Slashdot Mirror
The Himalayas and Nearby Peaks Have Lost No Ice In Past 10 Years, Study Shows
DesScorp writes "A story from UK's Guardian reports on a study of ice levels from the Himalayas area, and finds that no significant melting has occurred, despite earlier predictions of losses of up to 50 billion tons of ice. 'The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia, which is not significantly different from zero,' said Professor Jonathan Bamber, who also warns that 8 years simply isn't enough time to draw conclusions. 'It is awfully dangerous to take an eight-year record and predict even the next eight years, let alone the next century,' he said." Readers have sent in a few other stories today relating to melting (or persisting) ice around the globe; read on for more.
bonch writes "New research from the University of Colorado concludes that the polar ice caps are melting less than previously thought. Almost 230 billion tons of ice annually melt into the ocean, 30% less than past predictions. The new data comes from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite, which provides more accurate estimates than previous methods."
The earth being a complex thing, though, note that these observations don't mean an end to predictions of elevated sea level.
Finally, an anonymous reader writes with another ice story: "NASA's Terra satellite saw a huge crack in the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica and it is all set to give rise to an iceberg the size of Manhattan! The huge gash in the snow is 30 kilometers (or 19 miles) long and nearly 100 meters wide, and is widening every passing minute. This is expected to create an iceberg more than 900 square kilometer in area, as compared to the 785 square kilometer area of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island and Bronx combined, said NASA."
The earth being a complex thing, though, note that these observations don't mean an end to predictions of elevated sea level.
Finally, an anonymous reader writes with another ice story: "NASA's Terra satellite saw a huge crack in the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica and it is all set to give rise to an iceberg the size of Manhattan! The huge gash in the snow is 30 kilometers (or 19 miles) long and nearly 100 meters wide, and is widening every passing minute. This is expected to create an iceberg more than 900 square kilometer in area, as compared to the 785 square kilometer area of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island and Bronx combined, said NASA."
I think the lesson to take away is to strive for a rational, "healthily skeptical" position when presented with climate data. It's just such an unpredictable thing--literally, a complicated system the size of the entire world with a scale spanning molecules, continents, and beyond. The media doesn't help, either--it's drive for alarmism tends to overly simplify or exaggerate situations, and perhaps even the scientists involved get caught up in it.
For example, do you remember how polar bears drowning in the Arctic sea due to global warming were cited as a reason to classify them as an endangered species, and how they were used as a symbol of climate change in Al Gore's movie? The lead scientist was actually placed on administrative leave, and several questions were raised about how the bears actually died and how the corpses were observed from 1,500 up in a helicopter rather than examined to actually determine their cause of death. Whether or not they were really drowning, there just wasn't enough data to come to the conclusion that was presented to the public with the level of certainty that was conveyed.
Unfortunately, if you're someone who agrees with doing the logical thing--reducing the negative environmental impact of humans as much as possible, within reasonable economic boundaries--the exaggerations and alarmism sweep you away into being on a "side", and you're shoved right in the middle of the mosh pit of tribal politics. If you question a conclusion or suggest a way of doing things, and you maintain a nuanced or balanced position, you get shit on by everybody, and nothing gets accomplished.
George Carlin did an insightful (and profanity-laden) bit on alarmism in modern society.
Zealots...to your respective corners!
In this corner, we have Chicken Little, the frothing-at-the-mouth environmentalist who thinks the world is about to explode and every cute polar cub in going to drown if we don't do something RIGHT NOW! NOW! NOW! NOW!
And in this corner, we have Jesus H. Capitalist, the denier who thinks that pumping shit-tons of crap into the atmosphere and abolishing the EPA are good things because BP and Chevron say it's okay and Jesus says "Vote Republican!"
Gentlemen, when the bell sounds...begin your crazed hyperbole! Remember, bonus points are given for the most convoluted Nazi analogy.
Ding, ding.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
...Big Oil must've airlifted extra snow up there when nobody was looking! :)
CLIMATE change means, climates will change locally, and in micro-climate level.
global warming means, the AVERAGE world temperature will rise. 2 degrees celsius rise in a temperature, wouldnt be felt in your locale if happened. you wouldnt notice it.
but, if AVERAGE world temperature rises by 2 degrees celsius, this means that to effect that AVERAGE rise, innumerable local and micro-climates around the world will change, in WHATEVER fashion.
hence, the CLIMATE CHANGE term. a more correct term that describes the EFFECT that the CAUSE, global warming, has.
some locales may not see ANY change. some locales may get freaking hot. some locales may get cold. some locales may become rainforests. some locales can go humid, some go dry. some become exceedingly windy. ANYthing goes.
so, some ice melting around the world, some staying, is perfectly normal.
climate change is more destructive, because it is impossible to predict what will change and how.
Read radical news here
Just remember that 10 years ago "skeptics"(how exactly they define that term, I don't know) were pointing to how little ice was being lost from Antarctica in the preceding 5 years as indisputable evidence of a hoax.
As evidence that people believed this: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=antarctica+gaining+ice&source=newssearch&cd=1&ved=0CDMQqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.csmonitor.com%2F2002%2F0118%2Fp02s01-usgn.html&ei=Yko0T6zmIYrXtgegk4mwAg&usg=AFQjCNHtA3NtryZuUSi1k3FLEueaP9NWfg
Whoops, right?
Just doesn't work.
The science is settled? No. The science is shoddy.
I'm not so sure. I'd like to see some scientific data to back that up. In the mean time, I will remain skeptical by default.
(Only half joking here)
Controversy over AGW aside, this means nothing. The world can warm while some regions gain, lose, or maintain ice. It's GLOBAL climate change so what matters is the GLOBAL ice pack.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It's 'healthy' to follow the data and not make any assumptions before you analyze it.
That's what skepticism is.
In related news from last year, global sea levels dropped 6mm over 2010.
Disbelieving things by default isn't really much better, from a scientific perspective, than believing everything you hear.
[Citation Needed]
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The new study used a pair of satellites, called Grace, which measure tiny changes in the Earth's gravitational pull. When ice is lost, the gravitational pull weakens and is detected by the orbiting spacecraft.
Bristol University glaciologist Prof Jonathan Bamber, who was not part of the research team, said: "The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia, which is not significantly different from zero."
--
So what they were measuring was mass loss. Not exactly ice loss.
But in general ice/water moves a lot faster than rock. Still rock ways more than water. So they assumed all changes or not were ice/water.
What if the moutains got a bit taller as the ice was removed? That would seem to balance out the loss of ice.
Hmm, "The Himalayas continue to rise more than 1 cm a year "
I sure hope they at least subtract out that known growth rate. 1cm of rock over the entire mountain range is a lot of mass.
Anyone have the actual article did they subtrace mass increases due to mountain growth? And how did they calculate mountain growth. These things can go from positive to negative really quickly with a small change fudge factors like this.
'Normal' cycles would indicate that they should be increasing; the fact that they remain 0 is still a concern.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
>who also warns that 8 years simply isn't enough time to draw conclusions
Right, 8 years isn't long enough to draw conclusions when the 8 years of evidence doesn't point to the conclusion you want it to.
But if it points to the conclusion you want, then it's all the proof you need.
(Sorry... I think there are MANY forces at work that shape our climate, and people are pretty arrogant to think they understand all of them.)
I am glad that seemingly hard facts are being presented.
While I still think the overwhelming evidence supports the hypothesis that 1) GW is occurring and 2) man is responsible, at least this is better than the ranting and raving that I've come to expect from skeptics.
Of course my thinking is sustained by much more complete data sets of a GLOBAL perspective provided by climatologists. There was a recent animation produced by NASA recently that showed a map of worldwide temperature readings for the past 150 years. (I submitted it to slashdot, for some reason it was rejected). If the skeptics can continue to produce data that shows the GW is not happening I'm open to changing my thinking. But again, from what I've been following in the literature, there hasn't been much supporting their point of view.
Look, I'm not ideologically opposed to fossil fuels per say; with the vastly increased amounts of natural gas in the U.S. I'm happy to use a fuel that doesn't directly fund people who hate us. However I'm also not one to overlook an inconvenient truth.
Politically motivated.
HAND.
and understand why? HINT, it's not because of cooling or creating more ice.
It's because of more rain fall over land.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Shouldn't the vast global environmentalist "AGW" conspiracy have prevented these scientists from publishing their results? Isn't climate science controlled by a crowd that ensures their future prosperity by preventing dissenting opinions? How could this be?!
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Is it really wrong? So, one shouldn't question government? Or those that write laws. Or those that are trying to force their own views on people. Or be questioning of persons(or groups) ideological goals that could retrograde civilization? In order to follow data, you have to have data you can trust. If the person or people can't trust the data, they're going to be skeptical.
In turn, the more that people see the blackballing going on by the environmental movement, the more skeptical they become of it as well. This is further proofed by the coercion table, the more you want someone to do something by making them 'feel good' rather than 'forcing' the more likely they'll adopt it. Though as you can see the more heavy handed it's become over the years, the more people are lashing back, and support for any belief, of it has fallen sharply. And people believe it to be a form of taxable coercion.
Om, nomnomnom...
He's saying that you should believe him automatically, or you aren't a scientolog...er, a scientist.
I don't think you understand what skeptical means.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Number 2, I guess.
I was brainwashed into thinking that the scientific method leads to fallible results, which may be disproved by later tests.
I must be a rube for thinking that we should make decisions based on the best available theories of the time, with the acceptance that policies may need to change later.
How dumb of me to think that temperature changes might be a temporary thing, but it probably wouldn't hurt to cut pollution, anyway.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I agree. We're far enough into the global warming thing for 100% of scientists to agree that global warming is occurring, and 98% of them to agree that it's somehow caused or contributed to by human activity (those are real statistics in an article I read on the problems of the media trying too hard to present both sides of an argument regardless of the percentages involved; I'm too lazy to provide a link, but hey, so's the grandparent). The "healthy skepticism" sounds like someone trying to sound reasonable while still obviously not wanting to believe that anything bad is really happening.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
You might have nailed it. If you remove the mass from the top of the Himalayas in the form of water, the reduced weight will cause the mountains to rebound upward from the pressure from underneath.
Effectively, missing water mass is replaced by mineral mass, in what might be an almost perfect balance.
The term for this is isostacy, there's a wikipedia article on it.
--PM
Could it be because they haven't received a sufficient level of pollution, or the ice and snow are too cold to dissolve and allow the pollutants to dissolve in water? Adding solute to solvent depresses the freezing point. Just shortly (a year or two) after we started getting news about noticeable and unavoidable amounts of pollutants showing up in the cubic meters of air tested atop the Swiss Alps, we started getting news about the imminent collapse of the Alps' mostly glacial makeup. But that's because the alps, just warm enough for the glacier ice to melt just enough on the surface to admit pollutants, ended up with a depressed freezing point. On the other hand, I don't know about the quality of air on the Himalayas, but it could be possible that the ice never comes below freezing and so even if there were pollutants settling on the snow, they wouldn't make it into solution.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Note that this is not a reply to any particular prior comment...
From TFA:
That is exactly what one would expect for some degree of overall warming. The highest parts of the Himalayas are still high and cold enough to freeze out every bit of moisture in the air that brings them snow, but that air (mostly monsoon flow from the south) is generally moister because it and the ocean it has passed are significantly warmer than in the past. The result is low glaciers melting back from the warm air and rain instead of snow and higher protoglacial snowpack growing faster than the existing glacier paths can move out.
This is very basic weather science: more snow in routinely cold places does not mean they are getting colder, it means they are getting more injections of warm humid air. Of course that's only true as long as the cold predominates, because eventually it all turns to rain. I've watched this happen in Michigan, where we've gone from record snowfall years (but not record cold) to unusually warm and soaked-through winters.
It doesn't matter what studies you publish regarding climate change, the pro-AGW people will say that it either supports their claims or that the data in the study isn't enough to draw substantive conclusions from. Meanwhile, the anti-AGW folks will say that either the data in the study isn't enough to draw substantive conclusions from or that it supports their claims.
Meanwhile, the rest of us get to sit around trying to work out if a) mankind's effect on the environment is a significant enough contributor to the current climate trend that anything we can reasonably change is going to make any difference and b) if there's any chance in hell that you can get a *room* of random people to agree to noticeably reduce their energy consumption, let alone an entire planet.
Most of the "climate reporting" is completely retarded. High and low pressures alternate, air is always flowing from high to low. Like now Eastern Europe has been very cold, well at Svalbard they've had record warmth because the high pressure has pushed low pressures with warm, moist air north. These lead to huge local year-to-year variations with mild and cold winters. And every mild season people go "ooh, must be global warming" and every cold season people go "ooh, global warming is a hoax" and the media isn't helping with their sensationalism. To say if it was really a global effect you need lots of data and would probably end up in a boring conclusion like "Average world temperature rose by 0.08C this year".
What's that, zero point zero something degrees you say? 8C in 100 years would actually be extremely much, but it sounds very little, very boring. So 99% of it is sensationalist hype from local extremes, because if you look at a huge mass of data and cherry pick results you'll always find some that are way outside the normal. That's at least what I consider healthy skepticism, in fact I'd apply it to most things found in mainstream media. Extrapolating from the fields where I know they butcher the truth, I don't expect the others to fare any better. I bet that for example doctors are tearing their hair out over the medical reporting, where almost any result is hyped like a major breakthrough or a cure being right around the corner to get readers.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You couldn't be more incorrect. Being skeptical means to be not easily convinced. To not take things at face value and to demand solid evidence for extraordinary claims.
It does NOT mean "disbelieving things by default."
You don't know what the word "skeptical" means. It doesn't mean that you disbelieve something by default. It means that you don't believe something by default.
"Sufferin' succotash."
It is impossible to determine sealevel rise from the amount of melt water entering the oceans.
If you want to determine the content of any system, you must account for both everything entering it as well as all the stuff leaving it. If you count 500 people leaving the exit of a building, you should not conclude that there are now 500 more people outside the building - because you didn't count the number of people going in.
That's not cherry picking, that's pumpkin picking.
[Citation]
Because I am pretty sure the numbers are no where close to your posting.
I'd wager about 84% support the earth is warming, 74% support man influenced warming, 67% warming due to man made CO2, and 14% that the earth is in fact cooling.
As you didn't provide a citation, neither will I.
[Citation Needed]
here you go
-- no sig today
This description of the study seems a little more informative: "The total mass ice loss from Greenland, Antarctica and all Earth’s glaciers and ice caps between 2003 to 2010 was 1,000 cubic miles, about eight times the water volume of Lake Erie. “The total amount of ice lost to Earth’s oceans from 2003 to 2010 would cover the entire United States in about 1 and one-half feet of water,” said CU-Boulder physics Professor John Wahr" http://summitcountyvoice.com/2012/02/09/global-warming-cu-led-study-pinpoints-earths-ice-loss/
The funniest quote was from the University of Colorado Professor Wahr who states: ""It is awfully dangerous to take an eight-year record and predict even the next eight years, let alone the next century," he said." That's what us deniers say! Maybe we are reaching a 'consensus.' He prefaces his comments by saying: "Our results and those of everyone else show we are losing a huge amount of water into the oceans every year, people should be just as worried about the melting of the world's ice as they were before." I can assure Professor Wahr that denier concern levels about the melting of the world's ice is unchanged from before the release of the study. Most importantly for Prof. Wahr, 'everyone else' is still solidly behind the 'we are losing huge amounts of ice' school of thought in spite of the pesky Himalaya study.
What if I provide a citation for you? As in, "I am hapslappy_2222, and I endorse this message." (Rider endorsement: I also support legalized marijuana and public executions). Now, if someone endorses ME, and YOU endorse THAT person, we'll have an unassailable tautology of truth.
Yay for applying political science principles to real science!!
There is extremely solid evidence that the climate has been getting steadily warmer since the industrial revolution. http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/. That holds true even when we take into account things such as cities radiating heat and reduce them from the gathered data. And that holds true even on years when sun activity is low. That's as established fact as anything in the science can be: You can still claim that the earth is flat and call yourself a scientist, if you want to. You won't get much attention in peer reviewed scientific journals, though.
[Citation]
Because I am pretty sure the numbers are no where close to your posting.
For the claim that "98% of them to agree that it's somehow caused or contributed to by human activity," try Anderegg et al. Note that this is 98% of publishing climate scientist, not scientists in general.
I somehow doubt that that 98% would advocate abandoning scientific skepticism however. And I hope that most of them would be relieved ultimately to be proven wrong.
I will remain skeptical by default.
Absolutely! It's a sad day when those of us who do accept the mainstream position on this topic feel we have to denounce skepticism (ie. the demand for proof as opposed to mere nay saying) itself, or cannot recognise reports such as these as good news.
CITE YOUR GODDAM SOURCES... You. You have to be the first.
[Citation Needed]
It stops being skepticism and gets into denialism when the denier starts quoting the same old discredited arguments over and over again.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
In your post, you called me "addicted to exaggeration", "liar", "careless in comprehension", "sloppy" and "worthless". You also said that the claims I made were "laughable" and "not supported by facts". The problem is that you spent so much time calling me names that you forgot to... do anything else. Usually I'd dismiss a post like that as obvious flamebait but as someone evidently modded you up, I guess I'll try to find the factual claims there so I can respond.
Apparently, you think I've made some "industrial revolution claim" which is partially true. The whole point of my post was that whatever is the reason, the climate is getting warmer currently. That was the only claim I made and I can't find anything in your post that would show you actually disagree here. I also referred to the industrialization in a manner that pretty clearly shows it's a point in time. i.e., "The warming started about when it'd have started if it were due to industrial revolution". I was claiming correlation, not causality... and I guess you disagree very strongly and on a personal level here.
At the end, you link to the same graph I linked to (the source of it is on the NASA site I used as a source and a link to it is on the page I linked to. I considered linking to the graph specifically, but then decided it'd be redundant). It's the main source of my post so you linking to it still doesn't explain what you disagree with. What the graph doesn't show is the "40 years of cooling", though. In 1880-1920 it fluctuates steadily and after that the trend is rather obvious.
I guess that all the namecalling was because you think that if the warming was caused by industrial revolution, it'd have started a few decades earlier? Is that what you're trying to say?
Skepticism, always relies on stopping for a moment to think about a story you have read to find gaps in logic.
Hmm, melting ice, obviously if the location has temperatures in the range of -10 degrees and the temperature goes up to -8 degrees you are not going to see a great difference in melting at that location. You might see some interesting changes in glacier fracture due to stresses on 'weaker' ice.
Next up the 2 degree change in temperatures will not necessarily reduce precipitation, in this case snow falls. In fact at this location it will likely increase snow if at lower levels that rise in temperature is exacerbated due to local climatic conditions substantively increasing the moister in the air prior to it's rise to higher altitudes and the resultant increased precipitation occurs.
So all that ever will count are global averages, local areas only count where critical impacts might occur. Say like a storm surges might start flooding down town New York upon a regular basis or record snow falls over the whole of winter make even with a rise in temperature make Vancouver uninhabitable.
The real truth is, how much will it cost to take preventative measures and not need them and how much will it cost to not take preventative measures and need them. Aside from of course the mass execution of all Fossil fuel propagandists, political puppets and their funders. The world will really not be in a forgiving mood, with truly unpredictable changes in human society arising from that catastrophe but those short hair crested rock throwing monkeys have always been vengeful.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
What we actually need in this case is demand for verification, not skepticism per se.
If a guy comes to you and says, "oh by the way, I have this here research paper, where I've found out that OMG HIMALAYAS ARE MELTING!! WE WILL ALL DIE!!". The correct course of action is to ask him to submit said paper for peer review, and then see if anybody else can reproduce that observation. Once you get sufficient verification, you start treating it as an objective fact by default, unless future evidence proves you wrong. And, of course, more extraordinary claims require more stringent verification. How many times did we have to repeat Michelson-Morley experiment back in the day, before everyone was on firmly on STR boat?
Now, by that standard, we should reasonably treat AGW itself as an objective fact - there is plenty of verified evidence for it. What should be treated with considerable skepticism are the various doomsday scenarios that are often trotted out - precisely because most of them are not independently verified, or even easily verifiable in the first place - aside from some really obvious stuff, like a certain rise of ocean levels, and general statements along the lines of "climate will change significantly, which is highly likely to cause disruptions to our economics, albeit of presently unknown magnitude".
Seems to me this points toward something other than CO2 causing the warming.
And you would be wrong. It helps if you read the research on the subject. Also, the IPCC report has some very good layman explanations of the phenomena involved with planetary warming.
Something like, I don't know, water vapor, of which there is little in the Asian highlands, but plenty around the much lower areas where the glaciers are melting.
Actually, it is far more likely a result of GHGs in the lower troposphere preventing thermal radiation from escaping, which is already a noted result in stratospheric cooling.
Even AGW people admit that water is the REAL problem, and that CO2 is just a trigger for increases in that heat-storing gas.
Water vapor isn't a problem. It is a result of higher temperatures induced by higher concentrations of GHGs. You have your feedbacks a little backward.
But for some reason they seem to chafe at the idea of using condensers and other methods to remove the water from the air.
I'm not aware of any scientist chafing at the idea, however water vapor isn't the problem. Water vapor has a very short atmospheric lifetime. If water vapor was the only cause of temperature increases, then the system would actually self correct in short order. The temperature trend is a long term increasing trend, which could not be sustained by water vapor alone.
Come on, you think scientists who have studied advance physics, chemistry, and other disciplines would miss something so obvious? Water vapor is a feedback. Besides, we have nowhere near the technology to scrub the amount of water vapor out of the air that would be necessary to lower atmospheric temperatures. You're talking about battling the sun AND the heat retention of the atmosphere when it comes to water evaporation.
And not to worry, trying to sequester CO2 is just as stupid and futile.
Install reflux condensers (which are super cheap) on factories and automobiles and you reduce the humidity by as much as a few percent, which should easily negate the last century of warming. The best part is that it is effective instantly--no need to wait for three hundred years for the CO2 to come out on its own.
The amount of water vapor produced by cars and factories doesn't even register in the Earth's water cycle. The increased water vapor from higher temperatures (approximately 4%) is several orders of magnitudes higher. You'd be more effective scrubbing CO2, which by ppm, is a smaller and more manageable problem (though still intractable without world cooperation).
~X~
Well, the numbers I have can be found here
84% support the earth is warming
74% support man influenced warming
67% warming due to man made CO2
14% that the earth is in fact cooling.
These are in complete agreement with this expert as well.
Required reading for internet skeptics
And you just made yourself part of the problem by hurling insults. Using words like denialism or truthism to discredit those that speak out frankly is wrong, no matter what you believe. if you think they are wrong simply say 'you are wrong, here is the links that show this" and move on, its simple, easy, and doesn't turn any discussion into crap slinging which is what insults are.
And again as we saw with the ice ring correlation does not equal causation. Anybody that would have looked at the before and after of that glacier would have automatically said 'Its proof of AGW!" whereas if one would have dug a little deeper i'm sure the constant trucks pulling away from it fully loaded left some pretty deep tracks. Again it is better to discuss these things rationally instead of simply calling each other names. if they refuse to listen even after you have provided links without them providing any citation to refute yours simply point out they have a perception bubble and refuse to listen to reason and move on.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Your paper does not claim what you claim it claims (from the freaking abstract):
Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the eld support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
the relative climate expertise and scientic prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.
I'm still on the first page! You should see how they determine "expertise" and "prominence", it's a laugh. Honestly, I've never seen rhetoric abused so much in a supposedly scientific paper.
I can read on, but this doesn't look like it's going to be a terribly credible paper.
Here's a real gem:
Between December 2008 and July 2009, we collected the number of climate-relevant publications for all 1,372 researchers from Google Scholar (search terms: “author:-lastname climate”), as well as the number of times cited for each researcher’s four top-cited articles in any eld (search term “climate” removed). [ ... ] using Google Scholar provides a more conservative estimate of expertise
To examine only researchers with demonstrated climate expertise, we imposed a 20 climate-publications minimum to be considered a climate researcher, bringing the list to 908 researchers (NCE = 817; NUE = 93). Our dataset is not comprehensive of the climate community and therefore does not infer absolute numbers or proportions of all CE versus all UE researchers.
What really stands out, however, are the numerous confounders that are NOT considered by the authors at all!
Sorry, this paper is total garbage.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Those who are yelling "Global Meltdown", like their "Millennium Bug" counterparts a decade or so ago, are nothing more than fear mongers
They engage in fear mongering for one very specific purpose, and that is, they benefit from public panics
The "Millennium Bug" fear mongers spreaded fears so wide that even ridiculous fear such as "Planes dropping from the sky" were uttered by many
The "Millennium Bug" was little more than a hiccup precisely because the publicity spurred decision-makers to invest huge amounts of effort into reviewing/fixing old systems so that they didn't have problems. Had it not been for the publicity, many of the systems probably would not have been fixed and then there would have been hell to pay (as in "How could you eggheads let this happen?")
It was a no-win situation for IT professionals (at least in terms of the general public's view of them; I hear it was a major win for consulting companies who could scrounge up COBOL programmers)
It stops being skepticism and gets into denialism when the denier starts quoting the same old discredited arguments over and over again.
Just show them the hockey stick graph - that'll shut 'em up!
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Climbers who visit the Himalaya annually are constantly adding to their series of slides showing the decline in ice conditions on Himalayan peaks over the last 20 years. This is particularly noticeable on 6000m peaks. Google for Mera or Island peak for example. By my own experience the same is true of New Zealand. Once upon a time you could climb there in January February - no longer. The ice is slushy, downright muddy over most of the glaciers and the crevassing is constant.
I'm not sure how good this news is. From the Guardian article:
The scientists are careful to point out that lower-altitude glaciers in the Asian mountain ranges – sometimes dubbed the "third pole" – are definitely melting. Satellite images and reports confirm this. But over the study period from 2003-10 enough ice was added to the peaks to compensate.
So while the total amount of ice has remained relatively stable it appears the snowfall is moving up in elevation. As the atmosphere warms it can hold more water vapor so a possible cause of the increase in ice at higher elevations is warmer temperatures carrying water vapor higher before it precipitates out. The news may ameliorate some of the concerns over the water delivered by glaciers to the lowlands but it doesn't appear to me to be evidence against global warming.
Shouldn't the vast global environmentalist "AGW" conspiracy have prevented these scientists from publishing their results? Isn't climate science controlled by a crowd that ensures their future prosperity by preventing dissenting opinions? How could this be?!
They are probably still stunned by the release of the Climategate 2.0 emails.
Climategate 2.0 - A new batch of leaked emails again shows some leading scientists trying to smear opponents. - NOVEMBER 28, 2011
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
exactly. That is like polling a political party convention and finding out 98% of them agree on their chosen stance on guns.
Nonsense! A political party is self-selecting on the basis of political opinions so the selection bias is of the same nature as the information being polled, a political opinion. The selection bias here is not on the basis of opinion, but on the basis of expertise. If you want to rescue your analogy, it's much more like polling the 1000 best marksmen (expertise) and finding out that 98% of them agree on their chosen stance on guns (political opinion).
Let us not also forget about the many instances of research that has been abandoned or destroyed by some of those same climate researchers because it didnt agree with their views.
Could you jog our memory a little and list these many instances?
>>It was a no-win situation for IT professionals (at least in terms of the general public's view of them
We should have taken Newt's advice and let at least a couple big name disaster's happen then.
The only interesting thing from Y2K was my bank sending me a letter thanking me for my -95 years of loyalty to Wells Fargo.
They are called denier because 1) they are not climate scientist but still pretend to bring up OFT debunked theory to explain away their "skepticism" (solar activity anyone?) and 2) when pointed out that it has been debunked and linked to real climate or whatever they immediately distrust that source of info whereas 3) at the same time they link or accept much more dodgy source of info 4) total ignorance of the real research and refusal to actually publish a falsification of climate change, at which point they will usually whine about a conspiracy to NOT publish anti-climate change papers. There is a huge gap with skepticism.
This is the typical non-skeptic attitude, which you find nearly 1 to 1 in holocaust denial (not historian , did not study or do not accept actual evidence of holocaust, point at alternative explanation which make no sense and have been oft debunked, whine that there is a conspiracy to not publish their theory that holocaust did not happen. Remind you of some attitude ?). This is why they are called climate change denier : not because they are skeptic or whatnot , but much more because they use the same (wrong) process that holocaust denier use. Sure they dislike the word, but frankly, it is earned.
Skepticism as a process is totaly different, and a skeptic for example would keep a mind open for a possible falsification and error on previous data, but would not deny the mound of data we have by now.
So, yeah, climate change denier is spot on those people are not at all "skeptic" and don't apply skepticism as a process.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Yes, because the record is longer than 8 years.
Idiot.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Something immediately pops into my mind after reading this article. This is for the readers of /. as much as a statement to the general "anti-science" public.
It was the research of scientists that brought this anomaly public for discussions. Next time, before you go accusing scientists of running an "environmental agenda", remember that it was them that had the guts to offer a tidbit of evidence suggesting a circumspect opinion on the problem.
Sorry, hairyfeet, but he's use denialism correctly. When you choose to believe discredited arguments because you don't want the alternative to be true, you're living in denial.
The truth is that there's 14 different lines of evidence that indicate that climate change is occurring and 12 different lines of evidence that indicates that it's humans doing it. It's going to be extremely difficult for anyone to disprove all of those different lines of evidence. Too many people seize on one issue with one line of evidence and then proclaim because one issue exists that global warming no longer exists. They think if they can find one flaw in one line of evidence they can disprove all of the evidence in every line. In the public's mind that is possible, but in reality you would need to disprove nearly all of the separate lines of evidence. That's the reason why despite there by a full industry in denying that global warming, only a few of those people actually publish papers. And the ones who do publish articles that try to poke holes in AGW are usually proven to have made serious mistakes shortly after publication.
The opposition to AGW is driven by fears over what having to adapt to AGW will mean, not by skeptical evaluation of the evidence for and against AGW. Mostly because the evidence is overwhelmingly for AGW and anyone who's actually skeptical ends up agreeing that the theory is most likely true.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Even AGW people admit that water is the REAL problem, and that CO2 is just a trigger for increases in that heat-storing gas. But for some reason they seem to chafe at the idea of using condensers and other methods to remove the water from the air.
This is amazingly stupid even for you.
You're going to use insane amounts of energy (where are you going to get it? Burning coal?) to remove water vapour from the air.
Only to discover that the only result is to increase evaporation from the oceans.
The percentage of water vapour in the atmosphere depends on the temperature. Thats it.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Here, here!
There's a great blog and book called You're not so smart, and it goes into deep discussion of how people think and behave. and for the most part we aren't open to new ideas, we just cherry pick facts to justify our philosophical positions. It actually takes a tremendous amount of intellectual rigor to look at the MANY sides of an idea to come away with some concise idea of where the reality of the situation lands. This by the way is complicated in this modern age by the fact your search engines are designed to help you find what you're looking for. So if you're looking for justification, not only will you find it, but you will soon be virtually unable to find anything else... the engine will be leaned in the direction you push it. Just as an aside, this is one more reason to look for all sides of a conversation, because you want to prevent your primary source of information from becoming so biased that it becomes just another feedback on your point of view.
In the area of global climate change. We have a lot of very interesting information. Greenland is experiencing TREMENDOUS melting events and there is a huge influx of fresh water into the arctic ocean. The problems with polar bear and brown bears is well understood, including a recent event in which unusually warm coastal water prevents salmon runs in southern Alaska and resulted in serious die off of young brown bears. Glaciers through the Americas, Europe and Africa are disappearing. The loss of glaciers in North America is so pronounced that within 20 years the International Park name "Glacier" may have no glaciers to speak of. Ocean chemistry is changing, and measurable rises in CO2 have resulted in acidification threatening a wide variety of species that require carbonaceous shells (everything from coral to shell fish to crustaceans and their larva.) On the other side, chemical changes have caused a massive increase in ocean jellies (a well known survival response to perceived threat designed to ensure species survival in the face of potential calamity.) We're seeing dramatic shifts in the flowering and fruiting seasons of plant around the world. Shifts in animal migration. Statistical changes in weather patterns consistent with predicted models (increased numbers of floods and droughts and increases in precipitation and storm intensity.) Serious rise in droughts and wildfires in the Western US, Africa and Australia. These are all facts. Part of a larger picture and as some have already said, so complex that we don't understand it. However, we can begin to see patterns emerging. It would be profoundly foolish to ignore these signs, or wait until catastrophic environmental failure became clear and incontrovertible.
Wise money suggests there are a hundred good reasons for looking at ways to conserve energy, become more efficient, find renewable resources and create an energy economy that begins to move people and long term solutions off planet. Wise money suggests that rather than argue and justify a negligent past, it would serve us all best to invent a workable future and to that end, arguing against the impacts of fossil fuels and there growing scarcity would seem (at least to me) like a fools errand.