Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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.
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.
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.
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.
What claims are deceitful? Provide some references, please, instead of the usual derpy right-wing smears.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
If you believe that about Republicans (or Democrats if you're from the other side), you will be creating your own incorrect conclusions.
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.
Atomic scientists didn't create anything either. They discovered.
You might be confusing science with engineering.
Climate change is not an existential threat.
Probably not, but there might be a possibility of a runaway system if it gets far enough from it's current equilibrium.
But certainly, it is an existential threat to our way of life. The US DoD and spy agencies have both identified climate change as the greatest threat to the USA in this century.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
How about the exaggerations of the effects of global warming? Or just about anything said about "extreme weather" especially when claiming definitive proof of global warming. A recent example was the claim that Hurricane Sandy was a 1 in 700 year event even though we have at best 150 years of records to back that claim (meaning you can't really claim a frequency o f occurrence of less than 1 in 150 years). Even if that is a true statement, we still don't know how many 1 in 700 year trajectories there are that go through New York City (but it's enough that they get a hurricane every five years even in the absence of global warming).
A recent example was the claim that Hurricane Sandy was a 1 in 700 year event even though we have at best 150 years of records to back that claim (meaning you can't really claim a frequency o f occurrence of less than 1 in 150 years).
Science and statistics are far more capable than your naive counting approach.
Science and statistics are far more capable than your naive counting approach.
"Naive counting approach" is just a scientific tool like reason. If something fails the "naive counting approach" then it probably isn't scientific or statistics.
By your logic, apparently atomic scientists were responsible for the creation of atoms!
I am officially gone from
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 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)
I fail to see references.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
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.
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.
I fail to see references.
I fail to care. The reference to Hurricane Sandy and the stochastic analysis of its likelihood is a reference whether or not it fails to look like a reference to you.
and laughing while doing so.
Wow, that's some real paranoia you've got going there.
The closer parallel is Stalin,
Not at all. Finding the truth about what the planet is doing is much closer to Hitler. Or possibly Pol Pot. But not Chairman Mao or Stalin.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The US DoD and spy agencies have both identified climate change as the greatest threat to the USA in this century.
Yeah, well, what do you expect from such well-known liberal propaganda organisations?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
In other words, you are either a liar or delusional, and we can ignore your posts on Climate Change.
Thank you for the clarification.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
a) Yet b) Depends on where you live.
Je me souviens.
No, it's just a indicator of a person that understands arithmetic but not statistics.
No, it's just a indicator of a person that understands arithmetic but not statistics.
When you're trying to extrapolate to a considerable degree events more infrequent in occurrence than the duration of your sampling, then you aren't doing statistics.
I see in your previous post a veiled attempt at the fallacy of argument from authority. Now, I see the ad hominem fallacy. It's interesting who seems to have trouble with basic rhetoric.
The point is, you need to have a lot more data in order to know that you have a 1 in 700 year event. This need not be direct measurements of the event in question. More frequent related events could be studied.
For example, we have a pretty good idea of the distribution of asteroids in the Solar System (they follow rather closely a power law with distribution proportional to their cross-section area). So even though we don't see a lot of large asteroid collisions (apparently the last big one was about 14 million years ago), we see plenty of the smaller ones and can extrapolate with reasonable accuracy to sizes around a few kilometers (before the larger asteroids get scarce enough that the power law approximation breaks down).
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.
Also, if it fails arithmetic, then it fails statistics. The things I mentioned are warning signs that statistics isn't being done.
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).
Since when is asking someone to back up an assertion an argument from authority?
Also, there is the fact that the fallacy does not apply when providing an argument from a relevant authority. Or do you think you know better than your GP, too?
And since when is drawing the conclusion that someone unwilling to back up his argument is arguing in bad faith (even if expressed in an insulting way) an ad hominem?
In short, if I conclude from this post that you're not just arguing in bad faith, but too stupid to know the meaning of the words you use, I am drawing a conclusion from the provided facts.
When you're in a hole, continuing digging is a bad idea.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
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
Since when is asking someone to back up an assertion an argument from authority?
The quote was
I fail to see references.
First, it wasn't a question. Second, references are a very specific sort of backing - a publication or statement from some sort of authority.
At the time, I backed my assertion with the recent example of some shifty stochastic analysis of Hurricane Sandy's trajectory which was a story passing through Slashdot in the last couple of weeks. You failed to acknowledge that.
So you were willing to accept "backing" from an authority assuming you would ever choose to accept it as such (your "relevant" authority), but not backing from a real world example. I can't be bothered to play that game.
When you're in a hole, continuing digging is a bad idea.
You may want to listen to your own wisdom.
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?
No, you asserted something was shifty. You did not provide references.
In other words, you are a liar. And a stupid one, the evidence that you are in fact lying is only a couple of posts above the lie itself.
You crucify climate scientists for less, so no whining.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
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.
Of course you are. You're confusing counting with statistics.
It doesn't "fail arithmetic". Are you still in school or something?
You're confusing counting with statistics.
I'm describing basic rules of thumb for statistics. You can do these things, such as what you label "counting", without even having to understand the particular methodology used.
But you can't say someone got the statistics wrong because you are unable to count something. Which was your original line or reasoning.
No, you asserted something was shifty.
I provided the example of the once every 700 years storm which was claimed to be derived from at most 150 years of data. This is an example of speculation from insufficient information which I would consider a "shifty" act.
In other words, you are a liar. And a stupid one
You have yet to provide a "reference" for your assertion.
the evidence that you are in fact lying is only a couple of posts above the lie itself.
Except that it isn't evidence for your assertion and hence, not a "relevant" reference. Which boxes should I be checking off for you? Stupid? Lying?
You crucify climate scientists for less, so no whining.
I'm sure they're wincing considerably from my "crucifying".
It doesn't "fail arithmetic".
Again, they're claiming that they can determine an eventi is a 1 in 700 year occurrence from 150 years of data. Statistics doesn't work that way because you don't have suficient duration for the claim in question.
But you can't say someone got the statistics wrong because you are unable to count something.
Ok, what wasn't I able to count? I could determine the duration of the sample set (which at best can be stretched to 150 years). I can determine the claimed frequency of the event, 1 in 700 years.
Of course statistics works that way. Statistics gives probabilities for all sorts of events that haven't yet happened, or at least been recorded happening A "On in X year occurrence" is just a way of expressing a probability.
Of course statistics works that way.
Then by all means give an example.
Does that mean you can't think of one? When I give you a very well known one that you yourself come into contact with are you going to stop arguing, or are you going to continue regardless?
When I give you a very well known one that you yourself come into contact with are you going to stop arguing, or are you going to continue regardless?
That depends on whether it backs your argument or not. Since you asked, I can think of idealized cases where one can extrapolate from a small number of observations to many, for example, fair coin flips. One doesn't need to flip such a coin on the order of 2^N times to figure out what probability a particular combination of N flips will yield.
They require previous knowledge of the statistical model which happens to apply. In our present case, we don't have that information. We just have the data for 150 years of hurricane trajectories (which also decline in quality as one goes back in time). As a result, you can't make such an extrapolation to considerably longer periods of time, 700 years in our case).
You provided no example, merely an assertion on your end.
Perhaps you're not entirely clear on what a reference is? Then again, since you've amply proven your stupidity already, I am not surprised at all.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?