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.'"
When we have a nontrivial portion of the population who does not believe that humanity resulted from evolution by natural selection, and that the universe is less than ten thousand years old, did we really expect people to accept science that something bad is going to happen if they do not change their behavior?
Our failure to insist on scientific literacy rates as high as written-word literacy rates is going to be something that comes back to bite us, I'm afraid. I'm not sure there is anything to be done for the problem now, except educate as well as we can.
Maybe we can have some scientists say that a god revealed to them that it dislikes the smell of vehicle exhaust and is angrily heating up the planet as a result. Unfortunately, I'm only half-kidding.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Once the sky falls enough for a piece to hit you in the head, then it's too late to prevent its complete collapse. So do we want to prevent it from falling, or not?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
If you're going to take on an issue that strikes fear in the blood-pumps (not hearts) of multi-trillion dollar industries, they are going to spend some of those trillions trying to paint you a fool in the eyes of the public.
Anyone who thought it would be easy wasn't getting into the fight with their eyes open. All you have to do is look at the way medical cannabis is legal in many states, while the DEA continues to claim there is no medical use for cannabis to realize that going up against the status quo is, at best, "frustrating."
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
But shouldn't we be concerned that NASA's interest in Global warming is going to get in the way of their Primary Mission of Muslim Outreach"...
Without taking a position whether or not global warming is caused by human activities:
- There is a complete industry now that exists by the grace of the belief that GW is man-made and we can do something about it. This is business having an interest in governments and public believing we should reduce CO2 emissions.
- Being a GW denier is silly. However try taking the position that GW is not entirely man-made, or that GW will not be as damaging as to justify billions of investments. You will get attacked almost in the way blasphemists were attacked in the middle ages. You are a non-believer, and you should go along with the "common believe" and "consensus", what we all think. How dare you disagree? But science is not consensus based. One experiment is all it takes to create new insights, models, theories.
I feel frustrated by governments taking GW as an excuse to raise taxes and increase influence on everyones personal life whenever they can. For instance, banning the light bulb - just how stupid is that?
My karma ran over your dogma
This is a common misconception. We don't need to change our lifestyles to reduce greenhouse gas emissions signifcantly. We can simply get energy from other sources and improve energy efficiency. Individuals changing their lifestyles won't be nearly as effective in reducing greenhouse gas emissions than policies that promote using less fossil fuels and less energy.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Uh...I know a lot of people who have made shifts like that. And incidentally, it makes for a more pleasant life.
The only piece I really haven't done is "stop eating meat," I've tried vegetarianism, and even the suggested diet leaves me tired and hungry. As to the rest? I bike or take public transit almost everywhere-I still have a car, I think I put maybe 1500 miles on it last year. This year will probably be even less. I very rarely fly. If I need to log into a client's system to troubleshoot it, that's what remoting in is for. I don't need to personally be there.
As an added bonus, it's better! Biking is much more pleasant than sitting stuck in traffic, as is reading a book on the train, and the cycling part of it is good for your health to boot. Remoting in to a client's system rather than physically going out there saves the client paying for travel costs, and saves me having to deal with the hassle of it. Win-win.
Totally agreed on hybrid cars. If people want to make a difference, they don't need a different car, they need to drive the car less. Someone with the worst gas-guzzler SUV in the world that they rarely ever start is doing much more good than a Prius owner commuting in it daily. There is one thing, though, that encourages people (including the most ardent climate-change denialists) to leave that car in the garage more often-higher gas prices. I'm not sorry at all to see them rising.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
We need a strong fundamental shift in our lifestyles - stop eating meat - stop driving everywhere - stop flying in planes, stop consuming useless shit. No one - even global warming believers - seems to be willing to do this.
I know a few people who do that.
Personally I don't. I don't believe the answer is for a few people with the highest integrity to take action, whilst the majority don't do anything.
There has to be systematic solutions, such that everyone changes. The market always wants to go in the direction of more consumption, so those solutions have to come from governments' mandates.
It's either that or wait till the environment does turn to shit and non-sustainable resources are exhausted. And let nature put an and to it.
It isn't global warming science that many object to, it's that almost every 'solution' proposed seems to be a call for more redistribution and for people to scale back their lifestyles.
The problem really is chicken little.
I've tried to explain this to people "in the movement" and they just get livid. Because the environmentalists have spent so much time focusing on AGW/carbon, other issues which are much more obvious and easy to rally people on have been ignored.
The problem with the apocalyptic arguments are that people tune them out the same way they tune out fundamentalists Christian apocalypses. The AGW fundamentalists come off the same way.
The real shame is that while they've been preaching, real issues are being ignored. Mountain top mining goes on. Coal ash fallout continues. The irony is that if they addressed these real and obvious concerns about which few disagree, then carbon emissions would be reduced as a side effect.
Another thing is that the AGW apocalypse isn't as bad as the Christian one unless we go Venus. I don't think any scientists are suggesting that. I always imagine a couple guys in the Bay Area 20,000 years ago. One turns to another and says, "hey, put out that fire. If you don't the world will heat up and the whole valley will flood". Well, Hello... 20,000 years later we have "save the bay". Save the Bay??? That's the paleo-native American apocalypse. We should be filling it back in.
I always remember this one argument I got into with a guy at a coffee shop. I never got to explain why I thought it was wrong for the movement to focus on AGW. He just flew into a rage. That's not science. That's religion.
The economy is hardly working as is. Add regulation to reach a 20% reduction in CO2 and we break its back.
And that 20% reduction would only be symbolic anyway.
IMHO the science is a minor part of it with regards to the public. It's the fact that there is a perception that certain ideologies have seized upon GW as a free ticket to further their agendas of limiting economic and public activity and increasing the interference and power of government within our lives. The natural reaction of the competing ideology is to discredit the basis of this power grab.
Economically, with the general decline the G20 is experiencing, as the most advanced nations they would bear the brunt of this new philosophy of "sustainability", which would be suicide for them.
Politically, specifically in America, there's a reason progressives embrace GW and conservatives do not. It provides a cover for some of their longest desired goals. Further centralization of government, extreme enviromentalism, and anti-capitalism.
Science is just a patsy for both sides in this argument.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
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. The planet does a lot of thing that we cannot understand completely.
Weather is far from predictable-- as a pilot I find the weather predictions can rarely be trusted more than one day out... How can we possibly make predictions for *decades* in the future?
Am I saying we should burn all the oil as fast as possible and dump as many pollutants or greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as possible? Not at all... We humans have a duty to be conservative of resources in everything we do. Improving efficiency is a good thing, and that often takes economic factors.
The media have become as much a problem for serious debate as an enabler for that debate to happen.
They have added credence to otherwise unsubstantiated claims due to the claim of "balanced" approach to the issue which has resulted in a 'us vs. them' philosophy in so many issues in which proper scientific, evidential analysis is brought along side speculative, unsubstantiated and biased arguments and presented as equivalent when that is not the case.
This has happened in so many facets of current debates, and is not necessarily restricted to the lowest-common denominator type media outlets that truly there appears to be no hope that proper researched, independently verified fact can be brought to the public without a major injection of cash and a carefully planned advertising campaign accompanying it. Because where there is opposition, with all their clear bias, certain parts of the media will ignore it to give them a microphone, whether willing or not to voice their opposition no matter the weight and validity of their arguments.
Science has always battled the incumbents. In the past it was the religious leaders where the questions of how were being answered quicker than the clergy could justify. Today, science is besieged by not only the religious, but by those with the political and monetary will to preserve a status quo that may well spell hardship on future generations.
Climate change is one such area of science where those who are doing the actual work can have their findings drowned out by anyone who has a microphone and a name.
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.
But if that were the case why is it that alternatives to those solutions are not given but, more often instead, it is argued that anthropogenic global warming is not happening in the first place?
At least the former tactic I can respect. People who deny all scientific evidence because it disagrees with their worldview I cannot.
Happy people make bad consumers.
'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
The problem isn't people denying global warming. Most people have a poor enough understanding of weather patters to grumble something about global warming after a single hotter than average day.
The problem is proving we're the cause. No one is buying it, and since they don't have any actual proof of anthropogenic global warning, they use scary pictures of polar bears on tiny ice patches to convince the public of something they already believe in (non-anthropogenic global warming).
So, are we still on track for the oceans to rise 10 feet by 2050, like they told us kids back in the 80's? SCIENCE!
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
I agree, failing to protect our future from death is far less important than profits now.
12,000 years ago there was a mile of ice where I live. A few weeks ago it was 28C(normally about 5C this time of the year). So yes there is climate change. But every year the Hurricane people have said that there would be X hurricanes this year; yet nearly every year they were very wrong. Often they got it exactly wrong as to big years and quiet years. So I am leery of any predictions that go far into the future when we can all agree that weathermen's (climatologists) predictions are basically a joke.
Also in the 1970s these same climatologists were claiming that the ice age was right around the corner.
I am absolutely not equipped to say that they are right or wrong. What I will say is that they are often wrong about what is going to happen tomorrow. So I place zero value of what they say will happen years into the future. I will buy their analysis of the past, the science of making a history of what happened is getting better and better. The why.... not so much.
If I were a government official making plans I would plan for 3 scenarios. It gets warmer, it gets colder, it stays the same.
stop eating meat
Humans eat meat. Our teeth and intenstines are the evidence. But we could do with a bit less meat. Quite a bit less even.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
This is just factually incorrect. Al Gore is not a scientist. He, as you said, used the results of science for political advocacy. But using the results of science does not politicize that science. The scientists did not have to give Al Gore their blessing to use their results. They were not complicit in his work. The scientists involved in the IPCC have been remarkably objective and apolitical.
Back in the Kyoto talks, we were TOLD that if no action was taken, then the point of no return was something like 2007. Well? Based on that "science", nothing we do can help anyway.
We get predictions like that all the time. If there's anything we learned from the climategate emails, it's that a lot of the scientists working on this problem are not working in good faith.
The solution, I think, is to work on things that will help us anyway, even if AGW turns out to not be a problem. For example, improving electric car technology will be good for America, whether AGW is a big ball of hype, or whether it's real. Same with fusion electricity. We can work on those things.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There's $4 billion available without raising taxes: the oil and natural gas subsidies.
Dilbert RSS feed
Well, not just the Medieval Optimum, but other warm periods existed in human history, warmer than now. . . After all, in the 1300's, wine grapes grew in Britain, and Greenland WAS Green. CO2 is a FOLLOWING indicator of warming, with a 500-1000 year delay,
And, of course, solar input is NOT constant: it's looking like we're heading into another Solar Minimum, like the Maunder Minimum, the Dalton Minimum, and the Spörer Minimum.
The reason the average person does not believe them is simple the people pushing that mankind is the sole cause of global warming don't act like it is true.
We hear all this stuff about not flying and they have these huge parties/conventions all over the world in really nice fancy places, alot of the people coming via private planes.
You can see all the huge houses owned by the people pushing it.
Heck even countries are not acting like it is true, look at all the countries dropping low emission power generation in place of coal based plants.
Is unpopular decisions that are going to be very expensive. We can't just sit back can cry over the expenses and hope the problem goes away, we can no afford to NOT fix the problems.
Instead we see NIMBY's stopping just about every technology that can help us out, coming up with stupid excuses as to why they are not the ones being idiotic. Sure, some of the tested technologies are not paying themselves back as much as we could have hoped, but they are still better than no action, as even a failed experiment yields useful information.
Instead of building sustainable energy, the ones wanting to build have to waste their time in courts fighting ignorants over conjecture and details such as "will it spoil my view from my bedroom window in the morning".
Instead of building CO2 neutral power, we are decommissioning existing power plants, with the only alternative being coal or gas, which is NOT CO2 neutral. True, some of the decommissioned plants were unsafe, but not all are. But the easily scared population want them gone, just because one have a mishap in Japan after being exposed to forces in excess of five times the expected worst case scenario. People forget the fact that most nuclear power plants are NOT in the risk zones of quakes that bad.
Instead of looking into alternatives. people flatly say no when they hear some buzzwords. That is the damage the "green" movements have done to the efforts to get GREEN energy.
In parts of the U.S., it's already significantly cheaper to use solar power than fossil fuels. What is most needed at this point, at least in the U.S., is a more flexible, lower resistance power grid so that solar power from a sunny day in Texas can adequately make up for the bleak midwinter in Oregon. This is useful whether we move to "green" power or not.
The bigger problem is China and other early industrial nations. As long as new nations transition from agrarian economies to industrial economies using coal as their primary means of power production, no amount of regulation in modern countries is going to improve things; it will only keep them from getting worse at an ever-accelerating pace.
What we need to solve this is a ban on U.S. and European companies building coal-based plants in other countries—make it as hard as possible for developing nations to get their start using coal and as easy as possible for them to get their start using more modern power production.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
pfft! I have antique glassware that's more radioactive than store-prepped spent fuel - and I drink out of it. No ill effects. BLARP!
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Humans eat meat. Our teeth and intenstines are the evidence.
Naturalistic fallacy. Just because we evolved to eat meat doesn't mean we have to eat meat, or even that we should.
(not that I don't - I'm just pointing out the reasoning flaw)
Dilbert RSS feed
For years, the environmentalists have believed that it was necessary to exaggerate.
If they said "Here is a problem we should try to solve", they believed they would be ignored.
So instead they scream "THIS PROBLEM THREATENS OUR SURVIVAL!!! WE NEED TO SOLVE IT NOW!!!!".
After years of hearing this, the public recalibrates their bullshit sensors.
And yes, I consider myself an environmentalist. I just wish the rest of us were more honest.
This is simply not true. The economy has faulted because of massive fraud in the banking sector. Thanks to deregulatory policies of Larry Summers, Paul Ruben, and Alan Greenspan, we have no paper-trail to bring changes, since bankers were no longer required to underwrite loans. We had people printing money for themselves, and the greed got so intense, that the entire banking system is in jeopardy.
All of this has nothing to do with investing in renewable technologies -- or including the price of pollution into burning CO2. It can be phased in gently over 20 years.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Four Billion dollars? (Evil laugh).
That's nothing! Absolutely nothing.
(Maniac Laughter).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"When people are comparing what is happening now to those predictions, they can see they fail to match up."
Citation needed. When you are engaging in skeptical analysis, you need to show your work. If the majority of scientists agree, but you have found that they are wrong, you need to show the empirical evidence. Which predictions have you falsified? Using what data?
How about a spot check of your work? Let's see if we can tell whether your way is to use science or subterfuge.
Venice Skepticism: You reference a prediction that observed increases in the rate and severity of floods in Venice will abate over coming years, but do not provide empirical evidence that it has been abating. The paper you reference says on the first page that predicting changes in storm surge levels is inherently uncertain. It provides no significant empirical events that could be a cause for a reversal of the current trend, and relies on a new way of modelling the problem which has not been empirically tested. There is empirical evidence that it has been increasing, as well as empirically tested models that predict the flooding will continue. A claim that the current trend will reverse without empirical evidence -- with nothing more than an untested model that gives the answer you want -- is not science.
Greenland Sea Level Rise: You claim to refute the observation that the accelerating breakup of Greenland's ice sheet may lead to increased sea levels by showing evidence that the sea levels have not risen yet. The fact that levels have not risen in the past does not contradict the prediction that they will rise in the future if the Greenland ice continues to break up.
Those are the first two stories on your "False Alarms" page, not cherry-picked, just the first two. They are completely without rational or scientific merit. They are exactly the sort of thing TFA claims are at the heart of global warming criticism. I love rational skepticism -- but based on the first two examples on your own website, I can reach no other conclusion than that you are a shining example of intentional disinformation with a shoddy veneer of scientific inquiry.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
...One could argue, even less than symbolic, it could be counter productive. Breaking Western economies only drives all the production to less environmentally friendly areas of the world.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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.
Yeah, fuck the poor who rely on petroleum based agriculture for survival! Don't they know that the poor who are too lazy to move a few hundred yards a decade might drown maybe someday!?
um... I think he's operating outside his job description. Clue: National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Nothing about ocean there, if he wants in that crowd he's in the wrong agency - he wants the NOAA.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
- "I bet the majority still drive a gas powered car (instead of diesel or electric)"
Nope, using public transports.
- "waste and fail to recycle regularly, "
Partially true I'm afraid.
- "leave lights on instead of trying to minimize electrical/gas use. "
If anything I use too little light.
But you have the right point. People rant over wasting resources, yet most here are in the demographic that wastes the most.
One person can't make a difference, but if they join their effort, a billion can.
The problem is that most of that billion don't even acknowledge that something needs to be done and instead make excuses such as "batteries pollute too" or "recycling cost more energy than making new". Some may be partially right, but recycling prevents the waste to end up on a garbage heap, that in itself is a goal.
The economy is hardly working as is. Add regulation to reach a 20% reduction in CO2 and we break its back.
And that 20% reduction would only be symbolic anyway.
Speaking of chicken little and hyperbole in the debate.
Our economy and its energy usage is just like the obese person who goes into a restaurant and order 3 low calorie dinners for themselves.
We're running around trying to fix the symptoms when the airline industry, for one, has been solving the problem for decades.
To save fuel costs, they buy more efficient engines and streamline their operations - as much as they can - and as a result, they use less fuel; which has a side effect of lower pollution and other emissions AND they become a bit more profitable.
So, as we become more "green" we will use less fossil fuels - expensive fuels (and we're not even talking about the health and environmental costs) which will - get this - lessen the economic drag on the economy.
By being more fuel efficient and "green" it will actually boost the economy.
Or since folks like comparing the China; they are reaping what they sow because now, with the environmental devastation of their economic polices, they are experiencing some god awful things (obscene healthcare burdens for example) that will harm their economy.
That is incredibly naive. Think back to kindergarden economics. Supply and demand. You have a certain amount of supply of energy producing resources. If you remove some of that supply, say 95% of the supply that currently goes to transportation, then the price on the remaining 5% skyrockets. This causes widespread suffering, and total devastation among already marginal communities.
Liberals and environmentalists like to think that they are kind, and care for the poor, but they never stop to think about the impact that their policies actually have on them. This has happened over and over again over the past hundred years.
Whether climate change is occurring is properly the domain of science. Here, I think Hansen is on relatively solid footing. Pretty much all the important policymakers have signed on to the fact climate change is occurring -- as David Brin pointed out a few days ago, when the US Navy is updating its warplans to account for the Northern Passage being open, it's hard to argue that climate change _isn't_ being taken seriously by the establishment.
However, what we should do about climate change is not a scientific question. How much will CO2 mitigation cost -- not just in terms of direct and indirect monetary damages, but in terms of human life lost? Economic growth (a large part of which is driven by the availability of cheap power) has historically been the most reliable tool for improving the human condition. Without power, life is nasty, brutish and short. If CO2 mitigation mechanisms like the sort Hansen advocates were to be adopted worldwide, what would the butcher's bill be? That's an economics problem, and Hansen is not an economist. If the climatology community is going to scream at people, "well, you're no climatologist, so you're only invited to this discussion if you agree with us!", then the economics community is entirely within its rights to tell climatologists to STFU about economic choices.
Then there's the geopolitical angle. Let's say Hansen gets his worldwide controls on CO2. Let's also say that China, currently the world's leading CO2 producer, says "no, our poor deserve a better life and we need economic growth in order to provide it, if we stop building power plants we'll have a civil war and millions will die, so fuck you, we're going to continue to build one new coal-fired power plant each week." What does the rest of the world do then -- invade China to shut down their power plants? The rest of the world can't do nothing: if it lets China slide, then the next thing you know India says, "yeah, we're in the same boat, screw you guys" and the entire thing falls apart. How do you build a geopolitical framework for enforcement of such a system? Hansen is a climatologist -- he's not Henry Kissinger.
Hansen has won the scientific argument. He's losing the economics argument and the geopolitical arguments -- and deservedly so. He's neither an economist nor a diplomat, after all.
Note to the climate change looneytunes who are about to leap down my throat: I'M AGREEING WITH YOU, DAMN IT. The only thing I'm saying is that this is a big stinking problem with a whole lot of dimensions, most of which the climatology community is completely unqualified to talk intelligently about; and within the realm that it _is_ qualified to talk about it, the climatology community has already substantially won that argument.
The focus on how global warming is being caused has been detrimental. Its pretty deep stuff for a business major to know. You have to understand band gap orbitals to verify CO2 does indeed absorb various IR bands. Actually computing wavelengths from the orbitals filled is on the upper edge of what might be in highschool chemistry, I was not exposed until college chem. Then there is the statistics necessary to interpret temperature readings. Even engineering stat in college wasn't entirely sufficient, though most college statistics courses would be (engineering stat was dumbed down). There is no accepted water/cloud model yet even among the experts.
Trying to walk everyone through this so they are willing to act is hopeless. The cause is only of secondary importance in any case. If this was in fact a natural trend and it was harmful, we should still act and/or adapt in precisely the same ways for precisely the same reasons.
Presenting the consequences, good and bad, in a non-melodramatic way on a region by region basis for the entire world is the first step. It answers "Why should *I* change?" Water levels rising will harm many, but its not sufficient to convince many others. It is hard for a Welsh farmer who anticipates being able to start a vineyard, to be convinced by NYC turning into Venice. Give the farmer the whole picture for their region.
The second step is to present all the options for climate control and their relative effectiveness both alone and in concert. Reducing CO2/methane emissions is the most natural approach, but there are many others like sequestration, albedo engineering, and counter agents. One that comes up a lot is aerosolized SO2. Thus side effects of these other approaches should also be discussed.
We as a society will likely make the wrong choice, but right now many are making the choice without any knowledge of the consequences apart from climate horror movies, or any knowledge of the tools we have to counter these consequences apart from some vague idea we should drive less or use a different sort of light bulb.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
A number of historians have written about this topic, and what history says isn't encouraging.
Quite a lot has been written about the history of the "Fertile Crescent", whose core area was what we now call Syria and Iraq. 3000 years ago, it was a a fertile area, semi-arid but covered with forests and farmland. Now most photos you see from anywhere in the area show a rocky, plant-free landscape. The change is generally attributed to salination that was the result of irrigation projects that started about 8000 years ago, but reached their peak extent maybe 3000 years ago. Historians have said that there is a lot of evidence that the people then (farmers and hydro engineers) understood the problem of soil salinification, and understood that the solution is over-watering to leach out the salts. The problem was that, in the short term (of a human life span ;-), it was more profitable to use the limited water supply on the maximal crop area. So salts slowly accumulated, and eventually the farming died out because nothing would grow there any more. This process has been documented in other areas, but this is one area in which we know that the people continued maximizing their short-term profit even though they knew of the long-term disaster that would result.
Actually, it seems that the problems there aren't as serious as they look. Back in the 1970s and 80s, an interesting series of experiments were conducted: The researchers leased plots of land of 1 to 2 square-km, built goat-proof fences around them, then sat back and watched. This was done across the southwest-Asian "desert" area, roughly from Syria to Pakistan. The results were that a year later, every such experimental plot of land had turned into "grassland" (or prairie if you prefer). The conclusion was that the entire southwest-Asian desert is artificial. If we would remove the grazing animals from the area for one year, it would all revert to grasslands. Then the grazing animals could be brought back, since the land would support them. As long as the population of grazers was then kept low enough, the area could become several orders of magnitude more productive than it is now. But the result has been to ignore this. There's no way you can get the governments or the farmers in that area to cooperate with such a project, when it requires taking the land out of production for a year.
In both of these cases, the general population may not have understood the issue. The local technical experts (including the farmers) did and do. But their short-term interests have always been to maximize this year's profit, partly because if they don't do that, they'll be bankrupt and out of business. So the ongoing disaster continues.
The "global warming" issue is pretty much the same story. We've documented the process for centuries, and have detailed information for the last half-century showing conclusively that the changes are primarily due to human activity. But the people who run our economies have the usual interest in short-term profit, partly because if they don't behave this way, they'll lose to the others who go with the short term.
Anyway, history says that we probably won't do much about the issue, even though we have enough information to know how to do so. And, since the evidence says that the recent warming is mostly due to human activity, we can say that we now have the ability to control our climate if we wish. But we can only do this on a rather large scale, and we know pretty well that humanity won't organize on the scale that it takes to actually carry out such projects.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
So... an entire field of scientists doing their utmost to produce the most accurate models of climate change, with ever-improving accuracy and consensus on their work are being politically manipulated? They are _all_ blindly stupid or complicit? That appears to be what you're saying.
The only reason the science is being contested is the same reason evolution is: because some people have agendas that don't care about facts.
Would you like a slice of toast?
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
It's not the scientists who have framed the debate in this way. It's the politicians. As soon as it became a political discussion, it created an "us versus them" mentality between the Democrats and the Republicans. At that point, any hope of actually improving things through sane, well-reasoned legislation went out the window because neither party is capable of even remotely sane or reasonable discussion of any issue.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
What we need to solve this is a ban on U.S. and European companies building coal-based plants in other countriesâ"make it as hard as possible for developing nations to get their start using coal and as easy as possible for them to get their start using more modern power production.
So you're suggesting that the US and EU collude to prevent other countries from advancing beyond an agrarian society unless they make themselves dependent on technology from another country that doesn't have their and their people's best interests at heart?
Well, congratulations. We won't have to wait around for a possible, theoretical, climate disaster. Don't forget that China and India both have nuclear bombs and missiles. That will start WW3, and then everybody will be screwed.
Great plan. I don't recall seeing any climate problems in Fallout 3.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Are you serious? The amount of plant matter that needs to be digested by an animal to create enough meat to feed a human is far more than the amount of plant matter that needs to be eaten by the human to replace the meat.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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. . . .
Those are good points and it's a great example of the problem with this debate. I think that the FACT of global climate change at the hands of humans is pretty indisputable but what to do about it and how much harm it will cause is the next step in the debate. The idea of one or more huge government programs to fix the problem does not appeal to me, even as I acknowledge that sea levels are rising, species are migrating, ice is melting, etc. I don't know what else to do, so we might be stuck with a solution, government intervention, that is bad but better than all the other bad alternatives.
Currently hooked on AMP
No one has come up with anything credible that GW is happening either. Score so far; 0-0.
This is simply not true. Go read the IPCC report.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The data says it's a cycle. No. If the data says it's going to be a cycle, then you are using a model upon that data. Please, show me that model.
Would you like a slice of toast?
It's just that a bunch od spoiled, self-centered individuals (the same ones that created the current economic problems in the first place) would rather damn the rest of the planet to decades if not hundreds of years of misery just so that they can continue to line their pockets. People like you sound just like my children when they were about four. Able to do nothing but take, and then throw all sorts of temper tantrums when asked to clean up after themselves, and if that doesn't work, blatant lying and dishonesty. My kids eventually grew up. Why your parents never saw to it that you did, I'll never know.
The Tobacco FUD campaign went on successfully for 50 years.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Good scientists welcome opposition. They see their critics as their most useful commentators, because they help them find holes in their logic. They understand Richard Feynman's principles of good science. Good scientists are more interested in finding out what is true, and not so interested in pushing their own viewpoint. When someone disagrees with them, they ask for the data. Good scientists don't cheer when a researcher with an opposing viewpoint dies.
If scientists don't do this, they are not acting in good faith. When scientists don't act in good faith, you must look at their data, not their opinions.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If you read Merchants of Doubt, you will see a hideously long paper trail of extensive resources that have been put into the anti-environmental campaign. It is all sourced and documented.
What you say is simply not true.
The fossil-fuel industry outspends greenpeace 10-1 on lobbying and advertising in the USA. That is not a level playing field.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
2.) should we go dicking with things we don't have complete knowledge and control over. ..)
What, so digging up billions of tons of hydrocarbons and releasing them into the atmosphere isn't dicking around with things we don't have complete knowledge and control over?
No, we learned that a few of the scientists working on this problem are not working in good faith.
EAU is one of, if not the most important centers of global warming research. So it's not like we are talking about some small unimportant scientists in eastern Zaire, these guys are important in the global warming world.
I explained here what it means to act in good faith. In short, they've demonstrated they can't be trusted just because they say something. They have their own agenda, and are pushing it. Once a scientist has an agenda and starts pushing it, he/she tends to overlook problems with their theory. See also Linus Pauling and his weird vitamin C fixation. Brilliant scientist, but.......
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Since when has scientific consensus, or any kind of consensus of anybody's opinion been equivalent to truth? Study the history of science, or even just plain history of humanity. The majority scientific opinion once upon a time was that the earth was flat, everything could be made out of the 4 elements of air water Earth and fire. etc. etc.... If all the erroneous ideas of times past and of today were collected into a book, it would likely be one of the thickest books ever published.
The Earth has been much warmer and much colder, long before humans started driving SUVs and flying airplanes, thereby burning large quantities of oil. This is indeed a chicken little manifestation that does not exist except in the minds of those who have an agenda of more government control. Personally I am waiting for some warmer, drier spring weather here in Oregon.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
No, I'm suggesting that although coal might seem advantageous in the short term, it is severely detrimental to the host country and indeed to the rest of the world in the long term, and actually poses serious local problems in the short term as well. Therefore, other nations that have already seen this happen firsthand should act like big brothers to discourage their younger siblings from making all the same mistakes.
Which is why the time to prevent Chinese dependence on coal was a few decades back, and it is too late now. We pretty much have to let China burn itself out and move on to more modern sources of power. However, the sorts of regulations that would have prevented China from becoming a coal-burning industrial nation a few decades back can prevent some other nation (no idea who yet) from becoming one a few decades from now. And that is why such laws are needed.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The Earth is going to be fine, of course, I'm not a Gaia spiritualist. The question is whether human beings are going to do well in the future. From what I understand, due to climate change, one thing is that we're going to see human migration, which means political disruption, at least historically. Destabilization will occur as some countries adapt to climate change well and others face catastrophic circumstances. I agree that it's all very uncertain, but what seems highly likely is that disruptive change is coming from several directions based on climate change. What is most uncertain is what actions to take about it. The best thing we can do is find a way to provide energy for ourselves without disrupting the climate. I don't know why this is controversial. We should pour money into alternative energy. It's a safe bet.
Currently hooked on AMP
ther are three ways to deal with a problem caused by excess consumption
1) reduce consumption, especially unnecessary consumption, "scaling back lifestyle"
2) deliberate global depopulation
3) ignore the problem and hope technology and the invisible penis of the free market fix the problem before we have a large scale unintentional global depopulation
you can't get around it, and i don't know about you but the thought of deliberately killing billions of people or standing by and doing nothing while billions die is unpalatable to me, it's an entirely solvable problem but it does mean scaling back wastes of resources and doing what can be done to improve the stability of destitute populations because destitute populations have much higher birth rates. also do what can be done to reduce birth rates all around without coercion.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
"What he's saying is that with the US economy in the state it's in now, it's a choice of certain economic collapse and widespread death, starvation, & suffering..."
Why is it that the USA can seemingly find enough money for a recent war in the Middle East, or a recent war out in Asia, or even spending billions and billions on a new security agency, but spending a similar amount of money on something different would cause "certain economic collapse and widespread death, starvation & suffering".
Not that I think a similar amount of money would or should be spent, just pointing out the ridiculousness of that claim.
We aren't talking major sacrifices. Not at all. We just need to get our asses in gear and build either renewable or nuclear power stations to replace the existing power plants, which in most of the world are up for replacement anyway. At the same time we need to get fuel efficiency of transport up, and we need to get rid of the worst ways of getting fossil fuel (which have a fairly bad energy balance anway), such as brown coal and tar sand.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
But there are still the matters of
No, those issues are just as well understood as the fact that the Earth is warming.
As far as I'm concerned, until our weather man can accurately predict at least 5 days out
You can't even predict the outcome of a single coin toss, yet you have the gall to claim that out of a thousand coin tosses, about 500 will come up tails? You simply can't know that!
Everything he knows about nuclear energy he learned from Jane Fonda in the China Syndrome.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Scientific opposition from fellow scientists is very different than profit driven opposition from interested petroleum companies. 90% of the opposition I've seen to AGW is from people who have nothing to do with climatology, nor any discernible academic training in it. I'll take Mr. Hanson's view over some random schmuck's blog any day.
Disclaimer: I'm not 100% convinced of AGW, and am far from qualified to even judge the evidence. But, I think "climategate" was a farce, and pretty much the whole of the scientific community backs that up. I also think we should do something, even without 100% perfect knowledge, since acting is better than not if the theory is correct. If it isn't, we're still better off since I have a hard time buying that inefficiency within the status quo is a good thing, nor can I actually buy that spewing tons of nasty chemicals in the air is a net positive to anyone. I also have no loyalty to corporate America, they can cope, it isn't my problem.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Sorry; the data says it HAS BEEN a cycle. It was warm in Roman times; it was cold in the Middle Ages. It was warm in the 9th-12th centuries - warm enough for the Vikings to find grape vines in "Vinland", which we now know was Labrador. Then it got cold in the 1300s, enough to freeze the Greenland coastline so that the Vikings couldn't get back into their former homes. In 1776, the Hudson River froze so solidly that General Washington's troops dragged cannons across the ice.
In the mid-1800's, it started to get warm again. The Hudson no longer freezes, and in Hans Christian Andersen's neighborhood, you can no longer ice-skate. The trend, at the moment, is upward. But the historical record gives us pretty clear hints that the upward trend probably won't continue. And even the IPCC data indicates that there has been NO temperature increase in the last 10 years, even though the mathematical models said there SHOULD HAVE BEEN an increase. They were even writing emails to each other about how to "hide the decline" in the temperature data, because the DATA didn't agree with the MODEL.
See? Data. As the stockbrokers tell us, "Past performance is no guarantee of future results", but Jim Hansen wants us to bet the entire economy that the 2,000 year cyclical behavior will suddenly jump up and never come down again. I didn't believe that when the gold bugs wanted me to buy gold, and I didn't believe the "It can only go higher!" assurances that the local realtors were giving me in 2005. And I don't believe it now from the Warmies.
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.
For the history we have the emails. For the rest, just look about you here. Do you see calm persuasion going on or browbeating, insults and abuse?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
There are natural cycles DOES NOT MEAN THAT all variations are thus accountable.
This... is kind of the problem here.
First, we have natural climate variation.
Second, we have possible anthropogenic climate variation.
We know the former happens. This is pretty much a given. So to see whether the latter is significant, we *have* to analyse both. That's what climate scientists do; it's a basic and obvious step.
The conclusions they have come to, as a massive consensus, is that AGW is very much real and significant, and cannot be explained away by natural means. ... and then people like you come along and say, hey now, all you smart scientists, what about natural climate change?! I bet you weren't smart enough to think of that!!!!!
Would you like a slice of toast?
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>
This article was posted by someone else earlier, but it directly responds to your point about Hansen: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/04/1981_climate_paper/. In fact, Hansen's model seems to be holding up surprisingly well.
Before I do anything else, I want to address this:
"If the problem is CO2 being released into the atmosphere, then why don't they support nuclear power?"
Who are 'they', exactly? Climate scientists just tell us about what the climate is doing, and what we are doing to it. I don't think it's quite within their remit to support anything.
Would you like a slice of toast?
Are you seriously trying to argue that there has never been in the entire history of scientific inquiry a consensus which turned out to be wrong?
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
While I'm not the original poster you are debating with here, I will concede that there may be some influence on the part of activities of mankind upon the global environment.
What I don't buy is the significance of that influence, or that the current situation is so dire that if we don't destroy all technology and go back to a hunter-gatherer society with a 99% reduction in world wide human population that we are doomed to extinction. It is the politics that are involved here and trying to decide where that line is between doing one thing that is insanely stupid like mass genocide and the other which is completely ignoring the impact of environmental pollution and thinking it should be our god given right to consume every resource to its utmost potential for greater profits and not giving a damn about how it impacts the planet.
There must be some point in between to make a balance. Attempts to try and control pollution of all forms have largely been successful in most 1st world countries, where environmental damage has been reversed and living more in harmony with this world has been demonstrated as a proven fact. The Hudson River in NYC is returning to a state where things can now live in that river again, you can breathe air in downtown Pittsburgh, and air quality in Los Angeles hasn't really become much worse than it was when I was just a little kid. Those are just a few examples I can point to where there have been some successes on something larger than just the efforts of one person and involve whole communities making a difference because they have made a difference.
Given that there have been some tremendous successes in raising environmental consciousness, where does the line get drawn in terms of what action need to take place? It is wrong to say that some measures suggested to "control carbon emissions" simply aren't going to work? Is there a serious discussion on some of those sequestration systems about what harmful effects they may cause for future generations? Is there a reason we must act and do something rash right now without holding a measured public debate over the real issues involved? Is the world really going to end in a decade if those rash actions are not done right now?
Arguing over the "science" of "global warming" or "global cooling" is mostly naval grazing compared to the very real policy issues about how to deal with environmental damage in general. Those trying to "prove global warming" in many ways really don't care if there is environmental damage and in some ways even helps their cause if that damage increases so they can have larger research budgets to "fight global warming".
Nonsense the IPCC predicted that at 350ppm C02 the climate would become unstable, there would be continuous storms and droughts and wars over water supply.
The also said that the worst case scenario it would be 0.6C hotter than 2000 by now. We exceeded their worst case for C02 and Methane emission yet they were totally wrong and the temperature rise has been way below their best case scenario. The science has been spun from the beginning to try and create political action.
What's more anyone who simply points out that the amount of AGW may be less than what the models predicted is attacked as a denier and attempts made to silence them to avoid debating the accuracy of the models.
The major problem is that it a tragedy of the commons situation. The cost of action is much higher than is claimed and whomever acts first suffered great economic disadvantage while those who continue to increase emission benefit. You need to start with low cost changes and get global agreement to adopt them before any progress will be made.
Attempts to read ideology into opinion polls is silly. You get all these arguments about American's are stupid because less of them believe in AGW than Europeans, and liberals are smarter because they believe in Catastrophic AGW regardless of the data. The simple fact is that the recent warm winter raised belief in AGW in the US by close to 20%, and the cold winter in Europe drop belief in AGW over 15% in a poll there. Poll don't mean much.
Global warming is being sold as a single package: the assertion it has gotten warmer, that this warming is due to CO2 emissions, the prediction that it will get a lot warmer due to feedback mechanisms in the future, the idea that significant warming will have catastrophic consequences, and that we can and must intervene. If you don't accept all propositions, you are branded as unscientific and a luddite. In fact, there is firm evidence only for the first proposition, namely that global average temperatures have increased. The other propositions are increasingly based on guesses and opinion.
Don't believe me? Take a look at the IPCC report and actually read the conclusions. The language in the report clearly uses high uncertainties for most of the predictions. Furthermore, if you look at the report, you'll find that the effects of "catastrophic global warming" as described in the report can be remediated according to the IPCC report itself, and that such remediation may be cheaper than limiting fossil fuel use right now.
So, "global warming" isn't one issue, it's a lot of different issues and arguments. And the arguments for aggressive policies are simply not that strong yet. Furthermore, if you look at actual political consequences, no country or politician, not even those taking the most aggressive stances for action on global warming, have been willing and able to push through the painful policies that this would entail. Global warming right now is just being used as an excuse to push through policies with nobody actually addressing it. There is enormous hypocrisy on the part of advocates for action on climate change.
What danger is more certain or immanent?
A) Global climate change, derived from models
B) Fukushima reactor 4 spent fuel rods, unmanaged and uncasked, with 85x the cesium-137 of Chernobyl
Speaking of manipulating numbers to create a panic....
The article you cite says "The Fukushima site holds roughly 85 times the amount of Cs-137 released at the Chernobyl accident", which does not mean that it has the potential to release 85x as much as Chernobyl did. If we're talking about stored waste and fuel, the US certainly has far more at Hanford.
If the climate was going to change in a way that was bad for humans, but for natural reasons. We would still need to adapt to the change, or lessen it if possible. If the climate changes because we changed it, we still need to adapt to the change or lessen it if possible.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Nice attempt, but climate is not a binary, 50/50, either/or statistical problem. There are nearly infinite variables involved, and many important variables we aren't even aware of yet, and many that we are aware of, we haven't been able to sufficiently predict with enough accuracy and certainty to condemn vast numbers of people to starvation, poverty, and death based on them.
Unless, of course, the goals are actually more geopolitical/ideological than scientific, then it doesn't matter if it's accurate at all as long as enough people can be convinced to go along and people who question it are isolated, ridiculed, and personally attacked & destroyed. That "attacked and ridiculed" bit we see here all the time on Slashdot whenever AGW comes up and someone argues against the /. pro-AGW group-think.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
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.
Actually, while science is always being tweaked and corrected, I can't think of any scientific consensus this broad that turned out to be wrong in its major conclusions. Can you name one? (no fair going back to medieval times before the modern scientific method was developed).
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
Strawman! Climate science does not claim the that the current climate change is not within the range of "normal variation of climate," (in fact, it states the opposite of that) but rather that the scientific evidence shows that the natural causes that have produced large variations in the past are not present today.
Oh, really?
Time for an analogy to illustrate why I think your argument is worthless:There are no accurate models of airflow over the entire range of conditions experienced by an aircraft yet we've been flying the things for over a century. The models we have are good enough to get the job done in most cases and wind tunnels fill the gaps even today.
"Accurate" is realitive and in reality most predictions based on models have a margin of error. We really need better education in schools to get that message across to people so they have some defence against the bullshit PR that the above poster and many others are taken in by.
Oh please. The USA is one of the richest nations in the world. I'm in the poorest 20% of or so of Americans in a so-called recession and I still have luxuries like internet and a place of my own that most of the world would kill for. Forecasting widespread famine and death because you can't afford your netflix subscription is ludicrously stupid.
This space intentionally left blank
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.
"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.
I don't buy that as a legitimate methodology. In any other field, people would cry foul.
I had a recent case at my job where the efficiency of one of our machines is suspect. There is a known issue with the product and the customer has been looking out for degraded efficiency. They sent us a trend of efficiency over the last 18 months. The problem is, halfway through the data a thermocouple broke and they had to replace it. Even if you do a rolling average over very large periods, there is an obvious jump in the data. The new thermocouple might not have the same linearity as the old one, and is probably calibrated slightly different. Unfortunately because of this we can not draw any real conclusions from the data.
Plotting data like this using 2 different systems of measurement is fishy. If you're going to use ice cores, use ice cores. If you are going to use tree rings, then use tree rings. If you want to look at how much rivers have flooded over time and if you can prove that it relates to temperature, then use that. If you switch in the middle then you can't draw a real conclusion. It would be like converting a record album to MP3 and changing turntables halfway through a song. You can try to account for the differences between the turntables but even if you fixed it, it wouldn't be correct.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
"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.
I have always had a problem with this explanation. The problem is that what you just said doesn't explain why "Hide the decline" isn't relevant. It just acknowledges that the decline was hidden, and comes to the conclusion that obviously the data is correct because it was manipulated.
If you propose that tree rings are a good proxy for temperature, and upon testing, you find that the proxy doesn't match the actual data, you better have a good reason not to toss the whole thing out. Saying "Well, we just changed the data for the time we can actually verify and kept the data that we can't verify." is not a valid way to do science.
When presenting tree ring data, they replace very recent data with actual temps,
Think about what you wrote here. It should raise flags.
Well never fear, I'm sure having your (apparently very fragile) agricultural system tied ever more closely to more highly contested sources of fossil fuels also has absolutely no chances of working out badly.
High oil prices are already a reality, but you'll be much better off if you get ahead of the adaptation process by collecting some of it in taxes then wait for those prices to straight reality.
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.
I think that it is certainly true that early statisticians did not anticipate the extent to which their methods might be misused by dishonest people to deceive the public. If they had, they probably would have made a better choice of jargon than the term "statistical significance," because in common parlance "significance" is almost synonymous with "importance," whereas it's usage in statistics comes closer to "reliability." Certainly, no honest scientist would ever make a statement like "there is no statistically significant global warming," because it misleadingly suggests that absence of evidence (for global warming over a particular time scale) is evidence of absence. An honest scientist, if trying to argue that there was no warming, would state confidence limits on the trend. Why wasn't that done here? Because if you state confidence limits on the temperature trend over that time period, it turns out to be equally consistent with no warming and with warming even greater than climate theory predicts.
Wrong! But unless you have actually studied statistics, it is easy to get this sort of mistaken notion, particularly when there are well-funded parties working actively to promote this sort of misunderstanding because it serves their own financial or political purposes.
A proper statistical trend analysis will result in a best estimate of the trend (which may be warming or cooling) given the available data, as well as confidence limits on that trend--a measure of how much the estimated trend would be expected to vary if that observation could be repeated (i.e. if you had a population of earths with a similar climate trend but with different weather, each of which could be identically sampled over the same time period using the same methodology). The measurements do not yield a probability that the temperature has risen and a probability that the temperature has not risen--they yield an estimate of how likely repeat measurements are to differ from the current measurement by a particular amount.
If 19 times out of 20, repeat measurements would be expected to yield a trend greater than zero, then as a kind of shorthand, statisticians say that the trend is "significantly" greater than zero (this is equivalent to saying that the 95% confidence limits on the trend do not include zero). But if that is not the case (let's say if repeat measurements would be expected to yield a trend greater than zero only 18 times out of 20), this is not evidence that there is no warming--it merely indicates that the data is not adequate to resolve the question.
Some types of studies in physics require multiple comparisons. Look at it this way: a probability of 1 in 20 of a conclusion being in error due to chance is pretty good if you are only measuring one thing. If you are doing a thousand measurements, however, that means 50 false positives. If even one false positive is enough to lead to a false conclusion on a matter of import then you need to set a more stringent criterion for statistical significance--like, in this case, 6 standard deviations. However, there is a downside to setting such a stringent criterion. When you minimize