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Australia Cuts 110 Climate Scientist Jobs: "The Science is Settled."
An anonymous reader writes: With an ax rather than a scalpel, Australia's federal science agency last week chopped off its climate research arm in a decision that has stunned scientists and left employees dispirited. Why? Because the science is settled, there is no need for more basic research, the government says. No doubt many will experience a case of schadenfreude as they see those who have long claimed "the science is settled" face the inevitable and logical consequence of that stance.
Sure, we know the answer is "The world is getting hotter and it's all our fault" - but there are still a heck of a lot of questions that need to be answered. "How Fast?" and "Will the extra CO2 help crops or weeds grow faster?" and "What can we do about it?" and "Will such-and-such course of action have enough effect to avoid such-and-such consequences?"
We need those guys even more than we did before the original question was answered.
www.sjbaker.org
Anyone that tells you the science is settled is not a scientist.... they are a politician wanting to shutdown inquiry on an issue and install dogma in its place.
Science is not dogma, and if someone who is a scientist tells you that "The science is settled"; that is really just their personal opinion on the topic, And it should be taken to assume that the research results they produce might be accidentally (or maliciously) biased to reflect results consistent to the bit of science they would claim to be "settled".
Which is why I test gravity every day by jumping off of the Empire State Building.
At a certain point you have to get off the shitter and act on the information you have. Sitting around while you go from 99.99% certainty to 99.999% certainty is inefficient.
Yes, I know you're not supposed to read the article. You find out all sorts of interesting things like the fact that noone was actually fired, they were re-assigned to other stuff. You also find out why some of the stuff they were doing was interesting.
But the thing that caught my attention with shades of "we have to pass the bill before we know what it does" was that one of the reasons given not to transfer the people was that they were needed to figure out what the recent climate agreement actually meant.
So apparently the climate agreement was so badly expressed that the several people who were not transferred away from basic climate research are not sufficient to figure out what it actually meant?
Didn't Kerry block the language change that would have made it require anything?
Sorry, "smoking leads to lung disease" isn't dismissable as religion, and simply denying it isn't 'skepticism'. The current crop of oil-company-shill climate denialists are no different than the tobacco company liars of a generation ago.
No one in climate science is interested in answering those questions. It's all "X is caused by global climate change", where X can be literally anything,
If you read what actual climate scientists say, and not the hype in the press, they in fact don't say "It's all "X is caused by global climate change", where X can be literally anything," Over and over, they say things like, no particular storm can be attributed to global warming-- it's a long term global effect. Over and over and over. But the press likes disaster stories. They'll keep looking until they can find a way to write the story that makes it a disaster story, and bury the "other scientists caution that there's not enough data to attribute X to climate change" on page 2.
with pictures of polar bears in the background.
I've read a lot of papers by climate scientists, and never seen one with "pictures of polar bears in the background." I think I can safely say that if what you're reading has pictures of polar bears in the background, you're reading the popular press, and not a scientific paper. Even the paper (one paper-- count it, one) that talked about dead polar bears in the arctic didn't have pictures of polar bears in the background.
Proof is for mathematics and liquor. The fact that you don't know that shows you know fuck all about science.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Science is based in SKEPTICISM and PROOF.
That's true... but what I've noticed is that far too often, the people who call themselves climate skeptics aren't skeptical at all; they are absolutely credulous-- to anything they hear that denies the reality of global warming. Garbage articles that could be debunked in two minutes of thinking get picked up and passed along with notes of "see? it's all a HOAX!"
One-sided skepticism isn't skepticism at all. Skepticism doesn't consist of "I don't care what you say, I won't believe it, but I'll believe anything the other guys say, no matter how goofy." If you want to say you're a skeptic: be equally skeptical of both sides.
Real science doesn't consist of repeated skepticism, in fact; that goes nowhere. Real science consists of getting better data and improving understanding.
It's a turn of phrase in this case, but we know that man's emissions cause some aspect of the climate change we're seeing.
"Some aspect" where the exact amount is undefined.
Oh, and the total amount of warming we'll see is undefined.
Oh, and the amount of warming that is harmful is undefined.
Oh, and the benefits to the world from a warmer climate are undefined.
Oh, and the mechanism that triggers an ice age is undefined.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
With no "climate scientists", when every single prediction from the models come out wrong again, who will go back, adjust the models, and then retro-predict real life?
Seems the lessons of history must be learned over and over. Mixing up politics and science, religion and science or even politics and religion is generally always a bad idea. How soon we forget and each subsequent generation repeats the same mistakes..
Well, at least we know what to expect..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
And, since we know Mars and Venus are also getting warmer, it must be the Martian's fault.
Well, given that we don't know that Mars and Venus are getting warmer we don't have to look for causes for that nonexistent warming.
How much of the change is likely to be caused by which of the several known factors, and potentially unknown factors?
If there are unknown factors causing the warming then there are also unknown factors causing cooling that happens to exactly balance the unknown factors causing warming, since the observed warming fits pretty damn well the known factors that can cause warming. Or maybe we should just use Occam's razor?
What is the long-term temperature trend, based on long-term actual data (as opposed to COUGH corrections COUGH made up on the spot and added to the data).
The long term temperature trend is slightly cooled the corrections that are carefully considered. You might like to see a doctor about that nasty cough.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
All models are wrong. Some are useful. All climate models are wrong, particularly since this is really complicated stuff we don't understand as much as we'd like, but we can make some predictions fairly reliably and have confidence that they'll happen more or less as we predict.
There is no such thing as proven science. The best we can get is science sufficiently solid that the overwhelming consensus of involved scientists would be astonishment if it were to break, and we've had that happen before. If we speak of settled science (which is relative, not absolute), we speak of science that has a pretty much universal consensus.
AGW is a theory, not a hypothesis. It's not only a collection of observations, but has explanatory power and ties into other well-established science. Like any other scientific theory, it's got holes and almost certainly has some wrong assumptions. We know that the planetary surface is warming up, and we know that we're causing a lot of that, and therefore AGW is happening. We're fuzzy on a lot of details.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I agree, but we need more than that - climate engineers who can figure out how to modify the system to prevent the worst effects. I think it's great that among the general population the narrative is to reduce emissions and environmental destruction, but nothing about the nature of humans convinces me that we won't eventually end up having to use engineered solutions to the problem.
Just look at the US elections. Every four years I see a bunch of politicians turn up in some coal town and spout on about how clean coal is the future. The mindset in these places is so hard to change, made especially so by the fud spread by vested interests. Given the rise of solar and electric, it might be possible to wean rich westerners off fossil fuels over a 30-50 year period, but I can't see how we will convince developing countries to do the same, especially when the price for fuels falls through the floor.
What really scares me is if a nation that starts suffering the effects of climate change first, gets desperate and takes matters into their own hands. It doesn't take many aerosols pumped into the atmosphere to potentially cause a lot of effects on the planet, and if we don't know what those effects are it could be a massive disaster in a very short time frame.
And those climate models have been created and are available as software. It's now just a question of applying them.
The global climate models are there, and are getting pretty well validated-- although you do know that the error bars are still plus or minus fifty percent, right? But the more you want fine-grained data, though, the more you're still going to need to do a lot more work.
"Overall, things are getting slightly warmer at a pace we know to within a factor of two"-- that's something we know. "Australia is getting hotter"-- that's slightly harder to say with certainty: Australia is not the world. "These detailed results will be the result"-- that's getting very hard to predict.
The devil is in the details.
So tell me, what do yuo consider science?
Taking data, analyzing data, making models, verifying models, refining models, taking more data, taking more data.
All the stuff that climate scientists actually do, and climate deniers don't.
" I'd also suggest that if you really want to find out what's going on, follow the money. There's lots and lots of grant money out there for people in that field, but only if their results match what the politicians need to push their agendas."
I really find astounding this argument appears once and again. It's like... hippies hold all the money, not the big oil corps.
I imagine in the seventies was more or less the same: health problems with tobacco? It's an hoax. Just follow the money. There's lots and lots of grant money out there for people in that field, but only if their results match what the politicians need to push their agendas.
The money and therefore, if any, the politicians being bought is in the side of the oil corps.
The fact is, the ice caps are Mars are indeed melting. Look at the data yourself. You're entitled to your own opinion about what we should do about that, if anything, but the fact is each time we send a probe to Mars, the ice caps there are smaller. The principal investigator for the Mars Orbiter Camera, Michael Malin, says the martian polar ice cap is shrinking at "a prodigious rate." You can look for yourself and compare the pictures even from 1999-2005; it's visibly noticeable even in that short time frame.
We also know that Jupiter, Titan, and Pluto are warming.
So again, the question is "how much of the long-term trend on earth is attributable to the same causes that are occurring throughout the rest of the solar system?" the best estimate I know of is "probably about 30%, but maybe half that, maybe twice that."
If I'm getting warmer because of a fever, and the chicken breast in my oven is also getting warmer, they must be related or neither is really getting warmer. CHECKMATE AL GORE!
Delete your account you stupid fuck.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Most skeptics couldn't tell good science from bad science if their life depended on it, they're just borderline conspiracy theorists who has decided that the establishment or mainstream media are pushing an agenda with cherry-picked data, flawed models and spurious reasoning to give a false, but plausible impression. And because they've found some whack jobs contradicting it they think they're part of a small elite who haven't bought into the lies. They're just as much sheep as the sheep they despise, just going in the opposite direction of the herd.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
But the press likes disaster stories.
Yes they do and in general the popular press is REALLY bad at science reporting. I've had a few direct interactions with science reporters for our local paper and holy cow they were a bunch of idiots. They mostly have NO training in the scientific method, their knowledge of technology and science is severely lacking, and they ask incredibly stupid questions and misunderstand the answers. Worse they often come in with an agenda about what they are going to report about and will twist any facts you give them to suit their narrative. The only exceptions I've run into is if you get one of the reporters for a big paper like the New York Times or (obviously) one of the actual science journals. But that's rare. Local TV news are the worst of them all. Bunch of borderline retarded talking heads them...
I used to work at a tech center where we had all sorts of cool machines. Lasers, rapid prototyping, CAE, engine dynos, virtual reality, etc. Very cool stuff and visually interesting too. So they wanted to take pictures which is great. One of these idiots points at the wall where he sees a bunch of blinking lights and asks what that machine does because he thinks it would be a cool picture. We gently mentioned that, ahem... our air conditioning control panel was about the least interesting thing in the building. The guy didn't even have the brains to act embarrassed.
Well said.
Oblig. Winston Churchill quote, "A bigot is someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject"
If this is enough for you to say Economics is a science, then it is the softest science of all. Parapsychology (and I'm absolutely serious about this), is based more on data and scientific rigor than economics. Psychology is many times more rigorous than Economics. Fucking Gender Studies is more rigorous and data-based than Economics.
I am probably the only Slashdot user who has actually taken a course from Milton Friedman. My views on the pseudoscience of Economics is based on 30 years experience having economists as colleagues, friends, neighbors and lunchmates. I have played in a weekly poker game with economists. I lived next door to a Nobel-nominated economist for years back in Chicago. I watched Superbowl XLI with him and had to explain what it means to arbitrage a point spread that has moved 10 points.
Plus, if you read any Economics articles, you will find that their math is very unimpressive, and even suspect.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Except that "verifying models" step. None of the climate models are making better predictions than the null hypothesis,
About all I can say to that is "sorry, but you are wrong.".
or for that matter than the "lgw blindly asserting it's getting colder" model. Global temperatures have been remarkably steady for the past 19 years or so,
Sorry, but you are wrong. Here is the data from four groups on three different continents: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/resea... temperatures have not been "remarkably steady for the past 19 years or so" - they have been rising. and while that's within the error bars for most of these models, it's better predicted by the null hypothesis, and within the error bars if you take any of these models and put a "-" in front on their predicted temperature change. So, yeah, the negative of the models predicts as well as the models right now.
Not an argument that they're all wrong, but an argument that there's no reason to think any particular one is right, either. The "science" part is ongoing, but hasn't verified any of the models.
The "Government" didn't sign it. Obama did.
Without enabling legislation or ratification as a treaty, it's fancy toilet paper from a legal point of view.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Obviously this has nothing to do with climate change science - it's an excuse for the government to justify the massive budget cuts they've forced on the CSIRO, an excuse the CSIRO are happily repeating as they know everyone will be outraged.
It would help if any of the climate models demonstrated some degree of predictive ability. The difference between model projections and reality have grown to ridiculous proportions.
Let's look at that. The very first numerical greenhouse effect model was Manabe and Wetherald 1967-- That's the classic, the model from which pretty much all current climate models stem. Since the paper was submitted in 1966, that's 50 years ago-- definitely long enough to see how well the prediction worked. They predicted that the climate sensitivity to CO2 (assuming constant relative humidity) was 2.3C. Comparing that to the actual carbon dioxide, for the rise from 320 ppm to 400 ppm (here) using the Arrhenius relation, we get 0.74C for the temperature rise from 1966 to 2015. The measured temperature rise (here) is 0.7C, with the error bars in the figure 0.1C.
Looks like not merely a good prediction, but an outstandingly accurate prediction.
For comparison, the current IPCC 5th Assessment report estimate of sensitivity is that it is the range 1.5C to 4.5C with "high confidence", so Manabe and Wetherald's value of 2.3 is still is the range of current estimates.
The people saying "global warming" are all paid to say "global warming" to get/keep Government funding, so that government can dictate to everyone (except rich n powerful) that we need to give up every technology that makes the world run.
The fact is, ever number has been fudged to get the results they are wanting, to prove what they need to prove, to keep getting funding to support something that has no basis except "consensus"
When every major prediction has failed, the the consensus cannot be right. I remember all those predictions of "worse hurricanes" followed by "almost no hurricanes", and "Polar Ice caps disappearing" only to have "polar Ice caps expanding (which is now the new "proof" of global warming), on down the line.
not to mention the Greening of Africa, when it was supposed to be getting drier and more desert like: http://news.nationalgeographic...
The problem isn't Global warming, it is that EVERYTHING is blamed on it. Ice growing or shrinking .. GLOBAL WARMING, more snow GLOBAL WARMING, more rain and greening in Africa GLOBAL WARMING!
In fact, global warming may in fact be good for the planet, even if it isn't good for Humans. ;)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
"Because the science is settled, there is no need for more basic research, the government says." Before enjoying your schedenfraude, realise that this has been organized by political forces who think 'climate change is crap' and have dismantled as many government agencies with responsibilities in this area as they can. Justifying these cuts with 'the science is settled' is disingenuous to a comic extreme.
It isn't until you get to the last paragraph that TFA finally gives you the underlying cause of this astonishingly shortsighted and imminently disastrous decision:
“Climate science becomes secondary to business; business comes first
So there you have it. The ability to make money trumps EVERYTHING. Kind of answers the question of why we never see aliens. If all intelligent species tend towards a capitalist society, they all end up committing environmental suicide.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***