Slashdot Mirror
Losing the Public Debate On Global Warming
Hugh Pickens writes "Dr. James Hansen, director of the NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who first made warnings about climate change in the 1980s, says that public skepticism about the threat of man-made climate change has increased despite the growing scientific consensus. He says that without public support, it will be impossible to make the changes he and his colleagues believe need to occur to protect future generations from the effects of climate change. 'The science has become stronger and stronger over the past five years while the public perception is has gone in completely the other direction. That is not an accident,' says Hansen. 'There is a very concerted effort by people who would prefer to see business to continue as usual. They have been winning the public debate with the help of tremendous resources.' Hansen's comments come as recent surveys have revealed that public support for tackling climate change has declined dramatically in recent years. A recent BBC poll found that 25% of British adults did not think global warming is happening and over a third said many claims about environmental threats are 'exaggerated,' compared to 24 per cent in 2000. Dr. Benny Peiser, director of skeptical think tank The Global Warming Policy Foundation, says it's time to stop exaggerating the impact of global warming and accept the uncertainty of predictions about the rate of climate change. 'James Hensen has been making predictions about climate change since the 1980s. When people are comparing what is happening now to those predictions, they can see they fail to match up.'"
Facts are true whether I choose to believe in them are not. That's the message that needs to be hammered into the public sphere by the scientists - evidence proves it's happening. Whether the global warming, climate change, or what have you is man-made is the only thing really still in dispute among serious scientific circles, and the majority consensus among the researchers actively involved in studying it is that it is anthropogenic in nature.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
'James Hensen has been making predictions about climate change since the 1980s. When people are comparing what is happening now to those predictions, they can see they fail to match up.'
In other news, Hansen's 30-year-old global temperature predictions close to spot-on
and the promised "hockey stick" increase in temperatures not been seen in the last 15 years...
That's just not true.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A2.gif
And note, climate is what happens over periods of at least 30 years. At 15 years you're still in the realm of weather.
But heck, the fact you're not interested in a serious discussion of AGW is underlined by the Muslim outreach comment.
It's a problem of definition.
You say it's a child, I say it's an embryo.
When you say I want to allow the killing of children I get defensive. Because that's not what I'm allowing.
Holding on to that is "so important", because being bullied because of someone else's religious beliefs makes people defensive.
I largely agree but the "progressives" are not for extreme environmentalism - the conservatives greatly exaggerate their attacks to the point where it is hard to use satire to ridicule it. 1st time I saw Glenn Beck I thought he was over the top satire. The conservatives just went too far lately labeling a woman a slut just for wanting access to birth control. They'll often call Obama a Nazi and a Communist in the same rant.
Restraining the extremes of capitalism is not anti-capitalism anymore than Firemen are anti-fire. To an extreme capitalist, any criticism of their religion is blasphemy - and they are at the point of religion just like communists in the USSR. (A god is not required for something to be a religion.)
I agree progressives want to strengthen and expand democratic institutions greatly; not all of them believe centralized power is always the solution.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You have totally mischaracterised the debate. Most scientists aren't shouting about the end of the world -- but /some/ scientists are shouting about doing /something/ to mitigate against future risk. If there is a 10% chance of CAGW, and that can be reduced to 5% by investing 1% of resources now, then that is simply common sense. Heck, we spend 5% on the military budget.
/may/ get worse at an exponential rate (say 10% chance), and lead to serious suffering -- even in the USA.
But we cannot even talk about risk and risk-management, because as soon as you bring up the topic, "skeptics" accuse you of predicting the end of the world. This is just bullsh*t. Everyone has to feel the are right on whatever issue, even when they have to make up complete bulls*t.
As for AGW being "chicken-little", it is entirely plausible that there will be no ice-caps in 500 years time. It normally takes 10x that long or more for an ice-age to end. In just the next few decades, we will be hit in the wallet by insurance companies, who are already starting to factor in the costs of increased extreme weather events. The effects
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
$4 billion is 0.0003% of our national economy.
There may be an almost consensus that climate change is happening, but there is far from a consensus that it is caused by man's actions or inactions.
This is simply untrue. We are 90% certain that warming is anthropogenic, and furthermore, 97% of climate scientists support that figure.
You obviously formed this opinion by reading someones blog, or something like that. Climate change is the most well studied phenomenon in the history of the world. Go read what actual scientists have to say on the issue.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Actually, my knowledge of Greenland circa 1000AD is personal: In my undergrad days, I helped process samples from a Geology expedition to Greenland by two of my professors. Amongst the samples I cataloged were wood and tree branch sections, pulled out of the ice, and carbon-dated to ~990-1020 AD. Kind of hard to grow trees on the icecap. . . .
First, you have to prove it was mankind and is harmful. Let me toss some facts:
Recent melting glaciers in BC contain trees only 7600 years old. This means the ice isn't long time permanent. Be you creationist or evolutionist man survived and multiplied well 7600 years ago with a warmer climate. Most of the antarctic and arctic ice is recent ice as in less than 10,000 years old. Human species evolved when it was warmer.
Mars polar caps, Io ice melts, my SUT did it? Hm, prove it. There is a stellar component and tax-me-more eco freaks ignore the obvious. Ignore sunspots and stellar activities? Come now. Seelctive science is generally junk science.
Hey, I will not even argue warming exists!!! But is it bad to have say NWT turn into farm-able and livable land? Or ferns to grow again on the north slope of Alaska?
Let me ask, why does eco junk science always talk of gloom and doom for tax bucks? Yep, it is about the money for most eco freaks, it isn't about empirical unbiased opens science at all. Just political BSing the outlook for fear taxes today. 99% of what we are fed in the media is political jousting in the ruse of science, about money, taxes and power. Pretty hard to sort it out too.
People are getting sick of the BS and shutting down. Be it right or wrong.
The temperature change over the last 30-50 years is of comparable magnitude to the shift from the medieval warm period to the little ice age (the two greatest temperature extremes of the last 2000 years), a change that took more than 10 times as long to occur. Perhaps if you look further back you can find natural cycles that match the volatility of the current one, but the examples given above certainly don't cut it.
There hasn't been an increase in the last 10 years primarily because of a particularly strong la nina. Short term cyclical events generally have a greater magnitude than the overall warming trend. If you take ~11 year moving averages to hide the known cyclical variations, the warming trend is very much still there.
"Hide the decline" refers to the fact that temperatures inferred from tree ring sizes in the last couple decades haven't matched actual temperature readings (possibly because of other human influence on tree growth). When presenting tree ring data, they replace very recent data with actual temps, usually using a different color or something to indicate that it has been swapped out.
There are legitimate criticisms of the AGW argument, but you haven't put forth any of them. <ad hominem> This clearly indicates that you don't seek the truth, just the promotion of a personal agenda. That or you're not very smart, and it's usually wrong to attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. </ad hominem>
It is very revealing that so-called "skeptics" of global warming reject the results of studies carried out by multiple different laboratories, using a wide variety of different analytical methods and many different types of data collected from around the globe, but uncritically accept as fact conclusions based upon 3rd hand accounts of agricultural practices in one small region of Europe. Summary and citations of the actual science can be found here
It is by the way, absolutely false that there has been "NO" temperature increase in the past 10 years. In fact, analysis of the data shows a clear upward trend over the past 10 years. The question is whether the increase satisfies the technical criterion of "statistical significance" -- which means showing that there is less than a 5% probability that an apparent increase of that magnitude could occur by random statistical variations. This is a particularly stupid argument, because statistical analysis of climate models (as well as weather trends) indicates that 10 years is too short an interval to reliably detect the predicted global warming trend even if it is real. (Although if you correct for known natural sources of climate "noise," it turns out that it is significant after all. So while we cannot prove that global warming did not end 10 years -- or 10 seconds -- ago, this is not evidence that it has stopped.
Completely false. See here for a list of some of the confirmed falsifiable predictions of climate theory. And that includes the big one: predicting global warming before it was evident in the temperature record.
Citation needed. Please provide IPCC report references for the consensus climate science predictions that supposedly have not come true
Actually, there are hardly any scientists who disagree with AGW, and those few have been discredited. Also, Hadley didn't falsify any data, AFAIK Hansen isn't associated associated with Hadley, Hadley can't release the data because it isn't theirs to release, and Hansen (among others) does support nuclear power.
So, five wrong statements so far. Want to try for six?
What a long, strange trip it's been.
The question is whether the increase satisfies the technical criterion of "statistical significance"
You don't think that this sort of remark ... might be part of the reason global warming has such a bad rep. Let's run you through a basic application of statistical science here.
When we make a measurement, you're essentially placing a sensor in a noisy environment. If we make the wrong assumption that the noise is random (this is wrong, but hopefully close enough. Yes, hopefully). So you take many measurements and use a number of techniques to fix this data, including several that are essentially fraud (I can see the guy at this station wasn't taking his medicine these days, let's just drop that data - type of "fixing"). Then you test a hypothesis against that data. This does not result in "a warming trend" or "a cooling trend" it results in 2 numbers : chance that the temperature has risen -> p, chance that the temperature has not risen -> !p (hey sue me, slashdot does not implement latex and I'm not about to look up the correct UTF symbol for not). You might also calculate a value "q", the chance that the temperature has dropped. And this also gives you !q.
What may amaze you is that p > !p AND q > !q. So we're dealing with a guess here. The convention is that unless p > 95%, we don't say temperature has risen. For most data sets, p 50%).
Note that even this 95% is a concession of the scientific world to statistical sciences, and there's a huge problem with statistical sciences. By contrast, the canonical example of an exact science, physics, only considers a measurement reasonable when it passes a significance of six sigma (which is 99.9999998027% certain). That is *NOT* enough to declare something the truth within physics, the only thing that is enough for that is a mathematically consistent theory that passes repeatable experiments (and even then it usually takes 10 years or more).
Read that link. Think about the fact that climate science is in fact much more limited in what it can experiment with than medical science. Experiments are impossible. Today's data is unreliable to the point where ~10% of the data points are flat-out wrong before correction. Data going back thousands of years is used, and nobody really knows it's reliability (and the tree ring issue certainly seems to suggest a lot of factors we don't know are at play here) ...
So can you please understand that if it's not statistically significant, it didn't happen. Credibility is a huge problem already, please don't screw it by being wrong 50% of the time. No, not even if you mean well.
You're not helping.