Slashdot Mirror
Strong Climate Change Opinions Are Self-Reinforcing
An anonymous reader writes "A study recently published in Nature (abstract) looked at how personal beliefs altered a person's perception of climate change. Surveying a sample of people in 2008 and then the same people again in 2011, the study looked for 'motivated reasoning,' where 'high belief certainty influenced perceptions of personal experience,' and 'experiential learning,' where 'perceived personal experience of global warming led to increased belief certainty.' According to the article, 'When you categorize individuals by engagement — essentially how confident and knowledgeable they feel about the facts of the issue — differences are revealed. For the highly-engaged groups (on both sides), opinions about whether climate is warming appeared to drive reports of personal experience. That is, motivated reasoning was prevalent. On the other hand, experience really did change opinions for the less-engaged group, and motivated reasoning took a back seat.None of that is truly surprising, but it leads to a couple interesting points. First, the concrete here-and-now communication strategy is probably a good one for those whose opinions aren't firmly set — fully 75 percent of Americans, according to the polling. But second, that tack is unlikely to get anywhere with the 8 percent or so of highly-engaged Americans who reject the idea of a warming planet, and are highly motivated to disregard anything that says otherwise.'"
....when it's extremely cold in the winter, scientists say thats just normal weather, but when it's extremely hot in the summer, it's global warming?
Prof. Obvious of the Romero Institute noted today that people who already strongly believe something will continue to do so regardless of new evidence. In related news, the government edges closer to falling off the fiscal cliff, the totally solvable budget problem that we created to force our two political parties to play nice together. Both sides have recently stated they aren't open to negotiation, will not offer any concessions, and aren't talking to each other, however our correspondent on the scene reported recently that they have started writing numbers down on a sheet of paper. The sheet of paper was not immediately available for comment at the time of this post.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
"I believe GW is happening and that it causes bad things. Today bad weather happened, must be due to GW."
or
"I do not believe GW is happening or that it causes bad things. Today bad weather happened, as it does from time to time."
"I did not believe GW was happening, but did believe it would cause worse hurricane. Today a bad hurricane happened, so now I have more faith in GW."
or
"I did not believe GW was happening, but did believe it would cause hotter summers.. We had snowfall in June so, therefore, no GW.
The far more interesting thing than the conclusion reached by the source is that none of these is a remotely scientific line of reasoning. Correlating personal experience (i.e., weather events) with climate is long acknowledged as foolish, just like jumping to the conclusion that you live in the most unsafe city in the world because you got mugged -- or that you live in the safest one because you've never been mugged.
I've read plenty of studies talking about how abnormally cold winters in many places are also the result of climate change. What you did there? It's a logical fallacy. You're assuming that scientists say that, then making an erroneous conclusion based on it. But your initial assumption isn't factual.
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Cognitive bias is nothing new; it is not specific to climate change.
"A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations, which may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias
Sent from my ENIAC
But second, that tack is unlikely to get anywhere with the 8 percent or so of highly-engaged Americans who reject the idea of a warming planet, and are highly motivated to disregard anything that says otherwise.
I'm surprised the figure isn't much higher. The denial movement has been quite strong lately, even here on slashdot where you might expect some degree of scientific literacy.
That show is way cool! Some of those people believe in a global warming apocalypse. However all those people are idiots. They're taking the absolute wrong approach. They stock up with months or years worth of supplies, and then try to figure out ways to protect them. However the reality of it is most people are not knowledgable about military type tactics, and most people will not be vigilant 100% of the time. For me, I'm going to be the guy that stocks up on guns and military surplus gear and just a little food. When the food runs out, you band together with 2-3 other like minded individuals and start taking over the 'preppers' stashes. If the shit really hits the fan, it'll be a Mad Max style free for all, and I plan on being on offense, not defense. I'm going to be the guy bringing the rain!
How about just relying on the science to speak for itself?
A figure of 75 percent unconvinced is encouraging in one sense. I means that the majority of the people aren't buying either argument yet. That's fine. We don't have anywhere near a clear understanding of how climate change is working (or not), who or what is responsible and what, if anything, we can do about it. The fact that the majority remains skeptical is a healthy sign.
We can only hope that the group that actually does the science and gets it right will sway the majority. And that the group who is giving up on the science and switching over to propaganda and public opinion manipulation will be recognized as an admission of the failure to get the figures to go their way.
Have gnu, will travel.
If someone says they believe in AGW but refuse to support nuclear technology, the ONLY technology able to replace our base load generation requirements and not produce CO2, then it is more likely that they believe in AGW only as a vehicle to impose their already established political agenda of rationing and taxes.
The irony is that if we did go full nuclear, it would go a long way towards satisfying the agendas of anti-AGW people (Cheap and abundant energy) and the AGW crowd.
Then we'd never have to suffer any more wanksfests about Global Warming on Slashdot again. That right there should be worth a few rads of exposure.
eight percent of Americans need to be dispatched to save the planet. Remember, individual liberty is the number one threat to the environment.
Who do you trust more to give you the facts about this issue?
1. The vast majority of scientists who have devoted their professional lives to the study of the earth's climate;
2. Politicians.
I thought strong opinions were self-reinforcing. Disclaimer: I didn't read the article, just the title.
It's insane how so many other areas of study are just accepted when 99% of scientists agree, but this one is different. Shall I listen to some turd on the internet, or people who've been studying it most of their lives and actually know what they are talking about?!
We are pleased to announce that in recognition of their high engagement and their high motivation to disregard facts, those 8% are all eligible to a Darwin award.
but I also believe it is not due to mankind.
To show how these things work, I've been thinking about setting up a denial campaign for an obviously factual event: "Hurricane" Sandy.
It wasn't really a hurricane. National weather service decided not to issue a warning. The roller coaster would not have landed in one piece as it is photographed. We could build a pretty solid case that it wasn't real. It would really piss off the people who were there :-)
Bruce Perens.
MOND!
Why the hell is this even a matter of opinion?
The lay person does not have any idea about this. They are not equipped to evaluate the science, consequences, or solutions. We don't go around asking everybody what they believe the military threats to the country are, and what technologies and strategies should be employed to counter those threats. We don't go asking the public about what area of theoretical physics, in their opinion, will be fruitful to study and provide funding to.
Jerry Pournelle
Burt Rutan
Freeman Dyson
Not going to listen to politicians or political scientists on either side. The southern hemisphere has been on a "global cooling" trend the last 10+ years while the northern hemisphere has been on a "global warming" trend. There is record ice creation an the south pole while we record ice loss at the north pole. I am not saying they cancel each other out , but you only ever hear once side of the story.
The media has been extremely biased on what information they portray to the public. They justify it by saying that they don't want to "confuse" people ... Like they should decide? Like they actually understand themselves what is truly going on? If they are going to report north pole ice melts shouldn't they also report record south pole ice levels? There are really good scientists on both sides of the issue and the fact that some politician and media network can declare a winner on a scientific issue is just disgusting.
They do it by using words such as "consensus", "most scientists", and "expert" ... while never telling you that a Consensus is a logical fallacy, "most" doesn't mean anything as it could by 50%+1 of people that you picked to talk too, and "expert" could mean anything.
I am a scientist, but not one in the field of global climate. I make no claims to know what is happening, but I have to wonder why these people can believe they do. The planet has been both warmer and cooler than it is now and it seems rather arrogant for someone to draw a line in the sand and say what is and is normal. Hell, 125,000 years ago ... basically yesterday on a planetary scale ... there was no ice at the north pole at all. Life back then would think that what we have today is not normal.
Climate change is big business. Those in the profession who don't push the agenda end up hungry. Money corrupts all, and at this point I basically have a hard time believing anyone 100%. Scare tactics work, and generate money. And when caught in a flat out lie, over overexageration it becomes a 1 step forward, 2 steps back as far as trust with me.
The time to do something effective about climate change was 20 years ago. And the scientific data was solid back then. It was ignored because it was too inconvenient. I guess that will make a nice inscription on the tomb-stone of the current civilization: "It died because saving itself was too inconvenient".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/
A lot of the anti-globalwarming movement rely on classic FUD, throwing enough shit on the wall and counting on that something will stick.
Its still too cold for me to ride my motorcycle!
The people on both sides with the most entrenched views tend to know more than everyone else. They have studied the subject and are used to having their beliefs challenged. They can always find facts to refute whatever argument is flung at them.
Contrary to what most people think, there are facts that back up both opinions. What we can say is that the people with the most strident opinions in both camps are way too confident in their own rectitude.
There are a handful of climate scientists. Everybody else is a believer.
If 75% of Americans aren't as set, and 8% reject the idea of a warming planet, then it follows that the remaining 17% are firmly set that global warming exists, and are unlikely to be swayed by any evidence otherwise.
Cognitive bias works both ways. Apparently, even against the authors of the TFA, who neglect to even mention the impact of cognitive bias on those who are set in accepting it.
...from strong beliefs about anything being self reinforcing.
Then, it's climate, not weather. Otherwise somebody would have to take responsibility and what self-respecting politician would do that?
No matter how many decades engineers say that the levees in New Orleans are perfectly insufficient for a city in that place, it's still climate change when the inevitable happens. When hurricane Irene came to New York last year, the models of the expected flooding were right at everybodies hands - because it happened before. Several times.
Nobody asked the obvious question: Why hasn't anybody done anything about it, since everybody seems to know about it?
"But second, that tack is unlikely to get anywhere with the 17 percent or so of highly-engaged Americans who reject the idea of a *naturally* warming planet, and are highly motivated to disregard anything that says otherwise."
There, fixed. Both sides apparently have highly motivated reasoning going on, no reason you can't turn the sentence around the other way.
I'd suggest the way to discern between the motivated reasoning and the scientific truth requires ye good old falsifiable hypothesis statement as per Karl Popper.
WTF,
They come out with a bogus study that says 97% of scientists all agree. That's not proof, it's social proof.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Proof
Or maybe it's because the politicos who are pushing the idea of global warming tend to lie with every fiber of their being... and with every breath they take. All their proposed solutions do little more than give GovCo more money and more power at the expense of the US economy. It could be that too...
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
30% Insightful
40% Troll
30% Interesting
Booyah.
The tendency to believe things which agree with your existing beliefs is called "confirmation bias".
Motivated reasoning and gubermint sponsored "scientists" that insist flawed code = physical experiments and up = down. McIntyre has repeatedly shown how venal and biased this group is. Piltdown Man has 21st century decendents who are alive and aggressively fraudulent, looking to replicate Nazi equivalent ideologies. That CAGW financial and power scam, the Clinton-Gore $100 billion per year grab exceeds the peak Exxon-Shell oil profits at the mere cost of bending a group of opportunistic modelers and desperate academic failures. CAGW has become simply "seize the means" and oppress the population Statism for the 21st century.
denialists (like Jim Inhofe) will build a snowman and say, "What climate change? Nyuck, nyunk." People are conflating climate with weather. Climate is an average of what has happened over a period of years, decades or even centuries.
Scientists can't definitively say that Hurricane Sandy was caused by global warming any more than doctors say that one particular home run by Barry Bonds was as a result of steroid use. What both can say is that the likelihood of either is much increased by their respective underlying conditions.
I see little difference between Creationists who think the Earth is 6,000 years old and global warming deniers who think that humans aren't responsible for changing the climate by burning millions of years worth of sequestered carbon in less than three centuries. I'd really like to know how releasing gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere in the geologic blink of an eye doesn't have an effect. On a separate note, humans have altered the nitrogen cycle through the Haber-Bosch process by removing nitrogen from the atmosphere and put it into the biosphere. That amount of nitrogen in the biosphere hadn't changed in over a hundred million years.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
People believe what they believe.
This is news.
"perceived personal experience of global warming led to increased belief certainty." kinda like the sexagenarians in Alaska watching the glaciers retreat over a life time.
Strong opinions about anything tend to be self-reinforcing. That's sort of how opinions work. NEXT...!
Are the acronyms for global warming political views deliberately designed to confuse the fuck out of people or what?
AGW could mean Anthropogenic (man made) Global Warming (support for the idea of man made global warming) or Anti Global Warming (rejection of the idea of global warming).
Pro-GW: What the fuck is this supposed to mean? Similar multiple interpretation problem; could be someone in favour of creating global warming, or just someone that supports the idea that global warming is man made.
If I am confused, even after making a brief effort to read up on the topic, what bloody hope is there for anyone without even a passing interest, to break past all the FUD.
I don't care about the biased opinions of climate scientists. I don't care what they believe. I bet many of them believe in a supernatural entity of some kind. I will never believe a particular thing is true due to a poll. These discussions should only be about one thing: raw data.
Show me the numbers. Not someone's opinion about what they mean, but a detailed description of each experiment and the raw data that resulted.
Any of you devout AGW believers should have a detailed list on hand and be able to thoroughly explain each experiment as well as the resulting data. If you cannot cite the undeniable proof that you are always referring to but almost never actually showing then it could be argued that you have no idea what you are talking about.
I remain unconvinced of AGW for one reason: insufficient data to draw any conclusion one way or the other. It may well be that the amount of CO2 our species produces is sufficient to significantly warm the planet. It is certainly not impossible. However as far as I have seen that hypothesis remains unproven. Show me sufficiently convincing data from multiple experiments and I am quite willing to change my mind.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
you are a total dipshit that has played the overused "oh both sides are equally as evil" hand to justify your willful ignorance of AGW and your support of the gas and oil party. There is no room for debate when it comes to AGW, it is time for action. Believe it or not, reality has a liberal bias and people like you are standing in the way of progress.
Link to the "actual data", please?
We hear that ice is melting near the north pole and northern countries documented unusual ice melting more than normal. There is also the super storms that blanket(s) an entire state destroying cities and anything in it's war path. A lot of locals from other cities said that they had a hard time breathing so they left the state for other cities. Most citizens would agree that we have a serious global climate problem(s).
If AGW is finally proven beyond any doubt then the logical thing to do is build nuclear power plants. Lots and lots of them.
Fossil fuel plants would have to be retired or converted into nuclear powered plants. In addition to AC powered highways (raised wires or high voltage rails in the road surface) combined with affordable electric cars of course.
As far as getting the entire planet to agree to go 100% nuclear and give up on fossil fuel powered cars I haven't a clue. That would be very, very difficult and maybe impossible. Especially in poor countries where everyone might have to go back to bicycles.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
"First, the concrete here-and-now communication strategy is probably a good one for those whose opinions aren't firmly set â" fully 75 percent of Americans, according to the polling. But second, that tack is unlikely to get anywhere with the 8 percent or so of highly-engaged Americans who reject the idea of a warming planet, and are highly motivated to disregard anything that says otherwise."
Quick quiz, is it just as valid if I say:
"First, the concrete here-and-now communication strategy is probably a good one for those whose opinions aren't firmly set â" fully 75 percent of Americans, according to the polling. But second, that tack is unlikely to get anywhere with the segment or so of highly-engaged Americans who accept the idea of a warming planet, and are highly motivated to disregard anything that says otherwise."?
-Styopa
Link to the "actual data", please?
Sorry, but we don't have the technology for HTML links to alternative realities.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
[Warmist] climatologists are modern day astrologers who can explain every single event ever observed, and ever to be observed with their pet hypothesis. Once you have a non-falsifiable hypothesis that asserts it is confirmed when it is both hot and cold and wet and dry, if people aren't discerning enough to realize you're playing the game of "heads I win, tails you lose", they can easily be fooled by the flimflam of people in lab coats
He said without a trace of irony. What's your pet theory that explains climate science? Your unfalsifiable "everyone is lying" theory? Oh right, you just gave it.
Or maybe it's because the politicos who are pushing the idea of global warming tend to lie with every fiber of their being
Scientists aren't by and large politicos. The people denying global warming aren't by and large scientists. In about equal proportions.
What were you saying again?
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
To be fair I found the link on Forbes and the Heartland Institute, and replicas from scientists in the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/science/02cold.html
He's just reflecting the emotional outburst of the original post.
You will note that there are people who give it but cannot take it. Generally these people have no idea that they are being assholes, and are then shocked when they get even the slightest hit of a suggestion that they aren't perfect.
Normally I'd say move along, there is nothing to see here, but clearly we have a mimophant, and this whole discussion is about motivated reasoning. So it's all pretty topical.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Actual data shows that temperatures in the last 20 years have DROPPED, not increased.
You should check into that claim. It is, of course, trivially wrong. At least your using multi-decade trends. Most of your intellectual brethren will only look back far enough to get the statistical trend they want: nothing. But on a 20 year time scale there is a slight warming trend with p
Look into it. Open you mind. If you are wrong about this, you may be wrong about... many things.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
It shouldn't be big business. While some idiots in the oil industry are feeding pointless and expensive PR groups and paying for snake-oil salesman and third rate economists to fly around the world spouting bullshit, the others are just quietly making money from an oil addiction that isn't going to abate any time that the easy to extract stuff is available.
People can say what they like about how many problems come from burning oil or digging coal, it's not going to make it any easier to give up on them. We're seeing alternative energies where it makes sense but it would be very difficult to switch entirely to them. Nuclear? It doesn't run off magic beans that materialise in the reactor, you've got to get rock and do a shitload of energy consuming things to it before it's a fuel rod and the things you need to do are more conveniently done by stuff other than the electricity you get out of other fuel rods. Steelmaking is one example where the coal isn't just for heat so electricity alone won't do the job. Removing all dependance on fossil fuel would be very difficult so the companies that sell them are not going out of business any time soon no matter which way a debate would go. The luddite sideshow is just a waste of money from all directions.
None of that is truly surprising, but it leads to a couple interesting points. First, the concrete here-and-now communication strategy is probably a good one for those whose opinions aren't firmly set — fully 75 percent of Americans, according to the polling. But second, that tack is unlikely to get anywhere with the 8 percent or so of highly-engaged Americans who reject the idea of a warming planet, and are highly motivated to disregard anything that says otherwise.
Nor, we can assume, will it get anywhere with the authors of the article.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Which side gains more from lies, the luddites or the scientists?
You can make more money on speaking tours as a Sudoko puzzle writing climate science denier than a Nobel prize winner in any field of science.
You've outlined the problem well. Unfortunately there is an additional element which makes it even worse than you describe, the propensity of many well experienced and well informed scientists to forget the foundations of science, go beyond what the scientific method allows, and descend into personal interpretation. Even if well intentioned and from a credible source, it is false science when this happens.
Unfortunately it's all too common, and there is a reason for it: the climatologist's GCMs are not yet predictive with the required degree of statistical significance to be able to say "We have a theory of science which says X, and it has withstood N years of testing of hypotheses derived from X by M teams, and hence X is tentatively valid at this time."
Nothing like that can be stated about AGW because the GCMs (which are an expression of our theories) cannot predict the climate variations shown by our paleohistoric record accurately even for an unperturbed global circulation system, and so they are totally at a loss predicting it with scientific significance when it's massively perturbed by human intervention. This summarizes as "It's early days in climatology."
Given this state of affairs, the scientifically rigorous scientist can only say "Science doesn't yet know the answer because it cannot yet predict climate accurately" as a true expression of the scientific method. But people are just people, even scientists, so instead of this honest appraisal of the state of science in this area, they launch into personal interpretations which are not valid science at all.
There's all too much of this happening, on both sides of the argument, and it's sad. Scientists shouldn't be part of the debate at all, and to become engaged in it just makes their hands unsafe for operating the scientific method honestly.
Did you know there is something called "sulfur credits", they are part of the cap and trade system placed on sulfur emissions to reduce acid rain. The international system has been very successful in it's aim to cut acid rain and it's a credit to the US and RONALD REAGAN who personally pushed for it. Thatcher read Chemistry at Oxford before becoming a politician and was one (if not the) first world leader to call for emission controls on CO2, she was right behind Reagan's enthusiasm to curb acid rain. Shame today's Republican leaders make Reagan and Thatcher look like a pair of radical tree-huggers.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It was going so well, and then you blew it.
It's not political until the scientist advocates taking action to do something about it. Really, there isn't any possibility of doubt that enough CO2 would increase the planet's surface temperature (look at Venus). There is plenty of room to doubt that AGW might become a human (or planetary) crisis in our lifetime. Even if you accept that we are headed down this path, there's a huge debate remaining on what we can reasonably do to prevent it (if anything) and whether the benefits of diverting those resources outweigh the costs of what we stop doing instead.
Personally, I have next to no doubt that we'll see irrefutable evidence of global temperature increases attributed to human causes with a decade or two. I tend not to be as alarmist as most scientists in the field (it wouldn't be the first time that the people closest to an issue magnified the prognosis), but I wouldn't place a large stake against it, either. I have moderate skepticism over whether AGW will impact the planet as rapidly or severely as some of the forecasts. I have a high level of skepticism that any of the proposed measures (such as a Kyoto accord) are going to deflect this outcome if we are indeed already on this path. I have an extreme level of skepticism that radical reshaping of the earth's economy and geopolitical landscape is a prudent response, even if there's a theoretical hope we could actually succeed in averted catastrophic climate change. There's a fairly large scope for messing up civilization by engaging in radical politics. Am I the only person who worries about WW III resulting from attempting to shut the carbon economy down and not succeeding?
I am also fairly certain that we're about thirty years away from understanding climate science to the level required to confidently plan for the magnitude of the interventions that might be required. A five year old can point to a drowning man, but can't swim out to pull him in. Our climate science is like that five year old.
I don't even know where to classify myself as a denier or a believer. I seem to suffer from skepticism spectrum disorder. Surely I must be mentally ill if I can't be pigeon holed on one side or the other.
that not only is it occuring, but it's perfectly normal and to be expected.
I went from being (crudely speaking) 95% certain that "global warming" was a socialist conspiracy to about 90%.
AGW is technically plausible, but actual unbiased scientific evidence remains inconclusive, while there is much to suggest why environmentalist hysteria would become politically convenient - like Nazi eugenics or Soviet Lysenkoism, but applied to the present-day governmental needs to maintain and strengthen its power. The nature of government doesn't change, and sadly the "scientific community" remains very much in the government's pocket, combined with the selection bias of tree-huggers being the only ones to become "credible climatologists" (rational people tend to choose different fields of study). The human contribution to "greenhouse gases" remains a tiny tiny drop in the vast sea of natural sources of those gases, and it is likely to naturally diminish in a few decades (not to mention the multitude of other yet-little-understood non-anthropogenic influences on the Earth's climate), while the cure that the AGW proponents (political pawns) are seeking is so much worse than the disease...
But the smog over LA and Chernobyl and other local environmental concerns were definitely real, so, if something must be taxed, then taxing pollution (and risk of pollution) is not such a bad idea. Government spending and interventionism cannot be phased out overnight, until civilization reaches a point where individual Property Rights can replace all governments entirely.
This is my recent concession, which is a bit of personal evidence against the claims made by this story.
--libman
Yes, you are correct, yet no one is willing to admit these simple facts. Adding pollution to the environment is not good, but as far as CO2 goes, we are only returning it to where it came from. The Earth has experienced several ice ages, and times that are colder and times that are warmer. The climate changes on its own, without human interaction. There are plenty of scientists that have studied climate history as it relates to living things (see Greenland's for example, but there are many others), yet their facts must now be silenced due to the pressure of the AGW crowd.
It is very possible that human activity has some effect, but how much is unknown. However, if there is such an overwhelming consensus that AGW is happening with possibly dire results to the future of all humanity, then you would think that scientists would be working on practical solutions with the greatest of urgency. But they are acting so impotent about it all, it is only natural for others to question if science or politics is behind it. If only scientists are aware of the danger that humanity is in, then they should band together and start coming up with some solutions (other than "don't use fossil fuels"). They can do it independent of government -- they are humanity's last hope.
Neither. The scientific method has nothing to do with trust. You should never trust a scientist's personal opinion or interpretation, but only trust the results of the scientific method. Nature is the only valid arbiter of what is real, not people, and it's the scientific method that allows nature to express herself on the accuracy or otherwise of our theories.
An honest scientist should not even offer a personal opinion, except possibly under a strict disclaimer that "This is just me saying this, not the scientific method, so don't be swayed by my credentials which nature couldn't care two hoots about. YMMV."
I wish slashdot users would stop commenting on articles about scientific research with things like "this is obvious, any idiot should already know it," and "why are we wasting money paying for research that everyone already knows."
This is a fundamental misunderstanding as to how the scientific method works. If we refuse to research certain topics based on a subjective opinion that they were obvious we would never increase the body of human knowledge.
Angry gods throwing lightning bolts was the "obvious" cause of storms. Witchdoctors were the "obvious" solution to disease.
This is the procedure we must follow, because without it we are helpless to sort between ignorant superstition and actual causes of phenomena. Whether something was a waste of effort is a personal opinion and can only be determined in hindsight.
If you want to contribute to the solution, try running some GCMs yourself for a few years to understand the difficulty of the problem and the primitive state of our knowledge before you jump so rapidly to supporting one side in an utterly non-scientific debate.
The scientific method doesn't work in the debating chamber, and non-scientists raising the heat is very much contributing to our problems in climatology. This is true in science and in science education beyond climatology as well.
Consider yourself admonished by a scientist (although I very much support what you do in other areas.)
I used to believe that climate change was a real threat: positive feedback loops, massive release of methane from clathrates and frozen soil, flooding, etc. I used to argue that emission of large amounts of CO2 was a dangerous global experiment with unforeseeable consequences.
After reading up on the details (including the IPCC reports) and climate history, I changed my mind and I am not worried anymore. I believe global warming is happening, and it will have some costs and negative effects. But the horror scenarios people have been painting have no basis in reality.
And a lot of the ways in which (solid) climate change science is presented and used to justify policy is manipulative and misleading; these people have done a huge disservice to science and the credibility of scientists.
... the beliefs and biases of Slashdotters. The paper notes that people on both sides of the argument are affected, but the bias on slashdot is always that AGW skeptics are dumb, evil, corrupt, affected by their biases, etc. In effect, many here are proving the paper in a meta-sort of way by showing their preconceived biases toward skeptics and any biases they might have...
Nearly every part of the US government has written papers justifying an increase in funding and/or authority for itself based on the fact of global warming, the impacts that warming will have, and the special ability it has to help solve the problem.
There are, in fact, space scientists at places like Goddard and JPL building careers on AGW (no need to imagine an asteroid, just glom onto the AGW claims and make a career designing building and operating satellites to monitor it, computer models to predict it, etc) Biologists and Geologists, likewise, have found AGW-related studies as a way to get government cash... so if you thought that was a good idea, you're late to the party... get in line. If, as it seems, you are implying that the fact that nobody in these fields has imagined a giant AGW-style boogey-man of his own in order to profit from it, then you fail because AGW is so big and so rooted into left-of-center politics (which have lots of power in much of the western world) that it provides plenty of opportunity for everybody... no need to create your own scam when there's a big juicy one sitting right there with lots of political support, including the support of lots of dumb impressionable politically-active college kids.
"AGW denier makes stuff up" News at 11.
Answer the question posed.
That you answered a completely different quetion (and even then had to bring in "statistically significance" to make it "not warming" (hint: it IS warming, but the noise is high) and that you had to cherry pick 16 years (last year it was 15, year before 14, there's a pattern here...) indicates you do not follow science but rather repeat canards pushed toward you that confirm your presupposition.
Answer the question posed.
And they are replenished with more snowfall.
But have a look at the figures. out of 320-ish glaciers, 20 are growing, 80 are neither growing nor shrinking and the remaining 220 are shrinking.
And the number of growing glaciers are reducing.
I guess there's no recession since despite people being laid off, a bloke in Kentucky got a job this week, huh?
You obviously haven't followed it.
And you haven't followed up the release of the rest of the data. Has McI done anything with the data? No.
Seems it wasn't actually wanted.
Go on, explain it.
reinforcing. People take every fact that it is consistent with their view and add it to their collection. They ignore the ones that are not consistent. People do it all the time to preserve their sense of identity. There need be no other motive (economic or otherwise). Karl Popper ridicules this kind of thinking in scientists. If scientists do it, it must be far more common for the rest of us to do it.
"New York", yeah right.. that's in "America", right?
Well *I* learned in school..
Amerika Gibt Es Nicht (Peter Bichsel; in German)
So who cares that these fictional peoples suffer from confirmation bias.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
> convince so many people that scientists are lying them. The very same scientists who were on TV in 1988 warning of dire consequences from global warming have ADMITTED that they were lying. We greatly exaggerated in order to motivate people politically, some of the best known GW alarmists have said. Perhaps you've forgotten what these "scientists" were saying in 80s "by the year 2000 ... "(California will be underwater, famine will sweep the US, etc.) It's 2012 and California is still there, so quite obviously they are liars, or fools. The only reason anyone would trust them now would be extreme cognitive bias. Remember these clamotogists were screaming about a man-made ice age in 1970s. Wrong again.
Add in the facts they like to ignore, like the fact that other planets are warming too. Mars didn't have cars, so it probably has a lot more to do with sun cycles than sedans. Once you tune out the crazies and those who are clearly more interested in politics than science, here's what you're left with:
In the least few decades, the earth has been in a slight warming cycle.
The earth has warmed a little more than other planets.
The earth's natural systems have done remarkably well at counteracting change. (For example, warmer temps evaporate water, which form clouds. Clouds shield us from the sun, making it cooler. Thus, warmer temps cause cooling back to normal.)
Once again, California is still there. Alarmists and deniers both have been proven wrong. The truth is, it's a tiny bit warmer and it hasn't caused famine like they said it would.
No one denies that climate changes -- no one. I can walk outside and show you the geologic evidence of our last ice age, and boy, has the climate sure changed since then. The climate has also been much hotter, much wetter, and with far higher levels of CO2 than today, and there is plenty of geologic evidence for that, too.
The question is whether people are causing warming, not whether the climate is changing.
Call me unconvinced. I have yet to hear any theory that adequately explains both the changes we see in the geologic record, and the changes reportedly caused by Man. It takes a huge amount of warming to move from an ice age to today. Where did that warming come from, if not from humans, and may it, not humans, be responsible for any warming we are seeing today?
These don't seem to be unreasonable questions to me, and telling me that 97% of climate scientists think the world is warming is irrelevant and doesn't answer the question.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Hansen's 1988 paper used a model that is now nearly 30 years old and it gave a CO2 sensitivity of 3.4C per doubling. If it had gotten a figure of 3.2C per doubling, it would have been spot on.
The only primitive state of knowledge is yours.
Hmmm... Cognitive Bias sounds like one of those pop-psych terms that boil down to "I don't understand what you said, but I scare easily and I have a white coat on so watch your ass."
Yes Virginia, there is a threshold at which we form convictions and from that point on it takes a greater amount of evidence or testimony to flip the opinion. It is a Hysteresis characteristic that keeps us sane and alive because there are times when taking no position at all means you are slack jawed and drooling, get swept up by the tsunami -- having neither fled nor grabbed onto anything.
But I've seen a preponderance of evidence that warming has been in hiatus for the last decade, sea ice extent and temperature variation are well within pre-industrial historical norms, such that even a warming trend (even if one was present) would not make me quit my day job and go chicken little on everybody... that CO2 *follows* warming not leads it... that computer models STILL rely on the mythical effects of some imaginary 'CO2 layer' whose existence is dis proven by decades of balloon sampling... and the sea level stuff is so tenuous and disingenuous, attempting to generate immediate global taxation hysteria over millimeters of projected rise, while stable landforms (forget the Maldives they are atolls for chrissake move onto solid rock before you whine about the ocean) show the ocean level very stable over time periods, geological not climactic factors rule here...
And then. A whole dingle-berry load of headlines such as "this was... greater than expected" or "that was... greater than projected" over trends that are for narrow-years time windows and numerically still within the threshold of noise.
But it's not just about science, there is also annoyance and money involved.
Yes it's getting ANNOYING. That Cognitive Bias are people who have made up their minds who are merely annoyed by the behavior of the opposing side. Annoyance is not a bad thing it is a good thing, it is human natures way of reminding us that there is bull-hocky in the air. And yes sometimes it gets personal -- because the ECONOMIC RAMIFICATIONS of global warming hysteria politics, the CO2 money grab and lollipop-sucking diversion of funds to energy alternatives that will not scale, is threatening to erode MY take-home pay. And place an unfair tax burden on my children.
Therefore I see global warming hysteria as a DIRECT PERSONAL THREAT. Which I believe is a natural and defendable position.
Like I am annoyed by the way Bill Nye the Science Guy has become an Algorian science-is-settled clone and botched the greenhouse experiment... here we had a chance for a real celebrity to re-discover that the greenhouse effect only really works under glass (within an atmosphere) or on a planet-wide scale with uniform atmospheric composition of greenhouse gasses (Venus)... instead Nye swallows the CO2 heat dissipation Kool-Aid and refuses to admit that the 'result' is lost below the noise level and conduction within the apparatus, as would be ethical to do.
And Michael Mann attributes 1 foot of Sandy's 13 foot storm surge to Global Warming. What an absurd and disingenuous crock that is. He is.
See what we're up against? I really am a kind, gentle person unless I feel driven to extremes by unwelcome trends in my social environment.
Please don't mod me down because I am presently annoyed by Bill Nye, he's still cool and (unlike Mann) I firmly believe he may some day do what every scientist must do, re-examine his premises.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
As long as everyone writing "scientific" articles and "research" get the basics of climate all wrong, everyone is going to be driven to erroneous beliefs.
For example, the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are current levels + C02 production (gas / oil / forest burning) + CO2 absorption (Oceans, for example) + CO2 consumption (trees). Playing with one factor is meaningless. We can make cars more efficient, but if trucks and ocean carriers are horribly inefficient, the total emissions are not going to be reduced at all. And letting people clear cut and burn the forests and jungles is a double whammy: putting CO2 in the air and removing C02 consumers. The solution is simple. Require all car / truck / boat / train manufacturers to plant twice as many trees as is necessary to consume the CO2 they emit. Require all gas, coal, and oil producers to plant twice as many trees as is necessary to consume the CO2 they emit. Require all power plants to plant twice as many trees as is necessary to consume the CO2 they emit. Require all tree cutters to plant twice as many trees as they cut. Require all clear cutters to replant or plant far faster than the 10 to 20 years they currently wait. Require all trucks / trains / ocean carriers to be more efficient. This would reduce the CO2 levels.
wake up and hold your nose
It seems that some of you missed the title of the article. Before you reply to a post, ask yourself, "Does this post sound like its coming from some one with strong climate change opinions?" Chances are, if its a post on slashdot, its a post from one of the highly-engaged Americans who's "highly motivated to disregard anything that says otherwise".
If the article is true...then why are we spending so much time trying to convince the 8% that doesn't believe in GW vs the 75% that could be swayed if only educated? 17% already believes in GW plus the 75% on the fence would be 92% of the people. Sometimes I don't get some people's rationale of how to use their time effectively.
GW deniers give a bad name to skeptics. Let's pause for a moment and remember the times where skepticism has proven to be perfectly justified:
- Paul Ehrlich's malthusian predictions, which at the time were widely shared
- WMD in Iraq
- String theory
- Artificial Intelligence promises in the late 1970s
A good scientist should be, by nature, a skeptic. However a good scientist should also be ready to bow before the evidence and put skepticism aside. Particularly given that in most cases the prevailing scientific theory is generally correct.
Here is the link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2012/05/31/sorry-global-warming-alarmists-the-earth-is-cooling/ Another link: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/10/a-big-picture-look-at-earths-temperature-2nd-quarter-2012/ Global warming is just a hoax!
To be fair I found the link on Forbes and the Heartland Institute, and replicas from scientists in the NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/science/02cold.html
Sigh... Forbes and the Heartland Institute... what passes for scientific evidence on Slashdot these days.
Is this supposed to be a response to the GP's request for evidence supporting the GGP's claim that we've experienced Global Cooling for the past 20 years?
I hope not. Here's what the link contains to support the anti-GW movement:
The word "twenty" does not occur at the link, and "20" only occurs in some dates.
The article, which BTW is a (respectable) science writer's contribution to a magazine rather than a scientist's peer-reviewed publication, does have this to say about cooling:
The weather in two places is not diagnostic. The "sea ice returning with a vengeance" is further described, later in the article, as (a) "far thinner than the yards-thick, years-old ice that dominated the region until the 1990s" and (b) "still lower [in extent] than the long-term mean".
So that leaves the "sharp drop in the globe's average temperature" as the only possibly interesting claim in the article. He doesn't give any further detail. A strict reading of the grammar requires the claim to be about last winter, not last year, but maybe he wasn't stating himself carefully. If he meant the whole year rather than the winter, presumably "over the last year" means... oops, the article is dated March 2, 2008.
Yeah, in 2008 we enjoyed a dip.Never mind that it was still higher than any year recorded before 1990, making it of necessity one of the 22 hottest years ever recorded. Any plot of annual temperatures shows up and down from year to year; pointing out that one year is a local dip is vacuous. It's the trend that matters.
And what has happened since then? 2001-2011 account for 11 of the 12 warmest years on record. (1998 is the other member of the twelve.) A comparison of the first 10 months of 2012 to the first 10 months of preceding years suggests that 2012 is on track to be the ninth hottest year on record. And we set a new record minimum for arctic sea ice in each of the past two summers.
I seriously hope I misunderstood the intent of your post, because it doesn't provide the slightest evidence that we've enjoyed a 20-year cooling spell. 16 of the 20 warmest years on record have occurred in the past 20 years. I wasn't even going to bother replying, until I checked in and noticed that it was up-modded to an astonishing "4, Informative". I'm having a little trouble figuring out what it's informative about, except the extent to which
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The GGP request was mine, and no my previous post was not supposed to provide the evidences I asked myself. I found the Forbes and Heartland Institude articles and they were certainly very biased and one sided. I decided not to link them. If someone wants to read their bullshit google is your friend, though.
The link in my previous post was actually a NY Times article talking about the claim that there is a global cooling and showing viewpoints from several scientists about it. By reading the article it becomes clear that the cooling data was severely overblown, misinterpreted and used as propaganda to dismiss the effects of AGW.
Again and again we see discussions about our collective decision making turning into a Pro-Con debates. Again people (even those familiar with Karl Popper's work) use positivist language, insinuating that the data verified their hypothesis. I think its about time we kick this discussion into the Meta-Level.
The big question as far as I can see - and this applies to all science - is how to pick a hypothesis given data. In Philosophy of Science this is known as the Problem of Induction, and one should not assume that Popper's Falsificationalism is the final word. I believe there are good grounds to oppose any kind of methodological fundamentalism in science.
Skepticism is more then a catch phrase to add to a Hypothesis you don't like. Its a philosophy built over millennia that doubts the possibility of existence and/or uniqueness of solutions to the Problem of Induction. We all have Cognitive Bias, but the point of the scientific method is to filter that out. There is no perfect filter, and we need to keep tinkering not only with theory but with the very method that selects the theory.
Often neglected (if not forgotten) are IMO are several relevant issues to debate: What is the cost of being wrong here? How well can we estimate the probability of a given event (sampling errors)? What are the costs (and auxiliary benefits) of behaving as if this is the case?
I sincerely wish more people making critical decisions in our society would read the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an extremely erudite Skeptical Empiricist who advocates Anftifragility in society. AGW or no AGW, we need to dissolve the great myth of our modern age - that all this Science and Technology is headed in the right direction.
You deserve mod points for this. Excellent analysis.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
The GGP request was mine
Ah, that explains the "to be fair" phrase, which I never figured out.
Tip of the hat to you, for asking for evidence.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's as if you are expecting prediction of the outcome of some sort of game before it is even known what teams are going to be playing.
So you are seriously suggesting that even a Nobel prize winner is making as much as one of the liars on the denial travelling roadshows? Climb out from under that rock and look around.
Seeing as how we have this long range climate forecasting all figured out, I have a question.
Is it going to rain tomorrow?
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Please? It's not so difficult. We have:
1. A measured rise in CO2 concentrations
2. A vast body of measurements showing increase in average temperatures (yes, after correcting for solar variations and what not)
3. A very straightforward and hard-to-refute mechanism for CO2 to cause the increase in temperature:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas
http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect.htm
4. Well-studied stabilities of different gases in the atmosphere
The basics have been pinned down, debated, agreed upon and bought the t-^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H made it into university textbooks in the late 1980s to early 1990s. It's really not difficult: if more thermal energy is entering a system than exiting it, its temperature goes up. Simple conservation of energy. The mechanism for thermal energy to enter and exit the planet is radiation, and the way different gases interact with this radiation is well-understood. The earth is warming up, and it's because of the CO2 we're releasing - that's as close to a fact as an empirical branch of science like this can get.
The only thing that was (and is) not sure is how bad the effect would be. How much longer would a period of relatively low solar activity slow down the rate of warming? How much of the excess CO2 would be taken up by seas and plant material that doesn't rot or gets burned (slowing down the heating-up)? Would the feedback of the initial warming be negative (slowing down the heating-up) or positive (speeding it up)? Which spots on earth will get warmer and colder? Climate science is not about whether or not climate heats up due to our CO2 release. It hasn't been about that for the last 25 years! It's about how fast the warming will go in function of the CO2 levels and how badly different spots on earth will be affected. The stovetop is on; the question is merely "how high". We've come a long way in narrowing this down over the last 25 years and the results don't look pretty. A lot of governments around the world recognize this.
The present "debate" in the US is entirely fabricated, just like the past debates on whether tobacco increases the risk of lung cancer or on whether hydrogenated fatty acids cause coronary heart disease. The strategies used by industry to discredit reputable science are exactly the same. Even though I'm a big proponent of debating everything, the current climate change debate in the US is a disgrace to human intelligence. They're debating something that has been settled 25 years ago; one side just keeps on bringing up long-discredited arguments like a broken record, forcing the other side to keep on refuting them. The media give both sides equal weight for the sake of "political neutrality" (my ass) and the general public is utterly confused about something that is in essence very straightforward.
PROTIP: Letting the deniers "debate the controversy" is a sucker's game; it's a form of "rhetorical judo" which forces a skeptic (a GENUINE skeptic) to always make the first move in a debate, to which, the denier would have a list of cut-and-paste talking-points to give a canned response or rhetorical evasion.
It's letting a kook make a extraordinary claim ("All the scientists in this scientific field are WRONG, but I'm right!"), without extraordinary proof. Every. Single. Time.
It dosen't matter is the field is: cold-fusion, round-earth-ism, tectonic plates, smoking's link to cancer, evolution, or climate-change, the deniers all use the same play book (and in the case with smoking-causes-cancer and climate-change denialism, a lot of the PLAYERS are the same, q.v. the Heartland Institute)
II believe in global warming, but not in anthropogenic global warming. Failure to differentiate is attempting to undermine agw opponents.
For all those who claim that CO2 produced by nature & humans is causing warming I have a question:
How long with rising CO2 levels and no temperature increase before you admit your theory is wrong? 15 years? 20? 25? 30? Never?
It has been 16 years of rising CO2 (8-9%) with no rise in temperature.
When I read all these posts it just sounds like Nero fiddeling!!!
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
... or the "highly engaged" believers of Climate Change (Global Warming)
That statement above is missing from an unbiased synopsis.
There was the one I referred to above, the El Nino/La Nina thing and another one about the monsoons, both well over a century ago. Ask a farmer how handy it is to know if it's going to be a wet or dry season before planting if you can't understand how this would be "useful". So there's a couple of very old and very simple climate models that have worked right there that I thought would be general knowledge just about everywhere.
All of this deliberate ignorance driven by PR is translating into a distrust of experts in just about every field and is going to damage a generation.
Look kid, stop pulling our legs, there is no way you can possibly be so dumb that you could seriously think that is what is meant above. Please stop this parody of a dumb as shit luddite and let's have a serious discussion.
You suggested all climate science is worthless - I gave you an obvious example of worth, and now you are pretending that all climate science is worthless unless it's fucking astrology? Come on now, your parody isn't even funny and it's really insulting people that have just been hoodwinked by the anti-science PR and don't know any better.
You had the assertion that climate scientists are not "*actual* scientists". I've simply pointed out that such an assertion is utter bullshit, no matter what idealogical baggage you are using to fuel it, and now you are attempting to put all these other words in my mouth? Why do you feel so strongly about this issue that you are willing to pretend to be both stupid and actually be so dishonest?
"Dubious authorities" from the kid recycling PR and bullshit from a bugeyed idiot that goes around screaming about "world government" and who pretended he had a cure for AIDS a few years back? Quick puzzle kid, who is more dubious, a guy that writes suduko puzzles for a living but calls himself a scientist or a real scientist with published peer reviewed work?
As for your question, it was answered before you asked it. I suggest you look at that quote above from Attenborough again since he describes quite well where faith in expert opinions comes from. There's your answer.
An example of a "necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement" used and acted on many times in the field of climate science would be:
"Show me a better model and I will use it".
Why are you bothering to make so much noise when your lie that there is no "statement" was so incredibly obvious?
So there's the example you've wasted so much time asking for - so fucking incredibly obvious that you knew it yourself before wasting everyone's time. I can understand someone like yourself on a political blog or new age crystal gazing crap, but why are you here polluting a tech site with such an obvious lie?
Since the behaviour of climate scientists is not as you suggest it's irrelevant. You are attacking a cartoon cutout, an immobile strawman with a sign that say "warmist" instead of real people doing real science. Your demonstrated inability above to grasp the general knowledge about climate science that most of society gets from weather reports mentioning seasonal trends (for example) shows that your attack is based on ignorance and is nothing but pointless name calling. The problem here lies with you not having the merest clue what climate scientists do yet still making wild assumptions then telling bystanders that those assumptions are real.
So once again, "teen genius", what is it that makes you better than all of the scientists in a field you know little or nothing about?
Of course I understand, and I also understand that while your imaginary strawman has fixed and unchanging ideas driven by ideology the real climate scientists don't. It just boils down to you mindlessly calling them names based on a false premise.
As for your second petty little thing equating just about all science with astrology, there is nothing there to understand apart from a twisted and petty little opinion that demonstrates your lack of awareness of the world around you. It reveals nothing apart from your own shortcomings.