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Where the Global Warming Data Is
Several readers noted the latest fallout from the Climate Research Unit's Climategate: the admission by the University of East Anglia that the raw data behind important climate research was discarded in the 1980s, "a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue" according to the Times (UK) article. The Telegraph quotes Phil Jones, beleagured head of the CRU: "Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for NASA and the National Climate Data Centre in the United States, among others. Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them." Some of the data behind these other results can likely be found in a new resource that jamie located up at the Real Climate site: a compilation of links to a wide variety of raw data about climate. From the former link: "In the aftermath of the CRU email hack, many people have come to believe that scientists are unfairly restricting access to the raw data relating to the global rise in temperature. ... We have set up a page of data links to sources of temperature and other climate data, codes to process it, model outputs, model codes, reconstructions, paleo-records, the codes involved in reconstructions etc."
I have an energy patent that will go live January 2010. Forgetting for the moment that I don't own it - more when it's live - , within about sixty seconds of it being available to read, the scientific community will rip me several new ones until every single one of them can duplicate everything that I've done with their own labs and equipment.
Ponds and Fleishman said they successfully created cold fusion and they are now bus boys at Chili's. What I'm saying is that if the scientific community subjected the CRU to even the most basic scrutiny they would either be forced to prove their conclusions or sent packing.
Imagine for a moment someone spent thirty years recording data in any field then compiled a report based on their interpretation of the data only to delete all of the raw data. What reasonable person on this planet would say, "No problem, I trust you." Bull$#%@.
This isn't Republican or Democrat, American or European, this is the very basis of what Slashdot is founded on, that is don't give me bull$%#@ show me the data and your source, and most of all don't patronize me!
This world is going in the crapper unless we call everyone's BS.
"When the scientific principal is replaced by conventional wisdom or worse peer pressure, what prevents us from returning to the dark ages?"
William David Howell Sr.
Outside of the science, all I know is that the climate zone in my local area has changed. Plants which you could not grow before, you can grow now. I hear from Innuit that there are plants and animals in the North which they have not seen before. I know that tornadoes dot the German Rhine where no tornadoes were seen before, I know hurricanes on the Eastern seaboard are behaving differently, I know that Crete was so dry when I saw it that I couldn't imagine olive trees growing there without irrigation, I know that our highways are a half kilometer wide and countless kilometers long, with thousands upon thousands of idling cars sitting on them, ten times a week for as long as I've been alive, and I know that sea captains don't want to traverse the Indian ocean because the almanacs are no longer reasonable guides to chart how long a given voyage from one port to the next might take.
Everything else is told to me by strangers. Maybe the arctic is intact, maybe the rainforests never actually existed. Maybe Mt. Kilamajaro doesn't exist, maybe it's all a mind control plot. All plausible answers I suppose from people telling me that climate change is a myth.
Has anyone here seen a rainforest? Have you seen the clearcutting? Maybe none of this is real. Right now, the temperature where I am is 6 Celcius. Is my thermometer tampered with by some global warming co-conspirators? If I wrote it down, would somebody question it 100 years from now? Maybe the celcius scale has been tampered with.
The problem is that in this field there aren't thousands of other researchers. At this level all these guys know each other. I'm a tech in the physics field. In my specialty all of the PhDs know each other. It doesn't matter where they work. China, South Korea, Canada, UK. The climatology field is like that. These guys at CRU are some of the principle people who advise the UN's IPCC. The U.S. President's science adviser is one of the people who worked with this group (and is mentioned in the emails.) It is one of only four repositories of data used by the IPCC, and as far as I have been able to find the out other three won't release their data either.
"Your first paragraph seems to indicate that there are those who would actually choose smog over clean air."
Actually, there are. There are people who would choose money over clean air any day of the week. All of China has done it for starters. The fact that you find it hard to imagine doesn't make his argument a straw-man.
Personally, I don't really care that much since I have no children to pass the planet on to. So I'm all for saying fuck the planet and exploit the resources (including plants, wildlife, etc.) until there's nothing left of it. The human race isn't immune from natural selection and there's no reason to think that it won't select itself out of existence. Regardless, the planet will always be here (for a few billion years anyway) so our disappearance isn't particularly significant.
I'm fortunate that there are just enough skeptics to prevent any serious environmental change from occurring in my lifetime, thus sparing me what is likely to be a hefty tax or fee increase of some form.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Where have the glaciers gone?
My city of residence was covered by massive glaciers not too long ago by geologic standards. My house is built on a big pile of glacial till. I'm happy my area is warmer now than it was.
It's not a simple matter of true/false, either/or, all or nothing. People to reduce the problem to those terms are making it impossible to have rational discussion.
Yes, climate temperatures fluctuate with or without our influence. Yes, human influence is large enough and pervasive enough to alter those fluctuations. Yes, some areas of the world will benefit from further warming. Yes, some areas of the world are already at the limit of habitation/productivity because of warm temperatures and further warming may ruin them. Yes, it's always better to pollute less and have less man-made impact on the environment if we have a choice about it. Yes, we will someday run out of useful oil reserves. Yes, significantly changing our behavior may cost trillions of dollars and hurt many people. Yes, making those changes may leave us better off politically and financially in the long term.
These things are all true. Some of these facts are in tension with other facts. No simple solutions exist. We need a complex, nuanced solution. Unfortunately in these days of conservative vs. liberal sound-bite-bashing, it's impossible to discuss any complex solutions. The only choices we seem to have are "environmentalists are total frauds, burn all the oil you want" and "the world is about to end unless we impose a fascist state to dictate every detail of our lifestyles".
What I don't get, and maybe someone can answer this for me, is why do people care if global warming is man made or not? Even if it isn't man made, continued rising global temperatures will eventually trigger a runaway greenhouse effect that is catastrophic to our survival as a species and we need to do something to stop it or come up with alternatives for our survival. People also seem to forget about our alarming deforestation rates as well. Sure, there have been cool down periods on Earth, but what caused them and do we know for sure that will happen again? Do we want to place the survival of our species on the unknown possibility that there might eventually be another global cool down? As Carl Sagan said, Venus has the same amount of Carbon as Earth, except most of Earth's Carbon is still in the ground... for now...
Personally, I've resigned myself to accept the fact that the shit is going to hit the fan some decades from now. I'm reminded of the many pacific island civilizations that were wiped out because they destroyed their island's ecology. It's pretty clear collectively humans are incapable of any self control when it comes to resource consumption and we will continue these behaviors at the expense of our own survival. The extinct pacific island civilizations were modern humans so they are were as smart as we are today, yet there was still someone who thought it was a good idea to cut down the last tree or eat the last animal. Even if we had solid evidence that energy consumption would lead to catastrophic climate change, I have no doubt that we would ignore it and continue our consumption.
If it's not climate change that does it to us, we still have deforestation, desertification, and a rising global population. With the increase in competition for resources and everyone wanting to get nukes, it's looking like this will be a fun century for us...
Have you ever tried to have a rational discussion about climate change with someone who's either unaware of willfully ignorant of the science? It's really irritating, much like trying to talk to a Creationist about evolution. No, actually, it's worse, because at least Creationism isn't getting a leg up by way of the media's gross oversimplification. If I were a climate scientist, faced with "Well, how come it's colder in Podunk?" for the umpteenth time and subsuqently forced to try and get across concepts like global average temperatures, precipitation changes, the difference between "weather" and "climate", etc, etc, I'd want to at least start the discussion from a position that's not automatically handicapped.
No. Previously-locked carbon is really easy to define: oil and coal. Trying to extend it to "the building blocks of all life" because that dovetails into a paranoid fantasy about government taxing your body is fearmongering. No, it's worse, it's fearmongering in the service of some of the most powerful economic entities on the planet.
Saying that this will extend into a tax and, thusly, into a control of your precious bodily carbon is pure, unmitigated FUD. Water is also a taxed substance and has been for much longer: have we proxied water bills into mind control yet?
Are you really trying to proxy concern about the stability of the biosphere among scientists into the New World Order? This fails the "follow the money" test on so many levels: not only is politically unpalatable to tax something so ephemeral that governments are being dragged kicking and screaming to it, and not only is the economic incentive more of a disincentive, but the opposing interests have billions of dollars staked in it not happening at all.
You're working from a flawed premise: that everything government does is inherently flawed, wrong and immoral. Even assuming that's the case, who would even be looking at this (or past issues, like ozone depletion, acid rain, mercury toxicity in the food chain, etc)? Our oh-so-altriustic corporations that caused and make money off the problem in the first place? And yes, you can make the "well, government enabled it" standard argument and say the the solution is to sprinkle magic Libertarian pixie dust and make everyone into Randian supermen, but in the real world where we have billions of people who need to coexist in a functioning society with legacy social structures we need solutions that work, not philosophical wankery.
--srj/mmv
Actually in some parts of the country (USA) we view the labels Hippie and Liberal as compliments, usually applied by right-wing reactionaries to individuals that still know how to think for themselves instead of swallowing the pablum dished out by the right-wing controlled media (AKA Talk Radio) Yes, Rush and Sean are the media as much as they try to protest that they are not.
What you do about GW depends on its cause. If you accept GW and all its dire consequences then a reasonable course of action is to look to ways to mitigate some of those consequences, but one should also be looking at ways to slow, stop or reverse GW too. And then it matters what the cause is.
(The cynic in me also says that debating the cause also stalls any action without needing to directly debate the truth of the effect).
Wow, you just made me so angry I almost just filled this entire response with expletives. You are either stunningly ignorant of the how the entire world of communication works, or you are a troll, or you are one of the reasons why PR is required in the first place.
Of course the shift in language is a PR exercise. That's because when you are trying to tell the world some important information, use of language is important. It's called nuance. Public Relations is just that - relating information to the public at large. If you discover that the language you are using is not getting the message across, then you have to alter the language to succeed. Otherwise you simply get drowned out by people who are betting at language, but not necessarily better at science.
In case you hadn't noticed, the number of scientists in the world vs the number of 'laypeople' is somewhat disproportionate. scientists don't often get to pick the lessons that taught to the public, especially when a bit of controversy can be stirred up instead. Or the latest news about who's fucking paris hilton.
And this whole continual argument about how bad governments are at regulating stuff really gets up my nose as well. In what way are private businesses good at regulating anything?! The only thing private organisations regulate successfully is skimming as much profit off the rest of the world as they possibly can. Free markets only price short term costs, they have no model for pricing the long term impact of what they produce - certainly not without regulation and laws laid down by a strong government willing to take on special interests. Which are sadly few and far between.
I've run out of steam now, and I know that this will make no difference to anyone's opinion whatsoever. But i feel a smidgen better ...
Have you ever tried to have a rational discussion about climate change with someone who's either unaware of willfully ignorant of the science?
Have you ever tried to have a rational discussion about science with someone who's unaware of statistical analysis or the importance of reproducibility? It's like talking to a wall.
Take for example the raw climate data. It's level noise. Unless you add in adjustments like this and this it's completely boring annual measurements that vary but don't trend.
Adjust them, and they're sexy. They are alarming. They're a cause for action that makes the science interesting and important. We all like to be important, don't we?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You mean like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, first in the queue for a cut of carbon credit trading and hedging? Effectively a tax on everything (because everything needs energy), paid to the investment banks?
Have you ever tried to have a rational discussion about climate change with someone who's either unaware of willfully ignorant of the science?
I got a better question.
How you ever discussed a climate paper where you had access to both the data and methodology used by its authors?
"His name was James Damore."
Real Climate is claiming that data is available and has this nice link and stuff (given in the slahsdot summary.)
Following their link I noticed that there was no link to raw data for stratospheric temperatures but there was a link to processed data.
I followed the link to the processed data in the hopes that there would be some explanation as to why only processed data was available. I discovered that the processed data wasnt available either, instead the link only pointed to a page with GIF files (graphs.)
Essentially, Real Climate just lied to us about the stratospheric data. Not only is the raw data unavailable, the processed data isnt available either even tho it claims it is available and claims to link to it.
I then clicked around most of the "raw" sites linked to and almost all are fairly devoid of data.
Mr. Jones, the public may buy your bullshit because they might think a GIF file with a graph is relevant "data" but I do not. Mr. Jones, RELEASE YOUR FUCKING RAW DATA.
"His name was James Damore."