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Global Warming 'Confirmed' By Independent Study
chrb writes "The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project — an independent study of Earth's historical temperature record partly funded by climate skeptics, including the Koch brothers — has released preliminary results that show the same warming trend as previous research. Project leader and physics professor Richard Muller, of the University of California, has stated that he was 'surprised' at the close agreement, and it 'confirms that these studies were done carefully.' The study also found that warming in the temperature record was not caused by poor quality weather monitoring stations — thus rejecting a frequent claim of skeptics. Climate skeptic Stephen McIntyre has previously said 'anything that [Muller] does will be well done.'"
Because that's the real issue that most skeptics have been questioning of late. Anyone who isn't an idiot knows that the earth's climate is ALWAYS changing (and always has been). The real issue that people are talking about when they say "global warming" is the question of how much influence human activities have had on the normal warming/cooling cycles, if this is a negative influence, and, if so, what can humans do within reason to mitigate any negative influences. And *those* questions are a helluva lot harder to answer than "Has there been a general warming trend over the last 100 years?".
I'm not sure pure science is up to answering those questions. And it doesn't help that the issue has become hopelessly politicized--to the point where I've grown very skeptical of BOTH sides and their respective penchants for self-serving hyperbole and increasingly shrill fear-mongering.
Of course, there is also the question of DEGREE of warming, an issue where it's getting harder and harder to distinguish between mainstream science and Chicken Little fear-mongering. IIRC, initial models were showing a 1-2 degree increase over the next 100 years, something that clearly needs to be addressed but not something that's GOING TO KILL US ALL TOMORROW!!!!!. Somewhere along the way this kept getting more and more ramped-up to the point now where I hear advocates claiming that the entire east coast of the U.S. is going to be underwater by 2050. I can no longer tell where the truth begins and the humbug ends.
Of course, I'm going to be criticized here for even daring to question the accepted narrative.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
There is no amount or type of evidence, even in principle, which would answer climate change sceptics. They will disavow the fundimental principles of science if that is what is necessary to protect their beliefs.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Why did it take them seven years [slashdot.org] (almost exactly to this date) to come to this conclusion?
They were doing first-rate science on an enormous data set? Pulling off a major research project in less time than it takes to train two PhD students is pretty quick by any science's standards, regardless.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Not true. A depressingly large part of the climate change denial community still insists it isn't happening at all, and hasn't moved onto "yes, but...".
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
A real important thing to note was that this was paid for privately- with a large chunk of that capital coming from Climate-change-deniers who wanted to prove that climate change wasn't happening.
Climate-change-deniers often say that government paid studies are fake because governments are encouraging the scientists to come back with fake positives to promote various policies... ... they can't say that anymore.
The debate of man's involvement will still go on- but STOP DENYING THE PROBLEM! Let's put that to bed now.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I don't think you looked at the graph.
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/56197000/gif/_56197115_climate_change_624gr.gif
True. A lot of climate deniers talk like this:
- It is not warming
- Even if it's warming, it's natural fluctuation
- Even if it's not natural fluctation, it's not due to CO2
- Even if it's due to CO2, human didn't cause it.
- Even if humans caused it, it's not bad.
- Even if it's bad, I don't want to act.
"But for Richard Muller, this free circulation also marks a return to how science should be done."
I've long been sceptical of 'man made global warming' because of the science involved. It didn't help that people would say, "Only university-trained scientists can understand the data", either. (Obviously an idiotic claim. Anyone with a brain can learn, and Universities are not a requirement for learning.)
But this is the moment I've been waiting for. Someone finally did the science openly and put all their cards on the table. They aren't hiding anything, including their funding sources. They even used new data that wasn't tainted and made sure to watch for the things sceptics have been critical of.
So, as a long-time AGW sceptic, I'm saying: Thank you for finally proving it.
Now if we can only find ways to counter or offset it that don't hurt the environment even more than we already are, we'll be in good shape.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Why is it so hard to accept that human actions can have consequences ?
.......... why, really ?
A planetary biosphere which has evolved without homo sapiens sapiens' mega-scale industry and the innumerable effects it produces worldwide, is supposed to just take whatever you can dish out at it with your pollution, smokes, emissions, radiation, precisely because
it comes to me as if the people who are into this denial are moving with a centuries old understanding that thinks world is a biiig, biiig place. so that nothing can happen if 2-3 factories smoke here, a few people dump stuff in the sea somewhere. hey - guess what - people are doing it EVERYWHERE. and this planet actually is a small planet on the 3 orbit around a small sun in the outer rim of a galaxy called milky way. if you endlessly shit on it, it will get affected.
Read radical news here
The Berkeley study got $150,000 from the Koch brothers precisely because those who started it came largely from outside climate science, having established their considerable credentials in other sciences, and announced at the outset their skepticism about the standards of climate scientists. They expected they well might find - and the Koch brothers clearly hoped they would find - that the interpretations of the temperature records accepted by over 97% of current climate scientists were exaggerated and sloppy.
The Berkeley study leaders are now openly surprised that their conclusions - using more advanced statistical methods than have been employed previously - are within 2% of the mainstream climate science analyses. I'll bet good money they get no further funding from the Koch brothers going forward. The Kochs have many billions, and have been generous in funding the economics department at Florida State University, with strings attached to assure that department will support economic theories the Kochs agree with ("Austrian school" economics). Universities keenly court large donors. Had the Berkeley climate study likewise come to conclusions agreeing with the brothers' prejudices, that cash-strapped university could have anticipated generous funding to support a climatology institute going forward.
So which side of the bread is buttered? Were the genius scientists too stupid to see they just dropped the bread butter-side down? Why have they followed the science even when it drives away their funding?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Regardless of who is visiting us, other-humans, spagetti monsters, little-green-men it is important to acknoweldge that it is real.
Why? Because- if it continues we are in for some problems.
Possible interplanetary war, damage to Earth, extinctions, famines, possible new viruses from alien contact.
Stopping alien visitation (if caused by man) is only one side of the coin- the other side is WE NEED TO PREPARE because there is no reason for anyone to believe it is going to stop anytime soon.
So, we need to start thinking about- how to we stop coastal cities from being abducted, depriving us of our families. We need to think about how alien activities in local regions will change our way of life. If Nebraska is no longer capable of growing maize because of alien attacks- how will that affect the economy there?
Lots of cities are already seeing increased fear because they can't handle the increasing encounters they get as the aliens get aggressive.
Chicago is smart- they're upgrading their anti-aircraft with an increase in alien attention so they won't retroactively be dealing with lost population.
I don't care if you think man is not responsible- if you're republican or democrat- spreading denial of alien visitation is dangerous. We need our elected officials to take the threat seriously and prepare for the changes BEFORE they happen.
I don't want to sensationalise or be a scare-monger... we don't need to run into the streets screaming- but we do need to calmly, on a local by local basis sit down and analyse- what will alien war mean for my community and what needs to be done about it. Do we need to build large lasers, prepare the economy for a new agriculture (or loss of it)?
We can adapt to a war with the green men but we need to take it seriously and act now- rather than wait until it is too late.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
Question #1: Is the Earth appreciably warmer lately? Answer: Yes. There seems to have been some skepticism over this question but this appears to be where the nutjobs on the 'denier' side fell (we'll get to the nutjobs on the other side in a minute). To some extent we 'already knew this,' but the point of this study appears to have been that we need to start from this point -- that if we can't even agree whether the Earth is warmer, we certainly aren't going to agree on why or what to do about it.
Question #2: Is it our fault, i.e. is it anthropogenic global warming (AGW)? Answer: This study doesn't have anything to say about that, but as others have pointed out, it is 'consistent with AGW models.' This seems to be the most difficult question because there are so many variables. The earth is warmer, sure; but it's been warmer before without our having done anything to it and the crucial piece of information that would easily answer this question -- what would temperatures be if we hadn't been mucking about doing things for the last 200 years -- would require a control planet. I've been trying to educate myself about global warming for a while but it's been very difficult filtering through the noise and vitriol. It doesn't seem possible to me that can conclusively answer this question, and to some people, that's a reason to forget the whole thing -- but the realization that we can't prove it doesn't excuse us from having to make a decision. It just means that we have to make a decision with imperfect information.
(Question #2A would be 'if the Earth has been warmer before, is it necessarily a bad thing that it's warm again -- is that just a natural cycle? This is an interesting question but let's set it aside for the moment. Even if we assume that there is a natural cycle, let's still also assume that what we're concerned with here is the extent to which humans are changing that natural cycle, not whether 1 degree celsius is going to cause an apocalypse.)
Question #3: To what extent should we handicap our own consumption of natural resources or industrial production to alleviate AGW? If we aren't entirely certain about our answer to #2, it's difficult, but by no means impossible to make a quantitative analysis of the 'value' of reducing carbon emissions by, say, one ton a year. But this question is so political that it'd be tough to have a reasonable conversation about it even if it didn't depend on equally, but differently perplexing questions like #2, because it allows for a scenario where an elected leader has to make a judgment call that is going to favor the environment over his or her constituents' jobs. We don't like to think about it in those terms -- we prefer to just imagine that everyone will buy a Prius or bicycle to work -- but it's important to realize how far-reaching these decisions are. It's also quite naive to imagine that industrial interests only exist on one side of this equation. The green industry has just as many crooks in it as the oil industry does, as any industry does, because it is composed of homo sapiens. Throwing money at solar and wind is well and good, but it's a luxury that a rich country ('rich' being relative these days) like the United States can afford; it's a joke to imagine that India or Indonesia or China are going to handicap their economies when they've only just lately (to varying degrees) got round to having economies in the first place. That's not to say that they won't invest in wind and solar (China certainly has) but this is merely diversifying their own energy portfolio -- reducing their dependency on oil -- which is related to but not the same as pursuing green energy for its own sake.
Speaking as an American business owner for a moment, it's tough for me to accept that the solution here is to make it even more expensive to conduct business via something like cap-and-trade, though not because it will affect my own business (it won't, much). This is clearly a problem that requires huge expenditures of capital to solve, and a
Actually that's one of the key issues addressed by the study. Climate scientists have been accounting for that effect pretty much forever, but the authors of the new study were dubious about the way it was handled, so they did their own treatment. They found it was insignificant.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The graph from the BBC article was drawn by the Berkeley team, not a local ass clown:
http://berkeleyearth.org/analysis.php
As long as people will agree that the earth is warming up - will a long discussion about whether man caused it really serve any useful purpose?
Here's how I see it:
Picture yourself as a passenger of the Quantas A380 plane whose engine exploded mid-flight. The moment the engine exploded, what would you look at first:
a) trying to figure out what CAN be done?
b) trying to figure out whether it was caused by humans or not (terrorists or material faults vs. meteor or lightning strikes)?
Think that you will have to decide what to focus on, while the plane is having trouble staying in the air.
My guess is, that getting to land safely ANYWHERE was the top priority... But - it's just my guess...
Maybe you want to fund a study into the event asking everyone on board to see what they did first...
_OR_ we might try and focus on how to get the situation under control as safely as possible - by reducing the number of maneuvers that could contribute or increase the problem, and thinking about counter-maneuvers.
I bet you, even if the wing of that A380 would have gone, and even if chances of the pilot making ANY difference AT ALL - I bet you, they would have tried EVERYTHING to even minimally increase the chances of ANYONE surviving.
It is inappropriate to draw any conclusions from this research because it has not yet been peer reviewed. Watts of wattsupwiththat.com fame was shown a draft, and found some problems with the study, specifically with the selection of weather siting data. No doubt there will be other issues that need to be corrected, that's the whole point of having peer reviews. Everybody wants to skip to the end, but we need to let the process work.
You'd think that the /. crowd would be a little more sophisticated about this kind of thing than the average MSM reader, but apparently not in this case, given the comments I've read thus far.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
OK so now we have proof that there has been a recent warming trend. Where is the proof that it was caused by human activity?
Unlike the Slashdot Editors, I actually RTFA.
The study does not "confirm" global warming, and certainly not man-made global warming. It confirms that the analysis from various temperature stations over the last 100 years has been fairly accurate. This indicates a light global average increase in temperature over this period. This tells us nothing about whether the planet is truly warming, or if we are in some sort of long term earth cycle. It also tells us nothing about man-made warming, if it exists. Finally their analysis still can't fully account for the so-called "fudge factor" which has to be applied when you consider the positive effect of concrete cities on temperature readings. All they can prove is that previous samplings of the data were adequate, and that our somewhat inherently faulty data shows a positive temperature trend over the last 100ish years. They also reconfirmed the El Nino impact.
Finally, I think it's important to note that if this study had come to the opposite conclusion, it would have been derided as quack science and laughed off of Slashdot. Furthermore, the fact that the Koch brothers funded an apparently legitimate scientific study is unlikely to challenge the conception of most on this forum that they are a bunch of purely evil monsters, but it should.
how many subsidies have been paid to solar and wind power industries in the past three years?