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.'"
Because climate change is a more accurate descriptor. The record shows that increased CO2 levels accompany periods of instability (e.g. rapid growth and reduction in glacier size) even if the trend tends toward warming. While the overall trend will be toward warming such warming will not be evenly distributed over time or space.
Because the weather always changes and that way you'll never be proven wrong.
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.
I am amazed at how people love to attribute the worst possible motives to scientists (lying for what? to get a 20K-100K grant?) but refuse to see the motives of those who fund climate CHANGE deniers, which would be oil companies, investment fund managers with big stakes in petroleum, etc. with billions at stake.
For the dim witted I can only assume it is because in the back of their minds they think they can never be a PhD scientist, which feeds resentment, but they think they could possibly be a hedge fund manager or oil boss.
The term "Climate Change" has been around since at least the 1950's (see http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=326).
"Climate Change" is more common now thanks to conservative think tanks who made a concerted effort to use that term in the early 2000s because it was considered "less scary" than global warming. Scientists went along with it because "Climate Change" is technically more accurate anyway and they are not particularly good at playing politics.
You've got to envy the Republicans in their ability to twist language to suit their needs.
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.
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
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed in 1988, so where do you get the idea that what it's called has changed?
The indisputable increase in global average temperature due to human CO2 emissions is called global warming. The response of the global climate system to that increase is called climate change. The climate changes vary by locale. That distinction has been there for quite some time.
Support SETI@home
Then you're remembering it wrong.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz#Global_warming
Reference please.
Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_effect
The article says that his formula wes reasonable, but he could not predict industrial growth, so could not predict trends.
I agree that CO2 levels are linked to temperature,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Co2-temperature-plot.svg
But ... Misrepresenting facts doesn't help.
Note to all mods (for the second time) : do NOT moderate opinions without FACT. Most highly moderated comments in here have nothing to back their claims. It makes a mockery of Slashdot.
In the sixties and seventies, the climate hucksters were selling us on a man-made ice age.
Bullshit. The media sensationalized a couple of crackpots claiming a new ice age was coming. Check the peer-reviewed scientific literature during that time period. Just about every paper discussing the subject was in regards to warming. http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=11
In the eighties, they told us California would be underwater by 2000. It's still there.
Bullshit. No credible peer-reviewed research ever stated anything REMOTELY close to that possibility either during the 80's or anytime before or after. I'm pretty sure this is a crock that you just made up as there is no physically possible way for California to go "underwater" short of a massive asteroid impact. Even if all of Greenland and Antarctica melted, most of California would still be above sea level
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.
Oh, you're one of the conspiracy nutters. Ok, you want to play the money game? The National Science Foundation (NSF) has a yearly budget at the moment of $5 billion, and that covers all the sciences. Exxon has a QUARTERLY profit of $9.5 billion. So in a given year just Exxon by itself is making nearly 8 TIMES the entire budget for the NSF. And that is just one fossil fuel company.
The fossil fuel industry profits dwarfs climate research budgets by orders of magnitude. If climate scientists wanted money, they would drop this "conspiracy" in a heartbeat and go work for Exxon and the like saying how everything is just peachy.
~X~
No, it's because people don't understand the difference between the weather and the climate. The weather is what happens day to day, the climate is the long term trend over a wide area.
The climate is warming up over the entire earth. The problem is that it is on a human scale people see cold periods or one are getting a lot of rain and assume their personal experience is the global trend. This is unfortunately a very common problem and you see people on Slashdot extrapolating anecdotes about people they know into everyone everywhere all the time.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC