Slashdot Mirror
Blogger Finds Bug in NASA Global Warming Study?
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article at DailyTech, a blogger has discovered a Y2K bug in a NASA climate study by the same writer who accused the Bush administration of trying to censor him on the issue of global warming. The authors have acknowledged the problem and released corrected data. Now the study shows the warmest year on record for the contiguous 48 states as being 1934, not 1998 as previously reported in the media. In fact, the corrected study shows that half of the 10 warmest years on record occurred before World War II." The article's assertion that there's a propaganda machine working on behalf of global warming theorists is outside the bounds of the data, which I think is interesting to note.
The opinion: A link to the blog entry in question would have been quite on topic.
The pun.
My 0.02 cents
What software were they using that wouldn't be Y2k compliant? Graph generators from the late 70's?
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
I looked quickly at the numbers. This impacts U.S. air surface temperatures, not global. It almost seems like the U.S. is experiencing a somewhat lesser global warming effect than the rest of the world. Is this possibly due to the post-industrialized economy and tighter environmental regulations? This would mean we are still being impacted by global warming, but it is being countered by less heat-trapping smog and other pollutants?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Then again-- maybe not. I strongly suspect this story will receive little to no attention from the mainstream media. (emphasis mine)
Seriously, this data may be very interesting and correct some of our possible misconceptions about the severity of global warming, but come on. The last part of his blog basically makes him sound like a standard zealot conspiracy theorist with an axe to grind. How does that sort of nonsense advance the debate at all?
I hope people won't use this opportunity to dismiss global warming as a whole. There are numerous global warming studies and this "bugged" one is only one of them. Of course, no model is perfect, they're models! But I consider global warming a scientific fact nonetheless.
Animoog.org
As if millions of voices suddenly cried out "oops" and were suddenly silenced.
Gamertag: WyleType
Who cares what this data says, don't we already have consensus on this?
9 out of 10 scientists say the hottest decade was the 1990s, how dare anyone suggest otherwise?
Zogby should poll all of the scientists in the world and figure out what is going on.
Now we can drive bigger cars and oil will never run out! :0
You shank my Jengaship!
Obviously, dumping billions of tons of Greenhouse Gases into the atmosphere is not a good idea, period. However, this refined data shows the warming trend in a more accurate light, and that is all to the good.
I see this as (yet another) great victory of the scientific method, and in this case, aided by a sharp-eyed blogger. The beauty and strength of scientific truth lies in its "weakness": its provisionality - things are only true until proven otherwise.
This is very good news.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I think the conclusion says all you need to know about this "story": The effect of the correction on global temperatures is minor (some 1-2% less warming than originally thought), but the effect on the US global warming propaganda machine could be huge.
Then again-- maybe not. I strongly suspect this story will receive little to no attention from the mainstream media.
why? forty-two.
Well that's certainly interesting for you. I've been looking at our weather down near the Mexican border and we've had it pretty cool. Our winter was about average, cooler than last year, and our summer has (so far) not even come close to the records. Last year was a hot year for us, I think we almost broke the no-rain record (or did break) and came close to setting a new high for a certain day but this year has been pretty cool.
From what I've seen the weather's fine, and if it is getting warmer I find it hard to believe it could possibly be our fault, I don't think we're anywhere near that advanced.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
In other words, some random blogger claiming that climatologists have been using screwed up figures about global warming due to a "year 2000" bug is pretty miraculous. I find it more believable that there's more to the story here than what's being posted. I read some of the logic chopping in the blog post's comments, but I didn't see any climatologists speaking there. Just some random people who seemed like they were playing detective.
I'd like to see some additional corroboration on this.
RTFA. There is a link to NASA posting the new numbers. Need more corroboration?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Now really, that's taking it a bit far. I'm strongly opposed to young earth people, and what they claim is far and away more extreme than global warming deniers, who usually suggest something to the tune of natural climate cycles.
Gamertag: WyleType
1934 was also warm in northern Europe.
meanwhile I live in Canada, and the last few winters have been colder and harsher than any I can remember... if anything it seems we are having more extreme weather all around, hotter summers, colder winters, rainier springs and drier summers...
I'm not sure if where I live is on average warmer or colder than years gone by, but there is one thing I'm sure of, looking at any one small area is basically meaningless on the global scale.
....both sides have established a religious level of conviction of their position, and no compromise is possible or desired. Certainly intelligent discussion, moderate debate, and consensus are discouraged if not actually torpedoed by zealots of the Left and Right extremes.
Pretty much like every serious issue in American politics.
-Styopa
TFA notes that Anthony Watts has posted about it on his site. You might know Watts as the head of the surfacestations.org project, which contends that the surface warming trend recorded in the U.S. is the result of various data collection problems like the urban heat island effect. But now it looks like that warming trend was overstated--weakening the very purpose of the surfacestations project. Somehow I bet Anthony doesn't see it that way though.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Interestingly, if you look at the parent directory of the referenced "corrected" data, you get a much different picture.
Sure, the blogger did find a Y2K anomaly, but this doesn't discredit global warming the least; it just shows that the US isn't warming quite like the rest of the world.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I've been told in no uncertain terms that I must BELIEVE in global warming and that man has caused it. Many of the Brethren have warned the unbelievers that they face arrest, scorn and treatment as if they were traitors, holocaust deniers and altogether evil less than human creatures that must be silenced at all costs. By presenting the other side of the argument, (which by the way, according to the Brethren there is no other side of the argument) these people are giving comfort to the enemy. If there are facts which cause doubt about the truth of global warming then those facts must be suppressed. It is for the good of all. Oh, and it's all George Bush's fault I've been told. And America's fault.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
It wasn't a random blogger, it was Steve McIntyre, a statistician whose attention was drawn to an oddity in the data for an official temperature station next to some air conditioners.
That should read "Smell the iron".
No, wait--"Smell the irony". That's it, I'm sure of it this time.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
And closer to this subject, this same press will give as much time to people who promote Biblical Creationism and "Intelligent Design" as they will to real biologists who are doing science.
If you disagree with "Intelligent Design," that's fine. But can you refrain from making side jabs at those who study it by saying that "real biologists" don't believe it? One of the biggest misnomers is that intelligent design even precludes evolution... it doesn't. It simply ascribes a source. You can bash whatever line of it you want, but please don't make blanket assumptions and emotive appeals.
I can't wait to get modded into oblivion on this one.
Yes, you can dance to Radiohead.
Hey, guess what?
Living in Pennsylvania, this year, I had over a foot of snow in my yard.
In the middle of April.
April.
That's not right! We need to do bad things to the environment, before we're all victims of global cooling!
If this isn't global warming, I don't care.
That isn't global warming, that's a single data point.
That sound you hear is every scientist repeatedly banging their head against a brick wall.
I don't think we should be ignoring data from US meteorological stations: it does give us a very detailed look at climate over one large region of the globe for much of the past century, and we certainly need all the data available to understand global warming. Ice core samples can give us an idea of the atmospheric carbon levels going back many hundreds of thousands of years, and archaeology can give us some idea of corresponding temperature... but according to the theory of global warming, the planet has *recently* started to dramatically change, so we need as much data as possible for this time period.
Where are you living? I was in South Dakota and we had snow on the ground almost the entire time from mid-October to April, including some pretty bad storms when I was supposed to be flying out for a vacation in March. The weather fluctuates, these things happen. When I was a kid I was taught this in school. Now they're teaching that only increases are happening... and I don't understand it. For the record, I'm a mathematician, so I'm not entirely clueless about science. That said, I have not looked at the data for global temperatures.
I'd like to see some additional corroboration on this.
Uh, NASA admitted to the error and corrected the data in question, producing the exact same data set as the investigator. How much more corroboration do you need? It's in the article, if you took the time to read it.
I read some of the logic chopping in the blog post's comments, but I didn't see any climatologists speaking there.
Wait... you skipped the article, and read the *comments*? Sheesh.
Comment of the year
Anecdotal evidence is hardly an appropriate substitute for reliable, reproducable scientific analysis.
Unless, that is, you've already made up your mind on the subject, in which case anything that supports your view will suffice as "proof".
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Some skepticism is needed here.
Um... Isn't that what this article is?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
i dont actually have anything to say here. im just posting to undo my accidental moderation of you as redundant. i was going for insightful. whoops.
just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand!
.. because people were confusing it. It's called "Climate Change". The havoc we're causing on the atmosphere does not make it uniformly warmer - rather it gets way hotter than average in some areas and way colder than average in others... it just ON THE WHOLE WORLDWIDE is hotter on average.
The huge fluctuations in temperature differential are the main causes of the ever increasing stomr activity in the Atlantic and Pacific.
...if we all burn, then Microsoft burns too!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
What part of Indiana?
;(
Im in them dere hills of brown co. I used to be in Columbus, with DSL...
"but this year has been pretty cool."
Global warming is just that - GLOBAL
You are making the common mistake of confusing weather with climate.
First off, kudos for actually referencing the claims made, this is a critical and often overlooked step when dealing with such a contraversial issue. It won't stop people from arguing the point mind you, but it does give the less lazy among us an opportunity to at least validate the claims made.
Without a doubt, you've made a compelling case.
Now, allow me to make some suggestions:
Try to avoid statements designed to "stir the pot" such as "quietly released". I know it's a tempting expression to use and just about everyone does it. However, it carries with it the implication of NASA being forced to release the data but not wanting it to be noticed. If that was the case, then make the case, don't just make suggestive statements... Speak Plainly . It will give integrity to your report rather than make you look biased, thus giving ammunition to the opposing side. Remember, NASA is not required to make a fanfare, they just need to correct their data.
Also, your data stands on it's own merits, there is no need for you to make assumptions on how it will be received by the "Global Warming Propaganda Machine" or whomever. Again, it makes you look like your just trying to pick a fight and it diminishes the effectiveness of your report.
Now, I'm only taking the time to write this because I think your presentation is one of the better ones I've seen. It does not "debunk" global warming (particularly the "global" part if I understand the data I've looked at so far), but you make a great case for critical evaluation of the data and peer review of conclusions.
Regardless of who's side you're on, that's all any rationale person should want.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
And the climate-change doomsayers will deride it as (another) Bush snow-job. Wake me up when the cycle changes.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Oh come ON. Were people like you (please, forgive the generalization, but I can't come up with a better way to put it) saying this when the NASA study came out originally? The bias you're exhibiting is much too obvious to be confused with rational, scientific thought, and it isn't helping anyone's 'cause', just or unjust.
Also, and this is a general complaint, but...unfounded statements like "the sensor network is poorly maintained" do NOT (EVER) qualify as "Informative", unless backed up by some actual reference material. They just aren't, and it's ridiculous that there is that much blind trust here that unsupported assertions like this one get quickly accepted and praised. =P
2006 will be a bad year for hurricanes... didnt happen
2007 will be a bad year for hurricanes... hasnt happened
yet they are predicting thet the effects of global warming will start to take effect in 2009?
once they start getting the local weather 2 days out correct on a consistant basis THEN I will start to believe their long term forcasts
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
The tornado in Brooklyn on Wed. wasn't enough of a wake up call?
Does it really matter if we have global warming or not? we still have to shift from using fossel fules because someday fairly soon there going to run out and were all going to be left looking like overpopulated third world countries.
I do give a fuck about global warming, but for all those nay sayers you still have to tell me what your going to do when the fossel fules run out.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Because we all know that the governments and corporations that will make billions if not trillions off of "fixing" global warming are of course not self-serving and have "our" short-term interests at heart...
Please...stop this nonsense about fixing global warming and stopping the impending doom and spend the billions on fixing actual problems we have NOW, like world hunger and the poor state of medical care. Absolutely shameful farce...
- dm - The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity.
I think the problem with trying to confirm or deny global warming is that global warming can throw climates completely out of whack. it can cause temperature drops in some areas and rises in others. i don't think relying on temperature data alone can help. moreover, changing climates in one area can have more changes around it. its such a complex relationship that it makes it so difficult to study. A rise or a drop in temperature can technically still mean global warming exists. You can't look at the average temperature across the globe because global warming can actually cancel out its own affects over time. you can't look at an isolated spot because it will be affected by other factors that you will be completely ignoring. So, honestly, I don't think either side can use this information as any more than circumstantial evidence.
I wonder if such things are obtainable under the Freedom of Information Act? I know that *some* scientific datd is exempt..
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
But I consider global warming a scientific fact nonetheless.
Evolution and the big bang are still considered theories, Newton's law of gravity, over 300 years old is still considered a theory, and you are telling me you consider global warming, which just cropped up over the last 10-20 years, is 'scientific fact'? Get out of here.
There are hundreds to thousands of scientists writing hundreds to thousands of studies based on several million observations.
Now here comes along ONE yahoo who supposedly points out ONE alleged flaw.
Ergo we can draw the conclusion that global warming isn't happening. ?
Go buy yourself a sense of proportion.
I gotta better idea. Learn! You can't go espousing the validity of data then base your whole acceptance of global warming on the fact that its warmer for you this year. For all the debate on the issue most scientists would agree that trying to make an assertion based on one year of data would be idiotic.
"Don't confuse me with the facts, my mind is already made up."
...and we almost broke our snowfall records for the year last winter.
What is it with slashdot and being anti-global warming? It kind of disgusts me. The blurbs the post always misrepresent the strength of the actual findings and then the findings are actually really spurious. It really damages the credibility of slashdot.
This changes data only for the contiguous 48 , not global temperature. It is irrelevant to global temp and irrelevant as a measure of the validity of global climate change.
Here are the facts: increasing CO2 in that atmosphere increases the temperature. That is a fact. CO2 in our atmosphere is increasing and isotopic analysis of the carbon in that CO2 proves that it is from the combustion of organic Carbon. THAT MEANS US!!!!!!
Debate over.
Anything else is trying to quantify the effects or a disinformation campaign.
Slashdots insistence on publishing this kind of article makes me question what other dogma they are trying to push down my throat...
I need to know if anyone that had anything to do with collecting the data, writing the software, writing the article, or writing the summary, was ever on an oil company's payroll, ever owned stock in an oil company, or ever owned a car that wasn't a hybrid.
If I don't believe in global warming the article summary was more than enough corroboration, and is the final proof that global warming is a conspiracy run by Al Gore, the IPCC, the media, and anyone else who uses the words "Global Warming" without saying it in a mocking tone.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
When CLinton went on vacation the Brokaw typs called it a "Well deserved vacation". Bush doesn't take "Well deserverd" vacations. You really expect people to believe that the mainstream media is biased PRO Republican?
Biased TOWARDS Bush? What parallel universe have you been living in? The mainstream media has been bludgeoning him to death since 5 minutes after 9/11. The media will choose whatever angle they think will sell newspapers and/or advertising.
If this were some random blogger saying that this same data was actually showing that global warming was even worse than some would have you believe, you'd be on here saying "told you so!, told you so!".
Get bent. Your entire post is the typical BS we hear when something comes out that doesn't fit nicely into someone's agenda. You didn't even pay attention to to the link to the revised NASA data because you were too busy wetting yourself while referring to your anti-Bush talking points.
It's not a side jab. Real biology predicts actual observed behavior in biological systems. "Intelligent design" does not. People who study the facts and come up with scientific theories that are verifiable via observation are real scientists. People who speculate about an intelligent designer because the detail of the universe in their opinion is arbitrarily too complex to them or arbitrarily too finely tuned for human life are not being scientific. If "intelligent design" were in any way supported by objective facts , you'd find atheist scientists who would be confounded by it. They'd say, "I don't believe in a God but this stuff is clearly designed!!! Who did it, Xenu, the grays, Martians, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a giant black monolith?" You never ever find such a thing. Where are the "Intelligent design, Whodunit?" books by the nonreligious hard scientists? You'll never find an intelligent design proponent who doesn't have an a priori belief in a particular deity as designer. And since that belief is not founded on scientific principles it completely kicks the legs out from under any claims to scientific validity the "intelligent design" conjecture has. It's called assuming the antecedent.
Read the story above, which links to revised data:t
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.tx
Initially, one one think that oh, we are not going to have a warming trend, or there is a conspiracy theory, or....
Import the data (ignore the column "5-year_Mean"; you can generate your own)
Use the Excel feature of "Trend Line", and look which direction it's going. (All trend lines show the same thing. And most important: Note the RATE that it's changing!
I know this is slight off-topic, but I'm not sure where else to complain. Can we please at least spell tags correctly before displaying them to the public? Thanks...
"The huge fluctuations in temperature differential are the main causes of the ever increasing stomr activity in the Atlantic and Pacific."
Dude, what planet are you living on? In the two years since Katrina, the Pacific and Atlantic have been incredibly quiet. For 2006, we had 10 named storms in the Atlantic with only 5 becoming hurricanes (and two of those got as high as category 3). This year, in the Atlantic, we are up to a whopping three named systems and all were tropical storms. Heck, the year before in the Atlantic, there were only 15 named systems.
In the eastern Pacific, we have had only six named storms. And this is with half the hurricane season nearly over! I liked your post until the end dude. No need to sensationalize things.
If you want to believe that isolated, anecdotal events suffice as proof of man-made global climate change, that's certainly your prerogative.
My parents and Grandparents have lived in michigan for the past 110 years. My grandmother that passed 3 years ago and was 102 years old remembers when she was a kid, some winters that were incredibly mild and they did not get much snow. Now they did not live that far north, only up there by petosky,Michigan where they get enough snow to make a Northern Minnesota resident feel at home.
The mild winters are not out of the ordinary, Just wait for when we get slammed in a couple of years, then we will have all the global cooling nuts coming out of the woodwork.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If you're not denying that climate change is occurring, only the likelihood that man has caused it, why did you choose to reply to a post that only mentioned climate change, not man's potential influence on it?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Global warming is more of a political agenda then a science. Especially when you realize that all the "research" has been funded by political groups.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
This was originally reported on climateaudit. Currently slashdotted, but cached by google:
18541868
Of course, climateaudit.org has been under DDoS attack the past day. So that's pretty awesome.
The fact that while global temperatures are rising, the U.S. is not warming as fast as the rest of the planet... WTF?!?
Exactly. Scientists shouldn't hold firm to any theories of global climate change until they can *repeatedly* test the impact of human-induced CO2 emissions on *several* copies of the earth.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
All that and you still didn't get the point. Whether or not a person believes in Intelligent Design doesn't affect whether he/she is a real biologist or not. You can argue that in that specific issue they are not being particularly scientific, but not that they aren't real biologists at all.
Yes, you can dance to Radiohead.
Yes, it kind of does. Evolution ascribes the source for changes in species over time to a natural process, the hallmark of science. Intelligent Design ascribes it to a Master Planner, the hallmark of religion. The two are directly at odds with each other.
Think of it this way. What will humans evolve into in a million years? An Intelligent Design advocate will tell you "that which the Creator intends us to as part of his Plan." An evolutionist will tell you "that which natural selection determines is the best course for our species to survive and thrive."
That's not just a philosophical difference. There are more practical ramifications. The evolutionist will go about studying how the laws of nature operate to try to have better insight into the process. Thanks to evolutionists, we've made tremendous strides in fields such as genetics, pathology, and many others. The reactions of Intelligent Design vary wildly. Some do nothing at all, content that they know The Answer. Some deliberately belittle and obstruct academic research because it treads upon the Works of (their particular) God. Some manage to come to grips with it and still function, albeit it impaired by the confines of what they're willing to accept that might go against their religious beliefs.
No matter how they react, though, the fact that they're not willing to forsake supernatural explanations for natural phenomena will always be a handicap in the rigorous study of science. Some manage to do great work in spite of it. Most...not so great.
One more thing. When you're studying science, you must be willing to let go of your preconceptions and keep an open mind about results that you didn't expect, results that counter what everyone thought they knew for a long time. It's happened many times in the past that a scientist turned a field upside-down. Think of what Copernicus did to the Ptolemaic system, Einstein did to Newtonian physics, Michelson and Morley did to the luminiferous aether, and so on. Believe me, most scientists have considered the question, "What if there is an Intelligent Designer?" If we discovered that, for example, an alien species visited Earth a million years ago and seeded the planet to become what it is, scientists would be beside themselves with excitement and all over studying it.
However, I hardly ever see an Intelligent Design advocate even consider the possibility that there is no Creator and ask themselves in an unbiased fashion, "which explanation is more likely given what we know?" On the few occasions I have seen an Intelligent Design advocate address science, it's only to ridicule non-Intelligent Design position. The end goal of the study of science is not supposed to validate religion, it's to find the truth. The end goal of Intelligent Design is to make what we find fit neatly within the confines of their Truth, whatever the advocate deems that to be for his or her religion, and ridicule or completely disregard all other evidence. It's not compelling, and it's not science.
Of course, you're quite right. What we really need to do is create a hundred or so planets, seed them with single, cell life, wait a three to four billion years for a tool using species to evolve and develop an heavily industrialised global economy, and then compare the climate of these planets against a hundred or so controls that have not life at all. Ideally we should also have a hundred with life, but no industry.
And then we need to do it all again, two or three times, just to be sure the results are repeatable. Of course, if the climate change theorists are correct then it'll be long past the time when we might have been able to do anything about it, but at least we'll be able to settle an argument that by that time will have been raging for ten billion years or so.
Although, as I'm sure someone's about to point point out, four hundred planets isn't might not be a large enough sample to be statistically significant. So we might wind up having to do the whole thing over again...
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
You got em both...
You should consider the fact that he could be right on both accounts. The data could be screwed up because of a y2k bug (appears to be so) and it could also be that temperature station readings are skewered because of location.
He has a valid point on the latter. The heat island effect doesn't really take into account putting a temperature sensor near the exhaust of two AC units.
A lot of us supposed 'DENIERS' are really just skeptical of scientific consensus led by non-scientists and beaurocracies, reached in such a short period of time. I'm all for finding out the truth, I just don't think we have arrived at it yet.
Even the supposed consensus has had to tamper their predictions each and every time they have released one of their reports. I'm guessing they will have to do so again, unless they already knew about this, which would be a major faux pas.
As others have pointed out, your experience constitutes a single data point.
However, perhaps your views cloud your judgement?
This is the sort of thing which gives those who don't support global warming traction. Statements like that make global warming look less like scientific fact and more like an expression of self loathing.
A Human Right
a rough probability calculation gives that a p less than 0.03
thats supposed to convince me global warming isn't happening?
also the warmest was 1934,
check out a possible related event
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
It's funny that this topic popped up on Slashdot. I read this other article today. I love the insight and debate that I'm exposed to when the subject of global warming comes up, so I figured I would share a related article.
Remember hearing about El Niño back when you were younger? It's a weather pattern that is accompanied by warmer-than-usual weather and lots of rain in the East. It's happened in past years (big one in 1997/98, the second warmest year of the century) and got plenty of media attention. It hit again in fall of 2006-early winter 2007, explaining what you experienced, and since it also affects different parts of the world differently, would explain why you felt something others didn't.
s /Extreme_Weather/El_Nino.asp)
. html
Now, this past year, the media focussed on global warming instead of El Niño as being a cause. But, while El Nino itself is natural, there's been an increase in their frequency, which at least some, like David Suzuki's group (no surprise), attribute to global warming:
Detailed statistical analyses show that the increase in frequency of El Niños observed since the 1970s is very unlikely to be part of a natural cycle (e.g. Trenberth and Hoar, Geophysical Research Letters, Dec 1, 1997). It has been estimated that the observed pattern is 99.9% likely to be due to human induced climate change. (http://www.davidsuzuki.org/Climate_Change/Impact
If global warming is happening as most say it is (I ain't no scientist!), it's not like it'd exist because one year is suddenly warmer than another -- it'll be determined only by long-term scientific analysis of trends, you know, the kind of science that isn't undermined by a Y2K bug!
El Niño US: http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/elnino/el-nino-story
El Niño Canada: http://www.el-nino-news.info/El-Nino-Canada.php
A scientific fact is something real. "Granite is hard" "Water is soft" "Non-saline water freezes at 32 degrees celcius under 15 atmospheres of pressure".
h eory.htm
If the globe is warmer (on average or specifically) then that is a fact.
WHY it is warmer will always be a theory.
There are many hypothesis about why we are measuring warmer temperatures.
Right now, in my opinion, there is too much money and political pressure involved to get good science.
anyway...
Definitions:
Theories, Laws, Hypothesis...
They say it well here: http://home.comcast.net/~fsteiger/theory.htm
As used in science, a theory is an explanation or model based on observation, experimentation, and reasoning, especially one that has been tested and confirmed as a general principle helping to explain and predict natural phenomena.
Any scientific theory must be based on a careful and rational examination of the facts. A clear distinction needs to be made between facts (things which can be observed and/or measured) and theories (explanations which correlate and interpret the facts.
A fact is something that is supported by unmistakeable evidence. For example, the Grand Canyon cuts through layers of different kinds of rock, such as the Coconino sandstone, Hermit shale, and Redwall limestone. These rock layers often contain fossils that are found only in certain layers. Those are the facts.
And here: http://chemistry.about.com/od/chemistry101/a/lawt
Hypothesis
A hypothesis is an educated guess, based on observation. Usually, a hypothesis can be supported or refuted through experimentation or more observation. A hypothesis can be disproven, but not proven to be true.
Theory
A scientific theory summarizes a hypothesis or group of hypotheses that have been supported with repeated testing. A theory is valid as long as there is no evidence to dispute it. Therefore, theories can be disproven. Basically, if evidence accumulates to support a hypothesis, then the hypothesis can become accepted as a good explanation of a phenomenon. One definition of a theory is to say it's an accepted hypothesis.
Law
A law generalizes a body of observations. At the time it is made, no exceptions have been found to a law. Scientific laws explain things, but they do not describe them. One way to tell a law and a theory apart is to ask if the description gives you a means to explain 'why'.
Example: Consider Newton's Law of Gravity. Newton could use this law to predict the behavior of a dropped object, but he couldn't explain why it happened.
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I have also read elsewhere that really Newton's "laws" are only called laws because of history. If they were formulated today, they would be called Newton's theory of gravity.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Orson Scott Card, has been stirring things up recently, and makes some damning statements regarding global warming, saying it is time for scientist to abandon the faked data of the "Church of Global Warming".
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
re: "overall socialist agenda to try and deindustrailize western nations..."
n s
Ludicrous troll.
re: "Why else would the first world have to pay the third world for the 'right to pollute.'" (sic)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commo
To put it simply, because the benefits of processes which cause pollution, accrue to the individual or groups of individuals which create the pollution, but the costs of pollution are paid by all. Duh. Basic ethics.
Nice rant. I like it and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. A(nother) well reasoned retort. Carry on!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Yes, it kind of does. Evolution ascribes the source for changes in species over time to a natural process, the hallmark of science. Intelligent Design ascribes it to a Master Planner, the hallmark of religion. The two are directly at odds with each other.
:)
There are sources and there are sources. Primary sources, secondary sources. A source can itself have a source. So a natural process can still have another source and doesn't necessarily preclude design.
That's not just a philosophical difference. There are more practical ramifications. The evolutionist will go about studying how the laws of nature operate to try to have better insight into the process. Thanks to evolutionists, we've made tremendous strides in fields such as genetics, pathology, and many others.
Many useful innovations and inventions have been the result of evil ideologies and philosophies. Just because something produces something good doesn't mean it is, in and of itself, good.
The reactions of Intelligent Design vary wildly.
The same can be said of proponents of atheists. That doesn't necessarily mean anything.
One more thing. When you're studying science, you must be willing to let go of your preconceptions and keep an open mind about results that you didn't expect, results that counter what everyone thought they knew for a long time.
Great, we agree on something. That still doesn't prove that a real biologist can't believe in Intelligent Design.
And for the record, Christians are after the Truth as well, and we're glad you capitalized it.
Yes, you can dance to Radiohead.
That has got to be one of the most ridiculous, paranoid, conspiracy-theory-laden sentences I've ever read. If you're just trying to parody Ann Coulter, bravo to you. If you genuinely believe that, I'd suggest going back on your meds.
There are 2,000 zeta joules of readily available energy, enough to meet the demands of the entire world for the next several millennia if we are willing to invest a little in the technology and infrastructure. See http://geothermal.inl.gov/publications/future_of_g eothermal_energy.pdf
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Because it was flamebait perhaps?
and i was so looking forward to tomato farming on the antartic circle.
- js.
On one hand you're talking about arrest of global warming skeptics and 'believing in science' which are obviously erroneous statements. But the parts about Holocaust deniers and the end where you bring in Bush makes me think you're serious in your criticism of global warming advocates. I guess the question is, who are you trying to cast in a poor light by drawing these parallels to the war on terror?
When you have two different groups of people who seem to know what they are doing and they contradict each other it's hard to get the real facts out of the noise. So I suggested people take a look for themselves in their own environment. Besides in each persons own heart they think truth is whatever they themselves lead to believe base on the facts surrounding them.
It might be a normal climate shift, it might be global warming, I dont know for sure. But I do know in my lifetime what I see now adays is a lot different than what I saw as a child. That is solid proof, so if someone says "CO2 is causing global warming" I'm going to lead a bit toward them because I can see it for myself. Though I'm willing to accept it could be a normal cycle.
I don't care what people want to label it, but things seem to be changing. And if there is a slight chance it's our fault, then I personally am trying to remedy that by not driving as much, car pooling, or doing at least my share. Granted it's won't really change much if anything, but I'm reacting in my own way with the feeling I have.
Dont' see how that is flame worthy.
I believe that recent glacial melting has been pretty well associated with soot from such things as the Environmentalist-loved diesel, not Global Warming.
We are going to experience cycles of warming and cooling, especially as water vapor (the most important greenhouse gas) and CO2 fluctuate. CO2 levels are actually very low now compared with normal planetary activity.
While I am concerned about the future of our planet and our species' place upon it, I am growing increasingly sceptical of the wild claims surrounding a looming global warming catastrophe. When a scientist such as Stephen Hawking warns "I am afraid the atmosphere might get hotter and hotter until it will be like Venus with boiling sulfuric acid," any reasonable person begins to fear for the future.
My surprise and shock was learning that past concentrations of carbon dioxide were much higher than they are today (indeed, limits so high as to be unreachable, assuming that we have hit peak oil), as revealed in the interview below:
RES: Professor Robert E. Sloan, Department of Geology, University of MinnesotaJC: Dr Joe Cain, interviewer
I have learned that these past CO2 concentrations have been documented in peer-reviewed research journals:
My interest in past CO2 concentrations began by reading a (somewhat) more partisan summary of this information:
An even more thorough refutation, specifically of An Inconvenient Truth, can be found here.
IHAMIAS*
You might want to read the IPCC assessment of the affects climate change will have on food production and the spread of tropical diseases.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/un/syreng/spm.pdf
Here are a few relevant parts (emphasis added):
Starting to put the connections together yet? Climate change is a meta-issue. Dealing with climate change is directly working on world hunger and health.
(* I have a masters in atmospheric science.)
You also need to be careful when gathering your data. Neither mall samples of global data nor any number of samples at any specific location suffices to establish a long-term global trend. That's just as true if you're reporting thin ice in the arctic as it is if you're reporting cool summers near Mexico.
The huge fluctuations in temperature differential are the main causes of the ever increasing stomr activity in the Atlantic and Pacific.
BWAHAHAHA. Have you SEEN the hurricane projections and reality lately? What active hurricane season?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Oh good lord. Look at you. The fact is, the entire environmental movement is part of an overall socialist agenda to try and deindustrialize western nations so that the third world can be "equal". You guys on the left have your zealots too. Why else would the first world have to pay the third world for the "right to pollute". The whole argument is absurd. The same reason you pay people to take away your trash, to keep your own yard clean and so the neighbors don't complain. Why is this stuff getting modified +5 insightful? It should be modified funny.
Let me quote from the article here: NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II. And let's google "hottest year on record" and quote some of the "trumpetting media": The WMO says that 2005 is currently the second warmest year on record, after 1998. Averaged separately for both hemispheres, 2005 surface temperatures for the northern hemisphere (0.65 C above 30-year mean) are likely to be the warmest and for the southern hemisphere (0.32 C above 30-year mean), the fourth warmest in the instrumental record from 1861 to the present. WMO is, of course, the World Meteorological Organization which looks at global temperatures, for which the US is just one single data point which was incorrect by 0.01 in 1998. That totally changes everything!!!
Let me explain my concern, as it relates to another much less contravercial theory; what killed the dinosaurs. I was born in 1976. In those days, and I can remember roughly back to 80 or 81, the new hot theory was the asteroid impact; the one that caused the iridium layer at the K-T boundary. Later, as more evidence was found, it was supported and became mainstream. In the last 5-10 years or so, the hot theory questions that very well supported theory. Now they think it was a series of effects, from climate change to increased volcanism and changes in the biosphere; the rise of flowering plants; that worked together to have this effect. The KT impact on the Yucatan peninsula, was just another insult to them. Even today, I'm not sure where the consensus is. Still, no one was called a denier. Stupid, wrong, amongst other things, but never a denier.
What frightens me is the fact that your choice of words makes you sound like anyone who disagrees with you is questioning your faith. The fact is that a reasonable person could doubt the existence of global warming, or even have the opinion that global warming is caused by means other than enhanced CO2 output. The increasingly acidic tone of folks on both sides of the issue is taking away from the discussion; it's a simple fact that it's harder to convince people to agree with you when you attack the very folks you are trying to convince. The viciousness of both sides, but lately so much so the GW supporters, is troubling to me.
For the record, and I'm sure you'll want to know this. I don't believe that CO2 is causing the warming that I do believe is happening; I'm currently convinced by the evidence of those who say it's from solar activity. I have recently been convinced of that, but I'm willing to change my mind again. Granted, a strong argument would have to be made for that to happen. That being said, living in Manhattan as I do, I don't have a car and use mass transit. I also buy my power, at a 30% premium, from a supplier that generates electricity from wind and hydro. I think that everything that gets into the air when you burn fossil fuels, aside from CO2, are nasty things that I would be happier didn't get into the air.
- Mike
Once you've lost your temper, you've lost the argument - Me
Thanks for presenting that "fact". My life is now complete.
Brother, can you spare a tinfoil hat?
Is it a new slashdot requirement to mention ID in every article?
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
It's not even a case of being "unscientific". Intelligent Design is a philosophical theory, not a scientific one. Intelligent Design is only antithetical to science when it is used as an excuse to not learn science. As long as you don't subscribe to strict creationism, the two ideas can quite easily coexist in harmony.
Or, as I like to put it, science allows us to discover the rules by which the universe is governed. God created the rules.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Regardless of who's side you're on, that's all any rational person should want.
I too find it hard to believe in some global conspiracy, however I don't find it hard to believe that global warming happens (by chance) to advance the agendas of a wide variety of disparate organisations and whilst they may not be deliberately coordinating their actions this alignment of interest has much the same effect.
...or ignore those and they'll help to solve the global warming by reducing population...
not advocating. just sayin'
You're thinking small. Why miniaturize the laser, when we could instead enlarge the sharks? -John Searle
Yes it does. He might be a biologist by profession but when arguing about Intelligent Design he is doing Theology or at best Philosophy and as such do not speak as a biologist, but as a (hobby) philosopher or theologist. Remember biology is a natural science, biological research must be scientific, and ID is by nature no longer scientific.
No, it doesn't. What I'm saying is that what a person believes philosophically/theologically, it doesn't affect whether or not they are (in reality, fact, truth, whatever) a "real" biologist. When he/she is arguing for ID, sure, you can say he/she is not acting as a biologist. Fine. But that still doesn't mean that he/she isn't one.
Yes, you can dance to Radiohead.
The global data is being recalculated right now and has not been released yet. Accords tot he source of the data, the US data makes up the bulk of the good global data. Therefore the current Global readouts are GARBAGE.
Wait a few more days for those calculations to be updated.
And according to the predictions, it WILL make a difference in the global data, and GLOBAL WARMING as a theory just died.
(And yes, smoking does cause cancer, diesel particulates are bad for you, and big increases in CO2 can change the climate. Massive corporate spending on scammy PR doesn't change the science. It just makes it harder to see
I thought hobby philosophers were the only kind left. I haven't seen a professional philosopher in about 1000 years.
Protector of Capitalist views,
Meorah
Again, it makes you look like your just trying to pick a fight and it diminishes the effectiveness of your report.
If you're going to be a spelling Nazi (and Nazi, by the way, is a proper noun), at least do it right.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Go to the linked article, and search for "Top 10 GISS U.S. Temperature deviation". There are two tables, one showing the top 10 based on new data and one showing the top 10 based on old data. The order is different, but the biggest change is that 2001 is not in the new ordering, being replaced by 1939. The changes in the tabulated years are 0.1 degrees Celsius or less, and are typically 0.01 to 0.03 degrees Celsius, except for 2001, which had an error of 0.14 degrees Celsius.
How are these small errors characteristic of a "Y2K bug"? Wouldn't we see something more gross, like the 2001 data equaling the 1901 data?
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Take a look at the NASA GISS PLOT of the new data; it's quite informative: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D_lrg .gif
"seed them with single, cell life"
Why would you need to do this? Why not just rely on random, fortunate happenstance to create life? I mean, come on, have a little faith in spontaneous generation.
Also, it might increase the accuracy and validity of your experiment if you place your planets next to stars that have cyclical energy output. Then, be sure to employ a large group of politically-motivated elitists to gather your data for you. They should completely disregard the aforementioned stars in their conclusions, and quickly form a "concensus" of irrefutable judgment. And, any data gatherer who questions said "concensus" shall be labeled a zealot and expelled from the community.
Just some suggestions. Of course, you run your experiment the way you want to.
sig: sauer
On the heels of this announcement, climateaudit.org gets hit with a Distributed Denial of Service attack. Interesting.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
global warming is a theory.
the trend of a thermometer over the past 30 years is a fact, within the error bounds of the thermometer.
there **is** a difference.
The asphalt, or concrete (or a variety of other things) have thermal retention, which means that heat is retained past sunset and re-radiated. This biases overnight lows.
I suppose it depends on which side of the air conditioner you put the sensor...
"Granite is hard" "Water is soft" "Non-saline water freezes at 32 degrees celcius under 15 atmospheres of pressure".
The first two are subjective, and so are in no way, by any measurement, facts. Is granite hard compared to diamond?
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
I'm blown away by the unassailable logic in your comment. I realize now that I have been wrong all along and am both stupid and ignorant. I will quit my career in marketing and apply at the first coal mine I can find. Preferably in Kansas. But I wouldn't know if they have any, since I'm both stupid and ignorant. Thanks for shining the light on the shamefulness of my stupidity.
/sarcasm or was that pretty obvious enough?
Do I even need to put the
Yes, you can dance to Radiohead.
If you perform the analysis you suggested, the trendline correlation coefficient is 0.1443. I may not remember much from my college statistics courses but I do remember that such a low number signifies very little statistical confidence or relevance.
That's the main point that slashdotters do not seem to be getting right now, it's not like all the global warming theory went bananas.
All you guys, do yourself a favour and plot NASA's corrected data in your favourite plotting program and then compare to other data (be mindful of the Y scale). The years around 1940 were unusually warm in the US, but the year with the highest 5-year average temperature is 2000.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
No, the numbers speak for themselves.
It took ten seconds to create a plot in gnuplot with the corrected data.
I was surprised at the results. They show a random scattering of occasional really warm years, and a massive, unmistakable, consistent warming trend since 1980.
This was not at all what I expected to see after reading TFA. Maybe that's why they don't plot the corrected data.
No, just people that don't understand Climate Change isn't JUST about "getting warmer" will CALL the same Climate Change scientists "nuts" for saying that the cooling is the same thing as the warming that we've also seen.
The world is getting warmer, on average, little by little. But the MUCH bigger thing you'll find is extremes - of cold as well as warm - becoming a lot more common.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
Like I said, I'm happy to give a full, logical explanation if anyone wants. But the situation isn't any more 'controversial' (as in 'teach the controversy') than 1+1=2. If you don't understand that 1+1=2, then, well, the fact is you're either stupid or ignorant. But I'm willing to go to the trouble of spelling out exactly why if you want.
A-Bomb
"but if that temperature is going up, that is a fact"
And would be described by a specific set of number, i.e, "in the past 10 years mean global temperature has increased x degrees celsius". It would not be "global warming"
"The mechanism for that temperature increase may be a theory."
And is know collqially as "global warming", which is exactly what the OP insisted was a "fact".
So you have demonstrated quite effectively why OP was wrong, and why you are as well.
"In short, you fail."
Ironic considering you proved his point for him.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
Do we? I mean really? You're honestly willing to let go of the notion that there is a god when formulating what is true?
That's the big difference I see between proponents of Intelligent Design and Evolutionists. If you ask an Evolutionist, "What would convince you that the Theory of Evolution is wrong," they'd probably balk, but if you persist long enough, most would agree that there are some things that would do it. Discovery that an alien species interceded in the development of our planet is a great Star Trekish one. Direct observation and thorough (and repeatable) testing and analysis of a supernatural event would probably make some big headway. Discovery of scientific evidence that makes the theory impossible or highly improbable in its current form would be pretty significant. And so on, and so on; the point is that there are things that would change our minds. Even the scientifically sacred theory of gravity has been turned on its head by Einstein, and is even now being poked at by quantum physicists and researchers of string theory.
But ask a proponent of Intelligent Design what evidence could possibly convince them that their belief is wrong--what new discovery could put the nail in the coffin once and for all and convince them that the Theory of Evolution is most likely correct and cause them to forsake Intelligent Design as we forsook the notion that the earth was flat centuries ago--and you will get the exact same answer around 99% of the time: There is none. (That question is especially fun to ask of Creationists. Nothing illustrates why they have no business interfering with teaching kids science more.) Every Intelligent Design proponent I've ever met has insisted that every shred of evidence that we have that points to evolution being a completely natural process without an Initiator is either not true, politically (in a religious context) motivated, or not good enough to displace the words of a 2,000-year-old book and what their parents taught them as a child. In other words, they flat-out refuse to poke at it because to an Intelligent Design proponent, the theory really is sacred and therefore irreproachable.
I wouldn't take that as a compliment. I capitalized it because the Truth that most Christians seek is just that--a proper noun that designates a specific idea that may or may not be shared by others, and that may or may not, in fact, be true. I did it to differentiate it from the "truth" (uncapitalized), which is a plain ol' noun that does means that which is true. Rarely they may coincide, most of the time they bear no relevance to each other, and sometimes they directly conflict. The question is, which are you going to believe when they do conflict? The Truth, or the truth?
And if you're going to try to make a valid argument 'against' global warming, avoid claiming that the climate change agenda is being advanced by environmentalists. That's a political argument, not a scientific one. I work in the atmospheric research community, and there are in fact very few environmentalists involved. There are, however, thousands of atmospherics chemists, physicists, geophysicists, geologists, glaciologists, climatologists, paleoclimatologists, oceanographers, marine biologists, plant biologists and soil scientists whose work contributes to the big picture of climate change. In most cases these researchers are not focused on global warming in particular; it is most often the case that changes in the natural phenomena they are studying incidentally end up pointing to climate change caused by a man-made increase in global greenhouse gases.
So that means that the other half occured after WWII, which is worrying enough. There are global warming alarmists, but just because they exaggerate does not mean the problem does not exist.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
I agree.
However that graph with the associated article is far from clear.
It was colder in 1980 than any other time in the century.
A lot of the rest of it looks like a random walk.
I think people are over-reacting and over-committing before the facts are in.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
... Sad that it took this long to occur. Here are some more interesting tidbits from the updated data set. 1934 was 1.35 degrees warmer than the norm. 1998 was 1.23 degrees warmer. 2006 was 1.13 degrees warmer. In fact, the last ten years show an unbroken string of being warmer than expected. The 5-year mean over the last 24 years was warmer than expected.
The only thing that the new graph lacks is a headline-grabbing "warmest year EVAR!!!". The trends are still there. The data still doesn't contradict what other data sets show. I'm glad someone spent the time to go over the data with a fine-toothed comb, and found an issue. I'm not surprised though that the new data still fits current climate predictions.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I'm glad to see that we can discuss this with a certain measure of civility while we (obviously) vehemently disagree. I am open to change my mind. However, and this is what will really send red flags off to many I think, I do not base my perception of reality only on scientific evidence. As you pointed out, gravity which was so sacred and trusted by scientists was turned on its head. If that's the case... isn't it even remotely possible that one day the theory of evolution as we understand it now could be?
I'm not saying that science can't be trusted. What I am saying is that it can't be fully trusted because the entities who are discovering scientific facts are humans, who are themselves prone to mistakes. This is why, while I am open to change my mind, I will not let science be the only source for defining what my origin and purpose is.
Yes, you can dance to Radiohead.
I find it disturbing that skeptics have labeled "deniers" in when it comes to the climate change arena. This trite rhetoric suggests that anyone who dares question the causes of global warming is contradicting absolute and established fact, not to mention the implicit associate a different, and more loathsome, kind of denier. In case you've forgotten, or you simply don't understand the concept, a good scientist is first and foremost a skeptic. So, I'm going to go ahead and exercise my right to be skeptical until I see absolute and conclusive proof that human beings are a major contributing factor in global climate change, mmmkay? And in case you're wondering, I don't take this is sufficient grounds to avoid finding cleaner and more efficient energy sources for the human race, because there are plenty of other good reasons for that.
Everyone old enough to be a senior scientist at NASA has owned a car that is not a hybrid. You've basically set the bar up around what it would take for fundamentalists to accept atheism.
There doesn't have to be a conspiracy for global warming to be a fizzle, or not quite as we thought it was. It could very easily be a little mistake plus a lot of hype. That combination isn't exactly rare today.
So in other words, since the global climate is so complex, science cannot sufficiently explain past global climate phenomena, nor can it predict future patterns? Where have I heard THAT argument before?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
"The US data in general should probably be ignored as the sensor network is poorly maintained and the sensor locations are very poorly planned. As compared to what? What sensors are better? The satellites from space are better, but those have been rejected because they don't support global warming so "clearly, there must be some effect we don't understand skewing the satellite data"
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
A data set is a collection of anecdotal evidence collected with the same rules. Just pointing out that simply "it's an anecdote" is not very useful when all the anecdotes can be combined into a data set. Me telling you that there hasn't been a white Christmas in ages - not useful. If 90 out of 100 people tell you the same thing about a static location - something's up.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The Theory of Evolution seems to have been given a pass in that department. Is it, like climate change, simply too complex to explain scientifically?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
You know, I am really getting tired of the anti-global-warming people using anything they can find to discredit the science. Its like the anti-evolution folks trying to say its all wrong just because a few people in the past faked their results and were shown to be frauds.
They are missing the point.
Whether global warming is really happening or not is not so much important as the fact that we are belching tons (literally) of pollution into the air and water. How can anybody be against cutting down on pollution? How can anybody be against trying to preserve at least a portion of what's left of our natural envirionment? duh? Even without global warming we are still clearly systematically destroying everything on this planet.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
And your 20 years' experience are quite significant vs. the lifetime of the planet.
If you ever find a group of scientists who are NOT trying to debunk each other's findings then you've discovered a group of non-scientists. That's what science is about.
Your observations are exactly why you have to use a more rigorous procedure than personal observation of one or two winters to study something like climate. You might think last winter was messed up, but that doesn't mean it wasn't natural. Apparently it was even warmer in 1934. The English probably thought it was messed up when they were growing grapes during the medieval warm period. They also probably thought it was messed up when all their vinyards died at the end of it.
What percentage of all greenhouse gas is CO2? And what percentage of that is man made? I forgot because it is a really small number, can you remind me?
If you want to stop global warming, ban water vapor.
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
Have you looked at the updated data set? Tell me what trends you see. Oh, it's still going up? Trends are still there? 1934 is the warmest year on record by only a fraction? We're still in the longest warming trend in recorded history? I take it that's all just conspiracy to you.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
America's founding fathers are considered philosophers, as were the men that they borrowed ideas from (Keyes, et. al.).
It's not really a Y2K bug in the conventional sense, and it has nothing to do with Y2K software compliance. It's more like 2000 happened to be the year that the organization collecting the temperature data in the USA changed their procedures for correcting the data for the "time of day" that the temperature reading was taken. This meant a slight difference between the pre-2000 dataset and the 2000-and-later dataset, which is the inconsistency correctly recognized by the guy mentioned in the article.
:-) Two others were in the 1950s (1953, 1954), and the rest were 1990, 1998, 1999, and 2006. Perhaps this is merely indicating that, in the US, lately it's been the hottest it's been since the "dust bowl" years. That's not a pleasant thought.
So, it's merely a coincidence that the change happened to occur in 2000. It could have happened any other year. Referring to this as a result of a "Y2K bug" is misleading. If it is, then anything that changed in 2000 could be called a "Y2K bug".
I don't think demoting 1998 to the 2nd-highest US temperature in a century (barely -- by 0.01 annual average degree) is a big deal either. 1998 is an awfully close second. I also wouldn't ascribe much to the the claim that "half" the top ten years in the US were before WWII (1921, 1931, 1934, 1938). Last I checked, 4 is less than half of ten
The TOP 10 annual temperature years in the US are (celcius degrees from mean):
year annual 5-year mean
1 1934 1.25 0.44
2 1998 1.23 0.51
3 1921 1.15 0.15
4 2006 1.13
5 1931 1.08 0.27
6 1999 0.93 0.69
7 1953 0.90 0.32
8 1990 0.87 0.40
9 1938 0.86 0.36
10 1954 0.85 0.47
If you look at the top ten ranking for the 5-year means, the pattern is pretty clear:
1 2000 0.52 0.79
2 1999 0.93 0.69
3 2004 0.44 0.66
4 2001 0.76 0.65
5 1932 0.00 0.63
6 1933 0.68 0.61
7 2003 0.50 0.58
8 2002 0.53 0.55
9 1998 1.23 0.51
10 1988 0.32 0.51
The 1930s are down at 5th and 6th place. 2005 and 2006 are left out because you can't calculate a 5-year window around them yet.
Finally, the error changes the GLOBAL pattern insignificantly, and the global trend in the last couple of decades is greater than the USA trend.
In all, it's a worthwhile error to catch for the US data, but it doesn't change much about the overall pattern.
The height of the dust bowl. Drought. Pestilence. Ecological disaster. Glad everything is back to normal now.
Well the locations of a lot of the climate sensors are known to be in poor locations which will throw the numbers. And how are we suppose to have a reasonable debate when the underlying data is suspect? For me the global warming versus global cooling argument isn't relevant. I am more concerned with dumping millions of pounds of crap into the atmosphere and I would really rather breath clean air and not die of some rather painful disease with environmental causes. Climate modeling is hard enough with good data, if anything lets at least ensure that is what we are getting.
And for the record, Christians are after the Truth as well, and we're glad you capitalized it. :)
What if the Truth is shown to not include god or a son of god, that JC was just a nice guy?
Well, I live _IN_ Canada. Vancouver seldom sees significant snow. In 2006 we had major snow storms in early November. Does it mean it's getting colder? To paraphrase Carlin, I am not worried about the Earth's future; the future of the human species on the other hand ...
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
This tells us that the temperature during the last years are higher - for Stockholm. Other places may have a different figure. It is important to look not only for a single site but for several sites with different geographical influence.
What really is needed is an analysis of the temperature over a much longer timespan than just a few hundred years - and here the ice cores drilled from Greenland and Antarctica are one key. Another is the growth of really old trees where the thickness of the year rings tells a lot of the climate, but unfortunately not everything. A warm dry summer gives a different result than a warm wet summer.
And even if the climate is shifting - it's the polar regions that are seeing the greatest changes.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The important point here is not the inaccuracy of the data, but that the data was accepted at face value without being adequately vetted.
It doesn't matter how you feel about this subject, there is really no valid reason to allow studies like this one to be used as the basis for conclusions without access to all of the data and all of the methodology. This was never available. What does it say about your confidence in your results when you won't allow anyone to look at how you got there?
The study was wrong, and this guy had to not only reverse engineer the algorithm, he had to reverse engineer the data to demonstrate it was inaccurate.
There's no way anyone could think that was a good thing.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
And often includes such hackneyed approaches as attacking the crediblity of the journalist when the facts don't support your position or putting quotations around a statement to suggest it is of a dubious nature (i.e. '...if you're very careful about reading his "story"...').
This, however, is the blogosphere...I'd like to think that, in this forum, it is still possible to move beyond "Journalism 101" (and here, the quotation marks indicate that I am referencing your words and not my own.)
On the other hand, I don't know Michael Asher from Adam, so I can't comment on your apparant opinions of him.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
That's because the pollution wouldn't have enough time to spread around the globe after the start of industrial revolution, you fucking muppet...
A few things.
One is that it is possible to be industrialized and not destroy the environment in the process. Its more expensive, but that research and expence will lead to more growth, not somehow throw us back to the stone age.
Second, if the third world modernizes enough its unlikely that we will have anymore major wars. Americans (and other first world nations) aren't typically willing to blow themselves up to destroy other nations, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that our basic needs are easily met. Once everyone is on that level (which also means more economic growth, by the way), the world should be a safer place.
You only need to look at history to see why helping other nations get themselves going in the modern world is a good thing. WW2 was largely a result of WW1 and the German economy collasping under heavy war reperations.
Are you aware that some people push ID as a scientific theory? The very same people want to ban the theory of evolution from schools.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
*insert obligatory Hitchhiker's Guide joke*
Will we be able to recover the freedoms taken away from us under the guise of protecting us from global warming now?
What freedoms were taken away from us, pray tell?
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
The key is "recorded history". 120 years is an eyeblink in earth's history. There simply is not enough data, certainly in this data set, to extrapolate anything other than it appears that there is a slight increase in temperature over 120 years. Who knows what the next 120 years will bring? I'm sure if you were looking at this same data set in 1980 you would've been bemoaning the impending ice age since there was a 30 year trend of dropping temperatures at that point.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
Here's a plot courtesy of gnuplot.
(Posted anonymously because people are completely irrational about global warming.)
"Here are the facts: increasing CO2 in that atmosphere increases the temperature. That is a fact. CO2 in our atmosphere is increasing and isotopic analysis of the carbon in that CO2 proves that it is from the combustion of organic Carbon. THAT MEANS US!!!!!!"
Except that the increase in CO2 in the ice core samples lags behind the rise in temperature by a matter of centuries. So, it seems you have it the wrong way around. Increasing the temperature increases the CO2 in the atmosphere.
Our environmental sins may be legion, but quite frankly, I've read arguments on both sides, and the "deniers" seem to be the ones who actually have the convincing argument. We may have caused pollution en masse, but the Earth is getting warmer on its own. Wouldn't it be better to concentrate on fixing the problems we actually are causing, rather than creating fear and wasting money on a process that isn't our fault?
(And for that matter, why the hell is it so bad for the climate to be changing? It has never been a stable system in the past, so why should we expect it to be stable now? And, as far as I know, a warmer climate would mean that there would be more plant life, and greater fertility in the soil - and frankly, that's a net gain.)
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
Now, obviously most religious people aren't philosophers to know high level metaphysical realism, but they nevertheless have some intuition about this. Anyway, the fact of the matter is simply that atheism isn't in opposition to theism. Atheism is merely a subset of theism. Take theism, remove any arbitrary number of elements from it (you choose which ones, although it's usually something you dislike in your culture), then take whatever remains, say it is all there is, and you have (an) atheism.
Afterwards, if inside such a subset you do a lot of very detailed research, you'll surely discover a lot of truths about the subset. And these truths, by definition, improve our understanding of the whole set. But since the study of the subset doesn't include the study of anything outside it, any kind of "negation" at which it arrives of that which is outside its boundaries isn't a negation at all, but only a more detailed description of these boundaries. That's because the subset is defined by this negation, and arriving at it now and again down the line is simply expected. To treat this in any other way would be to incur in a circular reasoning.
Thus, when a biologist says: "Here is natural selection, there is no God, there is no Creator", he is in fact incurring such a circular reasoning. The correct saying would be this: "Here is natural selection. I don't know how a god or a creator affects or interacts with it, because Biology excludes gods and creators from its field of research."
Too bad scientists usually don't study philosophy. It would make their discourse much more precise.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
And as one goes back in time the quality of that data decreases. We hear of temperature, flood level details ad nauseum from the 17th and 18th century - its not just how far back the recording is but how much error is inherent in how they recorded it.
Without choosing sides on the debate, keep in mind that often times when someone finds a hack in the code that changes the data to show something different, the same person can often find another hack that puts it right back where it was in the first place.
Praying for the end of your wide-awake nightmare.
I wonder how many of the dinosaurs sat around debating about climate change? Is it getting cooler, should we build comet buster bombs etc? Shouldn't they have done something? I think we could certainly learn a lesson from history here. Don't do what the dinosaurs did, act now, act swiftly, save our way of life, stop the earth from doing the things it does to make things uncomfortable for us. Sometimes I almost think this planet is mad at us and it's not just some random rock twirling through space!
But reproducible scientific analysis can only occur on a string of anecdotal evidence. If you perform a string of bad experiments, you come to erroneous conclusions no matter how long you analyze.
/
http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/weather_stations
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
1 - I don't actually draw any conclusions about global warming,
2 - I specifically don't state my opinion about global warming, and
3 - My message is that GW critics (like you) will claim that this development "disproves" global warming.
4 - That GW critics, specifically, are an irrational and unscientific bunch. Thanks for backing that one up, BTW.
For the record, I'm an agnostic on GW, still waiting for some solid data that offers direct proof. There is, nonetheless, enough circumstantial evidence to convince me we should be concerned, and play it safe when it comes to contributing to the accumulation of greenhouse gasses.
However, my strongest opinion is distaste for people who defend foregone conclusions with vitriol and rancor and who filter and spin facts to fit their opinions. And interestingly, these same people never hold any credentials in the fields of atmospheric science or climatology, yet they feel as if their opinions on this topic should hold the same weight as scientists and climatologists.
I can see the fnords!
1) Raise average global temperature a whole lot 2) Wait for Microsoft, Sony, and the RIAA to burn 3) ??????? 4) Profit
That's why people proposing drastic action need to ask Climate Change: What if They're Right?.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I need to see the data that the algorithms operated on, presented and explained by someone with a doctorate in climatology.
First if you want to study the algorithms you need Computer Scientist/Engineers and Statistician, disciplines that have existed for more than a couple decades unlike climatologists. I consider Climatology an area of interest within geology or meteorology rather than a science in it's own right; certainly it's rigor is seems to be on a level closer to astrology the geology
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Have you read his comment?
Junk Science is an aptly named site, since it is full of junk science.
Just to pull apart one thing: they quote Hansen and Dyson on the difficulty of measuring global temperature: but it turns out that measuring global temperature _anomalies_ is much much easier and are accurate to within 0.1 degrees. And that's what climate scientists do, and therefore this is just another climate skeptic smokescreen.
(though I do agree that the models are not good at short term or regional level forecasts yet)
Congratulations, you've focused on the data quite well, while totally missing the point.
The data, which had previously been considered accurate, wasn't. The data was used as the basis for other studies, which themselves may or may not be inaccurate.
The point here really has nothing to do with the conclusions you so lucidly point out, but with the methodology. The data was not public nor was the algorithm used to calculate the conclusions.
That's not good science by anyone's measure.
And you'll notice, I never explicitly discussed the conclusions anywhere in my post. Try to do the same if you reply.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
As Alexander Pope said: "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing..."
You are correct that the correlation coefficient is low. For a simple linear regression this means that the variation explained by drawing the trendline is small compared to the total variation in the series. Those who went and made the scatterplot can see that for themselves.
However, the trend occurs over a large number of observations. A better measure of significance can also be derived with Excel, albeit you have to activate the "Analysis ToolPak" Add-In, and from there go to Data Analysis and Regression. From there you can get the p-value for the slope on the regression line.
The p-value can be interpreted as the probability, over all that time, of seeing the observed slope if the variation was due to purely random noise. Subject to assumptions about the nature of that noise (assessing which requires more climatological knowledge than I have) that probability is 0.000011, or less than 1 in 90000. Since the assumptions are fairly robust, and the p-value is so small, I think it is fair to say the trend is significant, for rational criteria of significance.
Please keep in mind that there is a fundamental portion of the scientific process involved: funding.
Whatever your subject of study may be, you are going to need funding. It is in the funding process that bias can be (unconsciously) introduced. When you approach the holders of the purse strings (Congress, university department chairs, corporate board of directors) you will be dealing with their own preconceptions and prejudices. It is particularly bad when the gatekeepers are elected, which means that they must respond to their constituency's emotional whims. And, given human psychology (darn it, I have to deal with those humansagain!), you will find that people support what they already agree with.Look at the pillorying of any NASA official who has questioned either party line. After a while, scientists (who, after all, have mortgage payments to make just like everyone else) are going to become very hesitant to do anything that would threaten their position... include release conclusions that their data support when those conclusions are contrary to "accepted wisdom".
Please keep in mind that there are many pressures here, from all sides, on the scientists in question. Sometimes I really feel sorr for those guys.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
The article's assertion that there's a propaganda machine working on behalf of global warming theorists is outside the bounds of the data, which I think is interesting to note.
...
Why? Folks who have been pounded on the head with propaganda can't take just a little pleasure in refuting it with valid data? Their pleasure somehow magically invalidates the data?
Still no non-opinion site hits for this on Google News, by the way
If he'd have taken an intro stats course, he'd understand that trends aren't about the outliers. He does a good job of making a scene because some outliers have changed, but doesn't bother to look at the trends. Or maybe he did, but ignored it because it didn't agree with him.
Heck, you can drop the corrected data into excel and have a trend line in a few minutes. No surprise, it's still increasing.
This brings to mind the beginning of my all-time favorite Wall Street Journal editorial:
" That's not a pleasant thought."
Yeah, but the CO2 - Temperature correlation is eliminated (at least for the US measurements), since you can't show a consistent upward trend in temperatures associated with the consistent upward trend in CO2 concentrations. So it's more like "gee it's been hot lately, but that's not anything new".
I am much less alarmed to learn that something scary happening now has also happened before and things turned out okay in the end.
The "experiment" is being conducted. If global climate change due to humans is occurring, which I think it is, we will know "soon" enough, right? Does history tell us that change due to political and economic policy shifts will happen when it is likely too late? The question is too late for whom (the US or other parts of the world where the impact will (is?) be felt first)? Humans 200 years from now will be the ones who will be able validate the models we are generating today relative to the policies that will be practiced from now until 200 years in the future.
That's because this proposition is meaningless. If you go after the philosophical basis of the "creator" concept, you find that at some point, usually right above the Platonic Ideas level, the identity principle ceases to apply. The Good, or as Plotinus called it, the One, for instance, is the undifferentiated "sum" of all possibilities, past, present and future, including those that contradict each other, excluding everything that is logically impossible, reduced to pure simplicity (or, rather, not-hypostasized into full infinite multiplicity of finites). Thus, it "includes" conscience, lack of conscience, will, complete lack of will, existence of a creator, nonexistence of any creator etc., in such a way that they are all the same.
Seems to me this paragraph is mostly meaningless.
Anyway, the fact of the matter is simply that atheism isn't in opposition to theism. Atheism is merely a subset of theism. Take theism, remove any arbitrary number of elements from it (you choose which ones, although it's usually something you dislike in your culture), then take whatever remains, say it is all there is, and you have (an) atheism.
That's nonsense. Are you sure you know what subsets are? Here's an example, the set of Men is a subset of the set of people. All characteristics shared by all people are also shared by Men. i.e. all people have skin, therefore all Men have skin. Now, if atheism were a subset of theism you could say the same thing: all characteristics shared by all theisms would also be shared by atheisms. The fundamental defining characteristic of a theism is the belief in god. All theists believe in god, therefore all atheists believe in god. Obviously this is not true, so atheism is not a subset of theism.
But since the study of the subset doesn't include the study of anything outside it, any kind of "negation" at which it arrives of that which is outside its boundaries isn't a negation at all, but only a more detailed description of these boundaries. That's because the subset is defined by this negation, and arriving at it now and again down the line is simply expected.
WTF are you talking about?
Too bad scientists usually don't study philosophy. It would make their discourse much more precise.
Yeah because all that crap up there was perfectly clear. Scientific terminology is plenty precise. Adding irrelevant philosophical mumbojumbo would just get in the way of getting real research done. It would be far more useful for philosophers to study science.
It must be really nice to not be expected to produce actual testable results.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I appreciate your expertise, but I expect more concreteness. There is not a single number in your post. If the qualified medium to high confidence is backed up by a 0.03% probability, then it really is nearly meaningless. Not reporting the numbers is engaging in sensationalism.
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
I want to have your babies.
This whole question hinges upon what the definition of a real biologist is. Given that there is no legal certifying authority or statutory definition of a "real biologist", I doubt we will come to any sort of agreement. It's not dependent on credentials. Plenty of naturalists made real contributions to the field of biology without having academic degrees in the field. However, I would say that if actual verifiable biological principles apply to a given question and the number of people working on answering the question are divided into two groups, and one group are using said verifiable principles, and the other aren't, then the group that is not using the science of biology to answer the question are not real biologists for the purpose of the question at hand.
Anecdotal evidence is hardly an appropriate substitute for reliable, reproducable scientific analysis.
Unless, that is, you've already made up your mind on the subject, in which case anything that supports your view will suffice as "proof".
When I was in high school in 1992-1996, we did some projects and pretty much determined at the time that the scientists really didn't know what was going on. I ignored the whole thing in college, and afterwards. About 2003, I started looking at the issue again. Apparently, the "scientists" are all bound and determined that GW is happening now and if you don't agree with us then we will discredit you or your research and try to get you unemployed ASAP. Now that its 2007, I have no faith in almost anything GW related. I'd like us to cease wasting money on the scientists studying GW and start spending money that money on engineers and new stuff improving efficiency in all our products. Of course, I'd also like us to stop wasting money on reporters and media people talking about GW and spend that money on the new products as well.
Unfortunately, the critics of global warming -- most of whom have no science credentials whatsoever, and certainly not in climatology, but will cherrypick scientific results to support their edified conclusions -- will be all over this "weakness." Now, whenever the subject of temperature records comes up, this error will be used to "invalidate" it, and they will ignore the fact that the data are now in fact stronger because these records have been independently reviewed and debugged.
Now, every time global warming comes up, especially in the MSM, this issue will be the distraction that prevents a real, rational discussion from taking place. And every critic of GW will latch on to this bug as "evidence" that global warming is a fallacy.
This is very bad news.
Now we have to wait for Manhattan and Ft. Meyers to be submerged before the critics will desist from their fanatical denials, hypocritical projections of bias, ad homenim attacks on past Vice Presidents, and willfully ignorant conflation of weather with climate.
Someone prominent needs to come out, and make a very big splash in the MSM to estabish the fact that the data - and whatever deductions can be made from them - are now stronger, rather than weaker.
That is what you posted, now try again to say with a straight face that you are agnostic on this issue. Wishy/washy hypocritics like you annoy the hell out of me, don't weasel out of something and try to say that you are playing both sides. If you are going to take such a strong position upfront, at least have enough spine to stay with it for at least a little bit, or at least engage in conversationg rather than jumping directly to being agnostic about it the first time you are questioned.
"but to claim that this somehow puts the lie to the data is an absurd overreach."
Why? Just saying so doesn't make it true, so tell me why.
"Can anyone offer an explanation for explicitly mentioning the '5 years before WW2' figure in the new data without mentioning that this is only one year more than previous, that doesn't involve a deliberate effort to spin the results?"
And saying it's "only" one more year isn't also spinning it?
Why are you doing exactly what you are trying to denounce?
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
Actually, it doesn't bias overnight lows. It accurately records the heat-island effect of developed areas. What this means is that the average temperature recorded by this sensor is higher than the average temperature recorded by a sensor out in the woods - which is correct. And this is why you see climatologist talk about temperature changes, not absolute temperatures. A 10% year-over-year increase recorded on asphalt is the same as a 10% increase recorded in the woods.
This is why the location of the temperature sensors really doesn't matter so much for the purpose of tracking climate change: a hot location getting hotter is as important as a cool location getting less cool.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The point is that short term weather forcasting (will it rain on Tuesday = where will my grain of rice be in the bathtub) is an entirely different matter than long term (will it be hotter in 10 years time = will my bathwater be cooler in 10 years) forecasting.
Short term forecsting is inaccurate because the weather is a chaotic system.
Long term "big picture" forcasting is fundamentally a different matter since you're not trying to predict "where will we be on the attractor" (short term forcast) but rather "what will be the bounds of the attractor" (big picture), which is a solvable problem.
After Dick Cheney's hunting accident, the CNN tag line - pretty much all day long - was "Cheney's got a gun".
Nothing like an Aerosmith reference to appeal to the kiddies eh?
A goal is a dream with a deadline
... a climate prediction that was EVER correct that was more than 10 years out. The closest to correct predictions that I have found are in the Farmers Almanac. They use records of the climate for the past 100 years. They assume there are long term cylical patterns. What will happen is a repeat of what has happened. They actually have a better than 60% track record. You should look at the track records for your Climatologists. It's nowhere near to 50%.
Here's what I remember having seen in my lifetime from the researchers on the subject.
1970's - Climate Science has advanced in the past few years. It is now possible to make accurate predications based on SCIENTIFIC models. All the predictions of a few years ago are meaningless. A new Ice Age is just around the corner. New York will be under year round Ice by the mid 1980's. It's all caused by Western Technology, mostly America.
1980's - Climate Science has advanced in the past few years. It is now possible to make accurate predications based on SCIENTIFIC models. All the predictions of a few years ago are meaningless. The ice age still comming, it's just delayed. The whole north half of North America and Europe will be frozen by 2000. It's all caused by Western Technology, mostly America.
1990's - Climate Science has advanced in the past few years. It is now possible to make accurate predications based on SCIENTIFIC models. All the predictions of a few years ago are meaningless. There won't be an Ice Age, instead, we are all going to die of heat. The next couple of years will break all records for heat waves. It's all caused by Western Technology, mostly America.
2000's - Climate Science has advanced in the past few years. It is now possible to make accurate predications based on SCIENTIFIC models. All the predictions of a few years ago are meaningless. Global Warming is still the problem, but you won't be able to actually measure the real effects for a couple more years. Sometime in the next 30 years (after the predicter is safely dead!) temperatures will break all records for heat waves. It's all caused by Western Technology, mostly America.
2010 - If the recent past trend continues, we will be hearing more and more about Global Cooling. The introductions, reccomendations and conclusions will continue to be the same. Only the predictions changes.
When it finally becomes obvious that they don't really know more than anybody else, they will trot out a new set of dramatic predictions. Supporters will continue to castigate those who question the latest prophecies of doom, and opponents will continue to reply in the same vein. Meanwhile, the dance of demand for support of new political power structures based on this will continue unabated. Because, for the last 40 years, only the predictions have changed.
For the parent, please consider. You decry those who remind you of past failures for 'mere meterology' while this is glorius 'climatology'. Climatology IS meterology. All that changes is the time frame. If they can't predict the immediate future, how can they have any real basis for believing they can be right about the far future. If you want to dispute that, please give me some facts. References to published data that can be used to corroborate a track record are facts. Models of the future do not cut it They are not facts, only tools. They can be made to say literally anything. The only model that really counts is the Earth. There is really no substitute for a track record of accurate predictions. Do you have any? Those I have seen are all worth less than a flip of the coin for accuracy.
Sorry predictions like 'There will be a storm' don't count. Specificity please.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
You're right. People shouldn't be basing their decisions on just this report. Ever heard of ice cores, for example? The IPCC has reams of data reaching back hundreds of thousands of years. That's basically the entirety of human history, and a significant chunk of land-based life on earth.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Seems to me you didn't grasp it. :)
It simple in fact. Theology will tell you that "time" and "space" were created. Furthermore, that "logic" and "mathematics" were created. More: that "possibility" and "causality" were created. And so on and so forth. Metaphysics will translate this into a logical hierarchy of "realities". Mathematical phenomena, for example, "includes" physics, since all physical phenomena are also mathematical relations, but isn't limited to physics, since non-physical phenomena also obey to mathematical laws. The study of these levels and how they interact with each other is called ontology, the study of being. And once you study ontology deeply enough, you see that it itself is encompassed by other non-ontological categories, such as those studied in henology, which analyzes non-dual relations (search the term on Google), of which the paragraph you didn't understood is a small overview.
Sigh. After studying philosophy I came to the conclusion that atheists usually don't know what they're talking about. They take the term "god", think it means something like a comics superhero, only bigger, and proceed to denounce that as non-existent. To which I answer: yes, it doesn't exist. Now, since the gods of which religions talk about have nothing in common with this concept, the debunking doesn't apply.
Regarding subsets, yes, all atheists believe in god. They just call it by other names: nature, causality, mater. And under specific conditions: while mathematical relations. In other words: atheists "understand" god while immanence. Religious people add to that transcendence. Both are two sides of the same coin.
I give an example. Anthropology has a central methodological principle: the anthropologist must study any culture in an objective and value free way. If he adds any value judgment to his studies, he isn't being scientifically precise. And it's all good and well, except for when an anthropologist forgets he began by doing non-judgmental studies. When that happens, he takes years of his studies, look at them, and end up saying something like: "These results are a proof that all cultures are equal, one isn't better than the other." To which I answer: no, they don't. These results, which taken as a whole show that all cultures are equal, prove that you applied very well your method of not being judgmental. Regarding the value of these cultures, they say nothing, because judging the value of cultures isn't something that Anthropology does. Simply put, Anthropology has no method for that, and cannot say anything about that.
It takes some years for a person to understand the terminology of any field. Why do you think it would be different with Philosophy? :)
Hehe, you inverted it. For something to be "testable", you must first know what "test" is. To test anything you need,
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
The IPCC "Summary for Policy makers" (linked and quoted above) intentionally includes far less numbers than the full report. It is, after all, a summary for policy makers. If you want numbers and references en mass to back up the statements in the summary, the full IPCC reports are all available online. The working group 2 report on Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability is especially interesting (and sobering) reading. WG2 Chapter 9 discusses impacts on human health and touches on some of the co-benefits of dealing with climate change. IMHO, the SPM, along with other documents such as the UDHR should be required reading for any politician taking office.
Duh indeed.
Oh yeah! That's right!... isn't what they used when they drilled down several thousands of years and found a lost fighter from 1942? Oops. Guess they forgot ice can melt and freeze many times throughout a single day. For some reason I have doubts that that ice was really 135,000 years old...
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
Interesting that Huricane Flossie http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_ep4+shtml /204039.shtml?5day?large#contents has grown in strength of the last 6 hours with maximum sustained winds up 10 mph to 85 mph. It is heading roughly in the direction of Hawaii. Its path looks a little like what I remember from Iniki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Iniki_1992_trac k.png. Might want to wait to the end of the season before counting up the storms.s -selling-solar.html
--
Rent solar power and keep you beer cold after a storm: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
... sometimes in fits and starts.
This only affects U.S. data, not all the other data from around the world which also supports global warming, so it doesn't mean we're off the hook. I would heave a great sigh of relief if it did.
This does underscore the need for transparency in all scientific methods, so that conclusions and methods can be properly tested.
There has been considerable science done since Al Gore's movie. Some of it continues to support the conclusion that we have made changes to our atmosphere which are causing temperatures to rise dramatically. Some data has become inconclusive. For instance, I saw one show where climbers of Mt. Kilamanjaro checked ground temperatures which revealed that increasing volcanic activity might account for some, if not all, of the ice melting that's been happening there.
But even with such corrections, there is still quite a lot of data from all over the world that indicates temperatures are rising and that it's caused by the increase in CO2 and other greenhouse gases. We can't ignore the rest of the data, unless someone can show that it, too is incorrect.
I, for one, believe that it is foolish to gamble that somehow things will turn out alright if we drag our feet or do nothing at all. There if far too much at stake. Even very small temperature changes in our past have had devastating effects on our civilization, and they occurred when our population was far smaller. Does anyone really believe that you can change the makeup of our atmosphere so drastically - increasing the CO2 by over 30% - and not have some detrimental effect? Even if you assumed that effect of changes in the atmosphere would be purely random, almost all possible changes would hurt us in some way.
I hope this latest report means we have more time to respond to the problem and will encourage a more open debate, but I don't think it means we should assume everything is going to be alright.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
Guess they forgot ice can melt and freeze many times throughout a single day.
Right, they must have forgot. Somebody really should explain that to them.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Sure I've heard of ice cores.
Now I don't profess to be an expert by any means, but it seems that using an ice core from the poles to extrapolate what the average temperature was for the entire planet seems to be cheerfully ignoring any number of other variables. As far as I know, there are no ice cores to be had in Florida.
The earth's climate, in my unsophisticated arm-chair view, seems to be an incredibly complex system that can't be adequately explained by grabbing a few arbitrary ice samples and making grand global and historical generalizations.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
Actually, I think he has a point. You can call yourself a biologist and believe in Intelligent Design, heck you might even be able to earn a degree in biology while still adhering to Intelligent Design, but you can't actually do any work, other than writing books about Intelligent Design as long as you believe in it.
All current areas of research conflict with the premises of Intelligent Design, so you have to choose to follow your religious beliefs or suspend them so you can actually do some work.
Now you may be confusing "Intelligent Design" and faith. It's quite possible to believe that something created the universe with an inherent design in it, and still be a scientist. The difference is that "Intelligent Design" is pretty much tied other unscientific beliefs like young earth creationism, because otherwise you just can't reconcile the fossil evidence with your beliefs.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Hypothesis 1
Proportionally large changes in proportions of climate-involved gases in the atmosphere are having effects on climate. As these changes may threaten the continuation of our advanced civilization, we should closely study all available evidence and model the effects to the best of our abilities.
Hypothesis 2
Massive numbers of scientists who study climate have a secret agenda to bring down industrial civilization, and will fudge any and all data in order to convince the population to end industrial civilization before the sky falls in on us from the shaking of industry's engines.
Note the parallelism
Both hypotheses see a threat to civilization. According to the first, the threat is that the effects on climate from our activities may get away from us. According to the second, the threat is that if we listen to scientists and act prudently, they will concertedly lie to us to achieve the neo-Luddite political result in which we renounce most of our technological and economic means.
Note the absurdity
According to the 2nd hypothesis, scientists - who have been essential in developing our technologies - have now massively subscribed to the sort of anti-technology ideologies that are found in the fringes of some English departments. This is a matter which is easily amenable to sociological research. It would be trivial, really, to go out and, using solid, proven techniques, interview a broad sample of environmental scientists on their personal views of and affections towards technology. It is central to the deniers' case that scientists, as a block, hold anti-technological views. Yet anecdotally, every professional scientist I know (some in climatology) loves technology. Is the only reason that the deniers fail to conduct the basic sociological research to prove their hypothesis that they know from their own anecdotal experience that it would fail to support them?
Are they doing something worse than fudging the data: failing to collect it in an obvious place, because they know it would prove them massively wrong?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I doubt such a small correction would be enough to satisfy the neocon/corporate agenda.
However, the trend of specious global warming "skeptic" stories on slashdot are probably much appreciated.
So why is 1998's data affected, when it occurred before they changed the data collection procedures?
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I don't put too much stock in this. I live in the DFW area nad the temp and rain measurments are done at the airport. There is soo much difference in both between there and my house. They have told me "it offically did not rain in DFW today" when I had a little over an inch in my rain guage.
We need to get Milwaukee buried again!
So, if I'm catching this right, your argument is "Screw your decades of data collected at a global scale. Lemme open the window and I'll tell you something about climate"
Dumbass
Look more closely at that (corrected) graph. In particularly, look at the year-on-year variability. The hot years in the 30's did indeed get very hot, but they were interspersed with cold years. No such thing happens in the late 90's and early 2000s - cold years in this latter period are all a lot warmer than almost any other cold years and in fact warmer than most years prior to 1930! This is another way of looking at what another poster was saying about ranking the 5 year running means, and is in fact the reason those running means are higher.
I guess global warming really was the non event, and Y2K did strike!
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Regarding subsets, yes, all atheists believe in god. They just call it by other names: nature, causality, mater. And under specific conditions: while mathematical relations. In other words: atheists "understand" god while immanence. Religious people add to that transcendence. Both are two sides of the same coin. First, only a philosopher could get away with saying "After studying philosophy, I came to the conclusion that atheists usually don't know what they're talking about...Regarding subsets, yes, all atheists believe in god." How do you then define "atheist"?
Anyway I'm intrigued. I don't believe in God nor do I believe in fate, "nature", or other non-observable forces that somehow shape the universe. I do believe in matter, causality (that there is cause and effect in the universe), the strong and weak nuclear forces, and other physical concepts. Are you arguing that believing that the universe exists constitutes believing in god?
If so, aren't you redefining "god" to be essentially meaningless? Certainly it's not the definition of "god" typically used by most theistic religions.
Am I misunderstanding your argument?
Just curious...
-Peter
The change in the U.S. temperature trend was on the order of 10%. The change in global temperature should be about two orders of magnitude smaller than that, as the U.S. only comprises 2% of the surface area of the Earth. Thus, a back of the envelope estimate suggests that the global warming trend will be altered by a few parts in 1000. There was actually a statement by NASA GISS to that effect quoted somewhere on Climate Audit, but it's been down so I can't access it.
Global warming is not "toast".
The guy who found the error - Steve something or other, predicts that the change brings the surface mesasurements down to the point where Global warming will top out at a TOTAL of 1-2 degrees above where it is now.
That "prediction" only holds if he made the same prediction before the surface measurements were changed: the change in surface measurements makes essentially no difference at all to the global warming trend (here).
That's pronounced Du mas.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Niot theat their sciecne was that great before.
I appreciate the Hume reference and I typically think of him when it comes to global warming. There are people with scientific facts on both sides of this issue, how do I determine who is right? Hume would say that we cannot know anything for certain, that we can't even trust our memories or senses to be accurate. He would say that just because something has happened in the past that it's no indication of what will come. And he certainly wouldn't put much faith in the facts being presented by either side. Towards the end of his life, a friend had asked him something along the lines of, "How do you guide your judgements if you can't even trust any facts or even your own memory of events?" His answer, "instinct." The man who took science too far felt that instinct was the best we could do.
I fairly agnostic on the issue of global warming, but my instinct tells me that the global-warming-is-man-made crowd is untrustworthy. They're too cult-like and they keep on pretending like there isn't even a debate on this. That's what drives me away from accepting it as fact. Also, in my experience, the largest problems tend to be ignored and neglected. The tremendous focus on global warming reminds me of the hysterical war on terror. It feels like bullshit and since I agree with Hume on so many other things, I'll let my instinct guide me on this one too. I could be wrong, but if I am, I feel like it's the fault of the global-warmers. Approach it like any other issue and I may yet end up in their camp.
Sure, the weatherman is predicting different things. But the weatherman is making his predictions based on computer models that are MUCH simpler, involve data that can be very easily measured (atmospheric pressure, wind speeds, etc), and involving mechanisms which are well-understood.
Climatologists, on the other hand, are making predictions based on models of poorly-understood and unimaginably complicated systems, with all sorts of known and unknown feedbacks over centuries, using data that can't be measured but, rather, must be "guessed" using complicated statistical methods. Did you know that the "margin of error" for the estimated global surface temperature is several times larger than the "observed warming"?
So it isn't entirely unreasonable to distrust the climatologists complicated models when the weathermans much simpler models don't always perform well. In my experience, however, weathermen get it right most of the time... for what its worth.
The planet has also been a lot hotter, and the seas a lot higher, than they are now. That's good for plants and fish, but it might not be so good for many cities and towns and the people who live there.
The point isn't that the climate we're seeing now is "TEH WORST" that there has ever been. Your entire post addresses a straw man.
The point is that the climate is changing quickly, because we are affecting it. The question is what do we do about it.
There's a lot about your post that indicates to me that you simply haven't done enough homework on this issue. Water vapor, for instance, serves mostly to reinforce warming trends caused by other forcings. It's not a long term forcing itself because it cycles out of the atmosphere so quickly. So to call it "the most important" greenhouse gas is misleading.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I think the surface station project has the potential to be a good idea--a scientist can never be too careful about data collection. But right now the project has almost no scientific value because it is not rigorous. Its product so far consists entirely of blog posts and photos with lines drawn on them. These are the tools of communication campaigns (see: 9/11 hoaxers), not scientific research.
See this other comment of mine for details on that. Also, take the time to view the responses for more on how other scientists have looked into the validity of surface temperature data.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Don't know the difference between a Climatologist, and a Meteorologist, do you?
Easy. A meteorologist has a significantly shorter period of time between prediction and verification than the climatologist. Therefore, his ability to predict accurately improves measurable within single human life spans. Climatologists have to wait much longer to discover how wrong they are and why, so their predictions are often ridiculously inaccurate.
As an example, climatologists predicted over thirty years ago that "the CO2 greenhouse effect warming trend should first become evident in the Southern Hemisphere." Actual observation over the last 25 years with NASA satellite data shows the exact opposite. No word, that I know of, as to why they were completely wrong.
Another example... In 1995, the IPCC revised warming estimates downward by 30% because the predicted temperature increases of 1.3 to 2.3 degrees C made five years earlier only turned out to be about half a degree. Apparently, they forgot to consider sulfate aerosols in their computer models... That's the stated reason, but I'd wager they forgot a lot more than that.
In a knee-jerk reaction to hurricane Katrina, climatologists and media everywhere were blaming global warming for increased frequency and severity of hurricanes. The world's foremost authority on atlantic hurricanes was crucified as a heritic when he called bullshit on them. Now, a new peer reviewed article in Nature by Quirin Schiermeier seems to dispute that claim as well. Run Quirin, run! Here comes a mob with pitchforks and torches... Apparently, we've been very fortunate for the past couple of decades and storm frequency and intensity is only now returning to historic averages. In the meantime, as GP poster pointed out... the past two hurricane season have been complete duds.
Having gotten so much egg on their faces in the past 40 years is bringing about a change in tactics though. I've noticed many climatologists' recent predictions are so far into the future, we'll all be dead before they can be verified.
It's easy enough to predict warming. The planet has been warming for the past 18000 years. It's going to get warmer? Ya don't say?! Warming thus far has only made the planet more habitable for human beings. Pardon me if I don't fall to my knees and repent to the holy mother Earth when a climatologist starts preaching fire and brimstone about future warming.
Causality, then, is an even more nebulous concept, so much that I won't even enter it (search for Hume's attack on the whole notion in his epistemological studies to see what I mean, although I must add that I disagree with him). Suffice it to say that what you call "cause and effect" is a concept devised by Aristotle, who identified it as one among four types of causes: formal, effective (the one you adopt), final and material. One of the reasons the Intelligent Design folks and evolutionist biologists don't get along is that the ID'ers adopt final causation, while evolutionists adopt effective causation, and both clash when applied to the same set of facts without the people arguing for one or the other previously acknowledging that they're applying different causative principles. Anyway, interestingly enough you cannot "prove" nor "disprove" any of the four causations, you can only "choose" to use one, other, or more than one of them.
So, only here we have at least three Philosophical "beliefs": first, that "the physical world" (let's avoid the term "nature", since you don't like it) is ordered; second, that the way it's ordered is intrinsically mathematical; and third, that this mathematical order is shaped in the form of effective causality. As things stand, none of them can be proved, only used. Interesting, eh?In a sense yes, although the universe as we experience it is only a small subset of the infinitely bigger set of possible universes. Because here's another thing you also believe, without noticing this to be the case: that for anything to exist as fact, it must have previously been possible, what implies that "possibilities" also exist as a component of reality. More precisely, then, believing that the infinite set of possibilities of which our universe is a single instance exist, this is the same as believing in god. Although only partially, while immanent, not while transcendent, since as stated above this last aspect isn't perceived by atheists.On the contrary. What happens is simply that religions express themselves through myths, not through analytic reasoning. To make a software analogy, a myth is a way to express a highly compacted perceived aspect of reality. You can leave it as is, since it is useful in this form nevertheless, or you can uncompress it by expressing analytically all of its content. Thus, if you go study (good) religious philosophers, both ancient and recent, you'll see all of them, from Medieval Christianity to Hinduism, doing this uncompressing, and saying in much more details what I abridged above.
This article on wikipedia offers some very nice examples. It's worth reading.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
The global climate - like stocks - are cyclical, volatile, and generally unpredictable despite the deceiving patterns we see drawn from inferences and our own biases. With that said, I call global warming (GWM) a HOLD. The entire warming sector is overworked and overbought. The technicals are making it skyrocket, and you've got the institutionals sitting on the sidelines watching the speculators work themselves into a dizzy. I see continued depreciation of global cooling futures (KWL) due to the surge of baby boomers having hot flashes in their old age. This trend is expected to continue into the late 2010s when teenagers and twenty-somethings today, with strong interests in being cool, form a developed market. However we see significant Paris Hilton risk to coolth due to her catch-phrase "that's hot." Long term OUTPERFORM on global cooling -- but currently STRONG SELL due to lack of broader market support.
The guys over at RealClimate have a pretty detailed rundown on what actually happened. Apparently the source of the error was a mis-synchronization between two data sets. The corrected data data does rearrange the ranking of warmest years (for the US only), but the actual changes are tiny, ~0.1C and within the error bars. The overall temperature trend is unchanged. So, basically, the change has high media value and essentially no scientific relevance.
From experience, this sort of thing happens all the time in all scientific fields. Errors get made, they get caught, and they get fixed. If the subject was anything at all other than global warming, no one outside of the field would have noticed or cared.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
Are you aware that the Tabular data that the dailytech article references that was "quietly" updated were for "Figure D: Annual Mean Temperature Change in the United States"? Note the word "CHANGE".
t did not have its data updated and still indicates that 2005 is the hottest year on record.
Which means that the difference in average temperatures in 1934 and the previous year was more than any other year on record, NOT that 1934 was the hottest year on average.
The article is incorrect in interpreting the data in the table. Yes, Figure D was updated, but that figure doesn't say anything about the absolute hottest average temperature... that would be Figure A... and the tabular data behind that figure http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A.tx
1934 was one of the three main years of the Dust Bowl, when US agricultural production took a nose dive as land dried up in the central plain and the soil eroded away. It seriously aggravated the Great Depression as many farmers went into bankruptcy and moved to cities looking for work when there already was none.
Ok, so bad farming practices were also a factor, but who in their right mind would take consolation that years like that one were warmer than recent years? And could the unusual weather conditions of the Dust Bowl itself have been a factor in some of those temperature peaks in North America?
If this was supposed to provide me with comfort that global warming is a sham, it ain't working.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Reference, please?
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
I'm with you, except that in fairness, the trend from 1980-2000 looks pretty much the same as the trend in the 1920-1940 data. The point being that 20 years is too short of a baseline. And in general, given that the climatological history of the planet at macro levels tends to cycle at the fastest at typical intervals of 10k-20k years (interglacials), the debate on this data set seems pretty meaningless to me. With this tiny amount of info, you can make any longterm curve fit.
To me, the clearest issue is the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. There's a lot more for a lot longer than has been the case for probably millions of years, and the amount is growing, and it is pretty much agreed by all that this is due to human activity. It is also agreed generally by all that this is a greenhouse gas. The only real question is exactly how does the global system react to a forcing event like that? It seems clear to me that it is likely going to have some reaction; the simplest extrapolation is that it will raise temperatures, but there are of course myriad non-linearities.
However, to dismiss that possibility on the basis of - essentially - a belief that some cabal is creating this debate for the purpose of selling ad time seems absurd on its face.
Seems to me that 1939 is tied with 1954, so 1939 is "also" in the top 10. I suppose then only five of the 11 top 10 are pre-WWII, if we want to look at it that way. I am not sure it's valid to put 1954 ahead of 1939 just because it has a higher 5-year mean, if that is what you did.
And yes, it doesn't change the pattern, or even any of the theories, but it does change the rhetoric. The "pro-warming" people have been saying for awhile now that because "N of the top M hottest years are in the last O years" or because 1998 was the hottest, that this somehow proves anthropogenic global warming. The data didn't actually support that, of course -- that is, it showed the rankings, but it wasn't significant enough to support such a conclusion -- but they've been saying it anyway. So this takes away one lame but successful rhetorical point so we can have fewer distractions to focus on the actual science.
As far as I know, there are no ice cores to be had in Florida.
Yeah, well, if the scientific predictions are correct, there soon (a few decades) will no longer be any at the poles any more either and those pesky scientists won't be able to do any more ice core studies. Then the whole problem will go away!
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
It's nice when people spot errors in data sets, but climate science doesn't depend for its conclusions on a single data set, or a single data point.
Even after the correction, the data set is still consistent with mainstream conclusions about global warming, which are based on hundreds of data sets using many different methods.
Jesus will come back and fix global warming - but will we ever know about it?
When Diebold refuses to release its code, that's all the proof most people need to assume they're stealing elections. Why doesn't the same logic apply to climate data?
It used to be the rule in the scientific community that if you don't disclose your methodology so that others can check your work and repeat your results, you get no respect. What happened?
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
That's the act of analyzing collections of studies and their results on a particular subject. Many such meta-analyses have been done on various kinds of climatological studies. They all come to the conclusion that global warming is happening. These include papers that show the opposite. No results from science are absolute. They are statistically acceptable (or not). Just as we accept a certain probability of a false result from a single study, we expect a percentage of studies to come to erroneous conclusions because of the statistical probability involved. And when the vast majority say one thing, and very few say something different, we go with the vast majority. If one paper from one particular kind of study switches sides, it makes very little difference to the overall conclusions. In fact, since there's already one major error in the study, there's a chance there's more, and it should be given less weight in meta-analysis no matter what it says.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Precisely.
Whether or not a significant amount of global warming is caused by humans, the whole issue has very little to do with science anymore.
Yep, the projects of a high school class outweigh all the projects of people with PHDs.
Grammar Nazi
You're supporting just how bad things are if you must compare current CO2 levels with those of 65 MILLION years ago! (All of the studies you cite are of that period). You seem to be implying that the last time CO2 levels were this high was when the dinosaurs went extinct. Doesn't that seem to indicate just how extreme the changes we are bringing upon ourselves are? Don't you think that was pretty bad for the dinosaurs and all large animals? (even if they weren't responsible).
Sure we might only wipe out millions of species (instead of 10s of millions) and displace 100s of millions of people/destroy economies instead of causing our own extinction but don't you think that is bad enough? What will you tell your children when they realize it will require thousands of human lifetimes to restore the biodiversity we have today (and caused the needless suffering of billions)?
Well, we don't have any hard data on the probability of life arising or one thing. So we wouldn't know how many planets we'd need to get our test sample. Also, I'm trying not to waste too much time here. The Big Crunch could be as little as 43 billion years away.
No. the test is designed to see if industrialised civilisations have an effect on global climate. Adding a second variable into the experiment is only going to confuse the issue. I suppose that, if it should transpire that industrialisation was affecting planetary temperatures, we could always monitor the debate to find out how many cultures tried to place the blame on an hitherto unnoticed variation in solar output. That would be a side experiment that wouldn't affect the main results at all.
I know the debate is generating an awful lot of hot air, but I doubt that it's enough to affect global temperatures. Still, feel free to run your own study.
I will, thank you. Now, about funding... :D
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Well, it's a matter of degree and accuracy, isn't it? If you have a range of hills or mountains, the get more rainfall on the side facing the prevailing winds. Reason is that air rises to pass over them, and in rising cools, and in cooling, becomes able to hold less in the way of water vapour. That's a global weather pattern, and science explains it quite nicely.
Complexity isn't a barrier to our making useful predictions; consider a car that loses control at high speed. That's an unimaginably complex system if you think about it. Each component of the vehicle is a collection of atoms, held together by electrostatic forces. Each atom has a half-life and may decay into some other element at any time; the atoms themselves have a complex inner structure and all of their components are subject to dimly understood quantum effects. That's before we factor in external influences like the friction between tires and tarmac, or the crash barrier separating the two lanes.
And yet, armed with little more than Newton's laws of motion, we can make a wide range of useful predictions about what is going to happen. Just so long as we stay within the limits of accuracy of the model.
There's no reason why science shouldn't draw make useful predictions about long term climate trends. We just need the right model based on the right assumptions.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
More importantly, the climatologists can't demonstrate the impact of humans on the climate with any precsion. Everyone talks about all of these climatologists. There are lot more people speaking authoratatively about the climate than there are climatologists, including politicians, actors, astronomers, physicists, and evolutionary biologists. There's your "scientific consensus", besides the thousands of scientists who disagree with them.
1934 and all that
Maybe if you got your punctuation up to the level where it wouldn't lose you marks on homework, I'd have less trouble understanding you... If you think that nitrous oxides, CFCs and all the shit that's contained in the smog is produced naturally, then think again. There's about as much nature in it than proper nutrients in your BigMac. You're right - the Earth produces its own byproducts, but you have to weigh out the quantities of natural "pollutants" and those that are manmade. The Earth has only accounted for the means of cleaning up pollution that She produces (trees, for example), defences that are being extensively cut out and depleted. To say that reckless, dirty, energy-wasting pollution doesn't contribute to GW, is to be a total ignorant twat.
Is that really flame-bait? I'll try it without the sarcasm: A predictive system that requires the future to not include unexpected events is not very useful.
The problem is with your memory, not the science. The notion that scientists in the '70's predicted an imminent ice age is an urban myth, and dates from a couple of sensationalistic articles in the popular press, written by journalists who misunderstood the science.
No, but whether they are a biologist affects whether they believe in Intelligent Design. I've been a biologist for decades, and I've never met a biologist who takes ID seriously. So if they exist, they are rarer than hen's teeth. The only one I've even heard of is Behe, from his book and what what I've seen of his writing on the subject, he seems to be pretty much a crackpot.
Back in the 1970's the scientists warned us of an impending global chilling, a new ice age. Now it is global warming. Historically the temperature goes up and down. It's reality. Given my preferences I would much prefer global warming rather than global chilling. I know full well what deep winter is like - you don't want an ice age. In comparison, global warming is a walk in the park.
Ohhh... so since the location doesn't matter, then lets put the sensors inside freezers in peoples houses. Then we can accurately record the cooling effect of developed areas.
But seriously, if your goal is to determine average global temperature, then I'm afraid that locating all your sensors on sun exposed asphalt will not give the same result as locating all your sensors on mountain tops.
Just because you do not like what I am saying does not give you the right to stop me saying it.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Do you really think the blogosphere plays by different rules than old media? What distinguishes bloggers from other journalists? The fundamental differences, so near as I can figure out, are only in degree, and in number. Instead of 5-10 major media conglomerates, spread out over a couple dozen network and cable television outlets plus some radio, newspaper, and magazines, you have a few hundred significant bloggers for any particular topic area. So you have a lot more voices out there, but does that really mean that those voices use radically better, or at least different, means of getting out an idea? I'm not convinced that they do. What makes you believe that blogging can "move beyond" the methods journalists have used in the past?
As for Mr. Asher, I don't mean to attack him, except to say that he uses the same tricks and tools that modern journalism demands. The title of the article, and the subsequent slashdot posting's title, convey the sense that the greater scientific body's empirical data on climate has changed completely. These titles, along with the tone of Mr. Asher's language invokes a conspiracy theory on the part of nasa and the mainsteam media, while the actual text of the blog entry seems to suggest that the impact of the data adjustment really is fairly minor. In short, the title is sensational to lure in readers, while the actual story is much more mundane. This is a regular occurence for much of the television and newspaper journalism, of which I am also not a huge fan. I hold Mr. Asher up to the same standards I hold other journalistic mediums, and feel underserved by the veracity and competence of both.
Im sorry a .1 degree variation can screw up our data so much but you believe the rest of the worlds data is more accurate?
> You're saying a scientist should give his code to the oil companies to pick
> apart line by line?
Correct. That's how science works.
It's interesting that, in science, you address the arguments, you don't attack the messenger or any hidden motivations. But in politics, it's exactly the opposite -- you always look for the hidden motivations behind positions and publically-espoused reasoning.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Except the post you replied to. My post too, of course, made no mention of disagreeing with you. This is likely since I don't think humans have had much of an impact on climate change, which as far as I know would be /agreeing/ with you.
/did/ mention human impact on climate change. You chose one that didn't. I suggest you aim better in the future, or you'll just appear like a wacko, instead of actually doing anything potentially informative.
I don't have a right to stop you from saying anything you choose to say. I do have an interest in keeping nutjob wackos from making all rational discussions about what is or isn't going on into an opportunity for political preemptive strikes.
There were plenty of posts which
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All