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Atlas Takes Heat For Melting Glacier Claim
dtjohnson writes "The 'Times Atlas of the World' claims, while publicizing its newest edition, that global warming has turned 15 percent of Greenland's former ice-covered land 'green and ice-free.' Now, however, scientists from the Scott Polar Research Institute say those figures, based on data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, are wrong. 'Recent satellite images of Greenland make it clear that there are in fact still numerous glaciers and permanent ice cover where the new Times Atlas shows ice-free conditions and the emergence of new lands,' they say in a letter that has been sent to the Times. Others have pointed out that if 15 percent of Greenland ice cover had been lost, then sea levels would have risen by 1 meter... which has not happened. Perhaps yet another climate controversy is brewing."
An update to the Sciencemag.com story pinpoints the probable source of the error: a 2001 map from the NSIDC illustrates Greenland's central ice sheet without showing any of the peripheral glaciers. The Atlas editors may have seen this map and misinterpreted it. Says the article, "Now glaciologists are left trying to figure out how not understate the importance of the extent glacial ice melt, while at the same time correcting the error."
What started out as a well-supported observation that the earth was starting to slowly warm, followed by the suggestion that humans pumping tons of excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere may be at least partly to blame, has turned into a goddamned politicized mess. On one side you have grant-whores and alarmists, who have taken this reasonable observation and hyped it more-and-more over the last fifteen years into some increasingly alarmist Chicken Little hyperbole. On the other side you have a bunch of bible-thumping right-wing corporatists who think that if we just let mega-corporations do whatever the fuck they want (including pumping whatever shit into the air they feel like), then we would all live in some libertarian utopia.
Frankly, I'm sick of all the bullshit from both sides. I've got a grant-whore "environmental scientist" (when did that even become a hard science?) screaming in one ear that we're all going to die if we don't go all-solar/all-wind in the next twenty years. In the other ear, I've got Jesusy McAnnRaynd telling me that Exxon only wants to give me love and flowers, and would never, ever hurt me. And frankly, I just want to punch BOTH of them at this point.
Both sides have taken to over-exaggerating and over-hyping every bit of evidence they touch. And I've come to distrust them both.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
False dichotomy. There are definitely reasonable scientists publishing papers ...
See more of this horrible scientific fraud in our 11 o'clock coverage!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
So when it melts wouldnt it take up less space and the sea level would have lowered.
"Now glaciologists are left trying to figure out how not understate the importance of the extent glacial ice melt, while at the same time correcting the error."
They wouldn't have this issue if there wasn't an opposition that will shout it to the heavens every time a mistake or revision is made in relation to global warming but every statement made in support of it is ignored, even if the two are part of the same package. "It's bad, but not as bad as this" will only be interpreted as "they've admitted they're wrong so it's all a hoax!" If we could actually have a clam and reasoned discussion about the issue without people with vested interests in it dominating the debate then this wouldn't be a concern.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Parent is definitely Insightful Flamebait.
My big bitch is that Jeusuy McAnnRaynd is the last person in the world I'd ever expect to be busy out there *defending* the scientific method. It's like previously KKK Democrats taking credit for the civil rights movement.
It is indeed a cold day in hell.
Except I don't buy that "environmental science" is any more an unbiased field of science than I buy that "ethnic studies" is an unbiased field of history.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Now glaciologists are left trying to figure out how not understate the importance of the extent glacial ice melt, while at the same time correcting the error.
How about you just be honest in the first place? If you are right about climate change, you don't need to exaggerate your claims. They should speak for themselves.
There's no such thing as unbiased history. It's more biased than environmental science, even. Just some guy's opinion about stuff that happened long ago.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
The rich ruling class are dicks and always have been. But their bullshit doesn't explain the increasingly shrill voices from the pro side of this argument. Fifteen years ago, proponents of global warming were saying this could me a 1 or 2 degree average temperature increase over the next 100 years. Now some of them are blaming localized WEATHER patterns on it.
If there are reasonable voices in this, they're being drowned out at this point. A 1 or 2 degree average temperature increase over the next 100 years is not causing a fucking drought in Texas.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
This isn't even true; global temperatures haven't risen since 1998. This contradicts computer simulation--the primary source of current global warming consensus--to such a degree that climate scientists are searching for hypotheses to explain the missing heat. So now people are coming up with explanations for the observations that don't match their predictions. Truly the scientific method at work.
Note that the the research in the article I linked also comes exclusively from a computer simulation; there isn't actually any recorded observation that the "missing heat" is in the oceans. It's just a guess. I suspect many environmentalists are unaware that global warming consensus comes entirely from simulations written by humans and not actual recorded observation.
Amen. For instance, the fact of the destruction of the World Trade Center towers is just someone's opinion. Actually, many opinions.
There's history, and there's opinion. Knowing the difference is helpful.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
And what is this "environmental science" but some scientists' INTERPRETATION of data? This isn't a field where the experiments can be replicated in some lab in Oslo, only where the interpretations of the data can be debated (and implications considered).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
"global temperatures haven't risen since 1998"
There is no point in making this claim. The scientists will refute it with copious data, and the deniers will bring out their own. Then everybody argues over what the data really means.
Lost. We are lost.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Except that 9 of the 10 hottest years in our measurements have been after 1998.
1998 was a statistical fluke, an out-lier, due to a very active El-Nino during that particular year. In 2010, the same temperature was reached under very average circumstances.
This isn't even true; global temperatures haven't risen since 1998.
Facts tend to disagree with your statement.
Wikipedia temperature chart
if we just let mega-corporations do whatever the fuck they want (including pumping whatever shit into the air they feel like), then we would all live in some libertarian utopia.
No, that's the corporatist position. Libertarians tend to be anti-corporate and would advocate for individuals suing those corporations for polluting their property. They favor stronger property rights than is typically* allowed in Western courts.
* sometimes courts do allow this, e.g. MTBE in groundwater, but it's pretty rare.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Well, a few more things it is: COLLECTION or the data, CORRELATION of the data, and CONSOLIDATION of the data with physics.
Seriously, you think these people just kibitz all day like talk-show pundits? I guess it's easy to look down on someone from miles away.
Someone had to do it.
Inability of people who publish coffee table material to understand the maps you draw hardly constitutes a failure of truth on your part.
Someone had to do it.
This situation reminds me very much of Kilimanjaro. The loss of snow and ice on Kilimanjaro has oft been cited by warming alarmists as proof of their theories, and in fact a picture of Kilimanjaro featured prominently in Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth".
However, the inconvenience was ultimately for the alarmists, since it has long been known (well before his movie came out) that the loss of snow and ice on Kilimanjaro is due to deforestation (logging by humans) at lower altitudes, and has little to nothing to do with ambient temperature. Less vegetation means less moisture for the air to pick up at lower altitudes, in turn meaning less precipitation for it to drop on the mountain when the air is blown up to high altitudes and cools down. And with drier air comes sublimation from the constant wind.
I do not claim the globe isn't warming. I'm not even claiming that CO2 isn't part of it... but I doubt it amounts to very much. But it's really kind of hard to tell, when the "authorities" and the media keep spouting such blatant bullshit.
we should start preparing for how to cope with the effects.
Most insightful post to /. ever. Climate doesn't change only because of some displacement of catholic guilt that we're all evil, or only because most american's have white skin, or because we don't hire enough motivational climate change speakers to make us feel guilty.
Climate changes, because thats what it does over time. Doesn't matter a whole heck of a lot if its natural or artificial, it would be wise to prepare for it. And the best way to prepare is not to deindustrialize, destroy our economy, and go all Pol Pot on our population.
I'm going to take the wild guess that turning our country into another Japan is likely to result in a better human outcome than turning our country into another Somalia.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
global temperatures haven't risen since 1998
I'm not going to talk at you about how to do data analysis and averaging. Picking 1998 as a starting point is a canary for someone who is measuring "increase" as "difference since start of plot" and then cherry-picking a high value as their start point.
Even if you use that highly-deceptive "analysis" technique, though, it's not true:
NASA GISS Global Surface Air Temperature Anomaly
1998: 0.70 C
2010: 0.83 C
2010 is the most recent year for which there is data.
NASA GISS Land-Ocean Temperature Index
1998: 0.56 C
2010: 0.63 C
If you look at the tabular data, anyone reasonably familiar with analysis should spot immediately that 1998 is an outlier and that there is an overall positive trend that continues up to 2010.
Other humans, with different interest, could re-interpret the same data, and publish their findings in a paper. It's a lot of work, but it's not impossible.
Actually, several group of people have done exactly this, and their results are in pretty good agreement.
Good on the scientists for noticing the error of the Atlas company and working to publicly correct it. That is certainly above and beyond the call of duty. I'm not sure how that makes them 'grant whores' though. They are not responsible for the misstatement. They are only responsible for publicly correcting it.
Water vapor only stays in the atmosphere for a week or so, and then it rains out. CO2 will stay for centuries, and will gradually build up as we emit more than is absorbed. Methane is also fairly short lived.
I'm more than willing to stipulate GGP was Correct Insightful Flamebait :)
My problem with the whole CAGW "science" is that it fails to start off with your basic falsifiable hypothesis, without which, playing the science game is pretty much impossible. NGW and AGW (natural global warming and anthropogenic global warming), when asserted simply in a given direction without magnitude, are almost trivially true (as well as falsifiable). Once you decide to place a magnitude on it, your falsifiable hypothesis statement gets even more important to have - typically, this is glossed over and we get nothing but ad hoc special pleadings for any observation contrary to models.
Ayn Rand was an Atheist.
Just don't tell the Tea Partiers.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Agreement with what? That the climate warmed over the past century? That's one of the predicates to a statement of CAGW, but hardly a resounding endorsement.
Natural climate change happens and is our default null hypothesis here. What observations of data could convince you that observed climate change is not due to CO2, or not due to humans, or is not going to be catastrophic?
Well, the important thing is that you've framed them both as equally bad so that you can feel superior to anyone who cares.
Intellectual honesty isn't about being unbiased. Nobody would be honest because everyone's biased, especially if you define "biased" as "having an opinion".
Intellectual honesty means exposing the basis for your conclusions to criticism; it means doing your best to apply the same criteria to your conclusions and methods that you apply to the people who disagree with you.
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The point is that climatologists are supposed to document their assumptions when doing that interpretation. Those assumptions can then be verified. They can't just say, "oh let's insert temp*=10; here because God told me it should be so".
No, it isn't causing a drought in Texas. There were droughts in Texas at least this bad, long before the argument started.
Not so. The following graph clearly shows that this year is an extreme outlier: http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2011/08/texas-drought-spot-the-outlier/
I remember the 70s and into the 80s when this began, they called global cooling then. Which is the problem some people are having, including myself, believing the current concepts.
Consider that in spite of a then moderate cooling trend, and in spite of natural cycles driving us towards cooling, most papers in the 70's predicted global warming. They were right. They had a physical basis for the prediction. They tested the prediction. They were right.
I don't know what your criteria for "grant whore" is; scientists have to put bread on the table like anyone else, and that means they have to submit proposals that are, in the judgment of the reviewers, likely to yield useful results. And after surviving decades of spirited debate, a proposal to overturn decades of climate research in one swell foop is going nowhere because nobody seriously believes you can do it with a single one paper or project.
I watched this whole debate play out *before* it became a political cause celebre because my wife is a geophysicist. The AGW hypothesis really started to heat up in the early 80s, and the scientific critics DID pile on with serious criticisms, and time and time again they bounced. They've looked at the question of whether 18th C Royal Navy water temperature records are to be trusted, or whether trends in remote sensing data are some kind of technological artifact. Lots of sound objections were raised, vigorously debated, then set aside as unfounded or irrelevant.
So does that mean you can't challenge AGW? Of course not. There's lots of places to start undermining it. You just aren't going to get a paper published at this late date that looks at one facet of the data and overturns the whole edifice of scientific consensus.
Now like everything else, most science is mediocre. It's conservative, unimaginative, and safe. But what everyone really wants to see is a big shift in scientific consensus. That's exciting and it brings new grant money in. But nobody's betting on an overnight overturning of the global warming consensus, frustrating as that is to some people who'd like to see that. You don't think that a credible line of research that was heading to the conclusion "use as much coal as you want" wouldn't find funding? The problem is that nobody who's actually followed the debate in the decades up to the big political snit is going to expect quick and dramatic results from such a line of research. You've got to start with establishing, "maybe coal isn't such a big concern" then work your way up.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
propaganda will never work against intelligent people.
You say that even as you mention Hitler? There were no shortage of intellectuals and academics that embraced Nazi propaganda. Another example of gullible intelligentsia would be Communism in the early and mid 20th century.
There was a study, and I don't recall enough info about it to cite, that found that belief in ridiculous crap (UFO's, spiritualism, etc.) was MORE common as education levels and intelligence rose... although it dropped off again at the very high end of both.
There were droughts in Texas at least this bad, long before the argument started.
Name one.
Support SETI@home
That's the "human interpretation of the data" part, subject to the various foibles and subjectivity of the humans doing the interpretation.
Same as when we measure the gravitational acceleration on the surface of the earth. Yet we biased scientists manage to get the same answer time and time again. Your big problem is when you don't like the answer.
Support SETI@home
We need another decade or two of study before we commit strongly either way. This will allow the science to be improved, and will (hopefully) cause the pop-culture aspect of the controversy to fade. The best thing that could happen for climate science is for both the public and the politicians to STOP CARING about it.
In the meantime, of course, nothing we do could possibly be making things worse, and so we might as well wait a few hundred years to really get the science right. As we'll probably get hit by an asteroid before then, there's no need to worry.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
How exactly is AGW falsifiable?
Show that an increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere won't cause an increase in energy retained by the Earth.
It's true that correlation != causation but often it's a big hint that the relationship should be investigated.