Nate Silver's New Site Stirs Climate Controversy

First time accepted submitter taiwanjohn (103839) writes "One of the first articles on Nate Silver's highly anticipated data-driven news site used flawed data to make its conclusions, according to some of the nation's top climate scientists. Silver's FiveThirtyEight published its first article about climate change on Wednesday, entitled 'Disasters Cost More Than Ever — But Not Because of Climate Change.' But climate scientists are condemning the article and its author, Roger Pielke Jr., saying he ignored critical data to produce a 'deeply misleading' result. The crux of Pielke's article is this: Extreme weather events are costing us more and more money, but that is not because climate change is making extreme weather more frequent or intense. The reason we are losing more money, rather, is because we have more money to lose. Pielke came to this conclusion by measuring rising disaster damage costs alongside the rising global Gross Domestic Product. He also cited a U.N. climate report, along with his own research, to assert that extreme weather events have not been increasing in frequency or intensity."

Comments

I know why they're annoyed

[Cryacin]

Since the correlation of GDP vs damage caused via disasters is being painted as causation, the Pro Climate change crows is just annoyed that their patent didn't go through on this new "scientific approach", and don't like an opposing view using their own "scientific methods" against them.

Completely understandable!

Re:I know why they're annoyed

[Bongo]

Find a definition of extreme which the AGW people are happy to stick to for 60 years.

Besides if air temps haven't been going up as fast as they were scenario'd as going up, what's causing the "freak" weather? The energy disappearing into the deep oceans where nobody can measure it? That's why it is windy today?

An African witch-doctor has a more refined sense of causality than that.

This is the problem

[Charliemopps]

This is the problem I've had with this climate change debate all along. It is clearly a very serious thing that we need to address, but there are people that have a ideology that's simply apposed to progress and science period. They're so intense about climate change they think exaggeration and outright lies are acceptable to achieve their goals. If both sides of the argument are tainted, the the general public will just throw up their hands in confusion and get no-where. Despite what many people may think, Jonh-q-public does notice when everyone from one side of an argument ends up being proven wrong eventually while the other side has never done anything but inform him. This is why the majority of the public trusts in science now rather than superstition. If you vehemently believe in climate change, the get the facts... the real facts. Educate and enlighten people. You'll do more for your cause than Al Gore ever did.

Re:Go after em Nate

[lgw]

Here's a pretty straightforward prediction : Higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere will result in higher temperatures.

Here's another : Burning lots of fossil fuels will increase levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

None of that is climate science. That's high school lab experiments. How much? Waving your hands vigorously enough may also cause global warming.

Predicting exact results is not easy

Neither is landing a probe on Mars, nor sequencing the genome of a pine tree (neat story today). Science does hard things. The dark matter to normal matter ratio was predicted accurately, which is why the idea was taken seriously after the CMBR data confirmed it to 2 significant digits. Before that it was one model among many, all of which were interesting.

Climate models are far from being useful science. Doesn't mean they're BS, but it does mean the field is young and has a long way to go.