Slashdot Mirror
Dutch Agency Admits Mistakes In UN Climate Report
Hugh Pickens writes "The AP reports that the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency has taken the blame for one of the glaring errors that undermined the credibility of a seminal, 3,000-page UN report last year on climate change, and disclosed that it had discovered more small mistakes. However, the review by the agency also claims that none of the errors affected the fundamental conclusion by a UN panel of scientists: that global warming caused by humans already is happening and is threatening the lives and well-being of millions of people. The Dutch agency reported in 2005 that 55 percent of the Netherlands is below sea level, when only 26 percent is. The second previously reported error claimed the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, which the Dutch agency partly traced to a report on the likely shrinking of glaciers by the year 2350. The original report also said global warming will put 75 million to 250 million Africans at risk of severe water shortages in the next 10 years, but a recalculation showed that range should be 90 million to 220 million. The analysis said future IPCC reports should have a more robust review process, and should look more closely at where information comes from."
All this means is that scientists are in fact humans and make small errors just like everyone else. I'm just glad that scientific academies and agencies have the integrity to publicly admit when they're wrong in spite of the obvious fear-mongering and finger-pointing that will result from the anti-AGW camp.
I suppose they will redefine the word robust as well now.
Keep hiding that decline, boys. Wouldn't want anybody to realize that we are in a global cooling snap and have been for a decade now.
When calculating using humidex, it's fucking 42 celsius and I'm way up north in Canada.
Americans don't know what "hot weather" means, their humidity levels are too low.
When I think about the year 2350 I think about Fireaxis and SMAC.
Global Warming: The Y2K Scare for the New Century.
Check it out, it's a seminal report.
Huh huh huh, shut up, Beavis.
In reports of this size, there will always be small errors. The problem is that right wing bloggers trumpet these up to raise doubts about the basic science, and then fox news et. al. broadcast this even further. The result is a complete disaster: people will not make the sacrifices needed to stop climate change if they have doubts about whether it is happening. A great example is leakegate, where the Sunday Telegraph used a tiny citation error to suggest a conspiracy of scientists to falsify evidence of global warming (the UN report cited another report which contained the peer reviewed work, rather than directly citing the peer reviewed work). Eventually, the Telegraph retracted their article, but not before the damage was done. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/06/leakegate-a-retraction/ As Mark Twain said, lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on...
Deconstruct the State
Nobody buys the idea that it's a scam anymore...
It's not one small error, it's a massive, brain-dead (or malicious) methodological error. Go to the IPCC report, check out WGII, and look at the citations page. It is so full of non-scientific, non-peer-reviewed references that as a scientific document it is practically worthless. A lot of them to WWF which however admirable the work it does may be (hey, who's not in favor of saving pandas really?), is still an advocacy group not a research group. It is really pathetic how horribly put together WGII was, just shameful.
Fortunately WGI was put together significantly more reliably, and each section is typically written by the top scientists in their respective fields, and includes both scientists who are smeared as 'believers' and 'deniers.' I say it is fortunate because WGI is such a convenient way to educate yourself on the scientific issues surrounding global warming, it would be bad if it were similarly corrupted.
Qxe4
"Keep hiding that decline, boys. Wouldn't want anybody to realize that we are in a global cooling snap and have been for a decade now."
Really. Such fools as you should be put against the wall and shot. Then buried with the stake through heart, just to be sure.
The garbage you're spewing is based on a simple fact of 1998 being a statistical fluke. However, the last year is the _hottest_ year on records and beats 1998. So no, there's just no global cooling. There are just stupid fools who don't understand the basics.
it's only 15 million more on the lower end and possble 15 million less on the top end. Whats 15 million between friends.
>>>Saying that Africa is going to have water shortages in 10 years and then say it might be 220 million years is more than a small error.
Always frakking everything up.
Oh.
Wait.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
None of us fucking ignorant idiots who are incapable of thinking for ourselves buy the idea that it's a scam anymore...
FTFY
How do people like this figure out to use computers? Also, you've misspelled 'modded' in your sig.
Interesting.
55% to 26% is a small error? Sounds like double to me. I'm not going to deny that climate change is happening, its happened for millions of years. I've seen layers of sandstone with sea shells it them, in the next foot of rock above there was petrified wood. From sea to forest in a short geological time span and back then humans weren't around. We may see climate change on such scales, that doesn't frighten me, we can adapt. The thing that does frighten me is politicians who use climate change as a platform to push whatever agenda they please.
"none of the errors affected the fundamental conclusion by a UN panel of scientists" but it did affect the fundamental conclusion of the public as a whole. If you want the entire planet to shift the way it lives, to spend more money and get less for it, then "small errors" likes these are anything but small and completely unacceptable. Measure twice, cut once.
No mention of the 6,475,248 correct statements in the report.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
All this means is that scientists are in fact humans and make small errors just like everyone else.
Well actually, overstating by 200% the amount of land underwater in a small country is not really a "small" error.
Some of the other errors are small, true. But it's hard to put a lot of faith the conclusion is correct when so many other little things are wrong. If the report is not consistent in accuracy throughout, trusting the result because they claim to have found "none of the errors actually matter" is not reassuring. It comes off more as sounding like, they already know what the conclusion should be, so the science was just there as window dressing to scare you good and proper.
It would be nice if other scientists could examine the data themselves to see in fact if there are not any errors that actually matter...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If the climate miraculously stops changing and steadies at current levels, and even if it is so predictable that we can evacuate places before storms hit, there will still be millions of people starving because the population keeps growing and the planet and its resources doesn't.
So meh to climate change. A few thousand people can live in a desert or tundra, 20 billion cannot.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
The Netherlands is 26% below sea level?
It's interesting how this fact is not disastrous to the Dutch. Why do we expect it to be disastrous to other people? I guess the Dutch must be some sort of super-men. Either that, or people adapt to difficulties and humanity is resilient.
The problem is that right wing bloggers trumpet these up to raise doubts about the basic science
Oh there's a far greater problem, it's people like you willing to whitewash inaccuracies and the inability for people to review the data used to reach the conclusion they claim is accurate. To just blow past that and still claim there's even science going on, much less that it is sound, is pretty incredible to me on a site where people are otherwise very level-headed about technical matters.
If you can't peer review, it's not science. If you're theory cannot actually predict anything but the past, that's not a good theory and you need to go back to the drawing board.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's not going to change the fundamental fact that no one is currently nor will so in the future do anything about global warming.
If you pick 1998 as the year to start, then yes, temperatures have declined from that extraordinary El Nino weather pattern.
Similarly, I can say that the economy has been roaring since late 2008 - the stock market is up over 30%! Or I can say the economy has been suffering since early 2008 - the market is down over 40%! Both cases are a little misleading, and not only because the Dow Jones has little to do with the real economy.
Global air and sea temperatures are on average going up, and have been doing so for decades. The US military is planning for the defense of the northwest passage. The USA, Russia, and Canada have already started bickering over the ownership of resources under the ice pack in the Arctic Ocean.
Something tells me that all of these things are not just coincidence.
The current debate over global warming is not unlike the debate over evolution, which is to say, there really isn't any rational debate, only people whose vested interests are threatened by the conclusions of science who are desperately grasping at straws to deny settled facts. In the case of evolution, the vested interest is an emotional attachment to long-discredited Bronze Age superstitions, while climate change deniers feel their (unsustainable) wealth and convenience are threatened by the growing recognition that those things cannot go on unchanged without risking our continued existence. As a result, each new fact added to the edifice of evolutionary theory, as with climate theory, leads to a perverse demand that science fill in the ever shrinking gaps. In the case of evolution-deniers, the gaps are now so small that they have been reduced to all but demanding a running video record of speciation. Climate change deniers have a little more wiggle room, the risk of global warming having been recognized for only sixty or so years now, but even they have been reduced to positing the existence of a global conspiracy of climatologists to rule the world.
It would be funny if the threats we faced were not both urgent and existential.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Americans don't know what "hot weather" means, their humidity levels are too low.
I lived in Houston for a few years. They know plenty about heat AND humidity, thank you very much... as does most of the south and much of the east.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
None of us fucking ignorant idiots who are incapable of thinking for ourselves buy the idea that it's a scam anymore...
FTFY
Why so many adjectives on 'idiots'? Did think that 'ignorant idiots' or 'fucking idiots' wasn't far enough considering how little citation or evidence or you know, just words outside of an acronym, you seem to want to provide ... ?
Interesting.
But, if we are honest, most of this is not about the science buy about the policy decisions. We are still reeling from the bad science that meant we could no longer increase yields by spraying crops with DDT just because a few radical scientists created massive birds deaths, like liberals caused the gulf oil spill to stop oil drilling. Or overstating the effects of lead on children, or asbestos, to destroy those industries and destroy capitalism. We all know that scientist don't really do science, but spend all their time trying to destroy democracy and all that is good.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Research groups are merely advocacy groups who do a better job of keeping their funding sources secret.
The current debate over global warming is not unlike the debate over evolution, which is to say, there really isn't any rational debate.
Exactly what many of us have been saying, how is it rational to believe in a conclusion based on data they will not let you see? Or to present a "scientific" paper laden with non-scientific articles from advocacy groups meant to make you envision a world without glaciers and the like... that's not a report, that's a movie script.
In the end scientific fact will win through, and we'll figure out how much of the warming trend is indeed caused by humans. Sadly these setbacks have cost years and a lot of credibility with the public, which they will have to win back carefully if they truly care about the environment.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I mean, come 'on. :)
The do ate the homework is more believable than this.
If there were not billions of dollars at stake - maybe I would just ignore it (not believe it), but no way this was a mistake.
If you pick 1998 as the year to start, then yes, temperatures have declined from that extraordinary El Nino weather pattern.
And, if you go back to the end of the last ice age, you'll also see a warming trend. Long before the industrial age and man-made CO2 emissions.
And again, if you go back to the beginning of the Pliocene Epoch, you'll find that the Earth has cooled since then.
What's your point?
"You're a fucking idiot because you disagree with me" == "Insightful"
Awesome.
Oh, only 220 Africans are i the danger of dying a slow, painful death; thats so much different from 250 million.
Let me spell it out clearly:
a) the IPCC report is not a peer reviewed journal; if you want to have it more valid, introduce peer review. In the scientific part that took place, however the biggest problems are in the part where the consequences are described not by scientists, but collected by social and political sciences.
b) the IPCC report is meant to be a basis for politics. There are few things on which politics is based which are really quantified. As a scientist this pisses me off, but i consider the IPCC report a minor sin in that respect. You really believe that political decisions can be made down to a level where the fact if 220 million people may die of thirst or 250 milion people may die of thirst would make a difference? Will they now start to prepare emergency measures? will they now plans for building wells and larger caverns differently to provide them a mean to survive? Or will we in the end just count the deaths there, congratulate ourself that the civilized world helped to save 1 Million people there? Politics is full of symbolic decisions, compromises between lobby groups etc.? Pensions, school systems, military actions; all these are field where you can watch politician making uninformed, intentionally uninformed, or even intentional decisions not based on valid science, but plainly on the feeling they want to induce in Joe the plumbers stomach or the opinions of the lobbyists paying for their advertisements.
c) so let me condense the message to the level needed by politics: 1) the best scientific estimates say we will get a changed climate; we may be lucky and the change may be significant, but minor; or we may be unlucky and the change will be mayor, if we continue like the last 100 years. 2) Its a good idea to limit our effect on the climate and stop burning the carbon sequestred in million of years in a century. 3) We have to develop technologies and scociety structure to deal with this. 4) we could develop technologies to do large-scale geoengineering, but carefully.
d) Last but not least - also as a scientist i have to criticize the role of the media. It is cynical that every time that some strong, but still withing statistical deviation, storm hits the USA, Europe, or Canada they will have some (self-declared) "climate expert" without formal qualification (sometimes from man environmental organization) who will tell them that this storm is due to the climate change. Usually this person will be introduced with a sentence like "Mr. x will tell us about how these storms are affected by climate change" instead of "we will talk to Mr. x. who is working for Organization y. He will tell us what he figured from secondary literature which he carefully selected to fit the sensationalist viewpoint required to get some airtime. He/she has nof fucking idea about even elementary physics, which is why he took this badly paid job as a NGO spokesperson" It is cynical that the same media two weeks later will have an "expert" who tells to the people that everything is not so bad; the Himalaya glaciers will not come down next year and no big wave will hit New York (which is right), so everybody just go on consuming fuel. Parts of the IPCC report where then taken from the Media, which influenced the non-scientific part. I can only say: Dear Jornalists, how fucking cynical do you have to be to Ignore possibly tens of millions of people dying just for the more sensationalist picture of a city hit by a hurricane, explaining how *this* Hurrican was made by Humans (which is a funny claim, similar to Astrology)
The IPCC report contains over six thousand factual assertions. Only 3 or 4 have been shown to be inaccurate, and they're all to do with the implications of GW. Not one of the assertions supporting the causes of AGW have been demonstrated to be inaccurate.
The errors in your comment show a serious lack of quality in your own research, and it sounds more like you've been believing in someone rather than trusting and verifying.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
We'd be building nuclear power plants left and right. The fact that they aren't leads to one conclusion: they're not really concerned about carbon emissions and are just using scare tactics to impose their will upon the rest of us.
Just as a quick reminder, this report is talking about errors in the Working Group II report (the effects of climate change), and not the Working Group I report (the physical basis of climate change).
The errors discussed here don't call into question the physical basis of the fact that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere increases the greenhouse effect; they have to do with the question of what the effects of the warming will. (And even there, I'll point out that the WG-II errors in question are from misquoting the research, or in quoting sources that don't refer to actual research at all-- they don't seem to be errors in the original science sources.)
It's easy enough to get this confused, since most of the media reports don't distinguish the reports-- don't even seem to know that there is not just one report being discussed.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
actually gave a shit about carbon emissions, they'd be advocating building nuclear power plants on an unprecedented scale. They're not. Combined with the shenanigans and scare tactics pulled, there can be only one conclusion: there is no cataclysmic crisis in the making, they're just part of a new type of religion that wants to exercise control over people.
While it is true that the situation would be better if we hadn't listened to them in the eighties and had built more nukes and less coal-fired plants, the fact remains that we are in this situation due to their short-sightedness and unrealistic expectations. Taking more advice from these retards is not the way forward.
These IPCC errors? They affect some implications, not the cause or the many other implications of AGW. CRU's data, their methodologies, their peer-review process? All vindicated by three independent inquiries. Any other inaccuracies you were thinking of?
If you want to challenge the mountain of good science that's been done on AGW, you're going to have to use better science, certainly more than vague, sweeping, unsubstantiated accusations. Though that seems sufficient for all too much of the public today.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Well said.
The technology to generate energy with little or no carbon output is already here. Nuclear power. In a couple of decades it could provide most of the electrical needs for the entire world. We were given this incredible technology, and we refused to expand our use of it.
If a fission power plant will stop a large part of our carbon footprint (imagine a world without coal power plants)... why have we not started to build them?
That's interesting.
The current debate over global warming is not unlike the debate over evolution, which is to say, there really isn't any rational debate.
Exactly what many of us have been saying, how is it rational to believe in a conclusion based on data they will not let you see?
I would like to point out the the fundamental physics is not only open-source, it is over a hundred years old. The detailed calculation of the effects of carbon dioxide, Manabe and Wetherald (1967), is forty-three years old, and you can and should repeat it for yourself. There are many global circulation models (the detailed numerical models of the thermal balance of the atmosphere), and most of them are open source-- you can go to the MIT GCM page, for example, and download the code and run it yourself. The most detailed models, with millions of nodes, will require a supercomputer-- but they are nevertheless open source, and you can get them, if you like, and find a supercomputer to run them on. And there is literally terabytes of satellite data available-- at the moment there are seventeen Earth-orbital missions taking important climate data. The thermal balance of the Earth is getting to be something that's measured with exquisite precision.
Even the historical climate data that you're talking about-- I assume you mean the sources for the CRU historical meteorological graphs-- is available. You do remember (or did you actually know?) that the data under discussion was a collection of meteorological data from outside sources (the CRU didn't generate the data, they just collated it.) If you want to go dig it up from the same sources yourself-- you are free to do s
Or to present a "scientific" paper laden with non-scientific articles from advocacy groups...
That's nice, except this is a discussion of errors in the Working Group II report, it's not a "scientific" paper (your quotes, not mine) at all, it doesn't even pretend to be a scientific paper. The working group II report was a summary of what the predicted effects are. The science of global warming is in the Working Group I report.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
If they couldn't write an accurate report the size of IPCC report, they should have written a smaller one. This report is a big deal, politicians are using as a guide for dramatic changes to the world's economy. I'm not saying it has to be perfect. But sloppiness and carelessness in unacceptable for something like this, and it is easy to keep the scope of a report small enough to ensure that every assertion made is accurate and meaningful.
I would also like to point out, the last couple of meetings I find it curious they need to spend as others have pointed out, almost 10's of millions on security to hold a climate conference?
Why?
Also, why do you have to spend 1 billion in security at the G20 if you are "good people" trying to do the world good.
-Hackus
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Ironically, it is due to environmentalism.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
My head still isn't big enough to think that I can hurt a planet. Sorry, just no. I'm also not confident enough in any prediction that's made for 300 years in the future. Try predicting a soccer game first. But more than anything, worrying about people in africa having a water shortage is just insane. First, that's their problem, welcome to irrigation, it's not new. and second, tehy live in a desert. The fact that they've had water this long is impressive, but they weren't exactly swimming in it. So really, I don't care about the amount of water in a desert.
Deal with today's problems today. They aren't global warming.
And as for problems in general, as I've said countless times before, capitalist societies do not achieve solutions by shrinking problems. That's how dictator and faschist governments solve problems. Capitalist societies solve problems by making those very problems much much larger -- because capitalist societies win the award for sparking the greatest creativity. And when there's money to be made, people get creative.
When capitalist societies use capitalism to solve problems, the problems are delayed nor postponed, they are entirely eliminated. That's good.
But yes, first the problem has to get big enough to be worth eliminating -- not 10% smaller so it'll last longer.
Global warming is the big one. You can reduce your carbon footprints by 50% all you like. More people are born every year, and more third-world countries are developing industry and you can't control China from the .U.S.A.. So your 50% reduction in whatever will merely postpone the inevitable by 5 years. It would be WAY better to grow the problem now, ten-fold, before the population does it for you. Get it eliminated sooner.
But few people properly remember the advantages of a capitalist environment. Few people ever learned. Most think that democracy and capitalism are the same. They aren't. They have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Case in point: you can democratically elect a socialist dictator.
Go figure.
The denialists are hypocrites when it comes to accuracy. Hypocrisy persists because the self remains unexamined. Hypocrites always piss of people. We will destroy this world because of the tyranny of ignorance.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Watch this typical example of how the anti-AGW camp operates. The journal "Nature" has said that scientists are in a street-fight. I mean, wtf? You'd think that people would be interested in what scientists have to say, but actually, we have reason on one side, and a dangerous delusional psychotic lunatic on the other side. Of course the delusional psychotic lunatic is going to engage in mirror-image projections to defend its ego.
So sad. So pointless.
We will destroy this world, because of our ignorance.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The priests don't mind being insulted. It's when they're being insulted for either entirely bogus or painfully trivial reasons that they get irked. For example, complaining about part of a report not using primary scientific sources when ... that part wasn't supposed to use only primary scientific sources and it specifically said so.
Putting it more bluntly, the "priests" will chuckle over a good, deserved insult as much as anyone, but these ones are just pathetic. No cookie.
There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production - with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas - parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia - where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree - a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.
To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather....
OOOPS!... sorry, I mistakenly was quoting scientific data from the 1970's with regards to Global Cooling. Nothing to see here I guess, just forget I ever mentioned this. Thank goodness we have honest reporting and scientific fact finding these days, nothing like an apocalyptic blast from the past eh? Now don't forget to stay scared and make sure you let your state agencies dictate how much you eat and what temperature you can keep your house at.
I'm sure they'll get it right with Global Warming this time!! Maybe we'll even die because of it in 10 years!
The magical number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I just love armchair environmentalists - you know, condo-living yuppies who might venture outside of their six-block down-town metropolis life once a year (to vacation to another city). Save the environment, please!!
I spend a great deal of time in very remote wilderness areas, and the thing that constantly amazes me is how life covers every square inch of our planet. Has for billions of years. No matter how harsh the environment, or what a particular area gets dealt in terms of weather that year, life always adapts. I've seen stories here in Canada (no references) that Polat Bears are adapting to less sea ice, and it's no surprise to me. We are making WAY too big of a deal out of a minute percentage change in temperatures year to year, the real world hands it much worse most of the time, and life pulls through fine.
What are we worrying about?
is human
That's not entirely true. I am a nobody and I totally believe it is a scam. I am over 50 years old and am relatively smart. I have seen so many of these types of things from the general scientific community in the past. The general consensus in the past, agreed on by the majority of scientist not working for the oil company, was that at our 1975 rate of oil consumption we would run out of oil by 1990. How many scientist are still supporting that idea? Come on, there was the Ozone hole that would take hundreds of years to close if we did the right thing, there was acid rain, death of half the world's population from aids, millions of deaths from H1N1 this last flu season, etc. etc. It has been going on for decades and when you get older you will look back on this and say to your kids, naw, the damn sun ain't gonna nova in a few years, it's just those damn crazy scientists.
All our views are based on faith - mine, yours, the media and bloggers, the politicians and the general public.
The only people in this world whose views are not based in faith are the people who have actually viewed the data, and who have studied the field sufficiently to make the most valid interpretations of said data. We call these people "climatologists", and guess what? The overwhelming majority of them agree: AGW is Real, and it is a Big Problem.
My own study inclines me to agree with them, but that is neither here nor there. Since I don't have the experience to judge sufficiently for myself, I choose to have faith in the consensus of virtually all the experts in the field, and not in the ramblings of uninformed and frequently obviously wrong armchair bloggers.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
When was the last time you heard a climate change denier admit to a mistake?
As I understand it, one theory says humans cause global warming... seems like;
1. The Earth warms up.
2. Profit!
3. Global Warming(tm) kills humans.
I guess people are just pissed off about step 2. I might be missing something about underpants gnomes or don't have the order quite right, but overall, it sounds like a self correcting problem.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The point is that there is more to science than just picking points in the data and fitting a curve. To draw scientific conclusions about a climate temperature trend, you also need to demonstrate support for a physical mechanism that could plausibly be forcing the trend. If people want to argue that we we are experiencing a recent cooling trend, they need to show data that supports a physical cause for the cooling. Otherwise, as you point out, it's just competitive cherry picking.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Seriously.
"We fucked up. Didn't review our data closely enough. We didn't care if it was wrong. But our overall premise is still 127-43/33rds% right!"
It's these kind of stupid-ass shenanigans that have people distrusting scientists nowadays.
The only excuse for this sort of sloppiness is the current climate (pun unintended) in the scientific community right now. Anything with the right "social" vetting bypasses any sort of rigorous checking before being released to the public.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
No, the reason why people do not believe in science is that then some agenda-pushing idiot writes a newspaper article which publicizes this error without putting it in proper context.
Mistakes will happen, we are just humans. Less openness (what you suggest in the end) will not help it, nor will it help build more trust.
Isn't it yet the right time climate astrologers, alchemists and futuretellers at least attempt to pretend integrity?
Some proper references for you
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=greenman3610&hl=en&gl=US#p/u/15/XB3S0fnOr0M
http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm
I'd like to pick that one apart.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
It's important to note that 26% of The Netherlands is below the CURRENT sea level, it does not take into account any projected rises in sea level. The 55% that was mentioned in the report is the area of The Netherlands that is currently under threat of flooding from breaches in the sea defences as well as current surges in river levels. I live in The Netherlands and those conclusions are already pretty damn frightening and they do not take into account ANY projections regarding sea level or river level rises caused by global warming!
A few months ago there was a hearing in the Dutch parliament in which most of the Dutch contributors of the IPCC report were present as well as outspoken sceptics. This hearing was very interesting for several reasons:
1. The difference in attitude between the IPCC contributors and the sceptics. The contributors to IPCC were open to debate, gave realistic assessments of the weaknesses in the IPCC methodology, gave recommendations on improving those methodologies and reflected on the need for improvements on their part in communicating the scope of the problem and the underlying science to the public. They were open to reasonable criticisms and recommendations from the politicians and sceptics present. The sceptics on the other hand took quite the opposite stance. They mostly kept repeating formulaic criticisms which for the most part had already been debunked, were not receptive to any criticism leveled at them despite the remarkably civil tone in which those were uttered by the IPCC contributors and generally appeared to lack ability to reflect on weaknesses or factual errors in their point of view. the difference was really quite striking. I had not expected to be as impressed as I was by the general civil, almost humble stance and attitude of the IPCC contributors.
2. The politicians who were there who are outspoken sceptics made fools of themselves on several occassions despite the general civil tone of the answers and then gradually stopped asking questions altogether except for ones directed at the sceptics.
3. There was one very interesting contribution by a Dutch researcher who was specialized in the relationship between scientific research and policy making who said that with the science at it's current level of understanding of the problem there is no fundamental problem in the science but a fundamental problem in the general aproach of politicians to this type of problem. What he said was that with problems as complicated as global warming (and global warming is by no means the only problem of this level of complexity that is going to come our way in the next few decades) the level of accuracy, confidence in the conclusions of the scientific process and the level of general agreement on those conclusions that many politicians demand before they are willing to take action is way above any threshold that can realistically be crossed. In other words no matter how good the science on problems of this level of complexity there will ALWAYS be outspoken sceptics, large margins of error, pretty high levels of uncertainty regarding the accuracy of the models and large problems in predicting the future dangers resulting from the problem. This is not a problem inherent in the science, it is a problem inherent in the level of complexity of the problem that will never be fully resolved by better science. His advice was that politicians should start acting now and that the policies they implemented should be flexible enough to respond and adapt to the various current and future scenarios and threat analyses. This reminded me of the criticism that many sceptics level at climate science: "At best science has shown correlation between man made emissions and global warming but we demand causal links." This kind of criticism is disingenuous: in problems of this magnitude of complexity the absence in causal linkage is not a sign of bad or lacking science, it is an inherrent quality of of the problems as such which cannot be overcome in any way that would satisfy even the most
Firstly, I'm Dutch. I know my country. And I don't see the point of the "mistake". It's irrelevant to the discussion of climate change. It's as relevant to the discussion as misspelling the name of one of the authors. It's a mistake, but it doesn't affect the conclusions in any way.
Let me explain:
What this really means is that the Netherlands is still a very flat and low country, and that it's still threatened by climate change. Floods can come from the rising sea level, but also from increased amounts of rain and wilder variations in river water levels. And, because the Netherlands is a river delta, we get it all.
55% of the country is prone to flooding, but only part of that is lower than the sea... and that also depends on whether you look at the low tide, mid-tide or high-tide. We've invented the 'NAP' for the sea water level... to avoid problems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normaal_Amsterdams_Peil
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_the_Netherlands
Now, 25% or 26% is below that level. But when there is a spring tide and a storm surge, that number changes A LOT. There are large parts of the country that are just 0.5 or 1 meter above NAP.
Does any of this mean that climate change isn't happening? Is the fact that the Netherlands, in reality, is 50 centimeters higher than suggested in the report going to affect climate models in any way??? I think not.
And anyway, the country is actually slowly sinking... mostly because of drainage. So, give us a little more time, and the report will be accurate.
30 years, not 40. Therefore since you made one mistake, your position should be reversed, yes? After all, that's what you're doing with the 2350/2035 error.
And we don't have 5 real data points: you average the record with a 30-year running average. Therefore we have 150 data points.
PS to find a trend in a line, you only need two points, three to give an error estimate. 5 points is plenty.
Add to that the fact that it's not just the graph fitting, but the physics which application produces an answer within bounds of error measurement the same answer. This is called "proving your model".
Scientists try to advance our understanding of our world, which benefits us all. When you've made a mistake, admitting it and announcing it is the best way to continue to work towards that goal. Any prestige you might lose is far less important than the common good.
Can you imagine a typical politician or religious nutter behaving the same way? Unfortunately, they have the loudest voices, and they generate far more heat than light when something like this happens. It's a very tedious argument: "What you said is off by 1%, so you must be wrong and what I believe must be right." Making mistakes doesn't invalidate the scientific method; making them and learning from them is part of it.
Chuck Norris: Socialism == a thousand years of darkness.
There were plenty of "experts" who were completely, totally, doomsaying when it came to Y2K. There were COBOL programmers who bought land in the middle of nowhere (easy to do given what they were earning), stockpiled food and ammo, and so on because they were convinced it was an unsolvable problem. Even though these were the people who should know what the fuck they were talking about, their paranoia (something you may notice is not uncommon with geeks) took over and they went full on survivalist.
I've never been able to find any interviews with them post Y2K to see what they had to say after it went off without even small problems.
The lesson is that just because someone is an expert in a field doesn't mean they know what they are talking about over all. In fact, perhaps because they get so wrapped up in the data and extrapolating it they are more likely to come up with a doom and gloom scenario. Regardless, saying "Well this guy is an expert and really understands this," doesn't mean that their large conclusions are valid.
Another example on a small scale that I love is at work. I work for an Electrical Engineering department at a university. At that department, we have total WiFi coverage, I mean you can walk all around the building and never lose signal, or even have it weaken much. This necessitates a lot of APs, they aren't just in closets and the hallway, they are in offices. Well, one of our professors doesn't like the "radiation" coming from it and thus put a shield over it to direct it at the window. This man is a PhD, and he works in areas directly dealing with real nuclear radiation. He should know the difference, but he's decided his little AP is dangerous. He's even been told that the other APs simply compensate and increase their signal level. Doesn't matter, he's convinced the AP will give him cancer or whatnot if he doesn't cover it.
He's an expert, and has access to other people who can give him more information, but is still being silly about it. Just because someone is an expert, doesn't mean they are never wrong, even in their field. Particularly as you get to the point where their field start to overlap with other fields.
Also people really need to separate the idea that someone is an expert at a given scientific pursuit, which is often extremely narrow given the amount of work it takes to become an expert, and that they are an expert at anything. You may have a guy who knows everything there is to know about thermal variations in ocean currents. However that doesn't mean that guy is competent to make public policy.
That code comment? What about it? It was with code that labelled "fake data". Seen any reports with a graph with one line called "fake data" on it? No? Then maybe that code wasn't used, hmmm?
You're talking bullshit and you're angry because you KNOW it's bullshit, so you project.
Other models agree with that one model, therefore those other models are as accurate and reliable as the one checked (better possibly, but not worse).
Let me be blunt, you don't WANT to believe AGW and you'll ignore anything to maintain that fantasy world.
All errors (including the "errors") always point in the same direction ... and that direction matches the overwhelming public opinion of the day. The question one naturally asks in that case is simple :
Are these scientists :
a) researching the climate
b) researching why it's even worse than we thought and why we need to give our entire economy in their hands, in trade for "preventing the end of the world"
I am sure that there are scientists falling in both categories. Politicians, like Al Gore, obviously plainly fall into category b. The question is how scientists are divided over both categories.
And quite frankly, I've always been taught climate is chaotic. When studying maths I both learned how to prove this and what it means. It means, according to theoretical mathematics that there's no meaningful relation between cause and effect (ie. cause and effect do exist, but "the butterfly wingflap causes a hurricane", rendering everything totally unpredictable).
And extremely frankly, I find the constant "revisions" of predictions to match observed data to be exactly what one would expect anyone who tries to predict a chaotic system : AFTERwards it's trivial to see what caused what. "That hurricane 'obviously' came from that freak wind movement in that forest, so we could have predicted it" as my statistics professor stated. Afterwards it's perfectly clear what has happened, however this does NOT mean you can predict it. The problem, simply put, is that there's a billion trillion freak wind movements per second around the globe and every 2-3 weeks one of them causes a hurricane.
And before anyone suggests it : a chaotic system will refuse to follow ANY mathematical principle that is based on incomplete information. That means any and all theories, especially statistics. Chaotic systems do not follow the basic assumptions of statistics, not even the weaker form of the law of large numbers, so you have nothing to work with.
even though it's an AC comment, IIRC this was exactly what happened (based on Dutch press reports of the issue).
What a bunch of pathetic greenies you all are.
Global warming/climate change is a surrogate religion. Read the Club of Rome report that kickstarted this all. All of you are pathetic acolytes without you even knowing it.
Keep up the brainwashing, social conditioning and thinking you're smart when you're fucking dumb.
Oh, yes, and anti-global-warmingists predicted the whole of Europe would be covered in ice three miles deep by 2006.
So, you see, by your methods Global Warming has now been fully proved without any possible doubt, because one theory presented by some people in the opposing camp have been proved false.
Religions and politics work that way, but science does not.
OK, since only 26%, not 55%, of Holland is below the sea level this means that CO2 does not absorb infrared radiation, right?
How much is BP paying you to astroturf for them?
I see what you did there! These aren't from actual scientific journals - this is from a popular news paper. This post is predictable - yes, global cooling was a fad in the popular media in the 70s. But if the poster had been better informed (or more honest, I can't tell) they would have pointed out that real climate scientists were predicting global warming in the 70s (and earlier!)
The errors discussed here don't call into question the physical basis of the fact that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere increases the greenhouse effect; they have to do with the question of what the effects of the warming will.
You took a little leap there from "greenhouse effect" (mechanism involving CO2 and radiation) to "effects of the warming". So you assume your conclusion ("warming").
Uh, did you read what I actually wrote? What I said was, that part-- the physical basis-- was covered in a different report that is not the report under discussion in the post here. I'm not "assuming the conclusion;" I'm saying that the conclusion (and the argument and data supporting it) is the subject of a different report.
... Until you establish the effect of CO2 on each of these, you cannot speak to the increase or decrease of the greenhouse effect solely on the simplistic science. Has this been done? Don't know, don't care.
Yes, "don't know, don't care" summarizes the position of the deniers: They don't know the science, and don't care enough to bother learning about the science.
So: if you don't know: go out and learn. Read some of the reports. Dig up some review articles. Find a textbook. Heck, go find some atmospheric science journals and read some original papers, why not? There are literally hundreds of thousands of man-hours that have been spent working out those exact details. Take a little time; learn about them.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Better review and fact checking is NOT "less openness".
30-40 years ago, publishing flawed papers like this would have been a career-ending move (whether the ultimate point of the document is still correct or not).
What has changed now?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Because a lot of very prominent people are attending, and they wouldn't want an "incident"?
Are you fucking kidding me? Did you not pay attention to what fucking happened?
Clever signature text goes here.
"I really don't have a huge problem with this Dutch mistake either, it's a small issue, although it is kind of funny."
BTW: What I thought was really comical was that when the Dutch error first surfaced there was a bunch of Dutch politicians standing up in parliment abusing the IPCC for sloppy work.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
One of the primary "scientists" behind the original complaints that led to this manufactured "controversy" is none other than Ross "degrees for radians" McKitrick.
Any of McKitrick's mistakes taken individually would be understandable, but after so many of them one can only conclude that either he is making these "mistakes" on purpose to arrive at a particular conclusion or he is one of the most staggeringly incompetent scientists in the world today. Either way, no one rational should be taking him seriously.
McKitrick by the way is one of the most prominent "scientists" cited by the global warming denial crowd, and is one of the only ones to have actually been published in a serious journal (hence his prominent status among deniers).
This really is no different from the anti-evolution movement. It's all bad information and bad logic to support a religion that can't survive contact with evidence, and they even use similar tactics (e.g. fakey journals publishing materials from fakey labs whose funding is obscured by shell companies and whose content is not really meant to fool anyone but Joe Beercan).
But is global warming a bad thing? Our climate has been hotter and cooler before. Global cooling is VERY bad and will cause a lot more death and destruction than global warming. Global warming just shifts the climate a little on the globe giving those of us in the northern and southern latitudes away from the equator more growing seasons. This is a good thing. It opens up a tremendous amount more ocean and land to life. On the other hand, even a few degrees of global cooling, a mini-ice age, would be a disaster.
All of this misses out on the real issue: pollution and the use of resources. Stop being so faddish.