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New Tool Allows Scientists To Annotate Media Coverage of Climate Change
Layzej writes: Have you ever been skeptical of a climate change story presented by a major media outlet? A new tool holds journalists to account for the veracity of their stories. "Using the Climate Feedback tool, scientists have started to diligently add detailed annotations to online content and have those notes appear alongside the story as it originally appeared. If you're the writer, then it's a bit like getting your homework handed back to you with the margins littered with corrections and red pen. Or smiley faces and gold stars if you've been good." The project has already prompted The Telegraph to publish major corrections to their story that suggested the Earth is headed for a "'mini ice age' within 15 years." The article has been modified in such a way that there is no more statement supporting the original message of an "imminent mini ice age."
They "might" not believe it but they will throw it in your face as "proof" that there is no climate change. I think this is a fantastic idea, it should become mandatory on all media articles about anything not just climate change. I'd like to see it used on claims made in religious articles.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Climate change is not a death sentence. There aren't any reputable scientists saying it is. I think you may have been listening to some sensationalist media stories, and possibly embellishing what they state. If you like, you can read some of the published effects of climate change, and "all life dying" is not one of them.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
This argument of yours have been completely debunked by science over and over. The main thing you're ignoring is how long things stay in the atmosphere. If your reasoning was correct we would already be boiling because water vapor leads to greenhouse, leads to more evaporation leads to more greenhouse etc. etc.
We aren't because there is a massive negative feedback system that counter-acts the effect of water vapor as a greenhouse gas almost entirely. That system is called "rain". Water has a relatively high boiling point and returns to liquid form fairly easily, so water doesn't stay in the atmosphere for very long before it rains (or snows) down again. The average time a water molecule spends in the atmosphere is only about 11 days.
On the other hand CO2 has a much lower boiling point - it does not return to liquid form in the atmosphere, it doesn't rain down - and the average lifetime of a CO2 particle in the atmosphere is decades - but centuries are not at all unknown.
A small effect over a very long time will always have a bigger total impact than a large effect over a very short time.
Of course, just to throw your argument into even further debunked teritory - CO2 warming increases evaporation as well as increasing the lifetime of water in the atmosphere (hotter air means it takes longer before it rains down again) - so the impact of water vapor on temperature is aggravated by CO2 - not independent there-off.
Source:
http://scholarsandrogues.com/2...
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Climate change is not a death sentence. There aren't any reputable scientists saying it is. I think you may have been listening to some sensationalist media stories, and possibly embellishing what they state. If you like, you can read some of the published effects of climate change, and "all life dying" is not one of them.
But if no reputable scientists are saying that climate change is a death sentence, why do articles like the one below keep appearing? It's about Christiana Figueres, leader of the Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Figueres was trained as an anthropologist, but doesn't do anthropology professionally; she's a Costa Rican diplomat. (Being the daughter of the President of Costa Rica probably gave her a leg up here). I'm willing to add a stipulation that anthropologists who have never actually worked as scientists shouldn't be considered as "reputable scientists" on climate models.
It's titled, "The Woman Who Could Save Humanity". http://www.realclearpolitics.c...
Well, if you actually read the article, it doesn't anywhere quote her as saying that climate change will be "a death sentence". In fact, it's primarily an article about how hard it is to get diplomats to agree. The closest it gets to any such statement is the title of the article (and article titles aren't written by the reporter), and a sentence in the article saying that on the well of her office is a picture of the Statue of Liberty waist-deep in water. I'm not sure if we should judge people by the satirical pictures on their walls.
Sounds like what we really need is a tool to annotate extremists on both sides. Why does this tool do that?
I absolutely agree. Accuracy is desired in both directions. We're in luck, though, the tool discussed here does annotate both sides! Here-- from the link in TFA-- is their tool applied to the Rolling Stone article "“The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here”:
http://climatefeedback.org/eva...
--along with the reply by the author, the very first point of which was "I didn't get to write the headline; the headlines are written by the editor."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
When people point to a 15 year stabilization of temperatures as evidence in the climate change debate
An oldy but moldy, taken straight from the "How to Lie with Statistic" playbook: cherry pick your baseline to produce the trend (or lack of trend) you want.
Climate deniers like to say "there has been no significant warming since 1998", although strictly what they mean is "there has been no significant warming *compared to* 1998." Why 1998? BECAUSE 1998 WAS BY FAR THE HOTTEST YEAR EVER ON THE INSTRUMENTAL RECORD. It's like saying, "My income hasn't gone up significantly since 1998," when 1998 was the year your hit the PowerBall. If you use five year moving averages the "stabilization" effect disappears.
Or when they point out evidence that it was just as warm 1000 years ago as today,
FTW: two other forms of cherry picking in one assertion. First, there's the kind of geographic cherrypicking that says "If Europe was warm in the middle ages it was warm everywhere," or "if there's snow in Washington DC it's cold everywhere", or "If there is unseasonal summer pack ice in western Hudson Bay then there must be unseasonable ice everywhere in the Arctic," all of which are trivial to refute but rely on the fact that most people won't bother to look up what's happening elsewhere.
Second form is cherry picking papers that sound like theysay what you want to hear. It's not that papers aren't important but science isn't like theology; it deals in contradictory evidence, which is abundant if you're trying to extrapolate global climate from local climate. That means you can prove anything by picking the right paper; you need to read the literature in a field as a whole. Since most of us don't have time to do that, let me suggest a more convenient way to get yourself up to speed on a topic: find a review paper in a journal that is (a) relevant to the question and (b) in the top quartile of journals in that field by impact factor.
What a review paper does is summarize all the significant and contradictory evidence that has been published on a question. It's a convenient and highly efficient way to go straight to the horse's mouth on a question, rather than relying on scientifically illiterate reporters. Choosing a top journal by impact factor eliminates what are essentially vanity press publications where authors can pay to get whatever they want into a "scientific journal". When some anti-vaxxer crackpot cites "their science" it's always in one of these pay-for-play "predatory journals".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That applies to both sides.
Potentially, but not as much as you seem to think
When people point to a 15 year stabilization of temperatures as evidence in the climate change debate, the frequent response is "that's not climate, that's weather" or "that's normal variation."
The problem is those responses are actually reasonably true. In a noisy data set like yearly temperatures, we expect there to be periods of slow temperature growth and periods of fast temperature growth due to short term variability so "that's not climate, that's weather" is true, 30 year averages are generally used to minimize year-to-year variability that can drown out the long term trend. We have had a confluence of natural factors working together to slow the surface air temperature growth over that period. Perhaps more importantly it's important to look at more than just the air temperature since the atmosphere only contains a small fraction of the heat content the earth can store.
Or when they point out evidence that it was just as warm 1000 years ago as today, it will be derisively dismissed.
That's a northern hemisphere temperature reconstruction, so it only covers half the world, and one of the authors of that paper, F. C. Ljungqvist, doesn't agree with your analysis:
But then there are those on the same side who will mention a 20-100 year period because it suits their argument.
Potentially, but those are periods that are long enough to cancel out year-to-year variability, though, I can't actually remember seeing anyone use a period that was longer than 30 years. Maybe it's not that the period suits the argument but that when you look at periods longer than 20 years, the evidence strongly supports one side in this debate? If that's the case, then the people who look at and accept the evidence have little choice but to end up on the same side of this debate?
Oh how I wish people would stop quoting skepticalscience as if a blog is a scientific resource.
Skeptical science says exactly would you did, and most of what they say is sourced against another blog(RealClimate.org) which was at least started by a pair of actual scientists, but is still itself not subject to peer review either and really does not belong in your exhibit of evidences. This is is what is WRONG with the whole 'debate'. Way too many folks believe themselves to be protecting and promoting the science while waving their hands at blogs and re-hashing the summaries from them. :(
One of the scientists that started RealClimate is Michael Mann, here is his latest article on historic temperatures. Mann is (in)famous for the hockey stick graph. In his latest work here he's gone a long ways to trying to improve upon his original paper and although he only graphs the NA trend(citing that the SA data is of much lower quality), it very clearly shows temperatures as measured by proxy records matched or exceeded todays temperatures on multiple occasions in the last 2k years. He tries to down play this, but the data speaks for itself. Mann even notes himself that However, in the case of the early calibration/late validation CP
The worst are the fanatics who claim that climate scientists are never wrong. They can think of a justification for everything. They use statistics the way a drunk man uses a lightpost: for support, rather than illumination. For example, at this point, it's pretty clear that the climate models overestimated the warming. It's no big deal, science will eventually correct itself, but watch as so many people can't accept that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."