggest the involvement of both (say, by deriving CO2 from extraordinary, geologically rare volcanic outbursts, providing initial warming which in turn destabilized methane which had been stored in permafrost or in ocean floor sediments). Whatever the precise mix of gases, the amount of warming is now well established, again from isotope ratios preserved in fossils. Rapid warmings of the order of between 5 and 10 degrees centigrade took place globally, the temperatures declining back to background values over many thousands of years, probably as the excess greenhouse gases were slowly drawn out of the atmosphere by reactions associated with rock weathering.
These geological examples strongly reinforce the modelled scenarios of global warming for later this century. Crucially, such temperature surges show the earth behaving in a non-linear fashion when reacting to environmental stress: that is, it tends to 'flip' from one quasi-stable state to another, and this kind of behaviour is inherently difficult to model or to predict. There will be, the oceanographer Wallace Broecker has said, unpleasant surprises in the greenhouse.
I added a bit of emphasis there. Those pre-historic levels seem to have "flipped" pretty quickly too.
But that was "volcanic" you say, well we're entering a period of "unprecendented" volcanic activity on the pacific rim. But hey, that's probably our fault too.
Unless I'm mistaken, and that's certainly possible, no one in the accredited scientific community disagrees with the assertion that global climate has changed, for reasons unknown, over geologically short periods of time, without the participation of humans, in the past 200 - 300 million years. That is neither a minority opinion, nor is particularly assailable as a fact (unless you're a creationist and want to go that "young earth" route).So telling folks that by cutting down their green house gas emissions, they are going to prevent or even ameliorate global warming is like telling someone that by not smoking they will not get cancer. Not only is it not the whole truth, it detracts from actually saving lives. If you can't understand that, or if you wish to dally in meta debate, you're welcome to do that. It just means, like our non-smoker friend, you haven't really done anything to futher the chances of humanities survival.
Were you asking from actual curiosity or trying to change his point in an attempt to disprove it?
The best way to discredit global warming computer models would be to produce equally plausible models which don't predict warming.
I'm wondering why nobody has done this?
All slashdot readers agree that splitting hairs will produce karma.
I'm unsure why you think signing up to Kyoto will ruin your economy. There are a number of economists' studies out there (and yes, I know most economists especially the neocon zealots are completely disreputable) that purport to show that the economy will be almost completely unaffected (like about 0.1% lower growth rate over 5 years or something).
From what I've observed, most of the people who claim Kyoto will cause the collapse of civilisation as we know it are in the pay of the oil and coal industries, so their statements should be at least treated with caution.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
Isn't Lomborg an economist? Most of them don't really understand the maths they use.
I'm pretty sure his work has been very thoroughly debunked - by scientists.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
Can you? Or your thinkalike buddies?
Well, that should be obvious even to you. If we try to stop what is causing global warming then we at least lessen the effects of it. The thing is, you can stop the cause but the reaction is much much harder to stop if it happends. Assuming it happends (which we do not know), then global warming is going to cause such major effects to civilization that we will not be able to do anything but try to survive. Think enormous migrations, major famine and watersupply problems. And this will come even from relatively mild global warming. If we are having wars today over petty issues then think what will happend once we face real survival issues. May seem a bit distant now as we sit and type with a well fed refrigerator and cup of coffiee but for the next generation it might be reality. I know what I would do to make sure my children survives. The thing is, you're betting everything you've got on black coming up on the roulette. If we assume that at least there is a chance that red can come up and place our bets accordingly then we do not risk loosing everything.
Even if I grant that global warming is occurring, do you have a shred of proof that things like the Kyoto Protocol will result in a net benefit to the welfare of most people? Ever hear of unintended consequences?
Of course there will be unintended consequences, there always is. The question is, which will be worse, the disease or the cure. I'm sure we'll survive the cure but I'm not sure if civilization will survive if the disease (given it's real) is as bad as some think it will be.
Poverty kills, and if there is one thing we can take as near certain based on experience, it is that collectivist prescriptions from the watermelon Left will result in increased poverty and misery.
That may be the case in some places/countries but raw numbers of poverty in some european countries, that have been governed by (mainly post WWII) socialdemocratic parties (not commies), shows far less poverty than, for instance, the US. That communism (or Leninist-Marxism/Stalinism to be exact) failed is not surprising since their fundamental view of the expendability and freedom of the individual is flawed beyond repair.
Life is what happened when Good Intentions met Harsh Reality (the brother of the more infamous Chaos).
There's also a fair bit of ice currently sitting on top of Greenland, and more locked up in glaciers all over the place, which will push the water level up some more when it all melts.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
You make the assumption that, because twice in a period of a 300 million years there have been rapid outbursts of greehouse gases, that this is one of them. There's a chance it might be, but there's also a chance it isn't. Are you ready to take that chance?
BTW your analogy to the smoker is faulty. By not smoking, a person will greatly reduce their chance of getting lung cancer - or will you try to deny this as well by claiming anectodical evidence of smokers who lived to be 100 years old?
Reminder: find a new sig
Those "scientists" believe in this "global warming" humbug have conspired to keep all the true scientists out of their journals!
This is just like the conspiracy to keep the shame of the evolution theory alive, as well as the fake moonlanding, and the lie that our world is not flat!
Eg if adding green house gasses to a system which is heated by the sun (or a radiant heat source producing the same wavelengths as the sun) causes temperatures in the system to rise, global warming is as proven as relativity, given the limits of our ability to demonstrate large scale processes within controlled environments...
That's your proof? That's seriously the best you can do? Heat a box up with a lamp, shove some gas in there, note a slight variation in temperature, and then state that because of this we need to spend umpteen trillion dollars and completely change everything about our lives and the way our world economy works.
Wow. You're gonna have a long road ahead convincing people with that particular "proof".
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Whenever you see a result like 75% for, 25% neutral, 0% opposed to any hypothesis, you have to assume there's a publication bias.
Example, public health studies of gun control. I've read them ALL up to about 1995 and most of the big ones after that. In US, Canadian and British medical journals 60 of 65 articles from 1975 up to about 1995 on the subject advocated increased gun control as a solution to murder rates, the other five were neutral. That's 91.6% for, 8.3% neutral, 0% against. Yet we know that there was a thriving debate on the issue with considerable publication of scholarly opinion and scientific evidence against gun control as a solution to violence.
The medical journals ignored any and all authors whose conclusions did not support gun control, plain and simple. Medical journal editors cherry picked articles they liked, spiked ones they didn't, and authors obliged them by not quoting from contrary findings. They are STILL DOING IT, even after the US Congress cut the CDC's funding for doing it.
Given that eye opener, I have to say I can believe in a systematic publication bias a lot faster than I can believe that NOBODY has found any reason to doubt the global warming hypothesis. People are not as noble and concerned with the Pursuit of Truth as one would like to believe.
Now, since I'm on a mission to destroy karma, I'd like all you little EcoNazis with mod points to crash this comment down to -1 as fast as possible. You managed to get me timed-out last time I posted on this subject but it took you a day or two. See if you can get it down to a couple of hours this time, eh?
And since I'm still here talking, take note of just how much return you're getting from your effort to shut guys like me up.
they seem convincing, that is the point. Of course no one's stock values depends on relativity being right or wrong. People who clamor for "proof" of a "theory" before "believing" in the theory don't understand the scientific method (or are oversimplifying it to the point of non-sense for political or religious reasons). Controlled experiments are always subject to the criticism that natural systems are uncontrolled. However, the principle that adding CO2 and hydrocarbons to a system that is warmed by radiant heat source will result in an increase in the overall temperature of that system is a "fact", it is "proven", it is "true". Increasing the carbon load in the earth's system will increase global temperatures so long as the energy from the sun remains the same or increases, that is "proven" by controlled experiments as well as historical observation. Just how that will effect day to day life (whether it will in the long run be "good" or "bad" for human population), of course is a much complex question.
Another problem with your "theory" is that you have obviously never studied atmospheric chemistry. The reason that you see the thinest is more complex than simply where CFCs are produced, especailly considering CFC's dissolve throughout the atmosphere in about a year.
The EPA has an EXCELLENT site http://www.epa.gov/ozone/science/hole/whyant.html that responds (with nice hard irrefutable science) to the misinformed statement above.
Because you have rejected the scientific method.
That meathod relies on experimentation and observation. Both show us that more CO2 and hydrocarbons in the atmosphere of a planet lead to a rise in temperatures.
If you applied the same criteria for "proof" to other areas of science, you wouldn't have ok'd the money spent on the Manhatten project, either.
Regarding the "spending billions" red herring, we are already spending billions dealing with the predictable effects of a rise in global temperatures and sea levels, and we will be spending trillions more.
>> you need to prove it TO THEM
Otto, you and others like you can;t be convinced by science on this issue, as you reject the scientific method. Historical observation can't convince you, laboratory experiments can't convince you, and observation of other systems can't convince you.
I have no doubt that as sea levels rise and we need to build dikes or abandon them, you will be claiming its being caused by sunspots or goddidit, not SUVs, not even when a billion chinese are driving them.
I was just pointing out that the science for human effects on global warming (really the effects of rising atmospheric carbon levels) is as solid as the science for relativity, as the grandparent raised that as some sort of standard, I'm not trying to convince you to spend billions on prevention rather than spending trillions on clean-up.
I have little doubt that given the current anti-science human climate, you folks in the political majority won't start listening to them snooty egg-heads on this issue until the seas have risen at least 1m.
It's really good; taste a little like bald eagle.
Keeping an open mind and focusing on the data rather than other people's analyses of it? If temperatures are going up and humans are producing chemicals that are chemically capable of causing global warming, that just means that temperatures are going up and humans are producing chemicals that are capable of causeing global warming. Unless the link can be measured, it's not necessarily there, eh.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
And back to my analogy, I didn't say someone who stopped (or didn't) smoke wouldn't get lung cancer, I simply said cancer. Just like our changing the amount of green house gases may prevent a kind of global climate shift but by definition there are other mechanisms that don't involve humans that will still cause a global climate shift. The end result is the same, massive changes in where humanity can live comfortably but we're not preparing for that now are we? Of course not there isn't any grant money in it.
--Chuck
Now he does that to try to emphasize the rapidity of change, but it also means that our current rise may NOT be due to humans after all as there were no humans on the planet when those shifts were recorded.
Then again, it may. Even if one or two shifts similar to the current one (at least you recognize there is one) occured in the past, that does not prove in any way that what's going on now is the same as what happened during those times. A lot more "grant money" would be necessary before a definite statement could be made in that sense. So it seems to me that you are jumping to conclusions, here - conclusions that support your agenda, obviously.
And back to my analogy, I didn't say someone who stopped (or didn't) smoke wouldn't get lung cancer, I simply said cancer.
No, that is the opposite of what you said. You said that "telling folks that by cutting down their green house gas emissions, they are going to prevent or even ameliorate global warming is like telling someone that by not smoking they will not get cancer" - in other words, that you can still get cancer even if you smoke (re-read the sentence above, I think you used too many negatives and lost count). What I replied is that, while you may still get other types of cancer, if you don't smoke you will have much less chances of getting lung cancer, therefore lowering the overall risk of getting a cancer.
Just like our changing the amount of green house gases may prevent a kind of global climate shift but by definition there are other mechanisms that don't involve humans that will still cause a global climate shift.
We are in an interglacial period. It's not supposed to get warmer than it is right now, and there is no proof that the currently measured warming is natural. Meanwhile, there have been millions of tons of greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere from fossilized sources. Climate models predict an increase in temperature. An increased in temperature is measured and confirmed through satellite data. I think it's time to put two and two together, now.
The end result is the same, massive changes in where humanity can live comfortably
How do you know we can live comfortably in those massive changes? What about people who live near the coast? I'm sorry, but your blind faith that "everything's going to be all right" just doesn't cut it.
Of course not there isn't any grant money in it.
"Grant money" is infinitesimal compared to oil industry profits. It doesn't even register on the same scale. The Energy Industry has a lot more power and influence than do climate scientists. Enough with the goddam "scientists made up Global Warming to get more grant money" lie. Nobody believes it but a handful of conservative "enviroskeptic" americans. We're through listening to your oil-friendly pseudo-science.
Reminder: find a new sig
Keeping an open mind and focusing on the data rather than other people's analyses of it?
Uh ok... in other words, who cares what the "experts" and "scientists" who "know" more about it than I do think - I'm going to make up my own mind based on my own understanding of the situation (which is about 1% of the knowledge of the people whose *job* it is to study it...)
Or the scientific papers, because dissenting voices can't make it past peer review and scientists being generally above average in intelligence know this so would tend to not bother attempting to publish a career ending paper. Proving the rest of the scientific community wrong is about the best career move you can make. Scientific history is full of examples, indeed, the whole scientific process relies on it. Science establishes a consensus, until there is sufficient evidence against it, If nobody brought up anything against the current scientific consensus, science would never move anywhere. Your tinfoil hat ideas about how science work just undermine your whole credibility. We call them quarks instead of aces because some guy feared for his job. It took years to get the mass of the electron right because no one wanted to contradict Milikin. Einstein didn't like the idea that the Universe was expanding, so he "fixed" relativity with the cosmological constant which he called his worst blunder of all time. Scientists don't like to say what will cost them money to say, and they don't like what goes against the ideas they are accustomed to. Scientists are not perfect by a long shot.
MMMmmm. Time to eat some Troll!
No, but all too many 'scientists' are Gaians or worse.
You must work for Faux News, eh? Nice mud slinging, without any sort of support. Personally, I went to Case Western Reserver U, an engineering school, and the only people I met who would even consider believing in Gaia were some of the few liberal arts / english majors there.
Under what authority do you lay claim to dictate how me and others live our lives?
Under the same authority you claim gives you the right to do whatever you want. I have the right to not be inconvenienced by you. You don't have to be doing physical harm to me to be infringing on my personal liberty and happiness.
But until the threat is at LEAST as proven as Saddam's threat was; please piss off and stop trying to run everyone else's life.
Well, that's easy. Considering no WMDs have been found, and it's been verified that Saddam *wanted* WMDs but was *not* producing them because of the sanctions, then we're already there!
Unless you happen to be one of the ones who loses their livelihood in the economic chaos that signing Kyoto would bring.
So, your livelihood is polluting? You make money off of that? Somehow, companies have survived even as pollution reducing techniques have been implemented.
The data on smoking was pretty damned clear. The Tobacco industry was forced to keep up a front on the issue because they realized what the trial lawyers were trying to do... what they DID do eventually.
Heh. The only reason they got in trouble is because they LIED about their research. If, instead, they had said "yeah, this is bad for you, but look how cool you are* *BTW, don't blame us when you die", then the blame would have been with the users. But, see, in the name of profits, they lied about the safety of their product. They did it to themselves, and they were fucking stupid to play it that way. The only thing more stupid is to act as if they were the victim.
> The best way to discredit global warming computer models would be to produce equally plausible models which don't predict warming.
None of the models are plausible. The Earth is too complex a system to accurately predict weather, even long-term, with current computing power.
But you can't make that argument if you "don't CARE about the science" because then the sea level rise and more violent storms are being caused by God to punish us and the solutions are religious ones, not ones based on reason.
If you leave the science out, then there is no argument, we should just keep playing until God comes back and cleans up our mess.
Woohoo, pass me a Duff!
Re:In other news...
Re:In other news... (Score:1)
by hesiod (111176) on Friday December 10, @10:45AM (#11053017)
(http://launch.yahoo....ion.asp?u=14
> The best way to discredit global warming computer models would be to produce equally plausible models which don't predict warming.
None of the models are plausible. The Earth is too complex a system to accurately predict weather, even long-term, with current computing power.
OK, produce equally implausible models which don't predict warming. Why hasn't anyone done this? If it were lack of funding of difficulty getting published, I'm sure we would have heard about it.
> there are still a few intellectually independent souls standing up and shouting that the theory of evolution is full of it.
s/independent/depraved/
There are still millions of level-headed people knowing that the theory of God is full of it.
For the millionth time: saying something is so does not make it so.
Because it's so drawn-out, I have to just summarize two of your possible scenarios:
1) we're wrong about global warming and do nothing: lose $X billion to replace something that needed replaced anyway. Scientists never trusted again, no catastrophic damage
2) global warming occurs: Floods, droughts, ecological "damage," more economic damage than otherwise
> but consider the two scenerios where we choose wrong.
But I have to add more, since you only listed one of those two scenarios:
C) Global warming occurs despite our best efforts: Because GW was not caused by the things we hastened to replace (shoddily, due to the mad rush to get it done), we first lost all the money we had to replace things, then those brand new reactors get wiped out in the massive flooding that follows, making us even worse-off. Double economic loss, same life loss, scientists are still not trusted.
Of course, there's the other possibility, which I admit is unlikely to happen:
D) There is no controllable global warming, we do nothing except we keep on living as we are, and we have more time to mature alternate power sources to replace oil more efficiently.
> The loudest voices are always extremists,
DAMN IT, WHAY AREN'T YOU MORE #$*&ING MODERATE!! GO, WHATEVER! HOORAY FOR APATHY!
> produce equally implausible models which don't predict warming. Why hasn't anyone done this?
Because seeking implausibility is just silly! (I'm just messing with you.) Don't know, maybe they have, but the aliens have hidden the results because they don't want us to find out that the Earth is just a big oven and we're the main course! Something about boiling a frog slowly comes to mind.
Err wait, that's backwards. They're freezing us to preserve us longer! That's it.
the sea level rise and more violent storms are being caused by God to punish us and the solutions are religious ones, not ones based on reason.
Please pay more when you are reading, often one sentence builds on an idea initiated in the previous one. The science predicts the sea levels will rise and storms will get more violent, and the statement was discussing what people will blame it on if they reject the science.
Sea level rise Beware, there are some scientifical terminalogies here.
If you can't do that, then you're just fucked, eh?
What an odd statement.
Scientists are urging people to get ready for the effects of and perhaps try to reduce the pace of global warming because we're all "fucked" if we don't.
> you're american aren't you?
That kind of statement also alienates those Americans who believe what you have to say.
most folks have an attitude like yours "prove it to me, but don't ask me to learn anything new". Can't be done, if you won't learn the science, you won't, and it's pointless to argue with you. Oil addiction is like drug addiction, you have to want to change, and you have to work at it and you'd deny and defend and hide from what's happening, until something happens that really knocks you in the head. We'll start making real steps to reduce carbon emmisions when major cities start being flooded. Of course it will be too late by then to save much of the coastal communities, but that's the way people generally operate. See you on the dark side of the moon...
this is a test
I read a newspaper article around April of 2003 that scientists were not measuring the output of the Sun. Isn't that an important variable to consider before concluding anything about global warming?
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
most folks have an attitude like yours "prove it to me, but don't ask me to learn anything new". Can't be done, if you won't learn the science, you won't, and it's pointless to argue with you.
Thankfully, most folks don't have an attitude like yours: "If you're not going to take my word for it, then fuck you". Sorry, but I don't take this sort of thing based on authority, and I have no interest in people who expect you to buck up without explaining why.
If you can't explain it in layman's terms, then you don't understand it. It's just that simple.
By the way, I personally do understand the science. That's the kind of guy I am. However, the conclusions by the actual science do not point toward any kind of impending catastrophe no matter how much you want them to.
Nevertheless, what the science actually says is not what I was arguing about *at all*, and since I can't seem to make you understand that, I'll just have to drop it. There's no point in arguing it any further. If you're not going to get it after 5 attempts, then I guess you're not going to get it.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Your mountain of evidence is just so intimidating. If you didn't catch that, it was sarcasm.
Time makes more converts than reason
It's just ten times worse now then it was before the combustion engine was invented.
The bulk of the gasses we currently believe are contributing to global warming are totally invisible. The next time you point to smog and start to tell yourself you can see the roots of global warming, remind yourself that in fact you cannot.
Wow, who the hell ever said that? You really took my words with you and ran. My whole point was even if you disregard global warming altogether, there is still a benefit to reducing emissions.
I'm not arguing your point; I agree that reducing emissions is critical. That said, your example is worthless, and your tone towards the parent utterly unwarranted. This is the sort of thing which, if said on the city street, often leads to a missing tooth.
Funny, because I do live in the city and I assure you that threats like that will end up right back in your face.
Time makes more converts than reason
Tell those cities to clean up their act, then. Those people should be able to clean up their own shit. Why should clean nations waste funds on unnecessary output controls just because Los Angeles or Mexico City can't clean up?
Besides. We all know that the clean air mandates are doled out by output allowances and nations use those allowances to buy and sell like any other asset. Pretty soon the US is paying Poland or Afghanistan so that Mexico City and Los Angeles can continue to pour out crap and it all becomes political purse strings.
Which still doesn't address the natural state of it all. Yes, humans are putting more CO2 into the air, and yes it may be causing some warming. But, guess what? Mother nature is responding to the increase in CO2 levels with algea blooms in all areas of the oceans. Too bad the media never gets the global warming hippies together with the algae freaks and explains to them the CO2 levels involved. It's perfectly demonstrated that mother nature is ramping up CO2 processing capacity and whatever global warming we're seeing will be properly modulated in 10-20 years.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
the next century. If that isn't an impending tradgedy to you, than you are a pretty major misanthropist. This is much more likely than getting cancer from smoking or dying in a car wreck, and of course the sea level will rise a good deal, the % is over how much (1m, .5m, 2m, etc.).
If you can't explain it in layman's terms, then you don't understand it. It's just that simple.
The reason scientists use all them big words is because we are talking about concepts that can't be described in ordinary english. Once you actually try reading some real science (as in Nature, not Popular Mechanics) maybe you'll get it.
If the general public doesn't get global warming, and won't trust the scientists, and won't learn enough of the science to figure it out for themselves, then it will take a major disaster to convince them that something is going on and them climatological eggheads have something to say.
yeah right .. next thing you are going to tell me donosaurs migrated out of Middle East after having survived the flood in Noah's Ark. Or you could at least have tried to read up what that amount of water in tha atmosphere would do to climate being a rather agressive greenhouse gas.
...what that amount of water in the atmosphere would do to climate...
That water would make the whole Earth a toasty 85-95deg F everywhere. The 95-105deg F temperature range happens to be where the chemistry of life operates at its best. It is no accident that all warm blooded creature's internal temperature is in this range.
As for the Flood of Noah, there is not a spot on Earth that does not exhibit evidence of flowing or standing water and sedimentation. Even the highest mountain ranges have evidence of water action and fossils in sedimentary rocks. Of course, whether this was due to Noah's flood cannot be asserted from this evidence, but it cannot be excluded either.
Most cultures on this planet have consistent legends of creatures commonly called dragons and drawings and pictograms that look very much like today's scientists depictions of dinosaurs. In the Biblical book of Job there is the description of a creature which matches that of a large dinosaur modern scientists have dubbed a Stegosaurus.
How often have modern evolution believing scientists said that a certain creature went extinct millions of years ago and then someone finds one of them alive or recently dead?
In any case, there is plenty of evidence that the climate and topography of this planet of ours was vastly different in the past and living things flourished in great and unimagined abundance in all areas. There is also evidence that sudden, catastrophic events intervened from time to time.
All theory is gray
Ok, if you put it that way, then I guess the duty comes out more on the lines of "know enough to judge who actually knows what they're doing". For instance, simple empirical test tell me that the 'expert' who tells me what the wether is going to be like tomorrow is unreliable at best, making his analyses useless. Likewise, I know that I can trust the guy who built my house on how to build houses, because my house hasn't fallen down yet. The ideal, the state to be achieved, is to be educated enough in the everything to be able to make that kind of call with everyone.
Yeah, it's practically impossible. But I'm getting closer every day. And if I can't judge the reliability of my source, I just refrain from judging the analysis as well.
In all honesty, you seem to do the same thing, you just have a more regular criterion for trusting people's judgement. If "it's their *job* to study it" then you accept. I guess that's more efficient than my way, but I'm going to hold off on adopting it, as it would force me to become a member of at least 100 different religious groups. After all, it's the *job* of a fundamentalist southern baptist preacher to tell me what god wants, but I'm still not entirely certain of his assessment that the world will be a better place if we burn out all the gays and non-whites.
Just my 2 cents, eh.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
http://www.ghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/MSU/msusci.html
Sure looks like a trend that is less than the noise to me.
On the contrary, !!a == a.
What part of atmospheric heat forcing by greenhouse emissions do you not understand?
Has it occured to you that the greenhouse gasses keep the heat trapped at the lower portion of the troposphere, away from the satellites?
*sigh* no-one is disputing that solar output fluctuates over time. The thing that you don't seem to have realised is that *this is taken into account* by climate models. Believe it or not, climatologists are not, in fact, morons.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
> this issue has become way too politicized, mostly by bitter liberals who hate that Bush is President again.
Hey! I'm bitter about Bush and still think that Environmentalists are fundamentally FUDdy. Take THAT. Err... whatever "that" is.
I should have put a smiley or scowly on that.