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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."
Refreshing there is some common sense creeping into this global warming/climate change/the new name when the current one looses its umph. Naturally the pro-we-ignore-the-earths-climate-has-changed-over-millions-of-years crowd cry foul. I cannot ever recall a group of scientists like these folks be so opposed and go to the lengths they do to squelch any and all dissenting views. That is not science but fanaticism.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
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. Aren't extreme weather events and their relative energy levels easy to gauge and track? Why is this controversial? Either there are more extreme / extremely powerful events, the average energy level increasing, or there aren't. Im sure that (like economists do for inflation), factors that are constant and not constant (like solar output) can be factored.
Most media sites are internet hacks now, posting stories for clicks, that's all they care about (alla Newsweek) and guess what, reddit is their big secret! Nate Silver was one of the very few that stuck to the data, and was trustworthy. But that was then, this is now. He has to prove his new venture is going to be accurate and truthful and not just another HuffPost type bullcrap.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
Most of the complaints about the original article are suspect, and the primary and most solid complaint (technological innovations in structures) has in fact been accounted for by Pielke.
I would trust someone vetted by Nate Silver a great deal more than anyone posting on a highly partisan site like "Think Progress" - the goal of FiveThirtyEight being to bring real and carefully considered data to have a conversation based on science, not emotion.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nobody is ignoring natural climate fluctuations. Nobody. The fact that the climate fluctuates naturally does not argue against anthropogenic climate change any more than the fact that the weather changes from day to day argues against the existence of seasons. How about you come back when you have an argument that hasn't already been debunked based on evidence here:
https://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
I'm guessing you ignored the part where he fudged the data he did use, and ignored a whole other pile of data and criticisms of his previous analyses, in order to produce this result?
I gather you didn't read to the end where the update explained why none of what you said is true?
538's original mix, sports and politics, are both essentially spectator sports. The major interest in entertainment and people watch for the narratives. Seeking to drive interest (and appease partisans) media come up with false narratives that ignore data. This creates a lot of low hanging fruit for 538 to take the data and point out the narratives are wrong.
I think that 538 has made the mistake of believing that this low-hanging fruit exists elsewhere. When you have multiple groups of writers all trying to generate the best 2.5 hours of cable news punditry every week you're going to get a lot of easily debunked BS. When you try to apply that same once over data analysis to areas of serious scientific study you're going to be the one spewing BS.
I hope Silver can find some additional areas of news that are in real need of analysis because trying to do original scientific research in a news article won't end well.
I stole this Sig
The day before this article came out, the AAAS released a report on The Reality, Risks and Response to Climate Change, and seems to be starting a publicity push on the topic.
Here's what I see -- the majority of scientists believe that there are real problems with global warming, even if there may be some cyclic effects (heat kills off all the humans, they stop causing problems, everything cools back down).
So instead we have groups trying to sow disinformation with questions about the incidence of some severe weather events (are we just monitoring better and catching more, in part because humans are in more places, or are they actually increasing), and are the increases in intensity statistically significant?
And at this point, I've seen some data that might've been tainted (eg, temperature monitors that have had buildings encroach), but the general concensus is that yes, storms are getting worse.
I'm not going to say his results are completely bunk, as he's likely right in that some of the problems can be explained by how and where people build (eg, in the flood plain -- but the flood plain was resurveyed and is growing in my area ... that might be because of silting up of rivers from construction, it could be because of increased rainfall))
Where I do fault the article is for referencing a 'recent' UN report that hasn't been released yet (website says "The Summary for Policymakers will be released on 31 March 2014"), so we can't actually get to the underlying data that he's basing his claims on.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Nate made a name for himself doing statistical analysis on events where there are generally two possible outcomes and a fairly limited numbers of possible ways to get there. Sports, voting, etc are ALL yes or no answers with very very limited possible ways to get there.
Real science on the other hand frequently involves situations where the answer isn't really known and the possible ways to get there are infinite. So rather than evaluating whether the local voters will vote for candidate A or candidate B is an entirely different situation than evaluating whether climate change is increasing the cost of disasters. There are two variables in the first and good data (such as polling) indicating how people in general will vote. With solid statistical analysis this type of situations should be fairly easy to predict IF your data collection is good. He made his name by doing better data picking than the others.
Climate change disaster levels on the other hand is an entirely different game. Because this is all rather cutting edge science, whether the frequency or size of disasters has gone up (at this time) is a question of open debate in the scientific community. This paper makes blatant assumptions about which side of this debate is right then proceeds to use that assumption as the basis to draw firm conclusions. This isn't good science and it's not good data analysis. Consensus is needed in science if you are going to rely on the conclusions to make predictions on other data sets. And that's exactly the problem, there isn't a yes or no answer to the question there was an assumed answer. There is evidence indicating things and certain scientists may agree or disagree about what that evidence indicates and in time after much research the scientific community will reach a consensus and we'll likely have the real answer with hard evidence at that point.
Nate should stick to what he's good at, fixed data sets with yes or no answers. He apparently doesn't have the scientific background to realize that not all scientific conclusions drawn in papers are either right nor are they the consensus of the community. After all, any jackass can write a paper and draw conclusions and be completely wrong or even fake data, in fact it happens all to often.
It didn't explain why it might not be true, it just asserted that it isn't. Contrary to popular belief here is a difference between bald assertion and actual argument.
.: Semper Absurda
The evidence claims that so far, there hasn't been an increase in monetary cost of natural disasters relative to GDP. I'll let other, more informed people tackle this factual issue.* My problem is purely based on faulty logic; at the end of the article, the author extrapolates that this trend of disaster damage being correlated with and caused by increases in GDP will continue indefinitely. But the only evidence cited for the conclusion that climate change won't ever cause increased natural disasters actually says that US tropical cyclones won't significantly increase in frequency and severity for several decades; I found nothing about winter storms/polar vortex, crop loss due to drought, sea level rise, etc. and I'm not even sure how accurately you can extrapolate to tropical cycles in other places, not to mention many of us hope to still be around in several decades. I appreciate that Nate Silver is a great statistician, but this is going to go downhill really quick if the conclusions of articles posted on his site are only tangentially related to the actual statistics.
*The other disappointing thing is that the author has claimed this before, has been refuted, and hasn't changed his argument even so much as to mention the points made by various people who had rebuttals.
Well, did you read the article? Because AFAICT his analysis seems good. Do you see real problems with it, or are you just guessing based on a headline? Because that would be as bad as what you are accusing him of.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Someone (in this case Pielke, Jr.) writes up their research then others with expertise in the field get to criticize it, hopefully producing something better ultimately. What is irritating is criticism from people who obviously don't know what they're talking about.
Well, did you read the article? Because AFAICT his analysis seems good. Do you see real problems with it, or are you just guessing based on a headline? Because that would be as bad as what you are accusing him of.
I read his article and the response.
If I recall his claims were mainly that costs had increased at the same rate as GDP (you really confident with his linear fit of that data? way too much noise) and that the IPCC had stated that extreme weather wasn't getting worse (not sure how true that is).
The response was that he was disregarding the fact that modern structures and forecasting should reduce costs, and that some work had indicated storms were getting worse. (to which he had a counter-response taking issue with the modern structure claim)
My point isn't that he's necessarily wrong (I honestly don't know), it's that it's a far more complicated question than the article implies.
I stole this Sig
Most models, including the ones cited by TFA, predict 1-2 C average global temp increase by the end of the century. Troll again, perhaps? The point being argued here, if you need comprehension help, is what the effect of that increase will be.
Yes, troll again - because whilst most models predict the rise, the models are completely wrong when compared with real data. So the decision becomes do we trust models which are NOT matching reality, or do we go with real, hard data (empirical science) and toss the models and build anew?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
That's about right. There's a sort of basic ontological fallacy in an article like this. Just because we can construct a question like "To what extent is climate change responsible for the cost of disasters?" it doesn't necessarily follow that it can be answered quantitatively, or that it even has a meaningful answer. Basically the article is two or three graphs and a bunch of qualitative analysis-- it's punditry in scientistic drag.
Running the numbers can never tell us what we have to do, right and wrong aren't subject to cost-benefit analysis. Always be wary of people that try to apply such logic, considering that the wrong thing to do tends to be the cheaper thing.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Does someone have a plot of the increase in climate scientists vs global temperature?
There's your problem.
Have gnu, will travel.
Pielke isn't a actual scientist, he's a political scientist who doesn't understand real science enough
He worked at the National Center for Atmospheric Research as a REAL scientist for eight years. Possibly using his mathematics degree, you realized he had one?
You weren't actually basing your understanding on who he was based solely on what someone trying to discredit him painted him as... right? Right?? Sigh.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Extreme weather cost more due to several factors:
It's just a trade-off between ability to get an income and the risk of suffering extreme conditions.
If the weather gets worse - it's harder to tell since you have to cover the weather for decades to see through the statistical noise. If storms hits a coastal region on average every 10 years it may still be a month between the storms and then 20 years of silence.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
>Can anyone who believes that it really isn't getting hotter explain why, if its not getting hotter all the world's glaciers and ice shields are simultaneously melting faster than at any time in geological history?
Carbon black. If you maintained the same level of CO2 in the atmosphere and increased the soot you would see a slight amount of atmospheric cooling but a much larger warm up in bright surfaces such as ice and snow. That is from the IPCC themselves. Somewhere close to half of black carbon sources are from fossil fuel sources. That said, the other half are from burning biomass and bio-fuels, which are considered carbon neutral sources, therefore the reduction of fossil sources and an increase of bio sources can still leave us in a situation that melts all the glacers.
A few weeks ago, Roger Pielke Jr wrote this in response to similar attacks on him by John Holdren.
BTW, the United Nations report he mentions comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group which shared a Nobel Prize with Al Gore.
Anyone remember how it all started?
Club of Rome publication "The Limits to Growth" (1972)
Oh, it started long before that.
Svante Arrhenius, 1896
if the quantity of carbonic acid [CO2] increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.
Or Gilbert Plass:
Plass, G.N., 1956, Infrared Radiation in the Atmosphere, American J. Physics 24, p. 303-21.
Plass, G.N., 1956, Carbon Dioxide and the Climate, American Scientist 44, p. 302-16.
Plass, G.N., 1956, Effect of Carbon Dioxide Variations on Climate, American J. Physics 24, p. 376-87.
Plass, G.N., 1956, The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change, Tellus VIII, 2. (1956), p. 140-154.
Plass, G.N., 1959, Carbon Dioxide and Climate, Scientific American, July, p. 41-47.
You forgot one: more extreme weather.
Really this is no longer an actual dispute among scientists. Or anywhere else, actually, except for the popular media in (almost exclusively) the US.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
Except the number of Hurricanes actually HITTING the U.S. has dwindled significantly in the last couple years. The one or two that do get through hit in more sensitive areas not prepared for it.
Every year the NOAA has pronounced a more severe storm season that's whimpered despite naming storms they wouldn't have even considered 10 years ago. I know, because I have been watching.
Example:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/t...
Found at:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/#...
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
As has been pointed out before - hurricanes aren't the only weather, and the US is not the world. You are very well correct, but then so is the claim that there is more extreme weather events. That's clearly going to happen when there's simply more energy in the system. It's pretty basic stuff.
The response was that he was disregarding the fact that modern structures and forecasting should reduce costs,...
What expertise do climatologists bring to this part of the discussion? This is not a question of climatology but of economics. The guys criticizing Pielke are out of their area of expertise on this.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
There are two things incorrect in your post. First, whether scientific findings are politicised or not doesn't change the merits of the underlying science. Secondly, the evidence has been shown time and time and time again, but some people just don't want to know. You seem to be the real "true believer" as you are believing in something against all the evidence. You are akin to a young-Earth creationist frantically ignoring all the evidence just to keep your precious world-view intact. AGW is real. It's measurable. It's not good for our way of life, business, or society.
I am sorry, but climatologists are claiming that modern structures and forecasting should reduce costs. Why? For example, the more modern structure of automobiles intentionally increases the cost of fixing an automobile involved in a crash. The design change is intended to decrease the chance of serious injury to the passengers, but it is accepted that this means that repairing the automobile will cost more.
When the climatologists make this claim, they are operating outside of their area of expertise. By doing so, they are being hypocrites, since these are the same people who have rejected much of the criticism of the theory of AGW because the people presenting it are not "climatologists".
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Very true. However if you look at the un-cherry-picked data, you see that there is still warming, and all the evidence points to it being mainly due to humanity's CO2 output. Alarmists and deniers can both sod off. AGW is real. Let's not pretend it isn't, or overstate the effects.
You'd be absolutely correct, but Scientology doesn't have any evidence, let alone scientific consensus, to back them up. So you're not correct. Not even slightly. Your bias is showing - it's ugly.
Hurricanes aren't the only form of severe weather. Droughts, storms happening elsewhere can be the "effect" of a lower number of hurricanes in your area.
And let's not even get into the "only the US matters" part of his argument.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
If "pro" is the opposite of "con" then what is the opposite of "progress"?
The biggest problem I have with man made global warming scare is that the solution always seems to be bigger government and more taxes. These AGW alarmists go running to Congress to ban this or tax that but neither will really decrease AGW. The way to decrease AGW, if it exists at all, is to create alternatives. Give us something better and people will naturally gravitate toward it because it will be in their best interest to do so.
By creating legislation to bar people from doing something does not prevent people from breaking the law. Getting caught with the wrong kind of toilet or light bulb in your house is unlikely and there is no real punishment for doing so. So people will break the law. However, if you can convince people that using the wrong kind of toilet or light bulb costs them money then you have a convert.
What Congress has done is made it difficult to produce energy that is both low in carbon output and profitable. They shut down power plants and coal mines, and stopped issuing permits to drill for oil and gas on federal land. What happened? We buy our oil from other countries where they don't care about spilling oil into the ocean. We put high voltage power lines into Mexico where they don't care how many people die from inhaling the coal soot.
What we should do instead is allow for the creation of alternatives. There has not been a new nuclear reactor built in the USA for four decades. There might be some new ones being built now but all they do is build new reactors on the same site as the old ones. We need nuclear power. Without nuclear power we must choose between the status quo, continued reliance on fossil fuels, or reverting to a caveman lifestyle.
I find it laughable about how people will claim that wind and solar will save the environment and give us all the energy we need. Windmills have been shown to kill endangered Golden Eagles and Bald Eagles but Congress lets that happen because wind power is good. Except that wind power does not make a profit. Its economic viability exists only because of taxes, taxes derived from profitable coal energy. Solar power is no different, it kills birds by blinding or burning them and is only held up by taxing the coal industry.
What happens if Congress is successful in driving the coal industry out of business with taxes? The subsidies for wind and solar energy goes away. Energy prices will triple and people will have to choose between freezing or starving to death. Same goes for gasoline and diesel fuel taxes. If the gasoline and diesel fuel taxes go away then we have no money for the roads.
I believe AGW is a farce. I believe this because the actions of Congress show me that they are not serious about it so therefore they have not been convinced. If they were convinced of the existence of AGW they would not be acting as they do. If they thought that AGW was a real threat to the environment then they'd be building nuclear power plants. If they were concerned about the environment they they would not be building windmills that kill endangered species. What they have shown me is that their greatest concern is growing the size of government. What better way to grow government than to build an economy that depends on government?
Subsidies mean people must do as the government says or they don't have a job. Taxes takes money only from those that know how to make money. The best thing that subsidies can do is take money from those that know how to make money and give it to those that know how to make money, which is no better than not taxing them in the first place. But subsidies don't always give money to those who know how to make money, but it does give money to those who know how to do what the government wants.
If Congress was serious about AGW then they'd stop taxing and spending. Instead they'd provide a legal and economic environment where people with the best ideas on saving the environment and the economy thrive. A good start would be to allow nuclear research to happen. They don't have to give them money, just permission to conduct their work.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.