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Scientists Explain Why Chairman of House Committee On Science Is Wrong
Lasrick writes "Michael Oppenheimer and Kevin Trenberth take apart Rep. Lamar Smith's (R-Tex.) Washington Post op/ed on climate science saying: 'Contrary to Smith's assertions, there is conclusive evidence that climate change worsened the damage caused by Superstorm Sandy. Sea levels in New York City harbors have risen by more than a foot since the beginning of the 20th century. Had the storm surge not been riding on higher seas, there would have been less flooding and less damage. Warmer air also allows storms such as Sandy to hold more moisture and dump more rainfall, exacerbating flooding.'"
Man, I certainly can't think of any better candidates for the chairmanship of the House Comittee on Science, Space, and Technology than a lawyer without any technical or scientific background, a big fan of SOPA, expanding the DMCA's restrictive elements, and PCIP. Just as icing on the cake, the guy is a Christian Scientist, so he probably has a worse-than-average relationship with medical science.
Honestly, how do we end up with these jokers?
Six official investigations have cleared scientists of accusations of wrongdoing.
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/global_warming_contrarians/debunking-misinformation-stolen-emails-climategate.html
Lamar Smith is to climate change what Antonin Scalia is to gay marriange. Scientists say to Scalia/Lamar: "we have no doubts, we've established X beyond reasonable doubt". Scalia/Smith says to the public: "As everybody knows, there's great controversy among scientists as to whether X is true". Fuck them both.
Ezekiel 23:20
I am not a scientist
Thank you, you could have saved the rest of your comment.
Ezekiel 23:20
I'll quote Feynman on this one, because I couldn't say it any better:
"I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the laymen when you're talking as a scientist. . . . I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, [an integrity] that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen."
If you really want to play the 'OMG Poor People!' card, it'd probably be worth considering the impact of even relatively modest shifts in climate or precipitation on the billion or two economically marginal subsistence dirt farmers and 'squalid urbanites who spend 50% or more of their household income on staple foods'...
The value of some highbrow beachfront property is highly visible; but total chickenshit compared to perturbations in the low-rent side of the agricultural sector.
So you obviously have made up your mind on the argument without looking at any evidence. You willfully accept propaganda and when someone offers you actual evidence you claim it is propaganda. You really should work for Fox News.
people who stand to profit from climate change
If you think that anyone would profit from even the average predicted scenario, you must be living comfortably on another planet. Droughts, floods, food shortages, heat waves, extreme weather patterns, economies destroyed? Where's "profit" in that, for any economy?
Ezekiel 23:20
We have centuries of data, and - most importantly - from different sources. Yes, the accuracy deteriorates the further back you go, but with things like dendrology you can improve the accuracy by making comparisons with samples from different regions, as well as comparing ancient patterns with recent ones. Also, ice cores from both the poles and from glaciers give very long timescale information.
We know due to lots of stuff, like tree rings and lake sediments. While they all have margins of error, they are all in broad agreement that the temperature rises in the last century have been exceptional. We also have CO2 data from ice cores that shows that for 0.5M years CO2 levels varied between about 180 and 280ppm, in step with the ice ages and Milankovitch cycles, while in the last 100 years it has risen suddenly to 400ppm.
Am I the only person who initially read this as "Lamar Smith (T-Rex)" ?
It depends on how you ask. Here are two examples:
Q: All you arrogant scientists want us to believe this AGCC nonsense; yeah, well prove it to me!!
A: Go F*** yourself.
Translation: You're a troll. I'm busy doing my work. I don't have time for trolls.
Q; Wow, thousands of scientists have spent decades studying this, and they appear to agree for the most part. Gee, I'd really like to know more about this, can you help me understand?
A: Well, it's really complicated, and I only know part of the science behind it. I can explain what I'm doing, but if you want an overview, perhaps you should start with the IPCC report, and maybe track down the references on the Wikipedia article. After that, I'd be happy to answer questions to the best of my ability. Again, though, I'm a specialist, so I won't be able to answer all your questions
Translation: I understand the sincerity of your question, but this is like asking a biologist to teach you all of biology while you stand on one foot. Really, you need to dive in and get past larval stage before you're in a position to ask meaningful questions.
Note: this is hypothetical, I'm not a climate scientist, nor do I play one on TV.
Or if you bothered to read the emails or follow the findings of eight separate panels: The conversations were taken out of context and there was no evidence of any wrongdoing. The other thing is even if the email leaks were true, the issue was with a few scientists. So you are going to discount the work of possibly thousands of other scientists that had nothing to do with the email? That sounds legitimate. That's like saying a few doctors were found to be manipulating data on aspirin, therefore all data on aspirin is not valid.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I'm not an expert on the matter; but my understanding is that there are all sorts of tools for drawing inferences about historical climate. The resolution tends to get coarser, and the precision isn't as good as having a network of contemporary monitoring stations; but it isn't a total shot in the dark.
Ice cores, if you can find suitably deep drill sites and observe good handling practices, can be very helpful. I don't think we have any that go back more than ~800,000 years; but that's certainly something.
For older stuff, plant and animal fossils can help you map out what climate zone a given area was subject to when the fossils were laid down. The geologic record should also provide some information on how active volcanic activity has been as a greenhouse gas source at various points in time.
For relatively recent; but pre-contemporary-monitoring, you can draw inferences from records of crop yields/successes/failures(a matter that has been of considerable interest, often complete with tax records from the relevant authority, for most of human civilization) and, once fossil fuel use kicks up, economic historians can provide decent estimates of burn volumes for much of modern human history.
It seems that the past 5 decades or so of accurate satellite and temp data is way to small of a sample.
Actually, we have a few centuries of fairly accurate data on temperatures. Granted, not in high-resolution grids, but in many places, there are temperature records going back to the 18th century.
It would be like looking at my speedometer while on the freeway on ramp and extrapolating that 45 minutes down the road I will be going 25,000 MPH not accounting for the fact that I will stop accelerating and maybe even break in that time It would be like looking at my speedometer while on the freeway on ramp and extrapolating that 45 minutes down the road I will be going 25,000 MPH not accounting for the fact that I will stop accelerating and maybe even break in that time
You do realize that the XKCD comic on extrapolation was a joke and not an illustration of how scientists work, don't you?
How can we know with precision about Earths climate 300 years ago, much less 3,000 or 3,000,000 years ago
Perhaps not with the precision that we have for contemporary data, but there is a large number of proxy indicators. Visit your library and borrow a textbook on paleoclimatology. It's fascinating stuff.
Ezekiel 23:20
This is not science class. The people asking the questions are not looking for real answers. The average person is simply not even qualified to ask questions.
Do you ask questions about how nuclear reactors are working to power your home? No. The experts know. If you ask a question of them. If they are nice they could give you some dumbed down version. But you will never really understand without spending YEARS of your life.
There comes a point where you simply have to trust the experts. We are well beyond that..... VERY well beyond that. The people asking questions publicly are simply doing it for political reasons. They are disingenuous and the enemy of scientific understanding.
It is reasonable to ask questions. However if you go around questioning if F=MA is applicable to every day life, your not questioning your a fucking troll.
Also, I don't even have a problem with saying that CO2 is the primary driver of increased temperatures - but I do have a problem with
a) anything that goes beyond CO2 (that is 1.3K for a doubling) that is pure speculation, consists of poorly researched feedback mechanisms, with the poor state of research in cloud formation being among the worst offenders and most important negative feedbacks that are currently being ignored due to the poor state of knowledge and
b) I do have a problem with the constant one-sided discussion of the effects of increased temperatures. They are always held in the tone of horoscopes and greek oracles to avoid any clear statements that could be easily contradicted. "Extreme weather events" being the worst offender. That's says nothing and is obviously taylored to feed a constant media frenzy. This is combined with a complete lack of reporting on past "extreme weather events". Thus even decidetly average events like hurricanes Katrina or Sandy (in their historical and geographical context!) become "unprecedented monster storms", which is just laughable for anyone who bothered to look into the history of hurricanes on the US south and east coast.
Well, you aren't giving it.
True, but incomplete. Sea levels have been rising steadily since long before industrialization:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.png
Therefore, although warming can cause sea level rise and sea levels have risen, there is no conclusive evidence that anthropogenic emissions have contributed significantly to sea level rise.
True, but that could mean anything from totally insignificant to significant increase in damage; nobody knows how much increase there is. Since the sea level rise isn't attributable to human emissions, however, that point is academic.
The actual problem is that people build in flood plains and too close to the ocean, because Congress bails them out with taxpayer money. That problem is much easier to take care of than carbon emissions.
True, but nobody knows whether that is a significant effect (likely not) either or how much of it is due to human emissions.
So, the scientists actually haven't said much factually wrong, but their statements are misleading and full of weasel words, and their policy recommendations are unfounded and ineffective.
Lamar Smith is right: "wait and see" is the right approach for the US. To that I'd add: eliminate federal flood insurance and disaster aid. If millionaires want to live on the beach, they should self-insure and not have the tax payer assume their risks.
AGW then you are either one of the authors, or you are a fanatic who accepts any act,
You sir, are an ideologue. There is a third option. The person you are denouncing may actually have some scientific literacy. See this entertaining video on skeptics and climategate.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
This is a classic tragedy of the commons situation. If everyone pollutes everyone looses. If only you pollute and no one else does.... you win. If you dont pollute and everyone else does... you really loose. If no one pollutes everyone kind wins.
I have no idea why tards on the right who get all huffy about free market economics would not recognize this economics 101 situation. Given a free market situation we will always turn to the WORST possible outcome. Since it is always better for the individual to pollute the Nash equilibrium is achieved when everyone chooses to pollute.
Now how to deal with this flaw in the free market solution is more up to debate. But in general this is the EXACT situation where governmental regulation is needed and will produce the most net surplus. The free marketer solution is that every single potential polluter gets together and negotiates who gets to pollute..... I like to call this solution a "government". But repubs get all pissy about that name for some reason. They think every individual entity should negotiate... They seem to forget there are a thing called transaction costs which make this completely crazy in the real world.
If you're more worried about the money than the science you're doing it wrong. Do you really think that the vast majority of climate scientists from around the world are falsifying science for the sake of money when they're smart enough to know that their falsification will eventually be discovered utterly destroying their scientific reputations? I don't doubt there are a few scientists around who are that venal but not enough in the long run to overcome the vast majority who are honestly seeking to understand our physical world better. To think they're all in on falsifying climate science is to postulate conspiracy on an impossible level.
The science is nearly 200 years old now starting with Fourier who discovered the greenhouse effect in 1824 and it's just been building since then. In the past 20-30 years it's been subject to intense scrutiny yet no one has come up with that magic bullet that explains the current climate change better than the current explanations. If somebody does I'll pay attention.
Could you be more specific? TFA looks fine to me, especially how it starts:
The two of us have spent, in total, more than seven decades studying Earth's climate, and we have joined hundreds of top climate scientists to summarize the state of knowledge for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the World Climate Research Program and other science-based bodies. We believe that our views are representative of the 97 percent of climate scientists who agree that global warming is caused by humans. Legions of studies support the view that, left unabated, this warming will produce dangerous effects. (This commentary, like so much of our work, was a collaborative process, with input from leading climate scientists Julia Cole, Robert W. Corell, Jennifer Francis, Michael E. Mann, Jonathan Overpeck, Alan Robock, Richard C.J. Somerville and Ben Santer.)
Please tell me: where, exactly, are you hallucinating this lack of care and honesty?
If the "threatening" now-faster-rate of sea level rise is on the order of a 3.3 mm/year, then how is it that the sea levels in NY harbors have "risen more than a foot since the beginning of the 20th century (which would be 1900AD.)
1000mm / cm ...we're talking 30 centimeters.
2.54 centimeters / inch
12 inches / foot
Wikipedia (linked above) says the *current rate*, which is *faster* than previous, is 3.3 mm / year. 113 years (since 1900) is 372.9 mm if we count 3.3 mm / year for EVERY year since then. That's a total of 3.72 cm (isn't metric easy?) or between one and two inches.
And actually, Wikipedia reports sea level rise this way: "Between 1870 and 2004, global average sea levels rose 195 mm", which is less than an inch.
So, a foot, how? [grumble]
There are only 10mm in 1 cm. So that would be 37.2cm, or 14.68 inches, since 1900. I think you'll find thats more than a foot.
the short answer is that sometimes CO2 trails temperature increase, sometimes it doesn't.
Usually when CO2 trails climate, it's because of orbital forcing, but interestingly, sometimes that temperature increase will increase ocean acidification and amply carbon feedbacks.
Hey, the carbon/feedback cycle is complex, no doubt about it. But carbon is a forcing -- no doubt about it, and right now GHG are responsible for the lion's share of the present and future temperature increase.
Here's deeper discussion of this issue: http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature-intermediate.htm
Here's a video that responds to the CO2 trails climate meme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ3PzYU1N7A
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Both sides can make their claims. But unless someone can do a proper experiment with a control planet, and make that experiment repeatable while you're at it, its all speculation. Not proper science.
You can't be that dense. By your reasoning, just about every aspect of science is "speculation".
Almost all non-trivial physics models are simulations. This includes everything from CFD's to weather and climate models. These simulations are built upon physical equations the describe the phenomena. These models are run against KNOWN CONDITIONS to see if the are accurately modelling the phenomena.
In the case of climate models, the models are initialized with pre-industrial conditions (with various small tweaks to the initial conditions to create what is known as an ensemble). Then the models are run forward to present day to see how well they modeled the KNOWN conditions that happened over that time period. And, not surprisingly, the climate models do a pretty good job. Keep in mind, these models are not STATISTICAL models. These are PHYSICAL models, i.e. modelling the actual physical dynamics of the earth's climate.
And even then, the models are just tools. The research used to the develop the models are based upon real world observations (historical as well as current). And this research has been ongoing since Fourier first proposed greenhouse gas theory back in 1824.
Speculation is someone saying "The moon is made of cheese!". Science is someone showing objectively that it isn't. Idiocy is looking at the science and disregarding it as nonsense since it goes against your belief that the moon is made of cheese.
~X~
It's both. More CO2 drives warming. More warming causes CO2 to bubble out of the ocean, permafrost to thaw and organic matter to rot and release CO2, etc. And thinks to the practice of carbon dating, we can say reasonably well that a large part of the current CO2 increase is from long-buried carbon sources--aka fossil fuels.
Yes, it's the rate that's troubling. Because in the past it took thousands of years to see the sort of warming the gradually resulted in tropical conditions in Canada's latitude. But with the rapid rate we're seeing now, the honest fear is that even if we were to simply stop fossil fuel CO2 emissions completely, we'd still continue to see the unprecedented rapid temperature rise because of the previously mentioned warming->CO2 release.
Except that your point is sort of superfluous. Even if what you state is true--which I'm not certain of--, the fact is that we know pretty confidently that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and higher CO2 concentrations means a greater temperature. We also know, pretty confidently, that greater temperatures have the above mentioned forcing cycle. That there have been possible exceptions to this cycle isn't comforting unless we have a good reason to believe the mentioned cycle won't repeat itself. That is, even if someone could come up with a good explanation for past higher temp/lower CO2 periods, it doesn't resolve the current higher temp/higher CO2 period. A better place to look would be lower or flat temper/high CO2 periods and consider why or how we could take that track. To that end, I haven't remotely heard anything to suggest we could be or are on that track.
The closest I've heard about anything along those lines is considerations on combating global warming with things like mitigating global warming with dust clouds (either in the atmosphere or in space). The general problem with that is a matter of scale--that human CO2 emissions are so great, countering them with dust would be of similar scale great, and that introduces a lot of unknowns like (a) how much dust to use, (b) how to remove dust if we go too far, (c) all the atmospheric (if done in the atmosphere) risks of increased dust, (d) the cost/risks of doing the same in space (a dust cloud could slow asteroids and increase the risk of them hitting Earth), etc. In essence, anything of the scale that could fix the problem are probably also of the scale of the problem itself. So, we have the real risk of solving one problem just to produce another one. Hence, it'd seem a lot wiser to head off CO2 release as much as we can and only really consider alternatives as a last resort.
But, seriously, we're so far from even seriously trying to deal with CO2 release. :(
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
If I may impose, could you explain how it is known that CO2 drives warming, and not vice versa?
We know that CO2 drives warming because physics. It fucking works. Now, warming may also drive CO2 to an extent, and the extensive warming we're causing may have a runaway effect, but that's not a happy story, that's a sad one.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Actually, it'd be more along these lines:
....time passes....
OT: We, and 97% of all the doctors out there agree that you have a sickness. It's so complicated we would never be able to help another person if we explained it completely to every person who's never had any medical training who wants to have it all explained, therefor we say "you have a problem, lets see if we can come up with something to help it out."
Patient: No, i know i've never had any medical training, and i'm scared of doing anything cause Billy-Bo-Bob and his wife/daughter Mary-Beth-Bob said it wun't nothing, so you're wrong because they all got them a 10th grade edukation. I don't want to actually have to take initiative and go learn to read so i can have a chance to understand it.
OT: If we don't try to come up with a solution, you may die.
Patient: You don't know nothing.
Patient: - - - dies - - -
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Are you saying the oceans, which are all connected, are as much as a constant 4" different in level, say, between NYC and, oh, Denmark or Japan?
Yes. See, for example, this Straight Dope which mentions that there is a 8" difference between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans at Panama.
It isn't being thrown out, it's being thrown IN. Into a vast sea of data that overwhelmingly favours one side even though you can try to cherry-pick data that points in the other direction (a la http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Escalator_2012_500.gif).
Nobody is taking one hurricane and saying QED, AGW exists. We're examining the effects of GW (A or no A) on a hurricane. And it's basing it on factors like sea level which are less chaotic than say wind patterns.
This is how you do science. More controls are good. But science is done in reality. We didn't need to create a control Sun and then make its entire mass utterly vanish instantaneously in order to learn orbital mechanics, and we do our verifications using a model of how gravity works and much smaller scale experiments like the Cavendish experiment (generally -- some astrophysicists have since dome some grand measurements as well).
And when birds start flying and magnets levitate, nobody gets excited when we make excuses for why they aren't falling to the Earth. When rockets start moving away in a vacuum, you don't point to it as proof of non-conservation of momentum and dismiss it when we point out you aren't considering the full system of rocket and ejecta. "That's just part of the rocket, not the whole rocket-ejecta system". And when people point out that Earth's gravity does play a substantial role in bird flight, citing the top speed of an eagle dive, nobody claims that they are extrapolating the entire existence of gravity from a single bird dive.
They threw out one set of data that was showing anomalous results. Since that paper was published there are many new tree ring datasets that don't show an anomaly past the 1960's. If you read the paper they fully explain the anomalous data and what they did about it.
Nor would people rush to conclude that a one-time one foot rise in sea level was a high price to pay with what humanity has achieved in the last one hundred years.
What makes you think sea level won't continue to rise, that it's a one-time thing? The last time CO2 levels were as high as they are now sea level was over 60 feet higher than it is now.
The alarmist models have largely failed to model both the past and ongoing present situation, and are therefore useless in predicting the future.
This is a big steaming pile of bullshit.
Ezekiel 23:20
Minus an atmosphere, and assuming .3 albedo (based on satellite measurements), the Earth would be about -18 degrees C (255 K). The average surface temperature of the Earth is currently around 14.5 degrees C. The atmosphere traps enough heat energy to take the entire globe from deep freeze to balmy. Geothermal and tidal heating account for pretty negligible amounts of heating.
So, two points: one, the amount of energy involved is rather large, and a small percentage change is going to have a huge effect. Secondly, heating the atmosphere changes its content. The atmosphere is more or less saturated with water vapor, and any increase in temperatures increases the amount of water that it can contain. We can't do anything about how much water is on the planet, for reasons that should be obvious. On the other hand, we're really great at making CO2. A naive calculation would indicate that you can increase temperatures almost arbitrarily by adding CO2, in fact.
Oh hey look there's a textbook that has this same objection explained in detail. Apparently your objection was addressed in the 1950s. Whoops.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.