Slashdot Mirror
Study Rules Out Global Warming Being a Natural Fluctuation With 99% Certainty
An anonymous reader writes "A study out of McGill University sought to examine historical temperature data going back 500 years in order to determine the likelihood that global warming was caused by natural fluctuations in the earth's climate. The study concluded there was less than a 1% chance the warming could be attributed to simple fluctuations. 'The climate reconstructions take into account a variety of gauges found in nature, such as tree rings, ice cores, and lake sediments. And the fluctuation-analysis techniques make it possible to understand the temperature variations over wide ranges of time scales. For the industrial era, Lovejoy's analysis uses carbon-dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels as a proxy for all man-made climate influences – a simplification justified by the tight relationship between global economic activity and the emission of greenhouse gases and particulate pollution, he says. ... His study [also] predicts, with 95% confidence, that a doubling of carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere would cause the climate to warm by between 2.5 and 4.2 degrees Celsius. That range is more precise than – but in line with — the IPCC's prediction that temperatures would rise by 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius if CO2 concentrations double.'"
Splendid. Where have you published this remarkable result?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Thou shalt chill, not shill.
Not only that, 500 years? Are they thinking the world started 7000 years ago and so 500 years to now represents a significant chunk of time to have merit?
Not to mention the past 500 years is 1/9000000th of the planet's actual climate history.
I did, the maths are applied to temperature estimates lacking in necessary accuracy and precision, and so are rubbish
So what do we have to give up to have a zero change in the global temperature
Only one thing: having so many offspring.
The problem isn't that we have an excessive lifestyle. The problem is that there are TOO MANY of us having an excessive lifestyle. Get the population down to a billion or so and we can all have diesels, coal-fired power stations and as much beef as we could ever desire.
It's just that all 7 billion of us can't all do that at once.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
And yet the climate change deniers will CLING to that 1% and continue to stick their ignorant heads in the sand and pretend that we aren't messing up our climate.
I suppose you can't ascertain whether the universe was created 5 seconds ago either. Fortunately the laws of physics, chemistry, thermodynamics, biology, etc. allow science to make Predictions not only about the future outcome of an event, but also about the probability of circumstances which caused observable outcomes.
If you leave your sandwich near me and come back to find a bite taken out of it, would you accept the argument, "You cannot ascertain the intake of past consumption with enough precision to absolutely blame me for eating your sandwich", or would you say I'm full of shit?
You're full of shit.
The confidence levels in the data are 99%, not in the conclusion.
PS - I believe in man driven global warming, I just hate sensationalized headlines.
If you want to find the modern culprits of greenhouse gases, look to India and China, not the US. We've cut our emissions drastically over the past 20 years.
I don't get it, after reading the comments here, why is there so much resistance accept that man is causing climate change? Just thinking logically, it makes sense. We're taking carbon that's been buried for millions of years, and then burning it, on a huge scale. How can this not affect the climate? I actually hope that the climate skeptics are right.
There are dozens and dozens, multi-proxy reconstructions of temperature records.
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Its called science.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Temperature goes up more or less linearly, and CO2 goes up more or less linearly. Thus they are well-correlated. There's not a lot of power to that correlation, as the article demonstrates itself by trying it with different lags (from 0 to 20 years -- would have been interesting if he'd tried negative lags); the data is too featureless to show anything interesting.
You mean accurate temperature records up to 1987, before they shut off the majority of the weather stations (83% and growing) and started to rely on atmospheric satellite data that has lower accuracy rates spread over much larger areas?
And the remaining weather stations turned out to not be very reliable either, with most being more than 2 degrees Celsius error.
http://www.surfacestations.org...
Its called data reconstruction, and the existing large scale records factor use multiple proxy methods of records of reconstructing the temperature records.
There are multiple indirect ( or proxy ) ways of obtaining temperature history, and all of these would have to be invalidated to prove the existing reconstructions wrong.
The reconstruction models match with accurate instrument measurements that we have for a past hundred years or so.
Educate yourself
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Enlighten me.
How does a 500 year data set apply to a 4.5 billion year old planet?
What postulate of statistics allows asserting accurate predictions from 0.0000001 repeating percent of the full data set?
Think about it. Could you predict the sentiments of every human on the planet (over 4 billion) by asking the last 500 people born?
The poster you are referring to made a legitimate argument. Your strategy was a silly ad hominem.
I don't know what the right answer is, but between your two comments I can easily say who the winner is.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
It's become a political litmus test. Just look at the names attributed to anyone who doesn't agree with you: denier, alarmist.
There's no room for real science.
But who is dismissing what? There has never in the history of the world been climate-stability. The causality of *all* prior changes appears to have been dismissed.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Yes, really they should have started the study at the year 1364, to get more years into the mix. That 1364 is about the start of the Little Ice Age, rather than starting in the middle of it as they do, is entirely beside the point, and should not affect the results at all. Six hundred and fifty years containing most of a period of excessive cold is a far better case of "Cherry-picking" than a mere five hundred.
Exit SARC mode
People who actually work in the field and spend decades of their life in this dedicated study have a vested interest in reaching a positive conclusion. If they found that there was no man-made global warming, they'd be out of jobs.
And yet SETI aren't reporting any alien contacts.
You're full of shit. There is MORE money available for any scientist that publishes papers that say there is no global warming. Oil companies are rich, and there are few qualified scientists willing to take their preferred side of the argument. And the reason they aren't taking this easy money? Because the science to say global warming isn't happening isn't there. It's easy to write blogs or newspaper articles denying it. It's impossible to write proper scientific papers that do so.
A baker will always claim his bread is the best.
And yet no bakers say yeast doesn't make CO2 to make the bread rise.
Folks, there is no doubt that man causes some degree of global warming. It may even be significant.
But putting forward a very questionable "study" with little practical "science" and having almost nothing that can be repeated or validated does not help the cause of proving global warming. It harms it! With each one of these "studies" it makes me wonder why there isn't some expert who has proven the thesis, with so many interested "scientists".
These news stories might be adequate for the masses, but definitely not for me, thanks.
Thats not how it works, the reconstructed records are not simply and aggregate of all the proxy methods averaged or summed up, this is not 3rd grade math or Spreadsheets 101.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
The poster you are referring to made a legitimate argument.
He's not made any argument at all. He's simply repeated his opinion, contrary to the scientists paper, with nothing to back it up.
It's classic denial, no more.
It's a questionable mixing of questionable data, with a proposed burden of proof that claims to immunize it against questioning or any part.
It's as though you only accept a cryptosystem broken if all stages and are shown weak.
500 years is not enough time to properly determine how climates develop, but 10 years is?
Additionally, the effect of CO2 on the climate is cumulative, and climate changes slowly. The last ten years of emissions pales in comparison to the stretch of time from now back to the start of the industrial revolution.
Enlighten me.
How does a 500 year data set apply to a 4.5 billion year old planet?
What has led you to this bizarre conclusion that the percentage of the planet's existence is significant?
What postulate of statistics allows asserting accurate predictions from 0.0000001 repeating percent of the full data set?
What "postulate" do you imagine says you can't? I haven't heard but a small fraction of all music ever created. But I can still name a Beatles song in a few notes. The size of "everything" is not relevant to the question.
Could you predict the sentiments of every human on the planet (over 4 billion) by asking the last 500 people born?
Polling is indeed the way that we find out the opinions of people in general. And 500 is indeed a reasonable poll, depending on the question.
But the equivalent to "500 people", would be 500 temperature measurements taken at one point on the earths surface. There is vastly more climate data than that that we have over the last 500 years.
>> with a proposed burden of proof that claims to immunize it against questioning or any part
wtf are you on about ? Every historical data record is carefully examined and questioned, and compared to other data sources. Every discrepancy is investigated.
Go ahead, and go question the things like CLIWOC, RECLAIM and ICOADS database, ships and farmers logs, alpine peatland records, ice cores, tree rings, pollen calibration, coral growth, sediments etc etc. Its being done by climate scientists and climate historians every single day.
Maybe you ought to publish a paper or two about how its all wrong and not questioned ?
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Hopefully in a journal that is reviewed by skeptics rather than Ideologues.
All scientific journals are reviewed by skeptics.
That's because all scientists are skeptics.
Wacky global warming deniers are not skeptics, they are credulous fools.
Skeptics look at the evidence before making their minds up, and change their minds if new evidence comes to light.
Deniers deny. Disprove one nutty theory and the continue denying with another, often incompatible nutty theory. This sometimes goes around in circles 'till they come back to the first, already disproven, theory.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Isn't this the Bill Nye v. Creation Guy debate?
Bill Nye made the point repeatedly that no, of course we can not observe directly with our biological sensing apparatuses the world of 1000 years ago, but we can create a fairly educated surmise of the reality based on what we observe today, combining bench studies with field observations, etc. Ken Ham's argument, repeatedly, was "We weren't there, so we can't know to any useful degree (degree, get it?) what it was like."
Science may be wrong about the anthropogenic nature of global warming, but science is quite clear and confident in its conclusion. Given Science's track record so far, I'm going to bet on it.
Where I live (Illinois) I can choose to pay slightly more for my power generation dollars to go to renewable generators. I dug a little deeper and verified that it comes mostly from wind and some solar. I also think its a misconception that electric cars put a tremendous load on the grid. Unlike our central air conditioning in the summer, we hardly noticed an increase in our electric bill after we got our Tesla.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Agreed, and 500 years is not really a large enough sample on a planet that is billions of years old either. Now we could make the argument from civilization on or say a number more like 50K years. and on top of that we are using different methods of obtaining the temprature today then we have in the past, be it better tools, or monitors in different locations. I still want more information because I am willing to concede that the temp is going up, I dont agree with the reason for it, or the options people want to try and fix the "problem"
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
On the other hand the media consultants employed by the billionaire owners of coal, oil, petroleum companies and investments in forestry products have absolutely no conflict of interest and they speak the original unvarnished truth.
I mean, who would you trust? Some one who is smart enough to make millions of dollars working for billionaires? Or the fools who spend so much of time studying and ending up working for a pittance? If these so called scientists are so smart why aren't they billionaires and millionaires? Shows who is smart and who you should listen to.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
>If they found that there was no man-made global warming, they'd be out of jobs.
You are showing complete ignorance of the scientific funding situation as well as academia.
Tenure track positions don't disappear if they don't get certain results. And there is a multitude of other climate topics that are important and need scientists working on.
And of course, this wasn't done by people with a vested interest in a positive conclusion, it was done by physicists. Statisticians with no vested interest have also found the same results.
You are just createing a false narrative that allows you to ignore facts you do not like.
If you can afford a Tesla, I'm not surprised you didn't notice the increase in your bill. Don't forget to thank the rest of us for the tax subsidy on your Tesla.
I wonder why this topic is so much discussed in the USA. In every other country climate change and the fact that we, humans, are causing it is accepted as a scientific fact. However, in the US, there is still a large fraction who doubt it or ignore it. And I am wondering why is that so?
Hopefully in a journal that is reviewed by skeptics rather than Ideologues.
Well, this just goes to show your utter ignorance of the scientific process in practice.
It turn out that scientits are much like normal people: given a it of power and the veil of anonymity (i.e. as a reviewer), they often act like utter assholes. Basically, there are plenty of reviews out there who love tearing any prospective author a new one, for good reasons or bad. They love nothing more than tearing someone's work to shreds.
There are proably hundred of screeds online out there about how bad peer reviewing has become with reviews getting more vicious and aggressive.
The fact that you think there is this league of idealogues who wave through papers supporting global warming truly shows the depth of your ignorance.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Anthropogenic warming isn't dangerous to the planet, it's dangerous to us. The timeline of the planet is irrelevant.
Yes, for an analogous meaning of "predict" as applies to the AGW scenario, ie. not predict precise emotions and behaviour at any given instant, but predict general trends with a certain probability distribution. What do you think psychology is all about? They conduct surveys and studies of small a percentage of the population to find correlations and establish general trends about humanity, like what makes people happy, angry, sad, how they respond to trauma, etc.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
We sacrificed other things so we could buy what was for us a swing for the fences dream car. Thank you everyone for the tax subsidy. And you are welcome for our support of the Tesla strategy to get the cost of electric cars low enough so that gas cars don't make sense.
Greed is the root of all evil.
>> the proxies can not be independently verified
The proxies are VERIFIED against each other, and over the time span that we DO have accurate instrumental records. Guess what, they match up, minus normal statistical uncertainty which is continuously further and further reduced by incorporating as many independent observations as possible. There are literally many dozens of methods of recovering climate data from human records and paleoclimate records.
There is this whole field of science called statistics and data analysis, try looking into it some time.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
How dare you let facts get in the way of left-wing "science.
There is no such thing as "left wing science", only science.
Your belief that science and politics are somehow the same thing amkes my thing you're probably a loopy wingnut who doen't let facts get in the way of a good political position.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It was a 7 degree rise for ages:
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matte...
Now that's the high end of the "prediction".
In 2010 NASA said this:
"8th December 2010 13:24 GMT - A group of top NASA and NOAA scientists say that current climate models predicting global warming are far too gloomy, and have failed to properly account for an important cooling factor which will come into play as CO2 levels rise."
And "New NASA model: Doubled CO2 means just 1.64C warming
'Important to get these things right', says scientist"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
In 2011 it was "Discovered" trees eat CO2:
Originally found at: http://www.google.com/hostedne...
Forests soak up third of fossil fuel emissions: study
By Marlowe Hood (AFP) – 5 days ago
PARIS — Forests play a larger role in Earth's climate system than previously suspected for both the risks from deforestation and the potential gains from regrowth, a benchmark study released Thursday has shown.
The study, published in Science, provides the most accurate measure so far of the amount of greenhouse gases absorbed from the atmosphere by tropical, temperate and boreal forests, researchers said.
"This is the first complete and global evidence of the overwhelming role of forests in removing anthropogenic carbon dioxide," said co-author Josep Canadell, a scientist at CSIRO, Australia's national climate research centre in Canberra.
"If you were to stop deforestation tomorrow, the world's established and regrowing forests would remove half of fossil fuel emissions," he told AFP, describing the findings as both "incredible" and "unexpected".
Also odd how this guy in 2007 was able to predict this winter's 100-year record breaking cold from things the IPCC have nothing to do with climate:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Do the alarmists have an explanation for these?
Need Mercedes parts ?
99.9% of reviewers agree with you.
Since I've been an actual real scientist who does actual real science and knows the actual real process, I can assure you that less than 99.9% of reviews of my work have been positive.
Again if you believe that there are idealogues who wave through papers, then that illustrates your ignorance far more than it shines a negative light on AGW science.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
People have made up their minds unfortunately. Changes in climate can easily be brushed off as natural variation. A few days of locally cold weather is enough to re-enforce a denier's belief that global warming is a farce.
Over time the consequences will become increasingly hard to ignore and people will suffer. As is typical, the poor will suffer the worse. Ironically, many otherwise conservative organizations such as insurance companies will be willing accept global warming as fact because it gives them an excuse to raise their rates in coastal areas.
There are dozens of ways of obtaining indirect climate data, and they are already compiled into comprehensive databases. You would have to show more than one of them being substantially wrong to disprove the full reconstructions.
These data sets are continuously reviewed, amended and further improved by thousands of people around the world.
You want to call all of it "questionable data" - please publish your papers.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Great, so either you want to steal their money or kill them. Sure appears to be classic thug politics.
No, the original statement is a fabrication so the conclusion is a non-sequitur.
The original statement from rubycodez was as follows:
we cannot ascertain the temperatures of past centuries with enough precision to make any such study nor claims
That's not a fabrication. That's just wrong. Calling it a fabrication bestows too much grace on it.
Sadly, the anti-science (and particularly anti-AGW) crowd has no shortage of wrong statements, because unlike scientists, they are not tethered to facts.
We may not have direct records but that's not what the paper presents. Science is not always able to have first-hand accounts, but only indirect data sources, and yet we rely on it for a shocking amount of findings. Will you start dismissing those as well because they don't suit your agenda? Because an agenda it must be, for you to make such unreasonable demands and yet draw unrelated conclusions from them, while trusting other science based on similar methods.
This. Claiming that indirect evidence does not count is a desperate, sophomoric attempt by the anti-science crowd.
Recall the recent debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham on the theory of evolution. One of Ken Ham's favourite strategies was an attempt to make a distiction between "observational" science and "historical" science, with the latter being invalid in his opinion. How often did we hear him say "you don't know, you weren't there" in response to indirect evidence?
What if, after the debate, Ken Ham had walked to the parking lot of his museum and discovered that the driver-side front fender of his car was damaged, with debris from his front driver-side headlight strewn on the ground? He would no doubt conclude that someone hit his car while he was parked there. But not so fast, Mr. Ham. Let's apply your own standards of evidence: You don't know. You weren't there.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Bird deaths are no myth:
http://www.cfact.org/2013/03/1...
and keep in mind that wind power is a very small portion of the power produced in the country now. Ramp it up to produce 100%, and you're going to have nowhere where you wont be able to see a turbine, and nowhere a bird can fly and expect to live a normal lifetime.
Drilling absolutely should be done for both sustainability and geopolitical reasons. We cannot convert the entire vehicular complement of transportation in this country to electricity for decades, and possibly never if the magic battery is not invented. Still no one knows how to build it. When they do, then we can get on with battery powered cars that can perform like internal combustion engined cars, and semi-trucks and boats / ships too. This may never happen.
And, BTW, fracking has been around since the 40's. Whats you're problem? Are you one of those enviros that opposes everything?
What we have to do is to keep costs down as long as possible, and that means petroleum. Only with the prosperity brought to us by petroleum will we have the research money to possibly perfect something that actually works, be it wind, solar, geothermal, whatever.
And we still have to research geo-engineering because the damn commies in China are NOT going to quit digging coal, ever. We either figure out a way to take the CO2 out of the air in order to reduce its concentration, or figure out how to live with a warmer planet. Maybe put some $$$ behind getting this working:
http://phys.org/news199005915....
Spoken like a true ideologue.
Spoken like someone who's never put a paper in for peer review.
A hint: they'll try to tear your paper to shreds no matter what it says.
If you actually did science you'd know that.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
What postulate of statistics allows asserting accurate predictions from 0.0000001 repeating percent of the full data set?
It's the postulate of denialism, basically, which involves burying the ovbious flaws in his argument under as much mathematical mumbo-jumo as possible. That prevents enyone with out a sufficiently mathematical background as calling it out as crap.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
> Agreed, and 500 years is not really a large enough sample on a planet that is billions of years old either
Yes, it is. Given that it has strong annual cycles, solar fluctuations with sun spots, and measurable cycles of _much_ shorter than 500 years that have already demonstrated their success in agricultural and urban planning, the existing record has already demonstrated its usefulness and effectiveness. Extending it _in detailed prediction_ is not feasible for such a chaotic system. Even biological changes, such as the advent of chlorophyl, have profoundly modified climate worldwide. Add in the occassional meteor impact, such as the dinosaur, and precise prediction over such long periods becomes nonsensical.
But measuring and analyzing short term changes? It's already well established that weather prediction for events like annual rainfall _work_.
Ha ha ha! Your reference to this "being no myth" is a site that is guest hosting Ann Coulter, and calls Global Warming a myth! Thanks for demonstrating my point so well. The bird killing aspect of wind turbines is just a myth made up by the same anti-science people that deny global warming.
And, BTW, fracking has been around since the 40's. Whats you're problem? Are you one of those enviros that opposes everything?
I would have thought the fact that I said build nuclear would have answered that for you. And I don't care whether fracking has been around since the 1840s, it's an environmental blight and a serious health problem.
the damn commies in China
You're a fucking imbecile. No wonder you linked to a Ann Coulter supporting site.
Yea, look at this ice core data. Much warmer in the past, with no anthropogenic CO2 influence.
http://i.snag.gy/BztF1.jpg
Certainly no catastrophic AGW, humans do well in warm times.
Cold is cop failures, starvation, and freezing to death.
The graph you link only goes up to 1855, so it is no wonder it shows no warming. Still, this graph keeps popping up to show that there has been no warming in recent years...
From http://www.skepticalscience.co...
"Easterbrook plots the temperature data from the GISP2 core, as archived here. Easterbrook defines “present” as the year 2000. However, the GISP2 “present” follows a common paleoclimate convention and is actually 1950. The first data point in the file is at 95 years BP. This would make 95 years BP 1855 — a full 155 years ago, long before any other global temperature record shows any modern warming. In order to make absolutely sure of my dates, I emailed Richard Alley, and he confirmed that the GISP2 “present” is 1950, and that the most recent temperature in the GISP2 series is therefore 1855."
Oh this is rich. The AC calling the scientists ignorant about how the peer review process works. Nice try AC, but GP is right, peer reviewers systematically try to tear pretty much anything that comes their way to shreds. I'm a scientists, and not only do I see this happening to my papers, I do the same to the papers I get to review. Extremely critical reviewers are an essential part of the scientific process.
Contrary to GP, I feel it's normal that it's so difficult to get a paper published. What is not normal is that scientists are under such high pressure to get so many papers published per year; the process could benefit from some "slowing down". But that's an entirely different discussion.
The American economy grew by more than 400% from 1865 - 1900:
http://www.shmoop.com/gilded-a...
Clinton do that? Factor for his 8 years vs that 35, that's about 4 to 1, so Clinton would have had to grow the economy by 100%. Didn't happen.
Bird deaths are no myth:
http://www.cfact.org/2013/03/1...
Nobody's saying it is.
But how does it stack up when compared to other bird killers (like glass windows, cars, etc)?
No sig today...
If "we cannot ascertain the temperatures of past centuries with enough precision to make any such study or claims", then we cannot ascertain that there has been a "Little Ice Age" in the first place - we're using the same methods to measure it! Conversely, if our proxy measurements about the "Little Ice Age" are trustworthy, then so are the ones for the preceding centuries and millennia. The axe swings both ways, you can't have one and not have the other.
Also, it is my understanding that this was mostly a local phenomenon, just like the immediately preceding climatic optimum, and if these are visible on the global reconstructions, it doesn't necessarily mean that other parts of the world have undergone changes in identical directions and magnitudes in the same time periods.
Ezekiel 23:20
What I find interesting is the conclusion of your linked article which mentions that it has been much warmer in the past, but restates the supposed dangers of AGW.
The article's conclusion is illogical.
Given the occurrences of much warmer periods in the past (no matter how catastrophic such warming might be to the billions of people now on the planet) there is no technological basis upon which to expect mankind now posses the capability to stop such warmer temperatures from occurring.
Which track record is that?
Be careful putting too much faith in almighty science. They've been wrong before, you know. A lot. And people died because of it.
You show a bunch of ideas that, when exposed to science, got shot down as objectively wrong pretty quickly. Sounds like the process works.
Want to list 6 current sciency ideas that are wrong but the scientific community considers reasonable? I'll give you a few to start you off:
1. Humans are not changing the climate. Current verdict: wrong. Supporters: a few loons. Evidence: about nil.
2. Evolution is wrong. Current verdict: wrong. Supporters: a few loons. Evidence: nil.
3. Vaccines cause autism. Current verdict: wrong. Supporters: a few loons. Evidence: nil.
I'm sure Slashdot2114 will be debating the bad science ideas that existed in 2014. Some will claim history shows science is death. Smarter people will note that imbeciles, public relations people, lobbyists, and trolls have always added noise and generally slowed the dissemination of knowledge.
Where do you stand, PR Man?
Much warmer in the past, with no anthropogenic CO2 influence.
And? Are you trying to prove that cyanide won't kill you because vacuum does? An increase in temperature can be caused by many things, and neither of them disproves that the others don't. Also, Greenland is just one place. When climate scientists talk about global warming, they're referring mostly to global accumulated heat rather than to local temperatures. Local temperatures in individual places can have the same peaks or valleys of equal magnitude. Or, they can have peaks and valleys of lesser or greater magnitudes. Or, in some places, they can even go in completely different directions.
Certainly no catastrophic AGW, humans do well in warm times. Cold is cop failures, starvation, and freezing to death.
Hey, if you want to go down the "let's make anecdotal evidence out of isolated data points" road, two can play this game. Look how your Greenland data have temperature spikes where Egyptian First and Second Intermediate Periods and European Bronze Age Collapse lie.
Ezekiel 23:20
It's not science. The Scientific method requires that observations can be independently reproduced and that a hypothesis is falsifiable.
You can get all the relevant data yourself, and run the tests yourself if you have the expertise
This notion that AGW is not falsifiable is plain sophistry. My guess is that you've heard of Popper's name, but wouldn't know the first thing about the philosophy of science. It is a simple fact that the AGW hypothesis is built upon may falsifiable hypotheses that make predictions. Climate contrarians, on the other hand, owe the world a scientific explanation, but for some (obvious) reason fail to see the irony in them not needing to back up their assertions with anything scientific.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Bird deaths are no myth:
http://www.cfact.org/2013/03/1...
CFACT is not a remotely reliable source, nor to they cite any such source. Google Scholar is usually good at finding real research papers on the topic. This is the top hit for 2013, and while it finds some bird mortality due to wind turbines, it estimates the effect to be much lower than that of other anthropogenic risks for birds, even assuming a 10-fold increase in wind turbines.
There is no silver bullet, nor will we ever manage to return the planet to Garden of Eden conditions. But "there is no single perfect solution, therefore let's not do anything" is not a viable approach to life. Perfect solutions to any problem are exceedingly rare, but that does not stop us from improving situations.
Stephan
The causality of *all* prior changes appears to have been dismissed.
On the contrary, if you actually read the article (for example), you'd note that it is about testing the causality of *all* prior changes to the climate, and see if they are sufficient to explain current changes. Notice how you missed that?
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Well, when Dr. Benjamin Santer, winner of the McArthur award because of his findings related to AGW, sets 17 years as what is needed to determine the trend, don't be surprised when we reach that timeline with no warming and then take the good Doctor at his word - there is a pause in global warming, and we only need 17 years to make that determination.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
You're confusing sophistry with science.
Spontaneous generation comes to us by way of Aristotle. It was finally challenged by the emerging field of science.
Lamarckian inheritance was not borne out by empirical evidence, so was effectively discounted. Modern understanding of genetics does recognize some mechanisms that resemble Lamarckian inheritance.
Miasma is an ancient greek magical revenge curse. Emperical scientists like Ignaz Semmelweiss worked away from that idea. For his trouble, he ended up dismissed from his position and replaced by Carl Braun, who stopped the handwashing program Semmelweiss had started and introduced a ventilation system to extract miasmas. The death rate went back up by an order of magnitude from when Semmelweiss was in charge.
Bloodletting goes back to belief in the four humours, which comes down from Hippocrates. Science is what has partially dispelled these ideas in modern times.
Aether is the fifth of the traditional Greek four elements. Once again, the idea comes down from fairly non-scientific thought. The name has cropped up to describe a number of different concepts in science, generally to describe something that may fill the universe in spaces in between regular matter. Science has mostly ruled out most of those theories. The general idea still lives on a bit in concepts such as the quantum foam.
Java Man... You've really got us there. A scientist dug up fossils of ancient hominids and... um... what's the smoking gun supposed to be there?
You mean accurate temperature records up to 1987,
Be honest with yourself. You learnt everything you know about AGW from reading specific blogs, and watching youtube and TV.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Be honest with yourself. Most temperature records outside of cities don't exist before 1977, especially in countries like the US, Canada, Russia, Australia or Africa. Do you know why? Because there were no stations to record the information.
And that type of ad hoc analysis is supposed to substitude for disinterested scientific investigation? Is that the best you got? Remember when Richard Muller was *sure* that climate scientists were cooking the books on temps, and promised to bring the best science to the problem in BEST? He got funding at the drop of a hat (from Koch), and Anthony Watts /promised/ to abide by Muller's findings. Then Muller's findings disagreed with what Watts wanted, and Muller was a AGW "shill" over night. And you think you know more than Muller?
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
There are climate scientist, and most of them work on climate models. The physicists in TFA are working the same problem from a different angle: statistics (and coming to the same conclusions). They won't profit from more money being invested in climate models, though, falsifying the assumption on which the post I originally replied to was based. Not that such an obvious troll really needs falsifying.
Bingo!
I basically accept that it is very likely that we are f*ing things up with CO2 emissions.
Yet the more I see what is happening with this evolution of an inquisitional attitude of "we understand the science, and you are just stupid and pro-oil" then I am growing disgusted and increasingly distrustful. Once you develop this attitude, then your rationality goes out the window. They have become just as religious now.
On this basis, I would confidently predict that IF serious evidence presents itself contradicting AGW, that the AGW crowd will fight against it tooth and nail, and would continue to lobby for their global regulatory schemes to combat global warming even if glaciation was encroaching upon central America.
"97%+ of geologists agreed the continents were stable. It was Settled Science. Hundreds of research papers supported it. Overwhelming consensus. And wrong. And, oddly (not really, if you think about it a moment), it was not a geologist but a meteorologist, Alfred Wegener, who ultimately showed all the mutually agreeing geologists they had it all wrong; the continents move." - Dr. Michael K. Oliver
Need Mercedes parts ?
Exactly. The solution to both the western dependence on oil and the contribution our nations make towards greenhouse emissions is nuclear power with a fuel reprocessing cycle. Perfect? Not by a long shot, but it would certainly have given us some breathing space; time enough to get our cars off oil, invest in solar, geo, tidal and wind power.
However it didn't work out like that because the no-nuke greenies stepped on the neck of nuclear power, effectively stopping it cold. We're resourceful buggers so we did the next best thing and focused our efforts on technology to yield significant energy savings and developed alternative energy sources to keep society moving along.
Oh, wait - that's not what happened at all - silly me. Instead, life went on. Growth went on. We built coal and gas-fired power stations to keep up with demand. Who could have predicted that outcome? Certainly not the no-nuke greenies anyway; likely they were off somewhere else by this time, busily chirping at people for eating McDonalds or some such.
Now we're at 400ppm atmospheric CO2 with 2-3 degrees of warming as a likely entrée to a much, much bigger problem. If the warnings are right then we should say thanks to the no-nuke NIMBYs. In the short term you've kept us all on the oil tit unnecessarily, but I really hope you all enjoy your true place in history as the motherfuckers responsible for Humanity's collapse back to the iron age and the destruction of countless species in the process.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Humans are not changing the climate
I do not know anyone who supports this. What we do support is that humans do not change the global temperature with their activities in any meaningful way compared with the other natural phenomena like solar irradiation, etc. The percentage of change humans cause with their activities is so small it might as well be totally irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas... yes, but not to the degree the models are claiming, or it would be hotter
Ca commence bien.
C02 is partially man made. Stipulate nearly all man made.
Our emissions are about 200% of the increase. Leave your "stipulations" at home.
C02 is large/rapid,but we are talking a change from .03% to .04%. not 30% to 40%, but 4 orders of magnitude smaller.
WTF? Please eat this tiny amount of botulotoxin I have here. Itls so small it can't have an effect on you.
Average global temp is on the rise, but has been doing so since the end of the last ice age.
Got a source for that, big boy?
There are other mechanism at play, like that great big fusion ball in the sky, that fluctuates in output.
so show a correlation between any solar parameter and global average temperatures.
Or water vapor, the most abundant greenhouse gas.
Which is in equilibrium with the liquid water in the oceans so cannot rise unless the temperature increases. Whoops!
You are a troll. Go away.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I already own a Prius; it makes good sense for 99% of my driving being in urban traffic alone. But 500 years is not enough to claim that all climate change is due to manmade sources; you need to go at least 2 million years of climate data to eliminate mankind. And in addition to that 500 years isn't even enough to cover one full ice age cycle. I call confirmation bias on this one.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
That's because all scientists are skeptics.
That is nothing but bullshit. I am a scientist. My bread and butter is getting stuff published.
Scientists are just people who persevered long enough with education to get a PhD and continue on. We are as stupid as the rest of humanity. We believe things without data or proof*. Without even logic. We have dogma and lifetime carrier invested viewpoints. We have truthiness about what is bad science and good.
We are just other people. Don't be the fool and assume we know better.
* For example, organic food is healthier or more sustainable, or the classic for german scientists, Zugluft.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Hopefully in a journal that is reviewed by skeptics rather than Ideologues.
All scientific journals are reviewed by skeptics.
That's because all scientists are skeptics.
This is just patently false.
James Hansen, one of the leading scientist sitting on top of the time series, called for trials of energy company executives for "high crimes against humanity and nature". When a human commits himself to such political ambitions, it becomes much harder to objectively accept position which would undermine the strong political stand he's taking.
Or how about the personification of "climate scientist", Michael Mann? Well, he refers to his fellow scientist who are not sharing his preconceived opinions as "not helping the cause".
These examples does not speak about scientists excising scepticism but more like political activists doing group thinking.