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How Climate Scientists Parallel Early Atomic Scientists
Lasrick writes "Kennette Benedict writes in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists about the existential threat of climate change, and how the scientists who study and write about it are similar to the early atomic scientists who created, and then worried about, the threat that nuclear weapons posed to humanity: 'Just as the Manhattan Project participants could foresee the coming arms race, climate scientists today understand the consequences of deploying the technologies that defined the industrial age. They also know that action now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will mitigate the worst consequences of climate change, just as the Manhattan Project scientists knew that early action to forestall a deadly arms race could prevent nuclear catastrophe.'"
If they were honest, why are they calling it "Climate Change" now, rather than Global Warming?
Seems to me they're trying to have it both ways.
(Note: This is just an observation, nothing more. If you try to argue with me about issues I haven't raised here today, I'm going to ignore you.)
When did we stop talking about the threat of nuclear catastrophe in the past tense? Last I checked, there were still at least a few weapons out there.
"The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a nontechnical online magazine that covers global security and public policy issues..." - Wikipedia
"Her research and teaching focused on organizational decisionmaking, jury decisionmaking, and on women's leadership and American politics" -Wikipedia
Just putting this in perspective
The knuckle dragging idiots that make up 90% of humanity on this planet can just about grasp that a huge explosion with lots of radioactivity is a very bad thing. However trying to persuade them that climate change that may or may not affect their lives in a few decades time is also a very bad thing is rather an uphill task. Mainly because they don't understand the science but also because a lot of them think its all a conspiracy by The Man (tm) to control what they do. And then of course we have the Ostrich approach to problem solving - just hope it goes away.
It is not science if your hypothesis is not falsifiable.
how do i neutralize this?
Atomic scientists had verifiable results from the start, they built them up to something that actually worked to end a horrible war and then they fell prey to paranoia and second thoughts and forfeited the peaceful possibilities of their science to a screaming mob of idiots like Hanoi Jane.
Climate "scientists" have bullshit. They have hockey sticks and "hide the decline" and ream upon ream of unverifiable nonsense. Any decent statistician can refute their arguments in a heartbeat, and many have.
Why stop at four billion years? Compared to the temperature some ~13.8 billion years ago, it's positively chilly right now!
I find it fascinating how science is often refered here on slashdot, but when it comes to climate scientists, all of a sudden the vast majority of scientists are stupid, lying, elitists scaremongers.
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Manhattan Project scientists may have foretold the arms race, but could they have foreseen that the advent of nuclear weapons would produce the longest period of peace between industrialized nations in the past several centuries? Considering the countless lives lost in the wars of the 19th and 20th centuries, how many lives have been saved under the haunting specter of nuclear annihilation?
In this context the analogy to climate science is less clear.
Republicans are slow witted and can't be told anything. They have to be shown, and after conclusive evidence is given, they will then create their own incorrect conclusions. You can warn about their conclusions, but only after collosal clusterfucks in the name of saving a penny will they finally agree (usually people have to die). You can show them and show them and they won't listen till there is blood on the ground (possibly their own). After seeing their own blood, they will then try and sue scientists for not sufficiently warning them (you have to basically shoot them in order to get them to listen). Global warming? Its a lie! (until the flooding, then), why didn't you warn us? I'll sue!, and finally "there has to be a way I can make some money off this."
The same thing is said in other threads about scientists discussing different issues. You just haven't noticed. Given that some "scientists" have lied in the past about climate change and how politicized it all is (from all sides) it's not surprising in the least that there might be a few more railing against it than (say) asteroid detection programs.
The arms race happened. It wasn't deadly. There was no nuclear catastrophe.
Carbon's increasing. We're still here. The polar ice caps are still here.
Good comparison.
Not only are the claims of the climate scientologists (that's deliberate) deceitful, as noted it the preceding posts, the claims that they're like atomic scientists are pure hubris. Have they created anything, much less climate? Of course not.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Since falsifying in this case is effectively proving a negative - ie demonstrate its NOT going to happen.
Obviously the person who modded you up is as clueless as you are.
The biggest similarity between the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and climate alarmists is that they both have predicted the end of the world like a dozen times by now.
When I was growing up, i.e. the 70ies and the 80ies, the climate scare was The Big Bad Global Cooling. At the end of the 90ies and until recently, the climate scare was The Big Bad Global Warming. Then the scare mongers got smarter and now the scare is The Big Bad Climate Change Whatever It Is. Since the climate is always changing it is a perfectly safe bet it is going to change, somehow. To prevent the climate from changing is about as possible as to prevent the Earth from rotating :)
BTW, we have an unusually cold summer here in the Balkans.
Today's crop of computer climate model extrapolaters aren't even close to Manhattan era scientists. I do not believe that we can tease the anthropogenic signal from the natural noisy data sets in order to predict the future. Extrapolating any data set that lacks a closed form solution is tricky at best. Producing a confirmation of that extrapolation is proving tricky also.
Whereas theorizing fission and then producing an experiment that confirms the theory is an incontrovertible act of science.
early atomic scientists:
- developed sound physical theories that any theoretical theorist could verify from first principles and a few key experiments
- proved that their theories worked in a series of repeatable experiments
- implemented their technologies as practical devices
- worried that the technology they themselves developed might be used for bad
climate scientists:
- make extrapolations involving tons of assumptions and unknowns
- their experiments and data collections cannot be reproduced
- haven't created any new technologies
- try to stop people from using other people's technologies
We still have some of the lowest CO2 concentrations in earth's history right now, and our climate has been changing rapidly (in fact, oscillating wildly) for the past 7 million years or so. To stop these oscillations, CO2 concentrations would have to go up substantially.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology
My mind was stuck in a 'Is she a total idiot to not see the difference?", followed by, "How arrogant to even make the comparison!", indignation loop.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Right or wrong, it's hard to take this article seriously when thebulletin.org doesn't exactly look like an objective and balanced source of information on climate change.
Climate change is not an existential threat.
Today's climate scientists are not builders, experimentalists or engineers. Often people assume that the guys working on solar power or alternative fuels work hand in hand with the climate guys. This isn't even close to true.
The "debate" which has raged around climate science has through political calculation or naivete used climate scientists to discourage government investment in the technologies which would make the largest impact on reversing climate change.
Endorsements are made for a patchwork of technologies which have no thermodynamic hope of solving our problems. Technologies which could be more impactful in the long run are dropped because of their links to the existing power industry.
It's complicated to explain to the public why we really need to work on things like chemical reduction of coal plant exhaust or efficient transformation of methane into oil. We really could have been using some help from the climate guys with that for the last 20 years.
In the sixties and seventies, the climate hucksters were selling us on a man-made ice age. In the eighties, they told us California would be underwater by 2000. It's still there.
Maybe alot of people twist and exaggerate the evidence for their own reasons when $ billions are on the line. A $100k grant ? Just in the Obama years alone, he's handed hundreds of millions of your money to fake greenies. By fake , I mean ones that took the money and ran, never living up to any of their promises.
Riddle me this Batman: How can you tell when a liberal knows they are losing the battle?
Answer: When they start renaming things (as in Global Warming to Climate Change).
Guess you can't blame them though, as the more time that passes without warming the more stupid they look.
It appears that you've just accidentally spoken the truth. You probably didn't realize you were acknowledging that climate "scientists" and their bosses have a lot in common with oil barons, but you've inadvertently discovered the truth.
Signed the Truth? You are a laugh riot. How much do you think it would cost Exxon and the Koch brothers if oil and coal production gets cut? A hell of a lot more than any bankers stand to gain from it.
Follow the money, but use your brain rather than your politics.
Support SETI@home
In fact, it is true that regional climate change has been happening here and there all through human history.
Unfortunately, it has tended to bring down entire civilizations.
So if there's a change in climate that we're causing, may we should stop.
Although I am an AGW skeptic, it is possible to switch over all power generation plants to nuclear ones over time and to embed high voltage rails into the roadways of all major highways and manufacture vehicles that can make use of them. The government could even pay for the rail electricity so that nearly everyone would want to use such vehicles. However getting more than a handful of the 196 countries on the planet to also switch to nuclear power generation and drive electric cars is much more difficult. And trying to enforce an all out combustion ban on the entire planet would require a world police state and a very well funded one. No matter what it's the poor people of the world who will suffer in any serious CO2 reduction program. Rich people will harldy notice the changes.
i was initially offended by an article making the claims of climate crusaders paralleling atomic scientists back in the OG days when people actually gave a shit. THEN i realized there may be some weight to this when you consider the possibilities or reality(?) of weaponized weather systems. where did my first post go you censors can all burn in a methane fueled fire please. i produced that methane myself so its green and non taxable in the future eco-tax scenarios, right? do you want to know how i made it?
anyways i think its good that we are almost at the point of considering that maybe we are being a bit self destructive here. i cannot wait untill industry that is heavily regulated by the EPA and impossible to participate in, returns to a competitive level on the world stage after china evaluates their current state of douchebaggery, or new solutions to old problems emerge, and we can all get back to making quality products. personally i am most excited about the possibilities of glass making a return as the standard drink container. i cant stand all this plastic flavored water i've been drinking.
Every winter a cold snap brings out a big crowd of people claiming that it disproves global warming.
Where are they during the current heat wave? Apparently the 'logic' only applies when it supports their position.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
However, the nuclear scientists have a clear advantage in that at least they showed some remorse.
Climate scientists are busy trying to kill off millions in poor nations by blocking access to life-saving energy resources, and laughing while doing so.
The closer parallel is Stalin, killings hundreds of millions for the sake of an ideology they can't let go of long after it's apparent it has gone beyond discredited.
With any luck in our lifetime we'll get to see war-crime style trials for the climate "scientists" to answer for the people they have killed.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ever trying to muddy the narrative, Kennette Benedict is hard at work spreading bullshit and FUD.
I find it fascinating how science is often refered here on slashdot, but when it comes to climate scientists, all of a sudden the vast majority of scientists are stupid, lying, elitists scaremongers.
You forgot sniveling profit mongers.
From Prof. Richard Feynman speaking on Pseudoscience.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtMX_0jDsrw
QED
The Union of Concerned Scientists had their Doomsday Clock that advanced and backed off of midnight depending on the level of political sanity being shown. Has something like that been done for climate change? How bad the floods will be in some future date? A measurement of a major seaport being underwater?
The comparison is bad and wrong. The Manhattan Project scientists were able to forsee the insanity that their invention would cause the world, and yet they still built it. Climate scientists are speculating the future and then continuing to speculate the future. A proper comparison would be a team of scientists working on freon refrigeration and deciding that despite the risk to the atmosphere due to freon, more lives will be saved by inventing the cooling device. The trick is that the scientists were working on something they knew was potentially dangerous and yet for a greater cause continued to work on it, the climate scientists are not dangering the world by writing the papers and the effect of their papers on the world will not endanger the world.
The joy of poorly applied mental statistics.
What are the odds that a group of people all agree something needs to be done about something they believe?
Does that have any correlation to them being right about it?
Climate scientists can't predict the future any better than nuclear scientists could or the millions of other people who've tried in other disciplines but aren't noteworthy. There's nothing comparable about the two groups at all that doesn't also include every other scientist alive with an opinion.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
To discount somebody because of who funds them is a logical fallacy equal to the classic appeal to authority.
That aside, however, it's always amusing to see people who attack any AGW skeptic/critic as obviously tainted by virtue of getting money from some oil interest (i.e. not to be believed because their arguments would benefit their paymasters) who then fawn over the proponents of AGW even though they are at least as tainted by the source of their funds. Nearly all of the people pushing AGW are funded by "Big Government". Big Government gives them their research money, and they produce results which show that, SUPRISE!, an enormous disaster is coming and it must be solved by growing government and giving it more money and power (just exactly what Big Government wants the results it pays for to be! just a coincidence, of course... nothing to see here... move along)
Some of the atomic scientists were so politically warped and so over-wrought on the subject that they helped the "other side" to get armed with nuclear weapons... and in doing so they contributed to the creation of the decades-long Cold War, a prolonged nuclear standoff that cost the world trillions of dollars and misdirected immense technical industrial and human potential into an ultimately wasteful (but made necessary) enterprise.
Over-wrought and politically-zealous AGW scientists have actually induced a great deal of AGW skepticism with their actions (the manipulation of data, the peer review process and the paper publishing process, and their exaggerated prophesies of doom that line-up neatly with the political calendar, etc) and in doing so have armed their opponents with the weapons needed for a lengthy standoff
Real science stays out of politics. The scientist who dabbles in politics will inevitably put his finger on the scale; it's human nature.
you're just an infantile anti-science left-wing nut who seeks cradle-to-grave government coddling.... who might be happier if he learned to change the carb on a V8
Don't you believe in science?
We are all just evolved animals. Humans are not any more special than polar bears and everything we do is just as natural as anything a polar bear does. If we "trash" the planet, then that's just what we do... it's not any different than a bear pooping in the woods. The planet was not designed to be any particular way and its entire ecosystem is simply a cosmic accident; there is no "correct" climate. If we humans end all life here by some stupid actions that cause runaway climate change, or if we do it much more quickly with nuclear weapons, we will have done nothing "wrong". The Earth will not "care". It won't even be a "shame" (shame is an irrational moral concept). We could wipe out all life here and make the planet into a toxic waste dump... and THAT might be what some future life forms a billion years from now look back upon as their "primordial soup"
You only pretend to be pro-science... the truth is that your entire framework is a mindless childish fairy tale world where some climate conditions are "better" than others and there is some "ideal" global temperature. You delude yourself into thinking mankind has a "responsibility" to do something other than reproduce; mankind has no more such duty than penguinkind does. You imagine that mankind has a duty to pass-on the world to future generations in some particular state, but mankind has no more duty to do so than T-Rex kind did. Save yourself from some future stressful mental breakdown; abandon your pretense of being "pro-science"... you are not.
Climate change is quite different from the Manhattan project.
First, the Atomic scientists were explicitly building a weapon. They directly foresaw its misuse.
Climate scientists are primarily observers. The engineers of the industrial revolution were its creators. Secondly, climate is a much larger system. While I agree irreversible change is imminent, the transition point is not at all clear. Unlike a bomb, when it goes off, it is immediatelt clear - not a slow acting device on human timeline.
We, the public, are complicit and responsible for climate change. Unlike the atomic scientists, Climate scientists are largely observers.
That's right, the richest banking family in the world dreams to tax your carbon.
They dream of taxing dick size too, I'm sure. Oh yea, that's made of carbon, too.
I find it fascinating how science is often refered here on slashdot, but when it comes to climate scientists, all of a sudden the vast majority of scientists are stupid, lying, elitists scaremongers.
Reminds me of evolution deniers. Those people are apparently ignoring the fact that there is ovehelming scientific consensus on human-caused global warning. From Wikipedia:
National and international science academies and scientific societies have assessed current scientific opinion on climate change. These assessments are generally consistent with the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), summarized below:
- Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as evidenced by increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, the widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.[5]
- Most of the global warming since the mid-20th century is very likely due to human activities.[6]
- "Benefits and costs of climate change for [human] society will vary widely by location and scale.[7] Some of the effects in temperate and polar regions will be positive and others elsewhere will be negative.[7] Overall, net effects are more likely to be strongly negative with larger or more rapid warming."[7]
- "[...] the range of published evidence indicates that the net damage costs of climate change are likely to be significant and to increase over time"[8]
- "The resilience of many ecosystems is likely to be exceeded this century by an unprecedented combination of climate change, associated disturbances (e.g. flooding, drought, wildfire, insects, ocean acidification) and other global change drivers (e.g. land-use change, pollution, fragmentation of natural systems, over-exploitation of resources)"[9]
No scientific body of national or international standing maintains a formal opinion dissenting from any of these main points; the last was the American Association of Petroleum Geologists,[10] which in 2007[11] updated its 1999 statement rejecting the likelihood of human influence on recent climate with its current non-committal position.[12] Some other organizations, primarily those focusing on geology, also hold non-committal positions.
I don't know why so many techies are ignoring scientific opinion on climate change. My guess is they have political reasons:
- most techies i know are individualists advocating right wing political ideologies (libertarians, minimal or no government etc.). Global warming is inconvinient to their views because it can be solved only with strong and coordinated world-wide effort. Free market can't handle it.
- global warming is tied with environmental activism. Unfortunately enviromentalists are also often advocating against nuclear power and some other tehcnologies techies like. As a result, techies view scepticaly everything that enviromentalists say including global warming.
What makes you think that sending the Earth's temperature to a whole different geologic era in the space of 200 years will be tolerable for most life?
There is no other warming trend seen to be anywhere near this rapid. Its like the difference between stopping a car at 60mph with brakes or with a brick wall.
You were called out on this in the other thread, but you keep spewing this misinterpretation of science because you think the economy needs to be saved from environmental regulations (even within the sphere of economics, a wholly unsupported claim except in the eyes of market fundamentalists such as yourself). Your opinion sounds "scientific" much the way a creationists does; the terminology is there but the conclusion is dead wrong.
Here is a far more considered assessment: Paleoclimate Record Points Toward Potential Rapid Climate Changes
This also provides a clue as to why "climate change" is often preferred over "global warming": That change could be so rapid as to induce a great deal of chaos where some regions experience, for example, heavier and more frequent snow storms (at least transitionally).
The atomic scientists were the smartest people of their time. The climatologists are the failed geography students how found out how to get funding by exaggerating.
You are so bought in to the lie.......the think for one second that CO2, which we all exhale with every breath, is so polluting the atmosphere that we are the problem is insane. Period! In fact, we are here, on the planet, as a symbiotic pairing with all the plants growing to provide the CO2 for the system to work. So go ahead and be a lemming as that path is wide.....as for me, I'll stay on the same path
is the product of disappointed parents
A major difference between the Manhattan Project scientist & the people working in climate change: the scientists at Los Alamos knew that ice floats & what that physically means. Seems the people in climate change couldn’t pass a grade 9 physics course.
Oh my, you just have is all over the climate scientists, don't you? What a piece of work!
What makes you think that sending the Earth's temperature to a whole different geologic era in the space of 200 years will be tolerable for most life?
There is no other warming trend seen to be anywhere near this rapid. Its like the difference between stopping a car at 60mph with brakes or with a brick wall.
You were called out on this in the other thread, but you keep spewing this misinterpretation of science because you think the economy needs to be saved from environmental regulations (even within the sphere of economics, a wholly unsupported claim except in the eyes of market fundamentalists such as yourself). Your opinion sounds "scientific" much the way a creationists does; the terminology is there but the conclusion is dead wrong.
Here is a far more considered assessment: Paleoclimate Record Points Toward Potential Rapid Climate Changes
This also provides a clue as to why "climate change" is often preferred over "global warming": That change could be so rapid as to induce a great deal of chaos where some regions experience, for example, heavier and more frequent snow storms (at least transitionally).
Water vapor is more complex than CO2 alone. Water vapor creates clouds both high and low, water clouds and ice clouds, day clouds and night clouds. Without the water vapor effects, the CO2 wouldn't be causing much warming. But water vapor effects vary much more than CO2 effects.
Water vapor effects also include thunderstorms and hurricanes, which move around hot tropical air and have a net cooling effect on the earth, by moving hot air to a higher altitude. Or so it seems.
So climate is in chaos, limited by the laws of thermodynamics.
Speaking of water, it appears that some significant fraction of the heat is going into the deeper oceans. We're not sure how much, not sure how it gets there, and not sure how long it will stay. These are all open research questions.
So while sensitivity shows no sign of being negative, it isn't very predictable. And, in fact, estimates of sensitivity have been wandering up and down for some time now. We need to know the sensitivity of the temperature of air at the earth's surface to CO2, water vapor, methane, and so on. But the total energy added can distribute to the deep sea as well, so surface temps aren't simply dependent on energy added.
The amount of energy that would raise the air temperature by two degrees, would only raise the deep sea temp by a tiny fraction of that, due to the difference in the heat capacity of water vs air. So temperature-change is not related to the energy added in a simple way.
Whatever the answer, it ain't simple.
I18N == Intergalacticization
As scientist. It is not a bad place to start as far as assumptions go.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
ABC News is STILL puffing the idea that major cities are soon to be underwater:
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/popup?id=3599774
In 1989 the director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program said entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of â€oeeco-refugees,†threatening political chaos, said Brown.
In 2007, the chairman of the University of Miami's Department of Geological Sciences testified to Congress that much of Florida will be underwater.
January 1970 Life Magazine â€Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support …the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….â€
How about that ice age?:
Earth Day 1970 Kenneth Watt, ecologist â€The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.â€
1976 Lowell Ponte in â€oeThe Cooling,†â€This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000.â€
July 9, 1971, Washington Post â€oeIn the next 50 years fine dust that humans discharge into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel will screen out so much of the sunâ€(TM)s rays that the Earthâ€(TM)s average temperature could fall by six degrees. Sustained emissions over five to ten years, could be sufficient to trigger an ice age.â€
> Bullshit. No credible peer-reviewed research ever stated anything REMOTELY close to that possibility
You are correct there. The people who say such things, including the U.N. Environment Program and University of Miami's Department of Geological Sciences, are not basing their statements on credible research, but on scare-mongering. So why do you believe them? You pretty much quote Goddard, and he's the guy who tried to sell both global cooling and a year later catastrophic global warming.
Models and predictions therefrom are not science. Secret models, far worse.
- most techies i know are individualists advocating right wing political ideologies (libertarians, minimal or no government etc.). Global warming is inconvinient to their views because it can be solved only with strong and coordinated world-wide effort. Free market can't handle it.
The Republican "Free" market certainly can't handle it because it protects the interests of large corporations. We are not permitted to defend ourselves against the aggression that is pollution.
For example if we had free market insurance, I could buy insurance against global CO2 emissions going above a certain threshold. Insurance arbitrage traders would break this down to a local level, until we reached a point where individuals could profit by *ahem* addressing the source of the problem. You can disagree with this if you'd like, but I think the only way to convince you is to build a coercion-resistant insurance market with extremely low transaction costs using recently invented anonymous electronic money. In the meantime I've got no objections to your use of carbon taxes - this same mechanism I describe can be used to defend against other widespread problems later.
TL;DR: I'm a libertarian who acknowledges climate change, and see it as my own responsibility to help build a free market solution BEFORE ending carbon taxes.