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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."
Where did I read that RealClimate.org was a propaganda arm of the AGW movement? Was it in those hacked emails?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
After seeing all this talk about these guys, they sure do seem like a motley CRU.
Regardless if global warming is a problem, we should ALL strive to lessen our effect on the environment. Restricting emissions that may not heat up the planet, BUT have noticeable problems on health of humans and wildlife. I feel like I have to remind people that even if global warming is false we should always do what we can to conserve our resources and lessen pollution.
This is just another sissy-fit thrown by the denier groups that are willing to use any tactics to distract people from the real issue. If there was any substance to these email, they would've produced the evidence by now. A few sentences blown out of context from a few cherry picked emails are merely red-herring.
If climate scientists refuse to look at proprietary data on the grounds that they can't release it:
"They are cherry picking their data, the met data shows there is no cooling, it's all a fraud!!!"
If instead they decide to agree accept the offer to see it by signing a NDA:
"They don't release the data, they cover it up, it's all a conspiracy!!!!"
Seriously, you will get some scientists that are fine with using proprietary data and some who are not. What the so called skeptics are arguing is that because SOME scientists decided the benefits of using more data outweigh the cons of being unable to disclose it, that means the entire field of climate science is a fraud. Never mind that their findings agree with research done with open data, never mind that you could in principle go sign an NDA yourself if you mistrust the CRU so badly. No it must all be a conspiracy, including the research that were made with open data that achieved the same conclusions.
The more I hear from climate "skeptics" the more the arguments feel similar to those of the evolution skeptics.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,576887,00.html
The above link says it all
"The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them." Why would there be a cover-up in the first place? Much is reported in the news about it, who or why would you cover up data on Global warming? My opinion is that there is a cover-up because there is something to cover-up. It exists, "it" is the true cause of the Global warming, something that has been covered up since NASA discovered a rogue planet heading for our solar system in 1983. Don't give me no crap on this, it's documented in the Washington Post. Crow.
Science was the first instance of open source. If someone else can't freely check your data and replicate your experiments you've got nothing. The raw data and source code for the climate models should have been available from day one. The fact that they weren't and that large quantities of data were "lost" throws the conclusions into serious question.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Translating Freely:
We cooked the data to show what we wanted it to show, then erased the originals to ensure that our version of the truth is the only version.
Those guys really took the lessons from the Ministry of Truth to heart. Way to inspire confidence guys. Way to convince the non-scientific public that there is a reason to quietly submit to a carbon version of a water command empire.
Why is Mr Jones still employed?
Why the hell weren't they using PGP?
Secure data you don't want on the web. How stupid can people be?
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.
It was not "not as pressing". It was no issue. No, wait, before you mod me flamebait, I don't mean really no issue. It was politically no issue. It was deemed something people don't give half a shit about, but that they do give a lot about the question whether they have jobs, whether these jobs are endangered by eco-friendly regulation laws and to make matters worse the eco movement was forming and people started to care about ecology and environment, and that their nature was going the way of the dodo (which eventually led to the formation of green parties and, to make matters REALLY worse for the leading politic figure heads, to them entering the parlaments of Europe).
You can see a similar development now with privacy and overreaching surveillance, and politicians lacking the foresight to see that people care about it, the founding of parties that ride almost exclusively on the privacy ticket and ... well, let's hope history repeats itself.
But back on topic. It was simply not politically interesting to publish or even push this information. It was not "withheld". It was just not interesting, neither for any political party nor for any media outlet.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I think I'd rather have people believe I was covering up a conspiracy rather than think I'm such an idiot that I 'discard' my original data.
What's up with this box everyone has to think inside of or outside of? Why does there have to be a box?
So does AGW stand for "anthropomorphic global warming" or "anti-global warming"? And would "anti-global warming" mean you are against global warming (meaning you think it's happening) or you are against the theory that global warming is happening?
On the other hand, suppose that global warming is real and is caused by human activities. Then, who shall be responsible for the oceans flooding nations like Great Britain and Japan, shrinking their territories to one-tenth of the original size?
Common sense tells us that if a nation -- e. g. , China -- pumps greenhouse gases into the atmosphere with wild abandon and if such an act causes global warming which greatly enlarges the oceans, thus flooding much of Great Britain and Japan, then such an act is essentially an act of war against the British and the Japanese. The British and the Japanese then have the moral right to initiate war against China in order to seize Chinese territory for settlement by the Japanese and the British.
Losing 90% of Japanese (or British) territory due to Chinese thoughtlessness is not a laughing matter and is an act of war. Military force is a legitimate way to eradicate Chinese thoughtlessness and to compel the Chinese to protect the environment.
What would be the point of releasing the raw data to the general public? Seriously, why bother? I know that I don't have the skills or expertise to analyse it effectively and come up with any conclusions that have *any* scientific merit. Surely the people who know how to analyse/process this data and draw meaningful conclusions already have access to it.
If Jones lost the data in the 1980's, then why do many of the emails from Jones (written from 1997 to 2009) talk about deleting the data should a successful FOIA request ever materialize? Oh well. I guess inquiring minds no longer read slashdot.
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."
Sounds fair. Let's ignore your findings and recompute using the other's data sets and see if everything comes out equal.
This is science. If you can't show your work so that other's can reproduce your results, you're out.
The site is the web page of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU), whose data, models and bias is under scrutiny here. This is the server the material was stolen from, and they're struggling mightily to do damage control. The material was assembled in response to a FOIA request and intended to be destroyed when the request was legally thwarted. This same organization has claimed to have "lost" the primary data their published information is based upon, and one of the researchers in a stolen email actually stated a preference for destroying the raw data to releasing it. Their newfound love of openness is nothing but damage control and the data they give should be treated with suspicion. Using them as a primary reference for this issue is of debatable worth.
And yes, one of the emails did reference using the site for advocacy - I just can't find the reference just now. If you know where it is, please post it here. As to whether or not the site is actually used for policy advocacy, don't trust me. Read it yourself.
So there, mister "flamebait" moderator.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Strawman argument. Fight windmills much?
The researcher can write in a clearly visible footnote, "by the way, the data for this is unavailable to anyone as we had to sign an NDA to get it". The reader and peer-reviewers will then have to decide to view the results slightly more questioningly and rely more on the credibility of the researcher, and might when they pick a graph for the front page of their monthly magazine choose one with openly available data instead. This is the normal way to do it. In fact, it's the way anyone except trolls and disinformative idiots would do it. Would you provide an article to a peer-reviewed journal with a written policy of requiring disclosure of data, while not including such a footnote? Would anyone?
Seriously, you will get some scientists that are fine with using proprietary data and some who are not. What the so called skeptics are arguing is that because SOME scientists decided the benefits of using more data outweigh the cons of being unable to disclose it, that means the entire field of climate science is a fraud.
It is clear from the discussions that being "unable to disclose" isn't the case most of the time - it's "not wanting to disclose". In your view these may be the same, but in realists' view they are not. Please ask me for quotes and references, including a couple of views provided by various professors.
"Never mind that their findings agree with research done with open data, never mind that you could in principle go sign an NDA yourself if you mistrust the CRU so badly.
Read. Read anything, because you obviously haven't. The CRU manipulated raw data using various statistical techniques and produced very widely published results that showed an alarming trend. Others have not provided what the CRU provided. When asked, the CRU stated that the raw data AND their transformations had been deleted. Based on their internal emails it is not clear that it HAS been deleted, and quotes can be found of "I would rather delete this data than send it under an FOIA request" (literally, which would be a criminal act). This means that "signing an NDA yourself if you mistrust the CRU so badly" would not be possible even though you claim to do so, because the raw data and how the CRU has transformed it isn't available.
No it must all be a conspiracy, including the research that were made with open data that achieved the same conclusions.
+5 for dismissing a case as conspiracy theorists while obviously lacking knowledge about it.
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.
Of course the world is getting warmer. It has been for the last ten thousand years. You know, since the end of the last ice age.
Back then, the polar ice cap extended down into modern-day Illinois. If only we could have stopped global warming from melting the ice cap all the way to what it was 100 years ago.
It seems if they have their methodology and processed data resurrecting the original should be trivial.
The climate debate isn't about science anymore. It is political and regardless of which side of the debate you are on the odds are the incorrect action will be taken. Compromise, short term thinking and power (no pun intended) considerations will twist the debate. Instead of climate change, carbon footprints and cap & trade, redefine the debate as energy independence and job creation. This is a US centric policy, but it is where I'm at, so come up with your own. Set a goal of national energy independence, including drilling for domestic oil. The US has limited enough supplies that low consumption credits and alternative energy sources incentives will be required to prevent the importation of oil. Automation of manufacturing to bring jobs back to the United States. Since we shifted our manufacturing to less developed countries, we've also shifted our pollution. Instead of innovating to reduce local workforce expenses via automation, most companies took the short term gain of lower cost labor and limited regulation. By subsidizing the R&D of automation, many of the jobs may come back.
The "statement" from the "beleaguered" "head" is nothing more than a distraction.
From May 2008 comes this little tidbit (sorry about the formatting):
Phil Jones wrote: > >> Mike, > Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? > Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis. > > Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't > have his new email address. > > We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
Right there is the reality of "deleted data" in clear violation of the FoIA.
. . . where it is oh-so-fashionable to deny that humans have anything to do with global warming. Get used to it.
CDs, Lies, and Magnetic Tapes: "...but there are other considerations related to magnetic tape also. Tape is very sensitive to heat..." Yeah, that's the ticket!
This will be conveniently incomplete, ignoring data identified as contrary to popular political opinion.
But I'm a climate change denier and therefore a conspiracy theory nut and other carefully selected categorising terminologies in the politically correct nomenclature.
And suddenly I'm censored. Because democracy is fine, for a while. We can be trusted to decide things for ourselves. Most things. Until the issue is bigger than any person. Dammit it's our children and our children's children who stand to lose! And we cannot be trusted to make the right decision anymore.
In response to the data loss claim, CRU states that only 5% of data was removed but it is still available from NOAA. http://www.eenews.net/public/Greenwire/2009/10/14/3
Maybe they tossed it, maybe they lost it, but there is at least one e-mail where a member of the hockey team states his intention to delete it instead of handing it over.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The data doesn't matter. If any of you have looked at a cross section of a Redwood tree that was 2000 years old (which you can do within a 30 minute drive of the SillyCon Valley), you will see decades and even hundreds of years with small rings and large period of time with big rings. You can see simply there that our planet (without the help or cause of man) goes through cycles and does not have a constant balance. The climate ebbs and flows over centuries.
Even with data, the scientists will still admit that they cannot definitively state WHY the temperature goes up or down. It is the rash decision of some to throw billions of dollars at a solution when they don't have confidence of the cause. I hope my grandchildren will be able to laugh at the history books that show we had nothing to do with the temperature changes and though we take drastic steps, the temperature will raise or fall on its own.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
"it's time we took the money away from the scientists who have been telling us this for years and gave it to the engineers to get us out of this mess."
So, you're saying, "Cut off funding for anyone who questions the official position that this is an urgent global crisis that demands massive government intervention"?
Revive the Constitution.
Incidentally "climate change" is the trendy new word because "global warming" has the pesky tendency to be falsified whenever temperatures are cooler than expected. With a generic word like "climate change" you're only wrong if the temperature stays perfectly and exactly the same!
"Deal with it like an adult, or deal with it like a leftist." HAHAHA I loved that. Priceless. People who want big government to provide everything they need and take care of anything that might make them feel bad and thus, make a parental figure of government, are more juvenile and immature than people who understand why this is a bad idea and are satisfied with the parents they have already outgrown. Whodathunkit?
In all seriousness, whether global warming is real or not, and whether it's caused by human beings or not is immaterial. Regardless of any of that, it will be used to justify the taxation of carbon. Fake global warming will justify this as readily as real global warming so there's no reason for the controversy of the issue to divide people on this one thing. A tax on carbon is a tax on life, seeing how we are carbon-based life forms. This will represent a new era of governmental power and control heretofore unknown to us and found only in the wet dreams of statists and other would-be tyrants.
If the _results_ from the lab in question match up with other independent results, what possible grounds to laymen have to presume the data was deliberately changed? Unless they assume that all independent labs falsified their data in concert, which would be a hell of a conspiracy.
What really bothers me about the complaints around the emails is that none of them (as I understand it) come close to proving that findings were deliberately falsified to point to one conclusion over another. All of the emails were either innocuous or, at worst, ambiguous.
And what have some skeptics done with ambiguous data? They have manipulated it to fit their pre-existing theories. Which is very close to the sort of bad behavior they are charging the lab with now.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
We have this quote from TFA:
By deleting the raw data, no one can ever reproduce or review the process by which raw data became tested theory.
This is not the act of a scientist; in fact, this would make you fail in the Elementary School Science Fair of your choice. The sad truth seems to be that, while Science concerns itself with discovering truth, these scientists have concerned themselves only with discovering funding and prestige.
Climate change theory must now reside with such things as Cold Fusion and Duke Nukem Forever.
So, you're saying, "Cut off funding for anyone who questions the official position that this is an urgent global crisis that demands massive government intervention"?
Say what?
I was saying tip the funding balance away from researching what we already know to be happening and towards fixing it up.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
came out long before this global warming nonsense.
Environmental responsibility was a legitimate issue that was hijacked by global warming alarmism. Recycling programs have been around long before global warming.
Global Warming and Environmentalism are two distinct issues. It's pretty sad that you feel a need to tell people that pollution is bad just because "global warming" might not be real.
That's like getting presents for 20 years from your parents, suddenly finding out about Santa and then being afraid that you won't get presents if Santa isn't real.
Work Safe Porn
Are you by chance an Engineer?
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
I've said it before and will probably do so again. Just because your data is valid does not mean that your conclusions are equally valid. I reviewed a journal article in my own field in which the author's conclusions were contradicted by their own data.
That there are concerns with some of the data sets used, as well as with the objectivity of the researchers is of fundamental importance. The authors of the analogous paper that I reviewed had a track record of supporting one possible explanation over any other in their research. That tendancy prevented them from seeing that their own dataset apparently contradicted their previous conclusions.
Ultimately data is objective, but conclusions are inherently subjective. You take the data, look for trends and then decide based on the larger body of research what it all means. There is no P-value for a conclusion or population parameter, only for sample statistics. My reservations concerning their conclusions are not dependent upon their data being invalid or their ethics being questionable. Those things help reassure me that my skepticism is well placed, but are ultimately unnecessary.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
why is this modded -1 troll? he points out some honest facts! climate change = anything the climate does, and a carbon tax is a tax on the basic building blocks of all life on the planet.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
The parent posting isn't a troll. He is saying it like it is. This "incident" involves four scientists. Just four. And I'm trying to figure out the scientific arguments being put forward by the contrarians. Are they saying that data has been suppressed that shows the world hasn't being warming significantly since the 1970's?!! Really? Thirty five years ago, I used to skate on local lakes...they used to freeze regularly. Those lakes haven't frozen solid for since 1977. Glacial retreat has accelerated since the 1970's...this is undeniable. And this isn't part of the retreat since the last ice age. To assert that the recent glacial melting is somehow part of a linear decline that began 10000 years ago is an absurd claim that can easily be refuted by looking at measures of sea level over the past 10000 years.
The assertions of the contrarians about these emails are irrelevant to the scientific discussion about climate change. They do not address in any real or logical way the arguments of climate change scientists. They are thus, a clear example of the use of the "Red Herring Falacy".
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Absolutely right. We used to joke that they would eventually tax us for the air we breathe...
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
There's been another breaking climate scandal. Some big name climate skeptics have been busted big time manipulating temperature data and lying about it.
They've manipulated the data to make it look like it was cooling when it was really warming, and the Drudge Report and blogger Anthony Watts have been caught up in the lies, and have tried to blame it on some New Zealand climate researchers:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/11/new_zealand_climate_science_co.php?utm_source=sbhomepage&utm_medium=link&utm_content=channellink
http://hot-topic.co.nz/nz-sceptics-lie-about-temp-records-try-to-smear-top-scientist/
"As long as its green, I'm not quite sure about this moralistic issue."
- Quote about writing "scientific studies" for the tobacco industry by Frederick Seitz, the author of that cover letter for that petition of 30000 questionable signatures against the science of climate change.
Phosphates are also plant food. Flush them in bulk---not toxic levels, just in bulk---into the environment and watch what happens. Pay particular attention to the fish stocks in any nearby lake, for example.
Climate change is not destructive in the way that, say, irradiation is. No one is saying that we're pumping out toxic amounts of CO2, but that we're risking knocking climate patterns and/or the biosphere out of balance, which could have other effects, like dramatic changes in local weather and/or local flora/fauna, or the lack thereof. We don't quite know how drastic the changes would be, how long they'd go on for, or if they'd harm us or some brown people halfway around the world.
For example: there's credible evidence that climate change from excessive carbon unlocking is causing ocean acidification, which could cause shifts in the gulf streams and/or dramatically screw up ocean life. It wouldn' t kill you on the spot, but it would cause a lot of people go go without food, either because of fish die-offs or because previously-fertile land is getting no rain. This results in a lot of pissed off hungry people (remember the prarie dustbowls of the Great Depression?).
Of course it's not so simple as CO2 is teh B4dzorZ. What's funny (or awful) is watching the anti-AGCC skeptics deliberately mischaracterize or outright pervert the science in such a way in order to muddy the waters. Which, I might add, they've been doing more often, longer, and in much nastier ways than this CRU incident.
--srj/mmv
Mods on crack are really active tonight. Parent is modded "offtopic"! WTF?
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Let's review... The hacked emails look bad, but they were obtained illegally and were never meant for public consumption - these emails were never "peer reviewed" so to speak. As far as I'm concerned, they are irrelevant, as tempting as it is to see some giant conspiracy in them.
Concerning the data that was tossed out: This was probably due to something as humdrum as cleaning out a room to make space for new equipment or office space or something similar. I remember in the 90s when I was working at a R1 university our group needed more space for new hardware, and we got money to convert a storage room to a cold room where we could stick our hardware. There were rows and rows of old 9-track tape (probably the same kind of tape that was tossed out from the climate research group in question). Nobody claimed them, nobody wanted them, so we threw them out (not before unravelling one and playing with it first though). Had someone actually wanted to retrieve data off of those 9-track tapes, they probably would have been unsuccessful anyway since magnetic tape degrades with time and tar files don't have any error correction built in.
So even if these tapes from the 80s were still around they would likely be useless. Unless some sort of data migration plan had been in place, they were probably destined to decay.
Concerning the paper records, they would likely be just fine assuming they didn't get eaten away from the acid assuming it wasn't acid-free paper. But those were tossed too.
So, to review: Some asshole gets into the private email system of a university, does who-knows-what to it (we don't know for sure whether the emails were filtered, cherrypicked, manipulated, etc.) and releases it to the world. The text of the email appears to contain some language which could be interpreted as a bit dodgy, but honestly if you think science is all fun and games and doesn't involve egos, power struggles, rivalries, and colossal asshattery, well, surprise, it does. Now we have the data loss issue, which is easily explained and is likely due to cleaning up stored crap to make room for office space (I am guessing but that is not an unreasonable scenario).
Meanwhile, hundreds of other independent studies from dozens of different sources of instrumentation and other proxies shows over and over and over again that climate is warming and it's anthropogenic in nature due to greenhouse gas emissions. Is anyone arguing that humans are NOT responsible for 280 ppm going to, what is it now, 385 ppm of CO2 over the past 150 years? Is anyone arguing that CO2 is NOT a greenhouse gas and that all else being equal, a shift in the earth's radiative equilibrium temperature upward would NOT be expected with this increase?
As an atmospheric scientist it's crazy for me to think that anyone would even need to mess with climate data as it doesn't need to be massaged to show the obvious. The fact that there is interdecadal variability (things have flattened out a bit over the past few years) is really nothing too shocking and fits well within the range of predictions.
So wake me up in 20 years an let me know how this whole "conspiracy" worked out. If we're back to temperatures from the 1960s well, I'll eat my hat or whatever serves as headwear in the 2030s.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
The facts do speak for themselves.
From the "HARRY_READ_ME.txt" file of the CRU emails, in the words of the CRU's own programmer, with page numbers annotated: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/25/climategate-hide-the-decline-codified/
- "But what are all those monthly files? DON'T KNOW, UNDOCUMENTED. Wherever I look, there are data files, no info about what they are other than their names. And that's useless ..." (Page 17)
- "It's botch after botch after botch." (18)
- "The biggest immediate problem was the loss of an hour's edits to the program, when the network died ... no explanation from anyone, I hope it's not a return to last year's troubles ... This surely is the worst project I've ever attempted. Eeeek." (31)
- "Oh, GOD, if I could start this project again and actually argue the case for junking the inherited program suite." (37)
- "... this should all have been rewritten from scratch a year ago!" (45)
- "Am I the first person to attempt to get the CRU databases in working order?!!" (47)
- "As far as I can see, this renders the (weather) station counts totally meaningless." (57)
- "COBAR AIRPORT AWS (data from an Australian weather station) cannot start in 1962, it didn't open until 1993!" (71)
- "What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah -- there is no 'supposed,' I can make it up. So I have : - )" (98)
- "You can't imagine what this has cost me -- to actually allow the operator to assign false WMO (World Meteorological Organization) codes!! But what else is there in such situations? Especially when dealing with a 'Master' database of dubious provenance ..." (98)
- "So with a somewhat cynical shrug, I added the nuclear option -- to match every WMO possible, and turn the rest into new stations ... In other words what CRU usually do. It will allow bad databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad ..." (98-9)
- "OH F--- THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done, I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases." (241).
- "This whole project is SUCH A MESS ..." (266)
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Because he's simplifying to the point of being wrong. So are you.
It's called climate change because "global warming" has been so soiled by deliberate misunderstanding that it's problematic to use. "Skeptics" have managed to insert a wedge of "creative" misinterpretation into our popular conscious: they'll note a cooling trend in a specific locale, or a specific time period, and gleefully use that cherry-picked factoid to shoot down the whole theory. It'll get some consideration, too, because the idea that the whole planet can go up in temperature on overage, but Podunk can get two snowy winters, is hard for may laypeople to understand. Skeptics know this, and prey on it.
And a carbon tax isn't "a tax on the basic building blocks of life", it's a tax on emissions of previously-unlocked carbon. This is why things like biofuels aren't being subject to a carbon tax, nor are the production of goods that use non-carbon sources of energy, yet produce something that contains carbon (like, oh, food). It's also why you get credits for locking carbon back up. Of course, people like you and the grandparent devise well, lets not mince words, outright lies about how this stuff works in hopes that people will accept because your lies smell vaguely like truth.
I'm reminded of any number of meetings I've been in where some dickhead vice-president who knows nothing about technology will, for political or budgetary reasons, give his or her creative, oversimplified misundertanding that sounds reasonable enough to other dickheaded VPs and managers, yet is outright wrong. What you're saying it like that.
--srj/mmv
Ah, there it is. ESR is a respected member of the community and I'll take his word for it absent definitive proof.
You can quite clearly see the "fudge factor" (actual code comment) where it was calculated to produce the desired result. Presumably this factor was computed, then munged into the raw data and the code commented out. Here you can see the hockey stick being built in the factory.
There are nice graphs where the "no trend" raw data is added to "a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" to create the results graph we have all seen that has no relation to the raw data but does show what would be an alarming trend if it were not for the fact that it's entirely made up. Since you clearly won't believe me, here's The NOAA's own fudge-factor chart by dataset and in total. They're from this page, and here's an official quote on that page from the NOAA:
Here's another nice link. Enjoy.
This is not science, to my understanding of that symbol.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
During 2001 the IPCC made a number of predictions as to what would happen as a result of the climate change. At the time their results were widely mocked and ignored by the "climate change deniers" circles.
It now turns out that the actual effects measured today are _worse_ than what was predicted. For example, the rise of the ocean level is 80% greater.
I think people should concentrate on the larger picture -- the predicted effects are happening. The whole CRU emails issue is peanuts and only diverts the attention from the real issue, even if we assume that everything that is being claimed there is true.
Watching NOVA about climate a university guy shows us his warehouse full
of ice cores. Best site of ice cores in the world. I know he's considered the risks,
but how much money does he really have to protect it? One wonders.
We just have to expect vital data to go missing from time to time.
We won't recover the great library at Alexandria either.
Daily mash article.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
In other words, it's bad PR. It's kind of you to admit this so readily -- it saves us time. The moment you are concerned with PR your agenda is no longer a purely scientific one. That is what left you vulnerable to "skeptics".
And rather than educate those laypeople with a more correct message, you'd rather adopt a different name. If that alone doesn't summarize what's wrong with this whole movement, and why many are suspicious of it, I'd be hard pressed to name what does.
Naturally the federal government will get to define "previously-unlocked." I am sure it will be a sensible definition that is logical, true to the science, and fair in every way, one that won't favor any particular interest groups or large financial interests. Because everything else government regulates has turned out this way, right?
Because government has never started with a small, agreeable maneuver that sounded good and was difficult or impossible to politically oppose, and then added more restrictions and complications, incrementally over periods of time. I mean, it's not like they have a track record of doing this, right?
When government sees a new excuse for the levy of a tax or the exercise of power, it is not concerned with whether that excuse accurately reflects the actual science. The excuse need not even have a basis in reality, it only needs to be something that average people will believe. "Any excuse will serve a tyrant."
In those meetings, you spoke up and (politely) corrected those VPs and managers, explaining why their reasoning was oversimplified or wrong, and showed those VPs and managers how their wrong reasoning might be corrected. You did that because as a scientist your primary concern is accurate data and sound reasoning, you recognize that good policies and good decisions are based on these, and all other concerns are subordinate to those two primary concerns. Right?
these idiots talk about carbon and not carbon dioxide? Does carbon monoxide warm the planet too? Or can we ignore chemistry and this is only about carbon? Ban pencils! I told one friend who is freaked about global warming to give up his soda pop. He said no:)
Organization: alphabetical, sometimes numerical or messy
Here's a nice graph of the NOAA's "adjustments". If you subtract these "adjustments" (their term, not mine) from every OMG Global Warming Will Kill Us ALL graph you've ever seen, you get noise. It doesn't matter whether you add the noise back in forward or backward, or substitute it with properly scaled level data from your favorite MP3: the result is the same alarming graph. But if you reverse the timeline on this "adjustment" and feed in your favorite source of noise you get a chart that looks like a precipitous drop in temperature in 1900-1909 that levelled off. Why did they make these adjustments? Was it because their raw data didn't agree with someone else's observations? I find it difficult to believe that NOAA's measurements became increasingly inaccurate over time with a determinable bias and that at the precise moment their instruments became reliable, the temperature increases stopped. That doesn't jive with my understanding of modern technology and error measurement, nor with my understanding of thermodynamics.
In short since the adjustments are the cause for alarm it would be best if they were examined closely. Most especially since several of the presumably credible sources use such similar "adjustments". The cause for alarm does not appear to be in the raw data. If you know of some credible source of uncooked raw data that does show this cause for alarm continuing to the present day (not ending in 1999), I'd love to see it. Be careful though - adding in these "adjustments" and throwing away the raw data appears to be the order of the day. If that raw data isn't out there, this is just the most amazing piece of pseudo-scientific groupthink I've ever seen.
The story now is that they've only lost 5% of the data, and the rest is good - trust us. This situation is fluid and there will be much more back-and-forth before the truth is finally heard. With the basic facts this dynamic, now is not the time to take bold action on questionable information.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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
The evil sulfur pollution that causes much of global warming and harm to human health is blamed on cars. This is not true. If you wanted to create the same effect on sulfur pollution as shredding every personal auto on Earth, you could do so by sinking 16 ships. 16. Not billions, not millions, not 1/2 or 1/3 or 1/1000th. 16.
/16 ships create more pollution than all the cars in the world.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Maybe you should try actually reading them, then.
Dog is my co-pilot.
"Read it yourself"
Pity you didn't follow your own advise. Here is an incomplete list of the factual faults with your "informative" post.
1. The emails were NOT stolen from RC they were stolen from a server at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU).
2.RC's blog is hosted in the US by a company called "webfaction", it has nothing to do with the UAE. Last time I checked the UAE and the US were sperarated by a large body of water.
3.Here is the list of contributing scientists, you will note all but one of these internationally recognised scientists work for US institutions, none are employed at UAE.
4. Their love of open data sources is hardly "newfound", they put up the list as a reaction to morons who can't use google to find existing data.
"I just can't find the reference just now."
Yes just like you couldn't find existing data without someone compiling a list for you, suspiciously convienient if you ask me...
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It takes 16 ships.
A huge part of the atmospheric pollution we see could be terminated with 32 well-aimed torpedos.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It seems there's a concerted campaign by certain political groups - especially USA political groups - to push the meme that this is a "scandal". But there is no scandal because the stolen emails don't invalidate the science.
They can't attack the science, so they attack the scientists. The science has been peer reviewed, independently verified, and the predictions made by CRU have already come to pass. The science is robust. So all they can do is attack the scientists.
This is a smear campaign, conducted by political screechers with a clearly visible agenda.
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? 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,
I can't put these two together. Are you a climate scientist with a peer-reviewed record who can evaluate contributions without resorting to realclimate.org? If you're not, how come you're claiming expertise?
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.
But by resorting to PR stunts, they've lost much of their credibility as an objective scientist. I now have to look at them, and instead of thinking about what they're saying, try to see through the spin to figure out what they are REALLY saying. I can understand why they're doing it, but it's a bad move; it will come back to bite them. Once it becomes evident they're spinning, even for a 'good cause', every statement they make becomes suspect.
Last week I was an AGW believer who was ambivalent about the harm. The abusive comments, including yours, and the rabid moderation of this topic have led me to investigate the issue. Now that I've seen that the "adjustments" are the whole source of the alarm, I'm convinced that the side of truth is on the AGW sceptics until we see some unadjusted observations. Congratulations - you've helped sway somebody over a cusp.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"So, you're saying, "Cut off funding for anyone who questions the official position that this is an urgent global crisis that demands massive government intervention"?"
No, he is saying that the question of whether AGW is real has been reasearched for over 100yrs, culimanating with two decades spent on what is probably the largest scientific effort ever undertaken by mankind. He is also saying there is zero eveidence in the scientific litrature to dispute the OBSERVATION that pumping half a trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere over the last 150yrs has already fucked up the climate.
Giving money to the engineers to fix the mess and avoid pumping another half a trillion tons into the atmosphere over the next 40yrs is exactly what every respected scientific institution on the planet has been loudly advocating for at least a decade. Some institutions such as the US National Acedemy of Science (NAS) have been warning their government about the OBSERVED problem since the 1950's
But yes, this is science and they could all be wrong. No matter how unlikely that possibility is you can still use the philosophical point to engage in wishfull thinking and prey that an oppressed genius will emerge from his basement and demonstrate why every physicist since Fourier (circa 1824) has been mistaken about the physical properties of CO2. Regardless of philosophy that position is not rational, let alone scientific.
In short the only people calling for more reasearch on the basic question of whether humans are effecting the climate are vested interest who want to delay action and the ignorant who lap up thier anti-science propoganda.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The amended statement is perfectly correct. Is nitrogen now a pollutant?
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.
> Incidentally "climate change" is the trendy new word because "global warming" has the pesky tendency to be falsified whenever temperatures are cooler than expected. With a generic word like "climate change" you're only wrong if the temperature stays perfectly and exactly the same!
Conspiracy theory bullshit. Global warming is what the world will experience. Climate change is what YOU will experience, because it's not going to have a uniform effect. It's not any less serious either: changing rainfall patterns can hurt you a lot more, a lot quicker, than yet another warm season.
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It's not just a wedge either, it's a wedge. No points for guessing where the Discovery Institute stands on anthropogenic global warming.
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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 difference is that if I don't want to pay to obtain the services of a private company then that is my choice. If, however, I decide not to pay the government for "services" like food stamps for the lazy, taxes on oil and coal, etc. then armed men with "IRS" emblazoned on the jackets will kick my door down and imprison me.
>>It's called climate change because "global warming" has been so soiled by deliberate misunderstanding that it's problematic to use.
>In other words, it's bad PR.
No, it's good PR. A good PR job by the other side.
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Really, what is your reason for trying to defend a big scam? What are your ulterior motives? Is it really that you are trying to save us all, and the world, from a climate change? Why? How is going to benefit you and your party? More control? What a douche. You and your president.
Let me just say that I'm not a purist. I agree with some who sum the measures of their instruments and find in those sums trends which are too fine to be measured by those instruments individually. I've argued this point with those admittedly more educated masters who taught me, and they shook their heads in disgust.
So perhaps I am equally unworthy to discern the truth, but I still know bullshit when I smell it.
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How is that relevant, am i not allowed to make a case for evolution unless I'm an evolutionary biologist?
The fundamentals of global warming are pretty simple, certain chemicals absorb certain frequencies of and remit it (some times at lower frequencies) towards earth (well 49% of it but that's more than 0%). Some of the chemicals are short lived (e.g water) other don't absorb much and some are in very low concentrations, the key one that is none of the above is CO2. Various independent research projects have shown a correlation between CO2 levels and global average temperature (long term). One of the key causes of confusion is that global average temperature doesn't map well to local average temperatures. Another is that while the fundamentals are strong, the macro data is pretty weak (but what macro data isn't).
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
If you were deliberately trying to falsify data, would you put a comment warning readers about it?
Don't you hate it when people use your own sig against your argument?
'All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer' -- Robert Owen, 1818
If you the data you have is hopelessly munged, and you're trying to get it to fit a predetermined curve so that your output can be deemed "correct", this is exactly what you do. It's wrong. It's not science. It's definitely not a good reason to turn the ship of state. But it's what you do.
The fudge factor array, when subtracted out of the result set, gives the same level noise data that all of the unbiased sources I've seen do. The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that it was removed as a filter when the base data was modified to fit, and the programmer who did the modification was so lazy he didn't even bother to edit out the calculation which creates a discarded result (which would amplify the modification doubly and cause the result not to fit) - thereby consuming processing resources for NO REASON.
It's a bad hack. Even if my reasoning is unsound, there's enough doubt here to prevent bold action on this suspect "model".
Help stamp out iliturcy.
That is one of the most intelligent and eloquent posts I have read on slashdot for a long time.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
This is reminiscent of the tobacco research showing that cigarettes cause lung cancer. There was incredible controversy about this, mostly because of industry funded research throwing doubt on the results. People were also saying that it was just a scare tactic.
http://www.tufts.edu/~skrimsky/PowerPoint/FundingEffect4.pdf
Just look at the larger picture of research funding involved since 1960's. Climate change was a total non-starter for most scientists years ago. The first scientists to proclaim climate change had an uphill battle to get any funding at all. The energy industry and the auto industries have a financial interest in throwing doubt on climate change, and then on whether the climate change is man-made. And they provide a lot of the current research funding motivation.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/feb/02/frontpagenews.climatechange
Now what motivation does a scientist have for proclaiming climate change? Scientists are ordinary people, most don't have grand agendas, they just want to get ahead with research papers and get tenure; they try to do some science. Controversy hurts researchers a lot when they get up for tenure. Climate change garners a lot of opposition, and there wasn't historically much research funding for it. What does any single researcher get for saying such a thing? A lot of grief, really.
There is very little historical motivation for any reputable scientist to manufacture a scare, all they want is research funding now, not research funding years from now. The government does not like climate change as a problem, they'd much rather the problem goes away. On the other hand there is plenty of financial motivation for many powerful industries to deny climate change. If there is a significant subset of scientists saying there is man-made climate change, we should really pay attention, as it is very likely to be true.
The irony here is that the "shift in language" was demanded psuedo-skeptics in the 1990's, some scientists thought they had a point and complied with their demands by switching to the more neutral term.
Of course none of this matters to anybody except the psuedo-skeptics who will continue distorting the facts right up until the day they spontaneously combust.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I'd call them "former scientists", and that's being generous. Once they decided to cook the books, they became politicians.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"changing rainfall patterns can hurt you a lot more"
Agreed!
Example: I live in SE Australia, we (as in the CSIRO) have discovered to our dismay that a 20% drop in rainfall results in a 60% drop in run-off into rivers and dams. Our grain harvest has been down by 50% or more for 8 of the last 10yrs. Entire forrests of 600yr old red gums have witherd and died. Every state capitial is on water rationing and scambling to build some of the world's largest desal plants (powered by coal of course). The dramatic fire and dust storms you read about in the news are trivial when compared to our water problems.
In the 1990's Tasmania had plans to use their massive hydro potential to export power to the mainland, dams were built and undersea cabling was installed. It was a good idea but since completion the dams have not had enough water to turn the turbines and the undersea cables are used to IMPORT power from coal fired plants on the mainland.
We are not the only ones who will wittness this slow motion train-wreck, southern Europe and California have been showing similar but less dramatic trends over the last decade or so.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I was going to use Australia as an example, but cut it because I realized I didn't know enough about your recent troubles. Thanks, very interesting.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Because he's simplifying to the point of being wrong. So are you.
It's called climate change because "global warming" has been so soiled by deliberate misunderstanding that it's problematic to use. "Skeptics" have managed to insert a wedge of "creative" misinterpretation into our popular conscious: they'll note a cooling trend in a specific locale, or a specific time period, and gleefully use that cherry-picked factoid to shoot down the whole theory. It'll get some consideration, too, because the idea that the whole planet can go up in temperature on overage, but Podunk can get two snowy winters, is hard for may laypeople to understand.
Your description of sceptics is right for some sceptics, but not for many. Sceptics are well aware that climate is the long term trends in weather. Sceptics know that you can't take one cold year as evidence, so they are amused when they watch climate change activists advocate one bad hurricane as an "example" of what climate change will bring (and some activists even go so far as to say the hurricane was likely caused by global warming.) Climate change activists are also quite vocal about "record" temperature years, even though one year does not a trend make. But let's leave that aside as a minor issue.
The bigger issue is that climate is at the minimum a 15 to 30 year trend. Sceptics know this. And you know what that means? It means the models and the hypothesis cannot be demonstrated to be consistent with observations unless we wait another 30 years. Notice the recent decade has been more or less flat or just not warmed enough, and we are expected to ignore that because 10 years is still short of 15 to 30 years. Fine. I am happy to wait 30 years to know whether the hypothesis is consistent with observations. Just don't claim the hypothesis is already proven beyond reasonable doubt.
And if you feel the need to say, "but by then it will be too late", then fine, I am happy to listen to people say "we have a speculation based on the data gathered so far, about the climate where we think it could lead to disaster sometime in the future--we can't prove it, it might be right or wrong, but we need y'all to pay attention, and you need to fund this thing more so we can gather much more data and do a real engineering-quality study with checks and counterchecks".
I used to believe global warming 100% until I heard them start saying that they were virtually certain, for all practical purposes, about their 50 and 100 year "scenarios" (predictions) about climate. Most predictions by experts have a high likelihood of being wrong, unless they have been made using an empirical study of the kinds of things that lead to good predictions. Empirically, being an expert in the field tends to make your prediction less likely to be true, due to bias of overconfidence in being an expert. There are ways round that, but sitting in your ivory tower shouting "But I'm the expert!!" is not one of them.
I'm prepared to lose my excellent Karma on this issue. To be honest I'm not prepared to lose it over whether Microsoft is better than Linux, or Linux is better than Microsoft:
Research has shown Mount Kilimanjaro has been losing glaciers/snow cap over the last 150 years or so. The reasons for this are micro-climate issues, particularly deforestation around the base on the mountain. Now, will you just shut-up about Mount Kilimanjaro being somehow proof of CO2 based warming hypothesis. It isn't, it never was and it never will be.
Secondly, this whole topic is posted by a Real Climate shill and is nothing more than a propaganda piece to try to limit the damage from the unfolding scandal. The datasets aren't entirely independent as they both take data from the same poorly sited, poor maintained and poorly analysed surface station networks. Moreover, there are big data quality problems with NASA's GISS data. If CRU data agrees with GISS and CRU data has been fixed, I conclude that either GISS data has been fixed too, or that they're both crap.
Here's a brief analysis of data quality issues with GIStemp. Here's information about the poor quality of the surface station network.
In all seriousness, whether global warming is real or not, and whether it's caused by human beings or not is immaterial. Regardless of any of that, it will be used to justify the taxation of carbon. Fake global warming will justify this as readily as real global warming so there's no reason for the controversy of the issue to divide people on this one thing. A tax on carbon is a tax on life, seeing how we are carbon-based life forms.
Lol. Actually, the tax would be on on carbondioxide, which is something living organisms *remove* from the atmosphere by tying up carbon in their bodies. So no, not a tax on life, but a tax on fossils. Which the entire developed, civilized world already taxes anyway.
This will represent a new era of governmental power and control heretofore unknown to us and found only in the wet dreams of statists and other would-be tyrants.
You know, I live in a democracy. Don't you? Why is it that some people are so fond of conspiracy theories? These latest "all-climate-scientist-were-one-big-conspiracy" is not even the most ridiculous to date. Anyone remember "US blew up the twin towers themselves"? Or "Aliens are visiting the planet all the time but the (US-for-some-reason) government covers it up"?
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
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."
Spaceballs? There goes the planet.
Notice the recent decade has been more or less flat or just not warmed enough...
Who the hell created this "past decade" meme I keep seeing everywhere? Rush Limbaugh? Glenn Beck? According to the NOAA, "Each of the last 12 years (1997-2008) was one of the warmest on record."
The warmest years on record go like this:
1) 2005
2) 1998
3) 2002
4) 2003
5) 2006
6) 2007
7) 2004
8) 2001
9) 2008
Here is the handy Wikipedia entry showing the data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_since_1880
Note the graph which really tells it all from 1880 to present. Keep on denying, wingnut.
He is also saying there is zero eveidence in the scientific litrature to dispute the OBSERVATION that pumping half a trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere over the last 150yrs has already fucked up the climate.
That's a conclusion*, not an observation. In the context of scientific research, observations are measurements; while there is a general usage of the word meaning "remark", it's unhelpful to use it in this context.
* Or an assertion without evidence, but I'm giving benefit of the doubt.
Yes, anyone who disagrees with you is wingnut.
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."
A slashdotter who knows the limits of his own knowledge, very refreshing. :)
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Fair point, I was going to use the word "consensus" but that would have been an invitation to trolls who have never heard of the term "republic of science".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The effects on true believers whose religion has been shown to be false are so sad. You should have picked one of the traditional religions, which admit they are based on faith.
Anyway, all you have asked for has already been done and made available online many days ago.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cuttings-33.html
I understand the NYT has been silent about the contents of these stolen and leaked emails, presumably because these emails did not endanger national security.
To cheer you up I leave you with this happy video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEiLgbBGKVk
All of your points have been rigorously refuted ad infinitum, yet to no avail
This is what many skeptic say.
Skeptics will say anything.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
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".
It might seem that way, yet in Australia, the liberal party (who are conservatives) are in danger of being relegated to the political wilderness, because the MPs want to block legislation to reduce CO2 emissions. In the end, they will back down or be destroyed. Politicians will go where the people lead.
What we need is a new sound-bite. Sustainable economy. It is going to take a long time to change, but we will need it one day, AGW or otherwise. Sadly, I believe we will have to wait for the first widespread disasters, because deniers are so obstinate with their views, that they will need a kick in the nuts before they can let go of their arrogance, and see that plundering the earth is ultimately the same is pissing in the bed in which you sleep.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I'm not exactly on the AGW bandwagon, but I think this scandal is now overblown. The beauty of science is that all of this "scandal" doesn't matter. Regardless of how the data is fudged, AGW has made some definite predictions and by virtue of testing them, for ourselves, we can see what reality is.
We are past the point, except in exotic physics, where we need scientists to confirm many test results. Anyone can measure temperature, and share that data. If we do not believe planetary temperature data, we can always build a network app and check it ourselves.
This is my sig.
"The parent posting isn't a troll. He is saying it like it is."
No, he's not. I see this tactic all the time with AGW supporters - if there's evidence demonstrating a problem with their theory, they say it's just a smear campaign, or misinformation. This is not "just another sissy-fit thrown by the denier groups that are willing to use any tactics to distract people from the real issue." This is a revelation that the lead climate scientists in the world were engaged in fraud. The released program code and comments demonstrates that they "cooked" their data to create a more alarming climate picture than actually existed, and the emails contain clear proof that they conspired to defeat FOI requests and subverted the peer-review process at major journals to suppress conflicting research.
"And I'm trying to figure out the scientific arguments being put forward by the contrarians. Are they saying that data has been suppressed that shows the world hasn't being warming significantly since the 1970's?!! Really?"
No. Not really. That's another AGW trick I see used all too often. The skeptic points out a problem with the research, and the AGW supporter misrepresents the skeptic's view. I have yet to see a single person claim that there hasn't been significant warming since the 1970s.
There is no denying that we are on an overall upwards trend in world climate. None. However, the AGW thesis is that industrial CO2 has enough of an impact to swing the balance - that the impact is highly statistically significant. Little problem, though - since 1998 the global temperature has remained steady, with some cooling now coming into the picture...while the CO2 levels continue to rise. If the AGW theory was correct, there should be a corresponding rise in temperature over the last ten years...but there isn't. Some AGW climatologists have tried to hand-wave this away, saying that there's something going on with the oceans or somesuch, and we can look forward to cooling for about another ten years, but we shouldn't forget the AGW threat. In the meantime, solar physicists are noting that this pretty much correlates to solar activity quite nicely. So, yes, the temperature has risen since 1970. But the proof that it was due to human activity is quite weak.
What Climategate does is demonstrate that certain AGW claims themselves, such as this decade being hotter than the 1990s, cannot be substantiated any longer. The CRU, which is pivotal to these claims, has now been caught out fudging their data.
This is a good summary: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/30/crugate_analysis/
So, to summarize, this is the skeptic argument: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and if you add it to the atmosphere it will have a warming effect. However, in the case of industrial CO2, the warming effect is small enough that it is not statistically significant, and is swamped by natural forcings. THAT is the argument.
Clear enough for you?
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
You can certainly disagree with facts however willfully ignoring, dismissing, and spreading fud about them is clearly the domain of wingnuts.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
has nothing to do with global warming. It has to do (in at least my opinion) people making the wrong decision about what is right.
Basically you have some SCIENTISTS arguing that this research and information should NOT be available to the public, as they feel they are the only ones qualified to understand it.
Essentially, they want to avoid having to spend time defending their conclusions from people they view as biased or crackpots.
To my mind this is wrong on so many levels I find it hard to contemplate. I understand their frustration, and I sympathize, however this type of behavior is wrong.
First the arrogance to think, that only they know better than anyone else, it is just mind shattering. Sure they have specialized training that enables them to use this information likely better than most, but that is not to say that nobody else cannot reason for themselves.
Secondly, if they cannot defend their conclusions or their postulations from a bunch of biased crackpots, then they need to work harder at formulating concrete analysis and conclusions, and stop being lazy by saying "oh they are just crazy, it is a waste of time to defend MY theories". I am sorry, its called scientific method. Prove your shit, and defend it you bums.
Thirdly, if trying to build confidence in your cause and support for your conclusions, promoting an air of secrecy is not the way to do it. Science should be done in a transparent manner. You know, so your findings can be replicated, and your conclusions tested by others.
Anyway their simple lack of common sense here disturbing.
Yes, the fundamentals of global warming are pretty simple, which is why the computer models were able to so accurately predict the warming we've experienced for the last decade.
But yes, this is science and they could all be wrong.
No, this is politics. Science requires an extremely high level of proof and always retains an element of doubt because it is just about finding the truth. Politics, on the other hand, requires making decisions now about what to do. Based on the evidence currently available regarding the probabilities of various outcomes and the associated costs of those outcomes, reducing CO2 emissions is clearly the right thing to do. Yes, there's a small chance that it's a waste of time and there's a cost associated with that but there's a much higher probability that it will help avoid the very high costs associated with rapid global temperature rises.
I get so sick of hearing people use the 0.01% chance that the consensus on climate change is wrong as an excuse to disagree with the overwhelming evidence. It's as if it's a matter of religious choice - as if people should be allowed to believe whatever they want. Sure they can believe what they want but when they try to spread their beliefs or let their beliefs influence public policy, we'll be there saying how very wrong they are, as loudly as we can, while waving the mountain of evidence in their face.
I was saying tip the funding balance away from researching what we already know to be happening
How do we know that AGW is happening? Oh yeah, we've got all this data that clearly supports it...oh, wait, we don't. They won't let us see the raw data and have admitted that they'd rather delete it than reveal it.
Why do you think that is?
*sigh* back to work...
I'm glad you didn't fill your post with expletives. Trolls are useless, but your (rightfully modded) interesting post incited me to respond.
You're very good at this "PR" thing. And I have no argument with your discussion of language. However, every government has a track record of screwing their populace that has much better data than any climate science. You don't argue that point, you change the subject to letting private businesses regulate things. Thank GOD businesses don't run my life. No business can force me to do anything.
If I care about the environment, then I plant a tree. If I don't want to emit carbon, I don't drive my car and don't use the lights. If I want a hamburger, I drive to Wendy's and get one. If I don't like Wendy's then the market provides alternatives. What do I do if I don't want Social Security. Oh wait, I don't have a choice.
Free markets can price long term costs. However, YOU (and the rest of consumers) don't care about the long term. This can be proven by the idiots charging up credit cards that they cannot afford, buying houses with ARMs, and buying big ass SUVs with low mileage. Stop blaming the free market for giving you what you want. Also, why should businesses plan for the long term, when the government can step in and bail their asses out for the bad, short sighted, and incredibly stupid decisions they make.
Now let's get real, just like you didn't change my opinion, I'm not changing yours, but let's not blame businesses for the decisions that PEOPLE make. Because businesses are just made up entities built to take the blame of the people that run them.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Now don't get me wrong, I love wikipedia, and use it frequently. But there is some irony in the fact that you just cited a non-peer reviewed, public edited, frequently sabotaged, collection of user generated content, that happens to be a secondary source to back up a scientific argument? My grade school english teacher would like to slap you.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
How come "all-climate-scientist-were-one-big-conspiracy" is so much more absurd than "all-global-warming-deniers-are-funded-by-big-oil"?
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
"Man it's a good thing the earth is only billions of years old, or the 100+ years of scientific research might just seem insignificant in comparison."
Man it's a good thing that reasearch over the last hundered years has convinced you that the Earth is billions of years old.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The armies of Slashdot keyboard ants and moderation lizards rushed to plug the bleeding hole in AGW with their tiny authorities, resembling a manifestation in support of The Great Linguist and The World Peace Leader (Stalin).
Vladimir Illich Ulianov (Lenin) used to call them "Useful Idiots".
Others, like a Greenpeace activist interviewed in rp.pl quotes "scientific consensus" over 300000 climate-change-inflicted deaths per year. No word where the numbers came from, nor about the leaked emails which clearly show how the "scientists" try to bully a consensus on climate predictions. Would they have to discuss the mattter if it was settled?
What was in the leaked emails tells about the conduct of researchers from CRU enough for me to ignore their claims. They have no credibility, whatever theory they support.
I think you missed the context of my remark or perhaps I was not clear. I agree with your post and offer this list of consenus statements from various organisations who still put their faith in the republic of science.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
What's BAU?
Very good point.
Similar arrogance took place in the world of politics with the Lisbon Treaty in Europe.
All referendums (in Holland, France and Ireland) rejected the treaty, and the Irish had to correct their first, "improper" choice.
The "right" and "wrong" had been settled in advance, then worked on by massive propaganda to force the consent of population.
Two problems, one pattern.
I think you have mistaken me for someone else.
Please take your sanctimonious crap elsewhere. We don't want any ACTA, World Bankers, or any other globalist exploiters. We also don't need jerks like you trying to justify despotism because of the despotism that already exists.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
There is very little historical motivation for any reputable scientist to manufacture a scare, all they want is research funding now, not research funding years from now.
"Manufacture a scare" implies more research funding now. In fact, it'd be counterproductive to manufacture a scare in order to secure research funding down the road. After all, sooner or later someone will prove you're wrong, then where's your funding?
Lol. Way to spin it in a completely untrue direction there buddy. Apparently you missed the point that by including the discarded data or keeping the discarded data, the CRU results match the results of several other independent research bodies.
Or the fact that these implied claims that their work goes un-reviewed.... thats bullcrap too.
These 'lies' are only a product of your skewed perception and your ability to take a slim thread of reality and somehow contort it to make the sweater you think it should be. There is nothing awry here and the main work is still valid and corroborated by basically all other work in the field as well.
I'm a scientist and I've discarded about half of the experiments I've conducted along the way on my current project. Looking at my notebook you would see all of these things that I would not report, such as failed PCRs and non-working primers --- but you would have to actually talk to me to find out why I won't spend much time in my final writing discussing all of the discarded data. Guess what, some DNA sequences are illegible, some are not the desired product, etc etc etc...
And just like I would, the CRU has gone to explain the difference here and shown that this 'difference' has no impact on the results/discussion of the data and work. You don't have to believe them, though all the other independent work shows the same things. You don't have to, but until you're doing the science yourself you're no more capable or aware of what is really going on than anyone else on this planet.
How come "all-climate-scientist-were-one-big-conspiracy" is so much more absurd than "all-global-warming-deniers-are-funded-by-big-oil"?
It isn't. It is just as absurd. The climate-scientists who are "deniers" (I hate that term) are much in the minority, though.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Paragraph one, "You are a moron!": Slander the person you are replying to (e.g. "wing-nut", "idiot", "retard", "moron", etc. Get creative!). Then call them a "denier" so that it seems like they're opposing something like evolution, which conveniently lumps them into the same category as people who question that too.
Paragraph two, "How dare you question climate change???": Call their argument a "straw-man" and proceed to attack their audacity to question "hard scientific facts". Make some sort of reference to this person's education level, mainly that they are not a climate scientist and as such they have no idea what they're talking about - so they should trust the true experts.
Paragraph three, "CRU Doesn't Matter.": This is the meat of your argument! Although the scientists of the CRU broke all rules known to science and blatantly lied to us all, be sure to ignore this and point out that lots of other researchers have the same findings (even though many of them got their data from the CRU). We need to make it seem like there is a complete and united scientific consensus about climate change.
Paragraph four, "Case closed.": End on a high note! Make sure to say that case is closed, and has been closed for a long time. The debate is over. Everyone but the person you are replying to believes in global warming. This will make them feel like they are just pushing against a closed door.
Congratulations, you have won! If they are stupid enough to come back with real data, repeat this process until they feel so ashamed that they just shut up.
Incidentally "climate change" is the trendy new word because "global warming" has the pesky tendency to be falsified whenever temperatures are cooler than expected. With a generic word like "climate change" you're only wrong if the temperature stays perfectly and exactly the same!
Maybe ;) Or it could be an attempt to make a term that would not confuse the layman when some region or other gets colder due to global warming. What do you think?
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
I wouldn't underestimate this incident.
It comes at a very bad time. A recent USA Today poll showed larger numbers of Americans not believing that man made global climate change is a reality.
Frightened people who feel overwhelmed don't want to believe it.
Powerful people with significant financial interests against change don't want other people to believe it.
These people will use this incident to foster disbelief. Most people do not look at details. Unfortunately, since it is a highly politicized issue now, positive change requires that many people, including the ones that don't look at details, be onboard.
In other words, it's bad PR. It's kind of you to admit this so readily -- it saves us time. The moment you are concerned with PR your agenda is no longer a purely scientific one. That is what left you vulnerable to "skeptics".
How is trying to counter a powerful lie PR?
because when you are trying to tell the world some important information, use of language is important. It's called nuance
... even as "developing" economies that are actually far more massive are being given a pass while they carry on as if nobody on the planet has learned anything since 1960.
It can also be called "oily hucksterism" or "lying" or "spinning" etc.
We're talking about a movement that wants to re-arrange trillions of dollars of productivity by reallocating its output. We're talking about a movement that's prepared to wildly punish western economies that are doing more than any culture in human history to re-invent how they use energy, recycle materials, transport people and goods
Yes, it takes some real PR to make a kid matriculate from elementary school thoroughly in the grips of this new brand of Original Sin, and seeking salvation for it by cutting giant new polluting economies a whole lot of perpetual slack. Guys like Al Gore have cleverly positioned themselves to make billions off of that well-packaged guilt and fear trip, and it's well-nuanced PR that got him there.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Because a majority of experts back his stance?
Copenhagen and those Tungsten Filled, Gold Bar Twinkies.
http://smokingmirrors.blogspot.com/2009/11/copenhagen-and-those-tungsten-filled.html
We'll be doing a hammer and tongs, Smoking Mirrors flavored radio transmission this evening. It should be available for download on Monday evening. It makes sense to have a companion mirrors to counterpoint the broadcast.
Dog Poet Transmitting.......
The climate, data tinkering scandal, continues to implode as red-faced, finger pointing, dissembling scientists run out of the burning building, faster that Tiger Woods, in advance of his wife with a 7 iron ...and with bad knees on both accounts.
Once, these august emblems of pure scientific inquiry were wide-eyed children, dreaming of Nobel Prizes, dancing like sugar plums in their heads. Like the long tradition of other lying collectives, which date from the Royal Geographic Society and before; these graft-taking scoundrels have done their industry proud. They found what they were supposed to find and they said what they were told to say by the governments and corporations who provided the grants and salaries, in advance of their complicity in one more gargantuan, public rip-off.
They are joined in spirit by their comrades in the AMA-Pharmaceutical combine with their Tammy Faye flu and toxic vaccines. They are joined by their comrades on Wall Street and the banking world with their toxic mortgages and tungsten-filled gold bars; the accidental Twinkie. They are joined by their comrades in the heroin trade, as the opium flows from the killing fields of Afghanistan to the sidewalks of Main Street, USA. They are joined by their comrades in the halls of government, as the wars expand across the Middle East.
Yes, these honorable men and women are joined by other soulless husks in suits, from every industry and field of endeavor, whispering as they go, "Me first, you later... maybe." They are attended by a plague of lawyers who swarm like locusts across the looted plains. It's The Treasure of Sierra Madre, with thousands of deranged lunatics grasping at the swirling dust of imaginary gold... trampling their fellows, elbows sweeping to the right and the left as they belly up to the trough, snorting and stamping and sodomizing everything in their path like overcrowded rats... eating their own children, stabbing the household pets with forks and dancing to dissonant symphonies that sound like John Cage on bad acid.
Some unnamed hero dropped a dime. Some pissed off former comrade had finally had enough of those bankrupt, lying swines. Here they are, these men of complex learning and fine reputation. Somebody said, "Hello Sailor" and they went right up the stairs. They took off their clothes and they rolled around on the stained mattresses in the burning shame of their moral incontinence. They got on their knees and they did the job and they took the money. They weren't set up like Randy Cunningham and James Traficant for opposing the juggernaut of Ersatz Israel. They went willingly and laid it on the line for the corporate dime.
Few cities in the world look like Copenhagen at Christmas. It's a wonder to see and all the uptown panhandlers from around the world will be walking around with their hands out; looking for Santa to reach into his bag for their just rewards. They lied their asses off. They sold their souls for a pallet of tungsten filled gold. They want what's coming to them. They earned it. There will be no dissenting voices in Copenhagen. They will all be of one accord. The liars and thieves will toast one another for their tireless efforts on behalf of themselves. The faceless thugs in the black, Kevlar jumpsuits will be at every corner, just looking to break some heads, already half tumescent in anticipation of the crack of batons on available heads. They are damn well going to kick some radical, hippie ass. If they can't fire up the crowd, they'll send their agita
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
"Rather than illegally assaulting people who ask him questions Al Gore could actually engage people respectfully and answer questions on AGW and Climategate that people have. Why are you so afraid Al Gore? The vast majority of people aren't evil Al Gore, they just want answers to questions you're avoiding."
http://pathstoknowledge.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/al-gore-illegally-assulting-harrasing-and-detaining-people-with-his-security-goons-with-guns-to-avoid-any-questions-on-climategate-and-agw
My grade school english teacher would like to slap you.
Your grade school English teacher can kiss my ass instead. I link to Wikipedia because the data is displayed in a format easy for idiot deniers to understand. If you'd like to verify that the NOAA source is IDENTICAL, go right ahead.
Yes, scientists have other, nobler motivations as well, but it's money that makes the science go round. The politics surrounding the grant-making process governs what science gets done and therefore what gets submitted to peer-reviewed journals. We therefore have the potential for a vicious cycle, with bad politics reinforcing bad science, and bad science reinforcing bad politics. (I'm not sure to what extent this potential problem has been realized, but it's clearly a risk.)
-- 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."
Then why, per the e-mails from CRU saying just that, was data manipulated? Odd, very odd.
28% is a minority, but I wouldn't dismiss it as tiny. Especially since low voter turnout in the US can has influenced elections & laws.
"Basically, if we aren't in a retreat from the last ice age, we are in a decline towards the next ice age. As we seem to be still climbing in both CO2 and temperature, I would go for the former"
False dichotomy: those aren't the only two options. We have "or we're doing something different".
Or circular logic: they are the only two if it weren't possible to have AGW therefore they prove we don't have AGW because it's one of them.
If we aren't in a retreat from the last ice age, we are in a decline towards the next ice age. WRONG. The way to find out if we're coming out of an ice age or going in is to see where we are with respect to the ice age and the previous causes of it.
We're well beyond the average age of an interglacial, so indicating we should be going in to a new glacial.
Milankovich cycle is in a cooling rather than warming configuration for the earth, indicating we should be going in to a new glacial.
But we're warming.
What's changed?
We're burning billions of tons of fossil fuels.
And rather than this being an indication of something different, you just say "it must be we're leaving an ice age".
What a moron.
>>Heck, when it was proven he had had the Briffa data for YEARS while demanding Briffa had to give him the data and proclaiming that Briffa's failure to give it up was proof he was cherry picking, did McIntyre (who works in a mining company as a consultant after working for another as CEO) retract?
I find it hilarious that this was your response to my post mocking the fact that people dismiss McIntyre because he was an engineer.
The truth of the matter is, engineers are smart people, and he's found errors that climate scientists have accepted and printed retractions for. But if we can't get access to the raw data, only the massaged data, then it's quite possible that the climate scientists have made mistakes, and we'll never know, because they're afraid of being shown wrong, which is very anti-scientific.
You really think we're going to regulate and tax your breathing?
Hey, do you have a sister who is just as dumb as you? I've got some sperm to unload and the regular girls don't fall for my pickup lines.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Wow, that's an amazing set of incorrect information in such a small package. First, the Global Ice Age was supposedly due to cooling and the 'Nuclear Winter' and had nothing to do with CFC. Second, CFC's really did reduce the ozone layer, and the evidence since phasing CFC's out has been wonderfully along the lines of the estimates of the effect of removing them, thank you very much. Third, weather and climate are different. Fourth, we're getting pretty good at predicting weather a week in advance and for both weather and hurricane tracks we know why we can't predict them very well. Fifth, models give a pretty good idea of what climate is going to do (though plenty of error) even if we can't predict the weather very far into the future. I can't tell you which women around me are going to have babies in the next couple of years, but the model of global population is pretty good.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
The GP poster clearly misses the big point here. Cherry picking data is not science.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Every time I read something like this, I'm getting even more convinced that the following decades will define us as human beings. We can either work together globally, people from every culture and every nation, and unite to solve one of the greatest challenges our civilization has faced, or we can make it into a struggle about power and greed, fighting and distrusting others on our way into mutual disaster.
I think it is unfortunate that westerners in general, and Americans in particular, habitually see enemies wherever they look. I guess it comes with being a superpower, but I fear it will become the primary factor contributing to the eventual downfall of western dominance.
4 guys in a lifeboat, just enough provisions to make landfall, managed carefully. One of the guys wants to use the water to soak his aching feet, and to entertain himself by splashing it around.
The other guys should clearly put up with this, as "that is his choice".
emt 377 emt 4
I hate the term deniers as well, but the minority has no bearing in a scientific argument, just like the counter-argument I am going to make about Copernicus and Newton being in the minority.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Indeed, but the scientific arguments have a bearing on a theory's popularity among experts :) The non-co2 crowd's arguments have so far all been inconsistent with actuals measurements, as I understand it (I have only followed a handful through to final rejection: sunspot, volcanos, cosmic radiation, and others)
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
We can either work together globally, people from every culture and every nation ... it is unfortunate that westerners in general, and Americans in particular, habitually see enemies wherever they look.
You don't get it, do you? The enemies, in this case, aren't the Chinese or the Indians. It's the people who don't want them to be held to the same standards as everyone else. Who is it, do you suppose, that thinks it's fine for China to fire up three new dirty coal plants every day, while also proposing enormous new taxes on US coal burners (but not on China's!)? Who is it that's deliberately seeking a division in how that issues is addressed, globally? Really: name names, and then re-imagine who it is that you think is actually causing (rather than very appropriately talking about and reacting to) the international friction, here.
Are you operating under the delusion that China is just a small, backwards country that isn't, and never will be, smart or capable enough to be held to the same standards that you think a poor town in West Virginia should be taxed into tolerating? Are you that patronizing, or that dismissive of China's enormous population?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
--And rather than educate those laypeople with a more correct message, you'd rather adopt a different name. If that alone doesn't summarize what's wrong with this whole movement, and why many are suspicious of it, I'd be hard pressed to name what does.--
What does semantics matter but I guess you are right?
--Because government has never started with a small, agreeable maneuver that sounded good and was difficult or impossible to politically oppose, and then added more restrictions and complications, incrementally over periods of time. I mean, it's not like they have a track record of doing this, right?--
Yeah, like hydrogen power created from uh we'll carbon. I'm real sure that this Hydrogen is much better than electric cars;( Those electrics actually more convenient to use. Now we have hybrids that get less mile per gallon than a VW rabbit diesel made in the 80's. The fixes are known and have existed for some time and wont be tough on us, but the government is run by big corporations and big oil in particular. The fact is in 2009 we don't have any better fuel economy in cars than we did in 1985. So that tax thing wont work.
What will work is letting GM and the rest fail. Someone else will come along and make a mint with electrics but you can't produce 2 per day by hand and hope to sell any. The technology is there but no one is giving money to small businesses that know what to do. No, the government is giving money right back to the dealers and we are the junkies. Also, giving less money to those that want to kill us would be a plus too.
The sad thing is that when all of the junkies OD the dealers will be in the same shape and wont escape what's coming either.
Yes, who thinks it is fine that China fires up three new dirty coal plants every day? I don't know, because I have never met or seen that person. Except possibly among the Chinese, but are insinuating that it is someone else.
I hear what you are saying. But at the same time I hear China and others pointing out that historically the west has released much more carbon, that they release less per capita and that the west have much greater capabilities for transforming their societies. I'm not saying that they are right, but they do have a point. So for them you are the one that don't want the same standards.
The question is, what standards should we have? Hence my conclusion: During the following years we will be given the choice between cooperating and working out our differences, or being overly protective and quibble until we are all doomed.
Also I'm not sure why you would need to limit carbon emissions using taxes. Cap and trade seems like a much more efficient and fair method, and it also what the EU employs. It could be implemented on a global scale if the willingness was there.
--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?--
How is that, mine comes from a well and is free? If you get town water, you pay for what you use. Just pay for what you use and don't call it a tax. That's the real problem calling it a tax plus the government enforcing this is going to be a total nightmare of letting the big abusers off with lawsuits and such. Remember, when California tried to do that?
--You're working from a flawed premise: that everything government does is inherently flawed, wrong and immoral.--
The only thing flawed about this statement is the "everything" statement. "Most everything" would be closer to the truth. When the government is pretty much run by special interest groups no matter which side wins, what would you call it? A working solution seems so distant right now because of our leadership is lacking.
I totally agree with you that a lot of alternative theories don't hold up to scrutiny. But that still doesn't prove AGW. You could disprove 1000 more counter-theories, and that wouldn't prove AGW. The only thing that can prove AGW is future data... And well into the future as well. What pisses me off is that people are talking about the next 50-100 years. Climate happens on the order of 100,000 years, not a few decades. Humans have no sense of the timescale of this planet, and are quite full of themselves to be claiming they are powerful enough to change the course of the planet in just a few years.
We cannot make decisions based on computer models, because I have ran fairly accurate computer models that have shown Germany winning WWII (try having the AI face itself in Battlefield 1942, it's a computer simulation based on a limited amount of data). Computer models cannot give us certainty, they can give us a guess (a very educated guess, but a guess) of what MAY happen in the future. If you had to bet your job and life savings on these computer models, I'd bet you wouldn't. Any with cap-and-trade legislation, you may very well be betting your job and life savings.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
How you ever discussed a climate paper where you had access to both the data and methodology used by its authors?
And actually understood how to analyze both...
No, he is saying that the question of whether AGW is real has been reasearched for over 100yrs, culimanating with two decades spent on what is probably the largest scientific effort ever undertaken by mankind. He is also saying there is zero eveidence in the scientific litrature to dispute the OBSERVATION that pumping half a trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere over the last 150yrs has already fucked up the climate.
And the amazing thing is that with all of this research and media attention, people still have the misconception that CO2 increase causes temperature increase. All the climate data suggests that CO2 increase does not lead temperature increase, but follows. Even John Houghton, who was co-chair of the IPCC and is a supporter of the idea of antropogenic global warming, admits "Carbon dioxide content and temperature correlate so closely during the last ice age is not evidence of carbon dioxide driving the temperature but rather the other way round... I often show that diagram in my lectures on climate change but always make the point that it gives no proof of global warming due to increased carbon dioxide."
I'm certain that we do have some effect on the climate. I'm not certain what that is. However, it's pretty clear from the science that CO2 is not a direct contributor to temperature increase. Unfortunately, the propaganda has diverted our focus from the facts. And, regardless of what issues you're trying to solve, ignoring the facts is a sure way to a bad solution.
Just like Climate change is just the issue being used to promote world government. Doesn't really matter what the issue so long as it helps justify the objective. Controlling Carbon Dioxide is NO different than the Dihydrogen Monoxide hoax, other than DHMO was meant from the beginning to make a point... which evidently most people still don't seem to get.
Even Al Gore has come out recently to say that "It isn't Global Warming, it is about Global Climate Change".
Yes, ice has been melting AND ice has been forming. Overall, there is MORE ice. The past decade has seen significant cooling just like there should have been based on solar cycles as people have known and understood for hundreds of years.
I am sorry you can't go outside and ice skate any more, but how is a comparison of a generalization of a lake near your house as a kid versus a generalization of it as an adult evidence for or against anthropogenic global climate change? Also, nothing you have said shows any evidence that any of this change would be bad. Directly related, there were many predictions made in the 90's about "global warming". Storms, rising sea levels, droughts, floods, and cannibals. None of these predictions have even remotely come true, not to mention strong evidence that the people that made the "predictions" never believed them in the first place (Ok, maybe they did it for the insurance policy). 4 Dead polar bears and some broken ice prompted book signings more than anything else.
The only real truth to come out of this is what we already knew: The climate is really weird and unpredictable, and thus far NOBODY has been able to create a model to even remotely predict it. You do know that when the "weatherman" says "there is a 40% chance of rain today" means there is a 40% chance you are in a place that is raining right now. That's it!
What we CAN see are very real consequences of this hoax. Just as the DDT hoax is easily responsible for 40+ million deaths in Africa that were totally preventable, the United Nations and European Union have been denying third world sovereign nations the right to industrialize under the threat of war justifying it with "data" about their supposed "carbon footprint". Independent nations with the natural resources, the technology, and skill, and certainly plenty of labor to make much of Africa thrive allowing them to provide FOR THEMSELVES electricity, steel, clean water, and all the other things we take for granted are being denied. People are being denied the right to take care of themselves.
Genocide has always been justified. They don't worship the right God, and God is going to punish us if we don't kill them, or at least let our leaders do what they know is best for us. Their blood is different, so we need to kill them so they don't pollute the gene pool and we die of horrible disease, or at least let our leaders do what they know is best for us. We don't have enough food to feed everybody, and we can't let everybody starve, so we are going to have to let you die (oh yeah, there is still some "debate" over whether or not the grain silos were full at the time, but that is just an academic issue). Sorry all you darkies are dying of Malaria, but after we cured all our land, it turns out there is this one study that found a bird laid a soft eggs and we think it might be related, you are all just going to have to die because we would hate to think another bird might lay another soft egg.
So you tell me, just how sure are you about this Global Warming thing, this Anthropogenic Climate Change thing, keeping in mind this goes a LITTLE bit further than regulating what additives in your hair spray might end up in the ozone layer.
Yes, there are real environmental issues, air pollution, water pollution and such which are rightfully local issues that people in their communities can actually deal with. "Global Warming" is a scam and an
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
Incidentally "climate change" is the trendy new word because "global warming" has the pesky tendency to be falsified whenever temperatures are cooler than expected. With a generic word like "climate change" you're only wrong if the temperature stays perfectly and exactly the same!
I'd like to point out one thing about above paragraph. "Whenever temperaturs are..." refers to weather. Weather is not climate, and single weather events (such as temperature during any one point of time) doesn't falsify or prove anything about climate. Mixing weather and climate tends to put a writer into the "don't know what they're talking about" bin.
The way to find out if we're coming out of an ice age or going in is to see where we are with respect to the ice age and the previous causes of it. ... we should be going in to a new glacial.
But we're warming.
What's changed?
We're burning billions of tons of fossil fuels.
So what you are saying is that we accidentally came across the solution and saved ourselves from eminent destruction? Hurray for the oil companies and their insight. If that be the case, you should really let somebody know because figuring out how to prevent a natural ice age is NOT what the new world government is being created to combat. I also don't see how destroying industry as we know it, and forcing Africa into poverty helps the issue. We are causing severe suffering in attempts to discover more about something we know very little about. Have you noticed that every thing that has ever said in the 90's that was going to happen in 10 years NEVER happened? Haven't we hurt Africa enough?
You do know this isn't about 'believing', and this debate has gone FAR beyond the classroom. Very powerful people with lots of money and guns are doing stuff in the name of "global warming". I wish I could believe it was all being done in the name of humanity, I am just of the opinion that "Yay, world government is going to save us from ourselves" is a bit naive. Every dictator hell bent on world domination has been beloved... right up until they killed a whole bunch of people, then we say they were bad men. Hasn't this happened enough times in just the last 100 years? Sorry, guess after reading a bit of world history, been left a bit gun shy.
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
Do they indeed? Maybe you have a reference? In a peer-reviewed study?
It is precisely the other way around - his stance backs what he believes a "majority of experts" back. Whether he understands that or not is an altogether different matter.
This isn't much better than your average denialist, up to and including the condescending tone.
Your condescending tone implies you know more about the subject than the person you're replying to.
The sad fact is you are not much different than him -- you're only parroting other people's opinions.
How do we know that AGW is happening? Oh yeah, we've got all this data that clearly supports it
.
Correct.
oh, wait, we don't. THEY(tm) won't let us see the raw data and have admitted that THEY(tm)'D rather delete it than reveal it. [emphasis added]
RTFA. Hint: it's about the public availability of the raw data. Out of the 3000+ climatologists who trying to commuinicate reality to your are you perhaps referring to one or two scientists working at a single research institute? Wouldn't you prefer to be reasonable?
Why do you think that is?
Dunno. Some people have the quaint notion of ownership over what they produce with their own labour? Any nubmer of reasons. If I were not sane I should probably believe it is evidence of some world-wide conspiracy to deceive the public about I don't know what. And I-don't-know-what, because being sane, I lack the requisite deliusional system to fill that in, but I'm sure you could help me out there.
All paranoia aside, CRU have agreed to publish all raw data, so we will be able to see if it is in agreement with the preponderance of evidence with unequivocably establishes AGW.
Now a question for you. Why do you choose to reject very clear science (and survival) in favour of denialist disinformation? Are you stupid? (You don't seem it). Batshit crazy? Ideologically predisposed to disbelieve Science? Just easily taken in by that kind of propaganda? What is your excuse for still not having come to terms with reality?
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_emails%2C_data%2C_models%2C_1996-2009
The link you post to The Telegraph is merely repost of a blog posting from NZ. The graph he posts is clearly wrong: he is objecting to a set of corrections being made to the data, but then turns around and makes *no* corrections. Here is an explanation: http://www.niwa.co.nz/our-science/climate/news/all/niwa-confirms-temperature-rise/combining-temperature-data-from-multiple-sites-in-wellington Weather stations move or are replaced, and patching one timeseries onto another requires figuring out how to handle data collected in different ways at different times. The NZ warming hasn't gone away, and this shrill report is nonsense.
Business As Usual.
Where am i condescending? Overly verbose yes, but that was to avoid getting attacked for leaving anything out.
>The sad fact is you are not much different than him -- you're only parroting other people's opinions.
I'm replying to make the point that it's quite easy to understand the fundamentals of global warming, so ggp and me aren't parroting any more than somebody without an evolutionary biology degree is parroting when they defend evolution. I can't speak for ggp but I personally know what the absorption spectra of carbon looks like and that it is a largely inert gas (i.e it will stay up there for some time), so the only bit of the global warming argument I'm taking on faith is mirco-> macro.Yes the jump from micro to macro is a big one but the data (from multiple sources, not just CRU) tends to suggest that it's happening.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Like my government in Canada complaining that it doesn't want to make a move and give an unfair advantage to china, and then hearing that the EU is having a hard time passing its laws because their industry complains that Canadian companies will have an unfair advantage.
Per person China uses less then a quarter of the emissions than we do and they have been doing it for 100 years less then us! Quite being such big babies!
Speaking of big babies, when industry wants something it makes announcements about brave and bold entrepreneurial spirit etc etc. When faced with a small amount of regulation they cry like old ladies about risk.
We here are an advanced western society. Technologically advanced with a well developed civil society, justice system and financial industry. If we can't handle changing to a carbon free economy who the hell can?
I say grow a pair and live up to your responsibilities.
The problem is that if there is a critical GW problem what will it take to avoid it, will carbon taxes that would demolish the economy fix it, or must more be done at a greater cost. Is the cure more harmful than the problem?
Now if the economy is demolished, that will *really* slow down carbon emissions and reduce the burden on the environment... Woohoo!
Per person China uses less then a quarter of the emissions than we do and they have been doing it for 100 years less then us
Are you paying attention at all? China is going through our last 100 years of growth in roughly a tenth of the time. And they're doing it with a much, much larger population that is hungry for a middle class way of life. They're on track to use more energy than the US and Europe combined, and are devastating their environment like only the Eastern Europeans did under the Soviets. Wake up.
a carbon free economy
Are you actually familar with carbon, as a substance? I take it that you're not.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Look I am not saying that China are eco darlings. I am saying that it is pretty bad form on our part to say that we are not going to clean up our act unless they do. Its childish.
There is much good reading, and listening, concerning the ethics of the situation. http://www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/briefings/data/RSA_summary
China is also far ahead of most of the west (Canada in particular) when it comes to bringing renewables online. They are home to the largest Solar energy company, have the largest solar and wind farms being developed and by all accounts moving faster in that direction than most.
Have their emissions been growing fast? Yes but in the last 25 years they have gone from having 60% of their population living on less then a $1/day to only 10% now. That is also the fastest poverty reduction in the history of the world. Could you imagine the US having 1 in 10 people living on $1/day?
So do you want their politicians to tell those 100 million Chinese still living under $1/day that they have to wait for their electricity due to climate change concerns so that WE can continue living high on the hog for a few more years? And you want this in the name of "fairness"?
Nation states may be where the regulations come from, but the ethics are per person. To be someone spewing our 20+ tons of GHG emissions a year being upset at those dirty Chinese spewing 5 ton each while that drag themselves out of abject poverty is the height of absurdity.
Under Kyoto we were supposed to reduce our emissions by an incredible modest 5.2% of 1990 levels. Instead our (Canada) emissions have gone up over 25%! Hard to demonstrate any kind of moral leadership when we can't even keep our word. I am ashamed for all of us.
btw: "carbon free economy" is short hand for "Green House Gas free energy production". It sure would be hard to have an economy free of all organic compounds.
Since your common sense is so good, I hope you can concentrate for some lines and read (understand!) the following. When you put the Champagne bottle in the ice, the bottles temperature decreases. This doesn't mean that the whole system is not increasing its amount of "heat". In fact, most of the heat brought by the Champagne (and the room) goes *first* in melting the ice in the bucket and for a while (as long as there is ice) the temperature of the bucket is roughly 0C (32F). Once *all*the*ice* is melted then the temperature starts rising. What's happening now with the Earth is (roughly speaking) the same phenomenon. Temperatures ought to increase, but the polar ice caps act as a shock absorber. In fact, data (in all collecting centers) show that the polar ice cap is retreating quite fast. Get it? Enjoy the Champagne while it lasts.
"in the 1980s, "a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue"
That's strange It seems like it was in the late 70's to early 80's that everyone was saying we were going to run out of oil/energy/what not.... and the predictions of imminent ice age/climate change was being proclaimed by certain groups.... hmmm... I guess those groups are always with us. I guess it depends on how less pressing you define it....
FragHARD or don't frag at all
I totally agree with you that a lot of alternative theories don't hold up to scrutiny. But that still doesn't prove AGW. You could disprove 1000 more counter-theories, and that wouldn't prove AGW. The only thing that can prove AGW is future data... And well into the future as well. What pisses me off is that people are talking about the next 50-100 years. Climate happens on the order of 100,000 years, not a few decades.
Actually, that the climate is changing in decades is rather the central point of the theory.
Humans have no sense of the timescale of this planet, and are quite full of themselves to be claiming they are powerful enough to change the course of the planet in just a few years.
Argument from personal disbelief? :)
We cannot make decisions based on computer models, because I have ran fairly accurate computer models that have shown Germany winning WWII (try having the AI face itself in Battlefield 1942, it's a computer simulation based on a limited amount of data). Computer models cannot give us certainty, they can give us a guess (a very educated guess, but a guess) of what MAY happen in the future. If you had to bet your job and life savings on these computer models, I'd bet you wouldn't. Any with cap-and-trade legislation, you may very well be betting your job and life savings.
Every time you cross a bridge, you are trusting your life to a computer model. Now, if you go back and find the modelled prediction from Hansen et al. (google for it, it's not hard to find) you will see that their predictions has held up pretty well for 25+ years. An impressive achievement, in my opinion, and well worth listening to.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Without being scientific about this at all I would say that it is very suspicious that the view contrary to warming theory is almost never presented. It's not as though the skeptics don't have their own scientific experts that doubt that MMGW needs a lot more proof before we radically modify our way of living. http://petitionproject.org/ I am always suspicious when someone tells me that God definitely exists and that the debate over His existence is over. Just as I am equally suspicious of those who tell me that no God exists and that there is no debate about that either. However, I can find plenty of sources on both sides of this debate. It is an open debate with plenty of public discussion from both points of view. What really gives me the creeps is when the MMGW camp tells me that the debate is over but I don't get to even hear the other side's perspective because they aren't even given a platform for debate. The creepy lockstep that all of the news outlets that promote the MMGW's position really...well...creeps me out. All I am saying is that the MMGW folks raise a lot of flags with me (and others I know) because of their seemingly Byzantine approach to their position. These exposed emails don't help.
Ok, this is off topic, but I like how you mentioned crossing a bridge involves trusting your life to a computer model. I happen to be a civil engineer, so yes computer modeling is used to make bridges. However, these computer models are based on centuries of data, and also based on a very tight tolerance of the materials used. If you can show that the atmosphere of the earth is as homogeneous as A36 steel (which is a low grade), I'll eat both my feet. In fact, I'll eat one foot if you can show that the atmosphere is even as close to being accurately modeled as concrete design, which is based on empirical data as opposed to steel's theoretical methods.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
There are plenty of studies, easily found on google. He might believe the experts agree with him, but they don't. This is really no different than IDers saying evolution is bunk, and that science doesn't back up that theory.. even when the overwhelming majority of biologists have come to the same conclusion.
Do your own research, I'm not going to do it for you.
There are more trees now than ever before. Reason = modern forest fire fighting techniques. Before man learned how to fight forest fires they would destroy millions and millions of sq. miles in one swoop.
We also don't need jerks like you trying to justify despotism because of the despotism that already exists.
However, we do need people with a sense of humor, and the ability to recognize humor in others' words.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Do you listen to yourself? They're not spinning, they are trying to find the right words to explain the situation to laypeople such as yourself who obviously do not understand the first thing about the basic science behind it all.
I get the impression that you think ridiculous and unwarranted attacks are preferable to discussion. No wonder you agree that spin is good. Any tactic to win, right? The goal of science is for your team to win, after all.
dude, what coaxial said pretty much matches my understanding of the situation. The science on global warming/AGC is solid. I've been following it since the 1980's and I have yet to see anyone present a convincing argument for something other than CO2 for most of climate change that has occurred since I was born. The world of 2100 is going to be very different than it is currently no matter how well we respond to the problem and the question is will our complex civilization survive the changes that are coming?
At some level, we as scientists trust one another to not fudge things
Well, we have evidence of fudging the data. Confessions of fudging are in the code! From a report by the Science & Public Policy Institute: Climategate: Caught Green-Handed! (PDF) See Page 8, Example 2.
and the peer review process should take care of most of that.
Peer reviewing does nothing for integrity when you ignore the peer reviewers' comments, or you get to choose the reviewers!
It doesn't matter if GW or climate change is real or not, as we are heading towards bigger and better problems as we consume more food than we produce. We've been doing it for a few years now, and barring another "green miracle", which this time may have most of us eating algae brewed in vats, we're going to find out that Malthus was right, only off by a few years
Why is this even on SlashDot?... Why is this even on Slashdot?...Why is this even on Slashdot?
I dont' know. but when I read stuff like this it makes me wonder. I am not a scientist and I dont' trust them on either side. but this is interesting http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
Pollution control isn't about spending five cents more on your Happy Meal toy, it's about getting to enjoy a middle class living instead of farming shit for a living.
Whatever feel-good economy-crippling regulations you enforce on developed countries, it won't mean jack for the planet until someone makes it cheaper for China use solar panels than coal. Because when you're just trying to make a decent life for yourself, whether the world might be 1 degree hotter in fifty years or not isn't something you worry about.