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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.
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.
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?
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.
You might be correct, except that the US is more responsible than China and the UK/Japan are hardly innocent either.
This is less an act of war or one-sided recklessness, and more something akin to a bunch of ignorant fools drinking liquor and shooting their guns into the air not knowing that the rounds will return to the earth and strike them in the head.
(I will pre-empt the 'well the US does it more efficiently than China' responses with an I DON'T GIVE A CRAP because that is like us all sitting in a hot tub and we all kinda poop in it, but I poop the most and then I say "well, I really needed to and it felt better to me")
Every industrialized nation is to blame here.
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.
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.
Each American produces over 4 times the CO2 emissions of each Chinese person. (Directly comparing Nations of vastly different populations is absurd; by that standard Jamaica could argue our total emissions should equal theirs).
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
"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.
In fact, part of the information allegedly taken from these researchers is source code, and it's revealing. It helps reveal the significance of an e-mail about a "trick" done with the data.
Revive the Constitution.
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.
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.
Which was more or less addressed because we stopped pumping ozone-destroying chemicals into the atmosphere. Anti-AGCC people always being up "well, the ozone layer didn't turn out to be a problem" line, forgetting that the reason it's not a problem is that we legislated CFCs and such out of existence. Acid rain similar: it's less of an issue because we did something to fix it. AGCC is, unfortunately, much harder to quick-fix
The reason this stuff gets whipped up isn't the "Bilderberger manipulators" but a media that's addicted to thirty-second soundbites. Respectable scientists aren't the ones running feature pieces about how the Maldives will disappear or we could be looking at another prarie dustbowl: that's the media's need to parley anything and everything into a alarmist pablum* deal because reprinting the IPCC studies directly does not sell advertising space for used car dealers and mattress stores. At best, we get grade-six science textbook diagrams and selective quoting, and even that's pushing what the media thinks people can digest before the sports scores.
And this, of course, leads to simplistic retorts like "It's the sun!" or "Climate is cyclical!" because the sum of the data isn't commonly presented. Do you think that all the hundreds of people who hold Ph.D's on this stuff wouldn't notice the big, hot ball in the sky, or haven't done core extractions? Do you really think that they've overlooked things that obvious and just handed right-wing soapboxers such an easy mark? Really?
* Yes, this includes, notably, Al Gore. On one hand, he's done a good job getting the memo out. On the other, he's a lightning rod because people a) they hate anything Rush Limbaugh tells them to and b) he's simplified the science to the point where people who don't know better can poke holes in it and think they're right.
--srj/mmv
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
There wont be any more presents from Santa. His house will sink when the ice melts.
I don't therefore I'm not.
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?
Every industrialized nation is to blame here.
Yeah and the dirt farmers that burn thousands of acres of forest are completely blameless. People are to blame here. Interestingly enough, there is a solution to the people problem...
The solution, of course, is to set up a global despotic government, just as proposed in the Copenhagen protocol. History has shown that tyrannical leaders can kill 10-15% of their populations, and often suffer no repercussions at all. With the NWO proposed by the Copenhagen treaty the new tyrants could do away with a billion or more people, and solve this problem.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
You forgot one: Global warming occurs regardless of man.
What then?
Money is the root of all evil?
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."
Then we probably shouldn't compound the issue with CO2?
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.
No one disagrees that the earth's climate varies a great deal over any long period of time you care to look at. The question is, if the world is warming at the moment (and over a scale of tens of years, it is), then is this due to man-made causes, and is it happening far faster then it could due purely to natural causes? Furthermore, if the temperature is pushed up, will the effects become decidedly non-linear, in that the processes that regulate climate will themselves change and some (quite different ) equilibrium become the norm? The modeling and experimentation suggests that pumping CO2 into the atmosphere will have a warming effect, though how CO2 interacts with the various climate regulatory and feedback processes is extremely complicated and there's a great deal of work to do. The further question of altering the equilibrium state of the climate (which could be utterly disastrous for civilization, and a great many current species of life on this planet) is even trickier to answer, but there's plenty of good evidence to suggest this could happen (including in the geological record, so we know it is possible).
I am not a climate scientist, but I do know that in my own field it takes about 10 to 15 years to get really useful at anything. Therefore I am loath to make some quick contrary claim to someone who has spent many years thinking about something. Nearly everyone I have encountered who dismisses AGW is either pretty ignorant about doing science (that's fine, I am sure they are good at other things - it's unrealistic to believe scientific literacy could be universal), or are just plainly unable to contemplate or accept the changes required in the organisation of human affairs (even though these changes would also happen in the absence of global warming), or are just full of anti-environmental politics for various delusional reasons of their won.
Interstitial spaces are filled with cream.
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?
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.
I don't remember the cooling theory in the 70s, but I remember the ozone hole from the 80s pretty well. In my home state of Tasmania it was a bit of an issue, as it should have been in all the southern places of the world. There were scares about sunburn and skin cancer (which is still an issue), and cool satellite images of a blobby shape over Antarctica. There's a pretty solid link between UV radiation and cancer, and given the ozone layer's role in blocking UV, it was the beginnings of a real problem.
And then the whole world moved away from chloro-fluorocarbons as a propellant, giving the ozone layer time to rebuild through normal processes. It's mostly better now, and is a good example of the whole planet solving an environmental problem before it got any worse.
It's odd that you should use it in the opposite way - as an unfounded scare. You're completely wrong on that one. And the lines of code referred to in your link were apparently commented out, based on tree rings and used to produce a poster, not a scientific graph. The whole case is shaky for both sides - no-one is looking good right now. One side has stupidly lost its data (either wilful stupidity or an attempt to hide the truth) while the other is trawling for any word or email to take out of context (lay-people cannot read a few emails and somehow gain all the knowledge and context of an entire field of science).
No-one looks good right now, and as I've said, your post has its own problems. Perhaps you might like to reconsider your absolute certainty.
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
If we're adjusting the climate to suit humans, +6 to +10C should do it. That moves the arable zone closer to the irrigatable land. +13C would be bearable. Too much over that would be bad.
That leaves a large uninhabitable equatorial zone though. Most of Florida and many coastal cities will have to go. Most extant humans (India, Pakistan and China) would have to move North as their regions became uninhabitable. It would happen slow enough for the displaced to walk and forage on the way.
Even that doesn't prevent the Malthusian catastrophe but it does delay it for half a century or so. If we're not adjusting the climate to suit humans, well, we're screwed that much quicker.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
And each American produces almost 8 times the GNP of their Chinese counterpart. So by that standard, each Chinese produces about TWICE the CO2 per unit of economic output as his American counterpart. China needs to clean up its act.
"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.
The text you quote says
"Show the Briffa et al reconstruction through to its end; don't stop in 1960. Then comment and deal with the "divergence problem" if you need to. Don't cover up the divergence by truncating this graphic. This was done in IPCC TAR; this was misleading (comment ID #: 309-18)"
Whoever wrote that described truncating the graphic as 'misleading', not fradulent or sinister. The author also implicitly agreed with the premise of questioning the data, at least, by suggesting that the data in question be commented on for clarification.
The divergence problem itself is explained here - in short, tree-ring data used is used as a proxy for temperature but data for North America 'diverges' from other readings around the middle of the 20th century. And though I have no idea how reliable that blog is, it seems like it is the same issue referred to in this article in The Economist, where that (sober and well informed) newspaper states
Hence the eagerness with which bloggers fell on one of the stolen e-mails, sent in 1999 by Phil Jones, the CRU's director: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." Trickery associated with Dr Mann was catnip to the sceptics. But Dr Jones has clarified that "The word trick was used here colloquially as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward." The "hiding" concerned the decision to leave out a set of tree-ring-growth data that had stopped reflecting local temperature changes. That alteration in growth pattern is strange, and unexplained, but eliminating it is not sinister.
Got anything else?
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
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 ...
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.
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.
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!
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.
So, if you make more junk, you get to destroy the environment for anyone else? That's pretty strange logic. It's ok that I'm dumping chemicals in your water table, because I'm making a really big TV. It's ok that I'm acidifying the seas, because I'm doing it to make myself a really expensive SUV.
Perhaps you should develop an economy that isn't based on pollution. If you can't do that, then maybe your capitalist model is flawed.
It just happened to stop reflecting temperature for one period for reasons unknown, a period where we had thermometer records to check against. But you know, we will continue to assume (for reasons unknown) that the series reflects temperature back in time, in those periods where we don't have thermometer temperatures to check against. Riiiight.
Put it to you this way. You make 10 predictions. 5 of them come true, and 5 turn out false. You now hide the 5 that came out false. You present the 5 that came true as your original 5 predictions, and everyone believes you got it right 100% of the time. Your predictions are therefore highly reliable. A sceptic comes along and steals your private notebook. Therein he finds not just the 5 predictions that came true, but the whole 10 including the 5 you got wrong. You now appear to be someone who gets it right only 50% of the time (ie. like any naive unskilled person would). When questioned, you and your buddies say, in respectable sounding academic language, "it would have been inappropriate to show all 10 predictions." Riiiight.
Let's assume your numbers are correct, and that we have the highly simplified situation that you describe, with a simple absorption-reradiation day-night cycle.
Now, take a 100-year period. What difference between energy absorption and radiation do we need to induce in order to make the air temperature increase by 1 degree C, assuming no change in albedo? That's simple - it's the total energy required (1273 J/m3) divided by the time period (3e9 seconds), which is roughly 0.4e-6 W/m3 or, in other words, half a billionth of the incident energy. That's an order of magnitude which puts the effect in the "plausible, but needs verifying" range for me, and not something to be dismissed out of hand.
Actually they don't. At least, not in that graph. It's an optical illusion. Open the image in an image editor and draw vertical lines; you'll see that the peaks of CO2 and temperature match perfectly, which tells us nothing about causation whatsoever.
That's right. Assume we are heating the planet by adding carbon dioxide; it's made worse by the extra water vapour chucked into the atmosphere by the excess heat.
That's irrelevant. We're not producing energy. The argument is that we've artificially increased the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 30%ish.
It's 25%ish we (might be able to) influence as opposed to 70%ish we can't. I don't view that as "minimal".
The human-driven change in methane levels has had one third the effect of human-driven changes in carbon dioxide levels. Yes, methane can *potentially* be really nasty, but comparatively it hasn't been - yet. Insert your standard "methane sink going critical" apocalyptic scare story here; there are more than enough to go around.
That avenue's a bust, unfortunately.
That tells us very little. All we know there is that something changed. The equatorial temperature *appears to have* increased, with a corresponding drop at the poles. What we definitely do know is that a chaotic system underwent dramatic change, which is not exactly surprising in itself.
Not really, given a) the above, and b) a sound physical hypothesis for man-made warning.
Reality is the ultimate Rorschach.
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."
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.
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."
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.
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?
"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.
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.
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.
I saw it! It was on TV!
You need a re-introduction to the Socratic definition of "knowledge".
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell