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Global Warming Endangered by Hot Air?
oldwindways writes "The BBC reports that leading climate researchers are concerned that the tone of speculation surrounding many reports (scientific as well as in the media) could be making it more difficult for legitimate science to make a case for the future. Is Hollywood to blame? Have we 'cried wolf' too many times with global warming? Or is this just a case of some researchers who are not ready to face the truth? Either way, it raises the interesting question of how greater public awareness of Global Warming might be affecting the course of research and vice versa. Not to mention what happens when public awareness is shaped by factors other than scientific findings. This is especially troubling during what some are calling the warmest US winter in years."
I don't believe Hollywood speculation about global warming will stop us from taking the threat seriously.
The Hollywood speculation about evil robots has not stopped certain dedicated men and women from taking seriously all threats of domination by artificial life forms. For example, I recently caught my Roomba building an IED. When I shared that information on a forum that shall remain nameless, there were people who believed and recruited me for the Roomba Resistance.
But perhaps I've said too much.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
We can't seriously believe either side, but must stick to logic and examine all the facts. Both sides have their hysterical evangelists and paid shills.
Is Hollywood to blame? Only the day after tomorrow will tell.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
See now ;
Haliburton & co supporting and paying Bush & co in the u.s. presidential races and then securing no bid contracts to iraqi oil fields.
sony, warner & co creating RIAA and paying senators to further their terror regime and then getting juicy laws protecting their interests in return
Is it too hard to understand that there are HORDES of scientists who are paid and maintained by big buck industry interests ?
Is it too hard to understand that these scientists, who are in fact little more than laymen, do their payers' bidding and bark at people who are trying to fix some matters ?
There are people in this world, who care for nothing but their short term profit, you know.
The micro climate here, where i live, is too different from what it used to be 10 years ago.
No need for statistics either - for 15 years the micro climate have followed an EXACT pattern here, almost TOO exact.
However for the last 4 years, we are increasingly having erratic weather to the extremes that old people are much anxious about.
this winter, there was NO winter. really. it was spring/autumn all along.with very rare rain.
just the goings here, leave aside my relatives' my colleagues' my internet friends' experiences all over the globe are enough for me to deduce there IS something wrong with the climate all around, and there are greedy bastards spewing out fud in order to conceal it.
From this point on, yes, i will look upon these fud spreaders with an evil eye - it is readily deductable that such people have hidden agendas.
Read radical news here
You can't vote on scientific truth. For example, if even a majority of America is seen to believe in Global Warming in some kind of inane Gallup Poll, well tough noogies if the evidence shows otherwise (random pov, the reverse is also true). People's opinions DO NOT matter unless they are informed decisions rather than the "close-your-eyes-and-pick-one" sprt of decisions that are ruining this country.
So what if we've just had the warmest winter in years? That means absolutely nothing on its own, particularly when you consider the fact thta it's an El Nino (El Nina? I forget wihch is wihch) year, and that the respective seasons are going to be less severe. Maybe some people remember how mild last summer was? I don't believe there was a single day last summer when I didn't feel comfortable to wear long sleeves.
The reason global warming has no credibility is because of reactionaries, yes, but also because the arguments made have not been internally or scientificially consistent for 30 years. You cry wolf long enough bolstering your points with manipulated data, and nobody is going to believe a word you say. Whether it's 'global cooling' from 30 years ago, 'global warming' a year ago, or what they're calling 'global climate change' today (yeah, apparently calling it global warming or cooling doesn't work anymore, because nobody believes a word of it), it doesn't matter the slightest.
It's inconsequential to most people, in no small part to the fact that we've passed a dozen 'population extinction' dates for not only Earth becoming a huge desert, ocean, or desert, but claims that the world's population is going to surpass what the planet can provide (claims which often go hand-in-hand with the global warming hysteria). Nevermind the readily observeable information that while not only Earth's climate is getting warmer, so is Mar's - due to the rotational temperature changes in the Sun. IE, there's not a fucking thing we can do about it, and worrying about it, let alone doing anything for it, is just reactionary fear mongering.
"Global warming" is the Left's "imminent emergency" scenario which they utilize to the greatest political end economic manipulation as possible - just like the Right's "war on terror" is its "imminent emergency".
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Like Canadian Environment Minister Christine Stewart (a nurse by training, if you can believe that):
"No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits. . . Climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world."
As long as the public faces of the global warming scare are building vast energy-hogging mansions, flying around the world in private jets, and shooting down alternative-power proposals that clash with their refined aesthetic sensibilities, I will assume they are all power-crazed liars and mountebanks of the ilk of Christine Stewart.
We are being asked to overturn the very edifice of free-market capitalism, on the basis of wild speculation about the significance of mere statistical noise, teased out of scant and questionable data by grant-chasing academics, and shouted hysterically by power-mad left-wing politicians who won't abide by the same draconian regulations they advocate for the rest of us. No thanks. I'm going to keep living my life as I please.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
In the history of climate research, scientists have seriously warned about global warming only once so far. The evidence is strong, the consequences are potentially devastating, and it appears to be happening faster than anybody initially thought.
Not so. My parents' generation (now 50) was told that if they didn't stop driving their gas guzzling cars NOW, the majority of the world would be desert by the time their children (me) reached 20. I'm a bit over 20 now, and the precipitation levels in the semi-arid area in which I live have been, while not record highs, quite a bit higher than in the previous decade.
Do you have any idea how many times the 'earth doomers' have said we were going to kill ourseles off? If not global warming, then global cooling, over-population, thermonuclear war, genetic (plant) modification, etc. - and all their projected times for extinction or some other cataclysmic life-ending event are well in the past. For instance, I distinctly recall hearing in elementary school that by the year 2000, the world would be too over-populated to feed itself. This, to gullible and impressionable kids! That's reprehensible.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
To think that we (as a human race) have a very good understanding of long-term climatic processes is just arrogance.
Did you notice this sounds exactly like the start of an argument for intelligent design?
We have models which we are always refining, but they will always just be speculation. We look back mockingly at how ignorant some scientists were 40 years ago (eg. during the 1960s many/most geologists did not accept tectonic plate theory). It is silly to think that people forty years from now won't be doing the same about us.
The whole point of theory and evidence is so you can be relatively more confident that this is not going to happen. If the criticism of science that it might be overturned one day is sufficient to reject its conclusions, then you should always reject every conclusion, ever.
You're basically asking everyone to assume that you have some great piece of counter-evidence or theory that hasn't been thought of yet. If that were a good argument then you could "disprove" any piece of knowledge about anything, forever, and to be consistent, you'd have to. If later scientists disprove global warming theory some day, you should also reject that conclusion on the grounds that later scientists might disprove them in turn. And so on.
The whole point of science is to come up with knowledge that is less likely to be overturned than other kinds of knowledge (hearsay, religion-based, mere postulation).
That should be particularly true of climatic modelling. There is no robust equation for climate. People essentially just sit down and tweak the models until they get the results they expect, then use them to generate best case and worst case analysis. That folks, is hardly science.
Science is about evidence. Do you have any evidence of any of this happening? Is there any reason to believe you're not making it all up?
I have a hypothesis: you've just made all of this up off the top of your head but it sounds plausible to you personally. I invite you to disprove this hypothesis.
On polarization. It is remarkable how many discussions on Slashdot end up in the same controversies: Microsoft/Linux Firefox/Opera(/IE) Christianity/Atheism(/other religions) Republicans/Liberals.
Ah, it just goes to show how far we went from the USA's founding for a Republican to be ashamed of being a Liberal. My favorite Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson was both a Liberal and a Republican. He believed in liberty, eg liberal, and small government. Unfortunately the popular meanings of words have been twisted so they no long mean what they used to mean.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Nope. I just mean to point out that in some areas of science (eg. the laws of motion of slow things where Newton is Good Enough, thermodynamics,...) we have very robust models and in others (eg. climatology, earthquake prediction and functioning of the human brain we do not). We should be careful to take all results from the weaker models with a grain of salt. The "oooh look at last winter" remark in the summary was just plain stupid - particularly in a pievce about being rational.
"... you should always reject every conclusion, ever." Nope. Just be cautious about what you say and to the degree you accept what is being said. The unwashed masses don't understand that some science is robust and other science is very tentative. I personally believe that we are having a global warming impact of sorts, but I don't believe that this is "scientifically proven" or even very strongly modelled. Reacting with alarm is not scientific. That's not to say we should not proceed with caution (ie. we are likely having an impact, therefore we should do things to lessen the impact.).
As for the tweaking of models, well that's exactly what ckimatologists do. They try to make models that describe how the climate operates. Unfortunately this is a very difficult, slow, and error prone process. You cannot set up an experiment: "Say, tomorrow I'll heat up 500cubic km of ocean and see what that does.".THis makes it very difficult to control the variables and make robust models which is why most models have "best case scenarios" saying sea levels will raise by a foot or so, and "worst case" saying by ten feet or more. The result is that we have no real predictions for what will happen.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"I was born in the 60s. When I was a child the world was supposedly facing castastrophic global cooling according to "compelling evidence"."
I was born in the '50s, and I distinctly remember discussions of global warming in school in the '60s. There was a knowledge then that CO2 was being added to the atmosphere and the physics of it trapping heat. Since then, we have built up a tremendous ampount of evidence about accelerating global increases in temperature and CO2.
There was, after some extreme cold winters in the 70s and early 80s, discussions in the press speculating about the coming ice age and how it was due to arrive any millenium now. There was also discussion on how quickly an ice age could emerge
(apparently some scientists believe that once the tipping point is reached, it can come pretty quickly, though I don't know if quickly is decades or centuries in that context.). But the mainstream science correctly dimissed the few cold spells as not predictive of any long term trends.