Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Study How Non-Scientists Deny Climate Change (theguardian.com)
A new research paper suggest climate change opponents are "simulating coherence by conspiracism".
Slashdot reader Layzej says the paper "examines this behavior at the aggregate level, but gives many examples where contradictory ideas are held by the same individual, and sometimes are presented within a single publication." From the paper:
Claims that the globe "is cooling" can coexist with claims that the "observed warming is natural" and that "the human influence does not matter because warming is good for us". Coherence between these mutually contradictory opinions can only be achieved at a highly abstract level, namely that "something must be wrong" with the scientific evidence in order to justify a political position against climate change mitigation...
In a nutshell, the opposition to greenhouse gas emission cuts is the unifying and coherent position underlying all manifestations of climate science denial... Climate science denial is therefore perhaps best understood as a rational activity that replaces a coherent body of science with an incoherent and conspiracist body of pseudo-science for political reasons and with considerable political coherence and effectiveness.
"I think that people who deny basic science will continue to do so, no matter how contradictory their arguments may be," says one of the paper's authors, who suggests that the media should be wary of self-contradicting positions.
In a nutshell, the opposition to greenhouse gas emission cuts is the unifying and coherent position underlying all manifestations of climate science denial... Climate science denial is therefore perhaps best understood as a rational activity that replaces a coherent body of science with an incoherent and conspiracist body of pseudo-science for political reasons and with considerable political coherence and effectiveness.
"I think that people who deny basic science will continue to do so, no matter how contradictory their arguments may be," says one of the paper's authors, who suggests that the media should be wary of self-contradicting positions.
These scientists are wrong! Liars! They don't respect our religion!
Global warming is WRONG for one reason:
Hillary Clinton believes it.
TRUMP 2016!
Science is not immune to politics. It's really that simple.
But I didn't realize some could be so shameless that they publish papers making accusations on their opponents as if they already knew everything. No it is not climate change denial. It is a debate on how much data were fabricated to draw the conclusions on climate change in the first place (c.f. climategate). Seriously, it is time to stop this giant hoax and make science what it is: objective research on real-world, not driven by politics!
It's very simple. Plain, ordinary folks who haven't experienced mind rot as a result of being entrenched in ivory halls of academia have never ended up joining the Church Of Global Warming, never bought its left-wing bullshit, and have never prayed at the altar of Al Gore.
Plain and simple.
The politicians, scientists, and academics proposing solutions to combat it. All of these to date will fail utterly. And this is why people deny climate change, because they understand our leaders aren't capable of doing anything rational, and all proposed solutions are more damaging to the economy than the actual global warming will be. So it's entirely rational to not care or deny climate change when the short term becomes more painful than the long term.
Actual climate scientists are usually very open to the idea that they could be wrong, even though they currently have a firm conviction that they're right. After all--that's the essence of science.
The problem we "deniers" have is with all the political hacks and communists who think they know how to take action, all the redditors who think they know shit because they can regurgitate what their commie profs told them, and that we need to confiscate all the private property in the name of being "green". Fuck them. That's what it's all about. Yeah, man is *probably* altering the climate, and it could cause some serious problems down the road; but we'll manage it our way, not your UN ultra-leftist way. That's what you're not going to change, and I know that just pains some of you so much. The USSR lost. Deal with it.
Didn't they recently say that many scientific papers/studies cannot be replicated? I've also heard that many of the global warming studies don't include the solar cycles the sun goes through as well.
The problem with climate science is that it's so difficult. The average person the street has little hope of understanding all the data and how it interacts. They can never, therefore, have confidence in the results being reported to them. I'm largely in the same boat, btw; despite on and off studying over the past several years, I still don't really have a grasp on how all the data ties together and consequently I don't have a high degree of confidence in the reported conclusions of others.
Given this, attacking on the basis of "CLIMATE CHANGE" is the absolutely worst approach. The ignorance of your target audience will prompt them to respond contrary to your goals. Instead focus should be placed on the specifics; clean air emissions, water discharge standards, ect... Why? Because these are things people can understand, and they are immediately relevant to them. I don't want to live next to a factory dumping shit into the air/water, and neither does anyone else. That should be how climate change is addressed; not on the large scale, but rather the personalized one.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Bad Predictions:
Claim from the late 20th to early 21st century: Global Warming means that the planet it getting hotter. Temperatures will rise.
Life: Record lows in winter
Reaction: Change the term from Global Warming to Climate Change.
Claim from 2007 post multiple hurricanes: Global warming will only make hurricanes more frequent and more powerful.
Life: They haven't, they aren't.
Reaction:Just wait
Claim: Global warming will cause droughts.
Life: Flooding and heavy rains.
Global Warming Experts Reaction: Dry places will get drier, wet places will get wetter.
Claim: People who deny global warming should be discredited as scientists.
Life: Debate, discussion, new data and learning happen. Global Warming/Climate change has had its share of bad science and reckless predictions on both sides of the fence and it makes it easy for people to believe what they want OR what they SEE OR simply become resistant to the concept believing the issue to be more political than scientific.
Slashdot Reaction to this post: Predictable
At least that's what is they say here.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
Note that holding contradictory beliefs is fairly common of conspiracy theorists (link):
Another study titled Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories managed to show that, not only will cranks be attracted to and believe in numerous conspiracy theories all at once, but will continue to do so even if the theories in question are completely and utterly incompatible with one another. For instance, the study showed that: "... the more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered [and that] ... the more participants believed that Osama Bin Laden was already dead when U.S. special forces raided his compound in Pakistan, the more they believed he is still alive," and that "Hierarchical regression models showed that mutually incompatible conspiracy theories are positively associated because both are associated with the view that the authorities are engaged in a cover-up".
Citation: Wood, Michael J., Karen M. Douglas, and Robbie M. Sutton. "Dead and alive beliefs in contradictory conspiracy theories." Social Psychological and Personality Science 3.6 (2012): 767-773.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
The problem is that everybody has been hearing Doomsday predictions for so long that they're all just sick of it. Back in 2000 my university prof was showing all his graphs and basically stating that by 2010 we would have massive deserts all over the place - and everywhere else would be underwater. Things are obviously nowhere near as bad as what all the climate scientists were saying back in 2000. Massive scare tactic stuff.... and that's the only thing that is talked about. Whenever you read an article or watch a show about it - it's an "end of the world" type of presentation which we all know is preposterous.
What we do know for a fact is the untold number of jobs that would instantly be lost if government funding was taken away from climate science. So it is hard for these people to have an unbiased opinion. Does humanity need to stop polluting? Absolutely. However I am personally more concerned with dumping oil and garbage into our oceans than I am about c02 emissions. That being said - I am all for any regulations or technologies that makes the air in our cities cleaner to breath.... if we can reduce c02 at the same time then that's good but can we stop with all the doomsday crap? It is getting old. Humanity will adapt.
A lot of people also remember that it wasn't that long ago that climate scientists were predicting another ice age. A lot of older folks remember this so it's hard to blame them for taking the global warming scare with a grain of salt.
Science news is largely presented by reporters with journalism educations who don't have any background in the science they're covering and as a result don't really understand the nature of what it is they're covering.
As a result, when they report an issue like climate change, they're completely unqualified to explain the actual science and instead of covering the work that scientists do, they cover the scientists instead. Instead of explaining the research that led Dr. Jones to conclude climate is changing, we get an appeal to authority.
So the reason non-scientists deny climate change is that the argument for climate change is largely being presented to them via non-scientific arguments.
You can reproduce the same symptoms with any animal. In fact it is a universal life force. You can see the same thing on Animal Planet. The mammalian politics is a natural "evolution". A man's cortex is there merely to serve the cravings of the brain stem.
The deniers are just antagonists in a turf war. Climate change threatens their "territory" and authority. They are exhibiting a perfectly natural reaction. It's no different than the rivalry between the CIA and the NSA.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
"Climate Change" deniers are likely responding to the "propaganda-ness" of much of the media regarding the subject. Answers to simple questions such as how climate is quantified and what reproduced experiments have been done to support or debunk climate change theories would have a lot more effect to win over non-believers than political agitation such as "the planet has a fever..."
In all seriousness:
Physicist Hal Lewis; Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara: "It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford's book organizes the facts very well.) I don't believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist." http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/n...
Most republicans I argue with agree that climate change is happening. The disagreement usd whether it is man made our just the natural cycle of the earth/sun. Most republicans I talk to think the whole environmental movement is a scam for the companies and organizations to make money and that people have little effect on climate change.
It's really difficult to tell what is man made and what isn't with climate change and that should be the focus. The effect of the Clean Air Act and the effect of regulation on the ozone layer are some examples of where one can show how environmental regulation has made a difference on man made change.
As far as the scam argument, I agree with them that a lot of organizations and companies are just in it for the money or power. This seems to be the case of some of the mainstream environmental groups like the Sierra Club. I don't know the solution to that.
Alot of the skepticism stems from the doomsday-esque presentation of the scientists. I lost count of all the embearded professors who predicted the world would be under water by now, or one big desert, etc. These people are extremists so of course, rational people tune this stuff out.
If they would present their case in a more level-headed manner I think most people would be receptive to what they have to say.
Stop using terms like "settled science", which is unbeatable as a directly false, unscientific, science-damaging claim.
Science doesn't work that way. You can start with the Steady State model of the universe or Luminiferous Ether for two high-profile examples, of thousands. Scientific models are provisional and permanently open to new data, and never, ever, -ever- "proven". To claim otherwise is to directly lie about what science is and how it works, and always will work, in every case, everywhere, forever.
http://www.whatreallyhappened....
A (Not Quite) Complete List Of Things Supposedly
Caused By Global Warming
Acne , Longer plane flights , agricultural land increase , Afghan poppies destroyed , Africa devastated , Africa in conflict , African aid threatened , African summer frost , aggressive weeds , More Toxic Poison Ivy , air pressure changes , airport malaria , Agulhas current , Alaska reshaped , moves , allergy season longer , alligators in the Thames , Alps melting , Amazon a desert , American dream end , amphibians breeding earlier (or not) , anaphylactic reactions to bee stings , ancient forests dramatically changed , animals head for the hills , animals shrink , Antarctic grass flourishes , Antarctic ice grows , Antarctic ice shrinks , Antarctic sea life at risk , anxiety treatment , algal blooms , archaeological sites threatened , Arab Spring , Arctic bogs melt , Arctic in bloom , Arctic ice free , Arctic ice melt faster , Arctic lakes disappear , Arctic tundra to burn , Arctic warming (not) , Atlantic less salty , Atlantic more salty , atmospheric circulation modified , attack of the killer jellyfish , avalanches reduced , avalanches increased , Baghdad snow , Bahrain under water , bananas grow , barbarisation , beer shortage , beetle infestation , bet for $10,000 , better beer , big melt faster , billion dollar research projects , billion homeless , billions face risk , billions of deaths , bird distributions change , bird loss accelerating , birds shrinking , bird strikes , bird visitors drop , birds confused , birds decline (Wales) , birds driven north , birds return early , bittern boom ends , blackbirds stop singing , blackbirds threatened , Black Hawk down , blood contaminated , blue mussels return , bluetongue , brain eating amoebae , brains shrink , bridge collapse (Minneapolis) , Britain one big city , Smaller loaves of Bread , Britain Siberian , brothels struggle , brown Ireland , bubonic plague , budget increases , Buddhist temple threatened , building collapse , building season extension , bushfires , business risks , butterflies move north , camel deaths , cancer deaths in England , cannibalism , cannibalism again , caterpillar biomass shift , cave paintings threatened , childhood insomnia , Cholera , circumcision in decline , cirrus disappearance , civil unrest , cloud increase , coast beauty spots lost , cockroach migration , coffee threatened , cold climate creatures survive , cold spells (Australia) , cold wave (India) , computer models , conferences , conflict , conflict with Russia , consumers foot the bill , coral bleaching , coral fish suffer , coral reefs dying , coral reefs grow , coral reefs shrink , coral reefs twilight , Cabbage Shortage , cost of trillions , cougar attacks , crabgrass menace , cradle of civilisation threatened , creatures move uphill , crime increase , crocodile sex , crops devastated , crumbling roads, buildings and sewage systems , curriculum change , cyclones (Australia) , danger to kid's health , Darfur , Dartford Warbler plague , death rate increase (US) , deaths to reach 6 million , Dengue hemorrhagic fever , depression , depressed PETS! , desert advance , desert retreat , destruction of the environment , disappearance of coastal cities , disasters , diseases move from animals to humans , diseases move north , dog disease , Dolomites collapse , dozen deadly diseases , Drop in birth rates , drought , ducks and geese decline , dust bowl in the corn belt , early marriages , early spring , earlier pollen season , Earth biodiversity crisis , Earth dying , Earth even hotter , Earth light dimming , Earth lopsided , Earth melting , Earth morbid fever , Earth on fast track , Earth past point of no return , Earth slowing down , Earth slowing down 2 , Earth spins faster , Earth spins faster 2 , Earth to explode , Earth's poles shift , earth upside down , earthquakes , Specifically the 2015 Nepal earthquake , earthquakes redux , earthquakes redux 2 , Egypt revolt , El NiÃ
-Styopa
in scientific research. For example, what is this "hide the decline" all about? Why would scientists want to hide their data? Why wouldn't the CRU (Climate Research Unit at UEA) release their data sets as required by reputable journals such as "Nature." Why would they deny FOIA requests and conspire to find a way around them? Why would they seek to marginalize the "Climate Research" journal because some scientists had a contrary opinion, and why did they describe this as "plugging the gap" (their words)?
Why did a hockey stick emerge from their data no matter what "red noise" was input to the program? (White noise is random; red noise is random from the last iteration, like stock market quotes) And why did a hockey stick emerge only when the data was confined to the results of a single bristlecone pine tree? And why was the fact that contemporary tree-ring data showed a DECLINE in temperature in contrast to very accurate modern thermometers conveniently hidden? Was it because if they don't work accurately now there is no reason to suppose they were accurate thousands of years ago, thus putting the lie to the paleoclimate temperatures?
When you read about these shenanigans it reads like a political backroom dealing attempt to hide shoddy research. I implore you to read "Hiding the Decline; a history of the climategate affair" by A.W. Montford. isbn:978-1475293364, too avail yourselves of the degree of fraud perpetrated by these folks. Read the exposed emails sent back and forth which prove all this. Real the lamentations of the computer programmer assigned to try to make sense of all this as he says the data is a mess. One would think the members of slashdot could relate.
Why hasn't Al Gore been called to task for mixing up cause and effect on his giant graph showing correlation between CO2 and temperature? Turns out CO2 went up historically AFTER the temperature warmed. It's not a cause of warming temperatures, it's a result. But, as you may know, he won't debate anyone on the subject.
The climate may very well be warming. That happens when you are coming off an Ice Age, And it may be caused by us (or maybe not), but the degree to which these scientists sought to cook the data is unprecedented and one has to wonder why they went to such trouble to do it. They have made such a massive attempt to squelch opposing data that one wonders how they can look at themselves in the mirror and call themselves "scientists."
This is fraud on a massive scale, but who cares? The masses of people who aren't "scientists" won't be able to tell the difference anyway and we can just accuse them of being ignorant.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Not really it is simply people making dishonest arguments. The scientific evidence that the planet is warming is overwhelming the problem is that the proposed solution - reducing greenhouse gas emissions - carries with it a huge economic impact. Not surprisingly this means there are a large number of people who believe that the economic problems from reducing greenhouse gas emissions outweighs the problems of just warming the planet.
However they believe that this argument is not strong enough to prevent everyone deciding to cut greenhouse gas emissions so, although they really believe the science, their only option to prevent the economic problems they are worried about is to attack the science and try to pretend that it is wrong. So really this is simply a dishonest argument made be people who are so afraid of the impact of curbing greenhouse gases that they attack the arguments for this in the only way that has any chance of success even though they don't really believe the argument they are making themselves
When the chips are down so to speak it is amazing how overwhelmingly people will back science. One of the best examples of this which is often pointed out is despite all the arguments in US schools about whether to teach evolution vs. creationism (or whatever fancy name is the flavour of the day) everytime there is a concern about a new disease evolving an spreading e.g. SARS, bird flu, swine flu etc. no politician stands up and says that we should do nothing because viruses can't evolve. So when lives are on the line people really do believe in science to help and guide them but if they do not see an immediate threat to their well being then they'll happily undermine and ignore it to keep up their own standard of living.
The confidence intervals for climate sensitivity to co2 are not very high at all, thus predictions for temps will rise is under very considerable dispute. The intervals for the overall trend being up are very high.
Thus, it's not really a black and white issue, which is a real threat to propagandists.
Slashdot, BIZX, whipslash, whatever you simple dupes call yourselves these days - I am really happy that you guys have found somebody to fund you for your cooperation in correcting the record and settling the science and all the great, progressive things you guys get up to. Can we add a button though to let users filter these lefty pinko commie socialist circle jerk white guilt manshame articles out of the feed? I guess we'd still get some Windows 10 stories occasionally. Plus "sponsored content" or whatever you call those "stories" that are trying to sell me broken shot made by poor brown people.
Telling people what the trruth is at the butt of a gun, or destroying their careers or countries because someone proclaims they have found it, never works.
The reason why these people have to study this historical fact says quite a lot about western science to begin with.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Are the "scientists" conducting these "studies" psychologists or behavioral scientists? Because as far as I know, those are the only "scientists" who study why people would react one way or another to a situation. I mean marketing people do too, but that's hardly science. The cited article is unclear although what is clear, apart from the APA format of citation, is that it does not follow the standard format of SCIENTIFIC articles. Usually an article by SCIENTISTS doesn't go "1. Introduction 2. Conclusion". There's a whole lot missing on things like materials and methodology, discussion, etc.
So if you want an additional tip as to why people (including scientists, for I am one) reject climate change "science" - here's a big hint: follow the scientific method. Note that I am not even discussing the actual data evidence for or against climate change. I am discussing the lack of credibility of people who call themselves "scientists" but clearly are not. The scientific method and the way scientific articles are laid out is not new and does not need to be reinvented.
Perhaps the confusion arises because social sciences people are actually starting to believe that they are "scientists" because they took Poli Sci.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
people are just ignorant in thinking we can stop it from changing. it's like the ebb and flow of the tide, climate gets warmer and then climate gets colder. there's nothing we can do to stop it.
but i'm not saying we shouldn't live healthier and reduce/reuse/recycle, because we should do everything in our power to minimize our impact on the environment and try to make this world a healthier place for our children and aour children's children etc...
Adopting and upholding a contrarian opinion is a method of forming and belonging to social groups, gaining power and increasing reproductive success within the groups.
"Scientific" evangelists cherry-picking to frenzy the over-"educated" masses into an uninformed, unthought-out dogmatic opinion which they believe is "fact".
Whether or not "climate change" is true or not doesn't really matter as much as whether or not people who are supposedly educated use a sane thought process to investigate the matter. Most people are not leaders. They don't own a piece of any industry. They don't have power. What they say doesn't matter and they will never stand up and insist on being heard (I CAN JUST VOTE LOL, ALL MY THOUGHTS BOIL DOWN TO MULTIPLE CHOICE ANYWAY LOL).
"Climate Change" is totally ambiguous. Is the climate changing because of a natural process, or is the climate changing because of an artificial process? Correlation/causation????
"Scientific evidence" is a completely loaded term. It doesn't mean anything. It's a propaganda device.
"pseudo-science" is the same. Pseudo: A special greek word to sprinkle fairy dust on an argument to make it correct without support of reasoning and investigation.
These are totally ambiguous terms that mean absolutely nothing that have obviously been crafted specifically to appeal to people who have no experience with science (or evidence either).
If evidence is evident, then why does it need this qualifier "science" in front of it? It's obviously an attempt to jam extra words into a phrase to confuse people who are uneducated into entertaining an authoritarian (rather than logical) assertion of legitimacy. (almost all of you college graduates on this site count as uneducated just as much as (probably more than) any blue collar worker).
Lewandowsky and Cook - back on track with another paper full of lies and bullshit.
Remember the '97%' lie? Where 72 out of 12,000 papers supported his position, 1 supported the opposition's most extreme position, so he eliminated the rest and called it "science"? The paper where he had his forum members performing analysis? The paper where dozens of other scientists pointed out he had failed to understand their papers? That one?
Or the 'Moon Landing Hoax' hoax of a paper? Where these two allowed their forum members to submit answers to their online survey of opposition beliefs? Where they claimed to have included hundreds of skeptics and skeptic websites, all of whom reported they had never participated?
Oh! What about the 'Recursive Fury' paper, where these two 'analyzed' responses from skeptics - most of which they made up themselves?
After they've had multiple papers withdrawn for ethical, legal, and methodology concerns, you'd think they'd have learned to stop publishing this type of BS, but here they are at it again.
This paper uses careful selected objections to modern climate science (such as, your model don't produce real world data) and then says that because the objector has not proposed an 100% accurate alternate model, the objector is insane.
No, that is actually what the paper claims. That skeptics are not sane, or rational, or capable of coherent thought. All because some of them admit they don't know what the correct answer is, when they point out that someone else's answer is wrong.
Much of what was in "documentaries" like Inconvenient Truth and Gaslands was obvious BS. And we hear claims that Earth will be a lifeless cinder within a couple of generations even though CO2 levels have been much higher in the past.
Most of the denials that the climate is warming goes against well documented measurements.
The truth is somewhere in between. The best approach to minimizing the problem won't involve wealth transfer to poor nations. But neither side is going to budge.
I am a firm understander of climate change, and the "contradictory" arguments used are just scientific observations that sound bizarre to the author of the article. Both the deniers and the author of the above study seem totally ignorant of pretty much everything!
The Earth is entering a cooling cycle (everyone agrees there). Human induced climate change has raised the temperature as a second order effect, again both sides (climate change understanders and deniers) agree there too. The problem is the wording on slashdot is a MESS here. Everyone also agrees that a small amount of warming is good for us.
So the confused topics in the article linked and the slashdot blurb ARE ACTUALLY what both sides agree on and need not be studied except by linguistic fools.
As for the debate there is none, but some people are denying climate science even when they use those very arguments to oppose climate science... I can explain more but it will take a few 1000 words. Summary;
Deniers are insane,
the author of the study seems to be a total idiot,
and we have a planet to save here because climate change MAY be irreversible, and we should not take a gamble because if do not cut CO2 emissions, Earth may turn into a Venus with a matter of centuries.
Usually politicians ignore most of what science says and they go their merry way making laws regardless of the outcome. But now we have politicians wholeheartedly embracing what science is saying about climate change.
I tend to trust scientists a whole lot more than I trust politicians. Who am I to believe when they agree with each other? I believe politicians are seeing the climate change issue as an opportunity to grab more power over people. And the way politicians are heading with their solution to climate change is generally leading towards totalitarianism. It's their nature; they're all like that.
Maybe if we could just separate the politics from the science there wouldn't be nearly as many denying the science.
There is no need for alarm, everyone should just relax. Things are improving, eh. #CanadiansForGlobalWarming
Small wonder.
Half of the population have an IQ under 100, who would have thought?
that, as history has repeatedly shown, the political left loves to kill anybody who disagrees.
See: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, National Socialist German Workers Party, etc.
It's always the Marxists... Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini (headed socialist party before creating mutant socialism AKA fascism which is just indirect socialism via puppet corporations) ...
This is a problem for all the breeders of the world. I'm not having kids, so go ahead and deny global warming (real or not) all you want. It'll be your spawn that fights for resources, not me or mine. I'll start caring when immortality is achieved :)
As a thermal engineer who has looked at this issue fairly rigorously, I have come to the following conclusions on the climate change debate. Before I begin, I caution the reader that, though you may not like the facts or the sources, I suggest you avoid the logical fallacy "Damning the Source." The facts are easily discoverable and if you want to have a serious opinion on the debate, you need to do your homework (or else you are what is known as a useful idiot).
1. The climate changes: Go look at the global temperatures for the last 500k years or so. It has been both cooler and warmer than it is now, without the burning of fossil fuels. The climate has been changing for millennia and we have survived. There has been no earth shattering apocalypse. From a physics perspective, the earth rejects heat to space as a function of the absolute temperature of the planted (~288K) to the fourth power. A small change in temperature significantly increases heat rejection, making it hard for multiplicative-order changes in the emissivity of the earth (what the global warming people worry about) to significantly change the amount of heat rejected, thus elevating the temperature.
http://www.climate4you.com/ima...
2. The global warming "scientists" are the same "scientists" who were running around in the 70s saying that the next ice age was upon us. The reality is they are not scientists as they do not practice the scientific method, as it is impossible on a global scale and a sample of one, and many of the thermal interactions that they put into their models have not been tested or proven using the scientific method, they are educated guesses at best. They are either researchers, physics modelers, or mathematicians, but they are not scientists by definition. The public in large part has caught on to this in practice if not in theory, which is why "scientists" are not that well respected these days. True scientists should form a guild or association to guard the name more jealously, just as engineers (applied science experts) do (you can be heavily fined or even imprisoned for impersonating a civil, mechanical or structural engineer, depending on the state). The climate charlatans should be banned from the title of scientist and forced to use one of the above.
3. The climate change models have been wildly wrong for the last 30 plus years. Go back and dig out some of the old models predictions. These have been wrong at every turn. They may be getting better, but only time will tell. Based on past performance, they do not deserve the benefit of the doubt, especially if billions of dollars or the health of the economy are on the line.
http://cdn.thefederalist.com/w...
4. The climate change debate is now deeply intertwined with emotions, politics and research grant money on one side, and businesses and the general population on the other side. It is being fueled by politicians who see an opportunity to vilify their opposition, moral narcissists/intellectual snobs who make themselves feel better by believing that they take the moral high road and/or are smarter than their fellow citizen (hint: statistically they are smarter than some, dumber than others) and PhD's who are too stupid to get out of the rain (i.e. no common sense) but need their grant money, so they feed the pro global warming politicians more models showing warming/doom and gloom/etc. to get the next grant. It is a vicious cycle, and until we defund public research into global warming, we will continue to have this incestuous loop. I am not advocating banning climate change research, only the tax payer funding of it as a weapon for one political group to use against another, especially when intellectual fraud has been proven and the past product of the research has been junk models that have been proven inaccurate over time.
And from wha
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Well, they do willfully ignore any and all evidence that contradicts their hypothesis. And there's too much (taxpayer) money, virtue-signalling and too many opportunities for false moral superiority personal attacks to let go. Some people get a kick out of abusing others and if you can do it with government support, all the better!
when a scientist who initially buys into a theory that seems reasonable on its face, and then changes his mind after being confronted by new information, you presume he is SENILE???? You bubble-thinkers usually accuse your opponents of being bad for NOT changing their minds.... oh, I get it.... all that matters is the DIRECTION of change (silly me)
Are you a physician? Have you examined the professor before rendering your diagnosis?
Thought not. You are just as scientifically valid on your assertion of his mental state as you are about the boiling planet; you have your conclusion first and then you look for and twist everything in a dishonest PR move, just like the IPCC boys in the climate gate e-mails.
I most rational people don't disagree that the climate is changing - of course it is - its a natural process that occurs over the span of decades and centuries. It gets warmer, it gets cooler, then it gets warmer again.
Where I think the political alarmist climate change fanatics got it wrong or exaggerated is that its substantially influenced by man-made activity. What stinks about all this are the gaps in scientific integrity corrupted by politically motivated research funding and the political policies based on corrupted scientific data to drive policy, economics, and taxation in an unnatural way and those so-called world leaders who load their bank accounts with the plunder.
Nature has a remarkable way of bringing things back into equilibrium. More carbon-dioxide in the air - trees and plants grow faster and sequester the excess CO2. Someplace gets too hot - more evaporation generates cloud cover reflecting excess heat into space and storms turn thermal energy into kinetic energy.
Still, we have a responsibility to be good stewards of the planet we call home so some of the economic change.
...isn't respected by commoners with half a brain who can do research for themselves. Film at 11.
Trees and plants only grow faster if we aren't also cutting them down all over the globe (and in many cases they are just burning the wood, which creates even more CO2).
Nature's ability to rebound is severely limited when we are attacking it from every possible angle (air pollution, water pollution, deforestation, soil-exhaustion, pesticides, etc).
The earth may be a big place, with lots of hidden stabilizers, but humans are an even larger and more destabilizing force
People having contradictory opinions are rampant on here. Look at those who say they should be paid X dollars for their work because they have Y years of experience, who then turn around and steal music and movies.
Because the artists who made those works don't need to be paid for their years of experience.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Nature will undoubtedly find a new equilibrium, but there's no particular reason that it will include us.
Play Command HQ online
These positions are not at all incoherent if different people hold them, and the claim is still questionable even if one person holds them. A coherent version would be "I'm not convinced that the world is warming up, since there are methodological flaws masking what seems to be a cooling in many areas, and the parts that are warming up seem to be doing so for reasons other than actual human caused global warming, but even if it were a pure warming, I believe a warmer planet would be beneficial." Damning people for poor logic when you are guilty of it yourself is an unfortunately common activity.
There are sufficient reasons to believe both that the world is warming up and that humans are a significant part of that, but the evidence is quite shoddily gathered and mostly unquestioned in the scientific community because they already believe strongly in a nonscientific manner. Politicians then try to use this shoddy evidence in an extreme (and counterproductive) manner to push their own agendas. This is accompanied by absurd hyperbole that goes far beyond what is evident even if you take the evidence at face value. People then disbelieve this crappy evidence because it is used for absurd purposes. Then everyone acts shocked that they could be so stupid and incoherent "science deniers". No they are "political deniers" who don't want to ruin the economy and be controlled, and thus disbelieve the evidence on the basis of an inductive version of reductio ad absurdum, upon finding out about any of the myriad of flaws*. It isn't hard to understand how a rational person could disbelieve. It may be motivated cognition, but so is that of the supporters of the measures.
*For instance, heat islands, changing methodology, claiming places got hotter over time periods where they didn't, claims that heating continued when it didn't, changing their minds about previous temperatures, claiming the heat is unprecedented when it isn't, expecting a runaway effect from the heat when it has been far hotter previously, computer models that leave out extremely important factors such as actual albedo modeling including such things as clouds, etc,etc etc.
Think of your target audience as your average Trump supporter, if you talk about Pollution they know what you are talking about, if you talk about greenhouse gas emission its got nothing to do with them cos they don't have a greenhouse.
XKCD produced this graph http://xkcd.com/1732/ to shows how temperature has changed over the last 22,000 years
I know that many people don't like xkcd, but he had a nice cartoon where you can see the difference between a natural changing climate and what we have right now: Timeline
Climate science denial is therefore perhaps best understood as a rational activity that replaces a coherent body of science with an incoherent and conspiracist body of pseudo-science for political reasons and with considerable political coherence and effectiveness.
Why aren't we asking why the creation of a pseudo-science called 'climate science' is replacing a coherent body of sciences such as physics, chemistry, oceanography, and meteorology? While these true scientific disciplines have provided some credibility to the underpinnings of 'climate science', they stop short of providing a verifiable (i.e models that produce useful predictions) basis for economic policy. So, enter 'climate science'. Where the science is 'done' and no further study needs to be done or questions asked that might interfere with a political agenda.
We aren't "challenged" by it at all. We simply think that even a 4C global increase in temperature over a century is preferable to creating a system by which nations collaborate on massive intervention in the economy.
Now, Prof. Lewandowski may be too stupid to understand why we believe that, but that's his problem.
So now climate science is "basic science".
New way to suck up tax-payer funded grant money I suppose.
Her book, "Dark Money," details how US oligarchs have spent millions via interlocking institutes and think tanks to anonymize their influence on many issues in order to protect their tax breaks, subsidies, and exemptions from the law. Koch Industries, one of the top polluters in the US, outspent ExxonMobil to discredit climate scientists and fund climate deniers. People who fear change of any kind are eager to believe the claptrap that they hear and read.
After a long article on the Koch brothers,
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operations
Mayer was the target of an attempted smear campaign. Since they could not deny anything in the article, they determined to destroy her. The hired private investigation firm could find nothing in her personal life, so the Kochtopus ginned up four purported examples of plagiarism to ruin her professionally. She got wind of it. Since post-accusation denial is weaker than pre-slime attack, she obtained statements from the authors she allegedly copied from. One noted that she had credited him in the sentence after the excerpt that was omitted by the slimers. She sent those statements to the slimers, and no further attempt was made by them.
Non-Scientists ignore Scientists
XKCD produced this graph http://xkcd.com/1732/ to shows how temperature has changed over the last 22,000 years
One of my favourite recent xkcds.
They are connected very tightly by politics - well, money paying for that politics really. One of the arguments pushed strongly by the deniers is that climate change is just a trick to force companies to cut emissions, impose water discharge standards, etc. That was really the start of the PR campaign against scientists some years ago. Since some of the companies involved were donors to Republicans it all got very political.
Before the "debate" was kicked off with millions in PR money conservatives such as Thatcher were on the side of reality instead of PR. The only reason many conservatives are opposing reality King Canute style today is because of donor money from those who think climate change will be used as a reason to cut emissions, impose water discharge standards, etc and that new regulations will cut into profits.
Who knows - if it happened today instead of back then the Koch brothers and others may have donated to Hillary instead and the political situation would be the other way around, but historically it's the Republicans that decided to deny reality despite earlier conservatives listening very closely to scientists. Eisenhower would probably tell all the deniers to fuck off and let him run the country as well as he could with expert advice instead of playing stupid PR games of make believe.
Anybody who remembers a bit of chemistry and physics knows that CO2 produces a greenhouse effect. So do methane, water, and a number of other things. Way back in the 1970s, a bunch of environmental scientists documented a probable increase in global temperatures from what was already in the atmosphere, compared to pre-industrial times. It was obvious that liquidating fossil fuels by burning, producing large quantities of fossil CO2, would eventually cause problems. Due to things that aren't fully understood, a cooling cycle around the 1970s masked that in many parts of the world. The cooling is gone, the air pollution (at least in the US) that was shading things (high particulate concentrations) has been reduced, and we're making up for lost time.
The real issue is that doing something about it will cause change, and arguably cost some people the lifestyle to which they're accustomed. No amount of science, evidence, or argument will make people who see their lifestyle likely to decline change anything they do. They're not 'deniers' - rather, they're normal people who don't want things to change that they're benefiting from. The fact that things ARE changing is ignored, and will continue to be aggressively ignored, as humans and the rest of the biosphere are forced to adapt to higher temperatures whether they like it or not. And participate in a great extinction event, revealing at last that humans have not succeeded in separating themselves from the natural systems of the planet. The next millenium or 2 will not be pretty, but that's too long a timeframe for a species with a normal lifetime of less than 100 years to deal with. Most of us old farts will not be around to watch first-hand. Morally, we should be doing something about it, even if it does hurt in the short run; moral arguments don't work well in the Real World.
They have very convoluted and complicated arguments against Climate Change.
On the Economic side, you hear that the Carbon Tax, and funding for research into renewables (and smart grids, and mass energy storage, and electric cars, and etc); will have a net positive effect on the economy. Yet when you're talking with a denier - they're arguing that any tax is going to cause economic devastation and abridge everybody's quality of life and standard of living, and that shutting down all the fossil fuel jobs will leave millions unemployed. Nobody questions this claim (in the newsmedia), and rarely are the economic arguments compared or scrutinized. This is also an important point that needs to be made to climate change deniers. Where renewable investment has been made, where carbon taxes were enacted, positive, measurable benefits have been observed. Most mainstream economists actually agree with this, but those arguments are silenced in the mainstream newsmedia.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The "paper''s authors are themselves pseudo-scientists and live in their own self-contradiction pseudo-Dyson sphere of denial, of their perception of their miss-understanding of what they claim is denial, because of the money they receive.
Just for the record, there are myriad studies showing that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is steadily growing. They can indirectly trace this concentration back for thousands of years. The concentration began increasing at the beginning of the industrial age and has increased since, more rapidly in recent years. The average global temperature rise is very strongly correlated with this concentration. Enough people have done studies with the same results that it's hard to credit scientific avarice for the claims. In fact, I suspect there are many more deep pockets willing to finance bogus science disproving global warming than the government agencies (mostly) financing the work that essentially proves it. In other words, the claim that vegetation increases to keep things in balance is appealing, but apparently completely false.
most rational people don't disagree that the climate is changing
Most rational people aren't the problem.
What stinks about all this are the gaps in scientific integrity corrupted by politically motivated research funding and the political policies based on corrupted scientific data to drive policy, economics, and taxation in an unnatural way and those so-called world leaders who load their bank accounts with the plunder.
That's the great thing about this topic. Regardless if the science was funded by government with one agenda, or the oil industry with another the conclusions have turned out to be the same.
Nature has a remarkable way of bringing things back into equilibrium.
Venus would like to have a word with you.
More carbon-dioxide in the air - trees and plants grow faster and sequester the excess CO2.
Phew, just as well humans don't engage in mass deforestation.
1) Scientist may occasionally be corrupt, but it is very hard to regulate and not under the influence of a single political entity. To believe we would convince you of AGW because of financial benefits is projection (there are lots of ways to get money, all equally frustrating. In fact, it would be far easier to get money if I would try to convince people that no AGW exists)
2) Trees and plants do not necessarily grow faster with more CO2. Plant growth is limited by many factors and N and P are in many natural ecosystems far more limited than C. Increases in temp and humidity result in additional limitations on growth. In the end, the predicted increase in growth is by far outweighed by the increases in atmospheric CO2. You are trying to create your own climate model in your mind (in 30 secs or so) that is supposedly better than the ones we currently have that have costs 100rds of people many years to build and test. That does not strike me as particularly likely.
I kind of understand climate change denial, but I sort of don't.
There are many valid arguments against various proposed controls.
There are variations of the libertarian argument: That regulation is generally bad, government generally does things less efficiently than the free market, power corrupts, and so we should only give government more power to regulate after very careful consideration.
There are various arguments about the particular steps being proposed. Maybe the carbon tax idea will increase costs, but carbon producing activities are involved in products that aren't very price sensitive, and all you end up doing is causing inflation, raising tax revenue, and not doing a thing to reduce emissions. Maybe controls in a few countries will simply result in shipping high carbon manufacturing to third world nations.
There's also the nihilistic argument that it's already too late to stop the changes even if we shut everything down, so we should keep going, maintain our quality of life and our productivity, and hopefully enable developments that will allow us to survive and adapt to any future changes.
It's also legitimate to question possible social or financial pressure may have influenced results affirming climate change. This line of questioning is slightly undercut by the fact that all of the research used to contradict these results hold up even less under the same line of criticism, but it's still valid.
Yet you don't see these arguments much, whether from right-leaning internet nobodies, or actual politicians who were actually elected to office by people who presumably agree with them on quite a few things. The majority of arguments you see from the anti-regulation side are broken down into two general categories: 1) Legitimate scientific criticisms of methodology and acknowledgement of the unavoidable uncertainty present in most scientific conclusions, but phrased in such a way as to amplify the actual uncertainty in the minds of lay morons. (think variations of the "evolution is a THEORY, not a FACT" argument) 2) The uncritical, self-contradictory crap criticized in this article.
If the goal is to prevent onerous regulation meant to reduce emissions, or to stop the charlatans of the world from profiting from global warming scare mongering, there are numerous ways to do so that are 1) intellectually honest and 2) might actually convert rational, undecided people to your side. The fact that so few people are interested in more rational arguments leads me to conclude that these people aren't interested in changing policy so much as... I don't know what, really.
He means the imaginary ones that curiously only support the view taken by the vested interests who promote the denialism as exemplified by the gwpf astroturfing organisation et all
What a loaded term. How dare you 'deny' that there are flying saucers on the moon. You 'denier', you...
www.climatedepot.com
www.wattsupwiththat.com
First of all, The Guardian is hardly a neutral media source; it's rather radical left leaning with a clear agenda.
Now, let me remind everybody that global warming is a theory like everything else in science. Even the laws of nature we use every day are basically just theories, usually backed up by a lot of evidence sure, but still just theories. Plenty of laws have been struck down or modified as new evidence comes to light.
Same thing with global warming. Right now lots of evidence seems to confirm this theory so that's what we chose to believe in.
But lots of evidence also indicate that we are not seeing the whole picture. Geological data points to much more radical temperature changes in the distant past and while we have theories that can explain cooling (nuclear winter effects from volcanic eruptions or meteor impacts etc.) we still have no causes except "humans" for warming, and yet it is clear that we've had periods with a much higher average temperature than we do now, even with the global warming in effect, at times when mammals were barely invented yet, let alone anything remotely like humans.
So - I'm inclined to invoke Occam's Razor here. Given the still unknown factor at play in the distant past, I'd rather believe that the same factor is a play again than something new and complex is doing the same thing.
Note that I'm not saying that humans are not causing some warming. I'm just saying that it might not be the complete picture.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
That rather depends on what temperature readings you choose to use in the last 100 years ;-). But, everyone loves a graph that goes up at the end, whatever that might happen to mean.
Scientism is an ugly, arrogant, violent, and ultimately inhuman religion. Sprouting forth from the smoky filthy of the early industrial revolution, it has found it's greatest expressions to date in the mechanized holocaust of the Jewish people, the atomic bombs dropped on the cities of Japan, and the American robot war against the villages of Afghanistan. It is a religion whose destructive violence puts even Islam to shame.
500 million years ago the earth was about 14 C higher then it is today. The earth's average temperature, through out it's history, has been far warmer then it is today. If you only go back several thousand years or so, then yes, the earth is getting warmer.
OMG OMG the sky is falling!!!!11!!! OMG OMG the sky is falling!!!!11!!!
Wait, you don't think so? OMG OMG you're a sky falling DENIALIST!!!1!!!!!11!1 Denialist, denialist, DENIALIST, witch, witch, WITCH! Burn the witch, burn the witch, BURN THE WITCH!
You ignorant debtor redneck cishet fuckboy shitlord, you don't even deserve to live, much less have a voice in public policy. Now go fuck off to your trailer park and Walmart job, and be thankful we smart, well-connected, politically correct good people haven't yet sent the drones to liquidate you. 'Cuz everyone knows you deserve it. Now I really must get back to my ivory tower, my hand-poured artisanal coffee, and my super duper duper important job.
Let's see, where was I? Oh yes - OMG OMG the sky is falling!!!1!!!!!11!!1!!! The SKY is FALLING!!!1!!!!1!!
That's one of the arguments that climate change proponents have used to undermine their own side.
Because of course nobody who believes in climate change believes in the sun being hot, and thus Venus being hotter than the earth could not be due to it being closer to the sun.
Besides, who says the current temperature on Venus isn't the equilibrium of Venus? Everything is different there, why wouldn't the equilibrium be?
Thanks, that's a great example of how deniers promote post-factual politics. The scientists are all corrupt and taking money to say that climate change is real, despite the fact that they could make far more money shilling for oil companies. And of course, anyone who tries to do anything about it is after your money, I mean they are politicians so of course they are corrupt liars.
Have faith in your gut instinct that buying an SUV will all work out somehow, nature with fix it. As you say, plants love CO2, I mean okay maybe cutting vast numbers of trees down and replacing them with cattle doesn't help, but how can such a delicious steak, nature's bounty, be bad? And even if it is, you paying a bit more for it isn't going to fix the world, when China is even worse. Because everyone knows that they love steak in China. Why shouldn't you have it if they do?!
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Just like Creationists, climate change deniers have a REASON to not want to believe the science. It might be a stupid reason, but they hold a dogma that isn’t going to be swayed by evidence, because they do not WANT to share your conclusions. These people literally live in a fantasy world where evidence is fabricated and evil scientists across the world collude to mislead the public. (Ironic then that the deniers actively collude to mislead the public, many of whom are fully aware that they’re lying, but to this mentality, the ends justify the means.)
Creationists HAVE to have a young earth or else it breaks their religion (original sin and atonement). Climate science deniers are mostly motivated by not wanting to curb their activities because of the economic impact. Supposedly the left is all about entitlement and hand-outs to peolpe who don’t want to work, but this is an example of where the right seriously falls down in terms of personal responsibility. So they invent reasons why their activities are not irresponsible.
The root problem is the media's insitence of giving equal weight in terms of air-time to the climate change deniers to give the appearance of being balanced.
belonging to the Republican club. Since saving the world is a liberal thing, watching it burn is the conservative thing.
It's the Climate Change Alarmists who behave more like religious zealots.
Just sayin'...
You mean preachin' as it's part of today's lesson from the Church of Saint Reagan, Blessed be his Name.
Next week is a sermon on California: Bastion of Liberal Sin
1. Science is never supposed to reach a consensus on any topic. Not ever! That is the whole point of science. Countless theories and discoveries have been counteracted at a later date by new discoveries. That's how science works.
2. Climate scientists have been caught red handed many times both covering up flaws in their research as well as suppressing research that counters their findings.
3. Climate science is financially backed by fanatical political groups with certain agendas, if the findings deviate the money will dry up. There is a great deal of bias as a result of the vast sums of money influencing science for their own political agendas.
4. First it was global cooling then it was global warning now it's climate change. Well duh, the climate changes all the time, we know that is a fact. The argument is how much man has contributed to those changes. That is the real debate.
Computer models can only predict with accurate data input. Garbage In Garbage Out. We lack the input of all data in these models and very recently a paper was published where new data about the Sun's natural cycle has yet to be included in the latest computer models. In fact the climate scientists tried to suppress the publishing of this crucial paper and then refused to cooperate with combining their data with the new solar data. This new paper details the discovery of two magnetic dynamo's one deep within the sun and one near the surface. To summarize, these two dynamo's are out of sync much of the time but when they do synchronize and do so at exact magnetic opposites you end up with an enormous drop in solar radiation such as with the Maunder minimum. These scientists then modeled all their observations and predicted 370 years of solar history with the computer model to an accuracy of 98%. What do they find for the future? There will be a new solar minimum cycle peaking in 2030. The weather will likely be much like the year 1645. We are talking mini ice age. The northern hemisphere will be much much colder for decades.
Volcanic eruptions such as Krakatoa, Mount St Helens and others have done more to impact the earths climate. Krakatoa put more pollution into the atmosphere than the entire Industrial Revolution till even today. So one big volcanic event accomplished more in a few weeks than all of mans technological interference. Are we to believe that cow farts actually make any sort of difference? Automobile exhaust, coal and oil burning, they are a drop in the bucket.
Some how I am more prone to believe that the sun which is 1.3 Million times larger than the Earth and is a gigantic fusion reactor has a lot more to do with our climate than any other factor except geological volcanic disturbances. I also believe that mankind is full of itself if it thinks it could ever possibly impact the climate without eradicating every tree on the planet. This does not mean I do not care about the environment. I care very much about the environment. I want to see less pollution, less strip mining, less forest removal, etc. I want clean water. We are stewards of this earth and we should protect it. However, going down the path of the whacko's is not the answer and trying to end the debate on mankind's contribution to climate change is foolish. Especially since those backing these endeavors are extremist fascists with a historic track history of human devastation.
Get the politics out of science and let the facts speak for themselves. Open source science data, publish findings in the open and let the truth prevail. Open your eyes and see the political bias being pushed. Question everything. Do not attack those who question, as it is questioning that is the heart of science. Anyone trying to claim victory in any science debate is a fool. Ask yourself about the bias and look at who is behind that bias and what their political goals may be. The extremes would ban fossil fuels and nuclear power in favor of energy sources that are not viable. They would reduce human populations an
They should also do a study on how Scientists deny climate change, since not all scientists agree with it too.
>, and taxation in an unnatural way
Erm... please define 'unnatural' taxation, and natural while your at it. Money is not a naturally occurring thing and the laws of economics are not natural laws - they are simply conventions we agree on. There are several sets out there right now that work reasonably well and a few that work really badly but how well it works mostly consists ONLY of how good you are at convincing people to adopt the convention because that's ALL they are.
Such an entirely abstract thing cannot possibly have 'natural' or 'unnatural' as a descriptor in any sane sentence. However your use of it does reveal you as a strong anti-government probably libertarian economic conservative. The kind who always dismiss climate science based on provably false claims (like "the science is corrupted") which they never question because the reason they are fighting this theory has fuckall to do with the theory. It's an argumentum ad consequentum fallacy. They don't like the consequences of the theory (more regulation) so they claim the theory cannot possibly be true because it has consequences which they consider unpleasant.
Partly they are the kind of people who usually think that economics is a natural science governed by natural laws. Objectivist, Austrian school and Chicago School types typically. Which is doubly ironic since those, unique among all economics, are the only schools that reject empiricism making them the LEAST scientific ideas about economics we have. The only ones where, no matter how many times a bad idea fails, no matter how many times an action does NOT have the effect they predict - they never, ever change their ideas because they reject empirical data as a means of proving or disproving economic claims.
Isn't it ironic that those schools which treat economics as an engineered set of conventions - are MORE empirical than those that don't? They actually look at what happens in the real world and refine their theories when consequences consistently fail to agree with expectations.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Is there a data set for global temperatures for the last 100 years that doesn't show a sharp rise at the end? Is there one that would have continued the rather prosaic rate of change displayed in the rest of the XKCD comic?
...the negative consequences of a warmer world.
I've always assumed that the rejection of climate-change science is simply due to pattern-recognition.
There have been lots of cases where the "experts" are almost all totally incompetent. Economists who didn't see the crash of 2008 coming. Educational "leaders" who keep forcing new, ridiculous teaching methods on an unwilling public. Psychiatrists who prescribe drugs that are almost indistinguishable from placebos. 1970s-era climate scientists who predicted a new ice-age that didn't materialize.
I suspect that many people have been subconsciously "keeping score" over the decades -- tallying up in their minds all the cases where the "experts" have proven themselves utterly incompetent. As a result, our culture has become increasingly cynical about the abilities of the "experts". In light of this cynicism, it's quite natural for someone to ask: "Why should I believe anyone who studies extremely complex systems, when we know of so many cases where the 'experts' have demonstrated utter incompetency in understanding those complex systems?"
The underlying culprit, of course, is pseudo-science. Pseudo-science tends to flourish whenever people study extremely complex processes, such as economy, learning, biology, psychology, and climate. Pseudo-science is the single most insidious thing that can infect the human mind. It is extremely difficult to detect in general; and a person becomes absolutely powerless to perceive it once they fall victim to it. Pseudo-science is like a drug that strips people of their cognitive ability to even recognize that they're under the influence of its intoxication. It's almost as if the human mind is specifically constructed to be blind to pseudo-science. I suspect that quick, shallow theory-making was so crucially important to our ancestors, that our brains evolved to favor shallow theory-making over rational logic, and to make sure that those theories are in firm control of our thinking and behavior. That trait might have helped us survive in the stone age, but it's hurting us badly in the modern era.
The widespread embrace of pseudo-science has "poisoned the well" for anyone who attempts to analyze complex systems. Sadly, even if a scientific community is able to avoid falling into the trap of pseudo-science, the public will remain skeptical of its findings. That skepticism is perfectly rational behavior, and is the natural result of the one single thing that humans are the most adept at doing: recognizing patterns, and applying prejudices based on those patterns.
Seems to be a new denialist meme.
Why did the chart end at the last ice age? It would be really interesting to see what a graph going back longer than that would reveal about temperature differences over time.
It's amazing how he can determine temperatures to fractions of a degree 20,000 years ago and predict it to the same accuracy in the future. Just amazing.
How about a little bit of intellectual honesty...
The truth is, that those who politicized Global Warming are the #1 reason it is questions.
1. Scientific Consensus - dumbest claim, there has been a consensus about nearly every wrong belief in science. Until it was disproved. A claim of consensus is NOT a scientific argument.
2. Scientific studies - the track record of many, if not most, scientific studies is very poor.
> The amount of financially influenced studies.
> Incorrect studies.
> Out-and-out fraudulent studies
All lead to skepticism. Remember, this is the generation in which every dietary instruction of the 80's all derived from so-called scientific studies, have no essentially been disproven.
Furthermore, the science of studying studies has some interesting results. The fact that bad studies often are more influencing. The fact that most studies, even those purported to use proper techniques, cannot be reproduced. And it's not just limited to psychology studies.
http://www.economist.com/news/...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
https://www.jove.com/blog/2012...
3. Bad and untrustworthy science. The big problem that GW has is that they burned a lot of credibility. They did this by seeking a desired result and bending data to their expectations - that's bad science.
a. Most of the climate science involved taking multiple divergent data sets (satellite records, mercury records, tree ring records, ice records, etc) and merge them into one large pan-historic set. The problem is, there really is NO WAY to truly do that. And a certain part of that requires guesswork.
Rather than be honest about the guess work, they erred by choosing what best fit their goals. When you're debating an increase in a degree or two, yet are dealing with that much variability. The guesswork often exceeds the statistical data.
b) There has been criticism of the "recording centers" and strong, scientific based observation that many of those record keeping centers have been compromised.
c) Statements made directly contradicted with historical evidence. While they later made adjustments to correct, it wasn't until they were pressed hard publicly and politically.
d) Scientific models used for predictions, but fail to correlate. When ALL the models used fail to properly predict, it is clear that the models are not accurate. I believe the Russian model which was far less extreme was the only one that came close to being on track.
e) Media claims. Weather NOT Climate. Dumb BS. How many times have I been told weather isn't climate. And I am told this, in debates discussing weather being used to claim climatic warming. *facepalm*
Recently, there was a report that a spring was hottest on record. I laughed, because we had one of the coldest springs and I joked that the media would still claim it was the hottest on record. I said that as a joke, not expecting it to be true. Okay, so it was....and my thought was regional vs continental vs global. I expected the data to show that my region was cooler than average, but that the continent overall was warmer, and so was the globe. But then I looked at the temperature index maps. And my region was listed as above average temps for the spring. Okay, gotta call BS....when we're having one of the coldest springs, everyone is wondering if summer is even going to come, and I've lost a ton of crops due to extremely late frosts. And you are trying to tell me that I had an above average temperature spring. Bullshit. And that is the crap pe
You're confusing "concepts" with "predictive models". Yes, you can understand the greenhouse effect easily with an aquarium and a small plant. But trying to correlate disparate data across historical eras and fabricate that into an accurate predictive model is extremely complicated. And interestingly enough, something the Global Warming advocates have not succeeded in doing.
And when others point out flaws in your data collection and highlight bias in your attempts to correlate different temperature records, rather than honestly reviewing and adjusting those scientifically. You lash out in a political spectrum. Hmm....who is being scientific and who is not.
There is a site that documents thousands of temperature recording devices throughout the U.S. That site, scientifically, with accurate observation, demonstrated that a huge number of the locations had been affected by urban development. And yet, every global warming advocate I know, seems to trash and dismiss that. But that is sound scientifically documented information. So when we see crap like that, we understand that most folks here on Slashdot, are not about science but rather are enraptured by religion. Their belief is in the name of science, not the application of it.
Honestly, I think if such were taken into account and more of the critics were accepted into the scientific process, that we would succeed in developing a more accurate model. That model would likely show that yes, the world is warming, in part by a combination of the solar and manmade activities. And that the warming isn't quite as alarming but does require addressing mankind's general nature of polluting.
Once you remove all add-ons you are left with "there is a group of people which believe there was a holy man named Jesus of Nazareth who had a number of followers, and was put to death by the Romans." AFAIR he does not directly speaks of J, but of the believer of J.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Every time a global warming advocate exclaims "Weather isn't Climate" a moron is born.
Sorry, can you STFU with that line. We understand it far better than you all, who use every weather incident as an argument to your case. And the irony, is that I see this argument pitched repeatedly, when a skeptic or critic hasn't even made a claim about weather. You want a reason why people disbelieve, it's because of idiots like you who always retort "Weather isn't Climate" but then ignore the fact that well gee....critics are blasted repeatedly everytime weather occurs. Too many hurricanes, too few hurricanes, too much snow, too little snow, too much rain, not enough rain, heck.....I even heard the lack of sunspots was do to global warming.
At worst, Global Warming wipes out humanity, frankly, this would be a good thing for the planet.
For those collections exceeds the temperature increase in question. Your point?
Cutting down pollution is fine as long as everybody has to do it. Pouring oil down the drain in one place isn't less polluting than in another place because there is a law on the books in that place and not in the other. The point being that so-called developing countries don't get a pass on emissions just because they are developing countries. To do so is nothing more than fascist economics. When China and India have to meet precisely the same standards at precisely the same time, then I will believe that climate change is something other than wealth redistribution and a basis for non-productive individuals to attain power.
How about, a warm weak in February, followed by an unusually long and cool spring. Extremely late frosts. Everyone in the region wondering if Summer is every coming. And then I joke that no worries, the media will report that it was the hottest spring on record.
Sure enough, they do just that. The irony of course....is that I exclaimed, hey, regional != global. So I expected to look at the temperature map and see my region slightly cool, and the rest of North America and the northern hemisphere warmer. Lo, and behold, my region was listed as unusually warm.
That's when I call bullshit. But the sad thing, I predicted the bullshit. So who's agenda is being pushed that false information needs to be purported in the name of science?
And it sure sucked having half my fruit crops wiped out by late frosts. Did I mention, one of my crops is an Siberian kiwi?
And the number one group to confuse the two are Global Warming advocates who use every weather incident as backing.
But as a computer programmer, I am also very much aware of when the requirements constantly change, and shift, and we have to repeatedly modify the code to meet what the client claims they wanted all along. ;-)
We also fix our bugs, and don't claim they never existed.
This is largely based on the fact that so much falsehood has been presented to individuals.
The irony, is the number of conspiracies that have born out to be true. Bilderbergs, Tuscagy experiments, NSA monitoring and recording of phone conversations, CIA drug trafficking, modern art, putting the Shah in power in Iran, government poisoning of alcohol during prohibition, fats aren't as bad as the sugar industry wanted us to believe...and so many others.
So of course, folks are going to be more inclined. Especially when so many lies are told, politicians get caught in them all the time (*cough* Hillary)
It's the Climate Change Alarmists who behave more like religious zealots.
Just sayin'...
Damn straight. The worst of what's coming won't happen until most of us are dead, so party on. Who gives a fuck about our great grandchildren, right?
That's the problem. Its complex science. Its difficult to understand the findings for non-climatologists and non-mathematicians. When you take a multi-variable equation and put in front of someone who is neither mathematician nor climatologist its just a bunch of fooey. The result is that you get the findings out via a source that is increasingly seen as unreliable- the press.
So then you run into the problem of smart people who can figure things like this out wanting to ask questions about the equations being used so that can see for themselves what the deal is and EVERYONE from top to bottom screams at them that they are a climate-denier. No, they are a curious party who wants to understand the findings. Teach them. Stop screaming at them and making them into the modern day version of a witch.
Anecdotally, i have talked to climate scientists who treat people the same way. Oh its because of ice core drillings show these results. What do those results indicate? Are you questioning me? Yes, yes i am because i want to understand.
Take your "basic science" and put it in a form that the layman can understand. Its going to take a lot more effort that Al Gore talking about the hockey stick chart because climate change is not predicated solely upon CO2. Its a complex set of interactions between a lot of different chemicals and the sun's energy output. Its neither easy to understand nor easy to explain in simplified terms but until you do so there is no doubt that there will be people who think you are lying.
First of all, there was really no climatologist until recently. Go look at the degrees of MOST so-called climate experts. Guess what.....
Most are physicists, marine scientists, geologists, botanists, meteorologists.
Oh, and the climategate were cleared of "deliberate fraud", they were not cleared of poor scientific method.
Many scientists have solidly proved climate change is real but anthropomorphic climate is not; for the most part. As a result of political agendas, and conspiracy, those scientists are under massive assault.
It is on record that NOAA, NASA and AMOS have manipulated and, in some cases, outright falsified data.
*fail community
"Bananas grow" as well, bananas haven't had sex in years and have ceased reproducing. As such, bananas are merely on a long death spiral to extinction. Not a single new banana plant has grown in decades....
Don't you know "Weather isn't Climate"
Don't mention facts!
Or the fact that technically, the Earth is still in an ice age. See proof, polar ice caps. How dare you mention the fact that the earth has been ice free, and life thrived.
Bad bad bad.....
Is the fact that they present Global Warming advocates with scientific facts, and the response is always.....one of the two.
"Weather isn't Climate" (um, we weren't talking about weather, we were showing your data collection methods were inaccurate and that the measurements you recorded did not match the actual values that occurred).
"Refuse to believe in science...they're like religious!" (um, fact, we showed you documented observable, repeatable evidence of temperature measurement sites that were far out of spec, and could not be utilized for the data collection you were trying to record. You ignored absolute science for your dogmatic beliefs).
"Garbage in, Garbage out" your science is only as good as your data collection.
Math and Economics Deniers continue to ignore the Inconvenient Truth that is the $10-Trillion dollar debt. Economists around the world agree the debt is growing at a rate many times that of Global Warming(tm) and yet the Socio-Political Complex does nothing. When will these troglodytic Math & Economic Deniers come to their senses? They won't -- follow the debt-based money.
So, where is the study about all the uninformed non-scientists PUSHING fake AGW?
I wanna see a study on all the nonsense spouted by Katie Couric, or even the local news idiots about AGW and its impact.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
It is actually comical that the views espoused by these nutty deniers are in fact part of an actual conspiracy amongst oil companies such as Exxon to delay action on climate change as much as possible. Their actions have deeply damaged the level of public discourse in America, and have thus damaged democracy itself.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
It is a globalist political agenda. Science has been taken over by those with political motives. They aren't factoring in solar output, or the fact that the doomsday predictions have done anything BUT come true. In the 1970s, global cooling/new ice age was the hysterical message. That was wrong/didn't happen either.
I mean, I've seen the term used in many contexts - towards those who actually deny that global warming is happening, to those who just need clarification on various arguments, and those who ponder how responsible humans actually are. In short, the term has been used and abused so much that it really needs refocus if it is to be taken seriously, IMO.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
That's not true, as other replies demonstrate, but even if it were true, it's not evidence of super-natural backing.
Evidence of existence of him as a person is not the same as evidence of him having super-natural powers or connections.
I personally don't doubt that the scriptures are based on an actual person or persons (to various degrees), but the supernatural angle requires stronger evidence. "Bob said he saw the guy cure lepers" is not strong evidence. For one, we should give Bob a sobriety test first.
Table-ized A.I.
They have their own garden of eden story, where Earth was a paradise before it was spoiled by man. Each person born has an original sin - of breathing, and using resources. As religions go, it is an apocalyptic one: unless you convert, not only will you perish, but so will all of humanity. They have their sacred holiday in the spring, which is observed worldwide and promoted by all the media and government. To convert, you need to practice certain sacred rituals - the sorting of trash, the purchase of particular "blessed" "green" products. Indulgences are offered as well - one must buy carbon credits to offset the sin that is one's existence, in order to be "clean". Their food must be prepared in accordance to their traditions: organically. They have their sacred texts; Earth in the Balance, Silent Spring, Inconvenient Truth, etc. They have a list of sacred totem animals they worship: the polar bear, the dolphin, the snail dart...all of which they value more than any human. They have their prophets; Al Gore, Rachel Carson, Michael Mann. And they have their heretics - oil companies in particular, industry in general, and deniers everywhere. Deniers that they openly compare to Nazis, want to tax oppressively, lock up, and censor - so they have their inquisition, too. (They'd probably burn you at the stake, as well, if not for the carbon.) This religion is also completely endorsed by our government - separation of church and state be damned - and we are forced by law in many ways to conform to its dogma. We are forced to tithe to it's churches and agenda. We are forced to obey it's edicts and regulations. To sacrifice on their altars. They think that the oceans are rising, even though they aren't; that the world is getting warmer, even though it isn't; that the ice is melting, even though it's not. But, most of all, they believe. With all their hearts. And they won't rest until you do, too.
Climate science is entirely falsifiable - it just hasn't been falsified despite all the fortunes spent on trying to do so. Nobody has yet managed to do a real experiment that showed CO2 NOT acting as a greenhouse gas (that would falsify it). Nobody has yet found a single shred of evidence that disproves the theory - while there are thousands of independent sources of evidence that all support it, and nobody has yet come up with a better explanation for the observations than that offered by climate change theory.
Any of these things would:
1) Falsify the theory
2) Win you a nobel prize
3) Guarantee you tenure and an endless supply of grant money for the rest of your life at any academic institution of your choosing.
Basically EVERY incentive is to disprove climate change.
The failure of those trying to actually falsify something does not imply it is not falsifiable. It implies the theory is almost certainly correct.
At this stage, the most single most tested scientific theory in the history of science is so unlikely to be false - that we will almost certainly never see it replaced, modified and gradually improved - yes, replaced probably not. At least not for the next several centuries. Because at this point the only thing that could do so is an observation that actually does not fit the theory. It took 500 years for technology to give us a measuring device that could pick up the things that didn't quite follow Newton, and I'd say it will take about twice that long before something fundamentally alters climate science.
If you set the bar at CO2 causing warming, humans raising CO2 levels and things getting warmer, you are right about those being well established. We aren't gonna upset or falsify that anytime soon.
News flash, policy and behaviour changes aren't really driven by any of those points. What's the severity of the future we face is the question. On that we have two examples below:
1.The IPCC worst case scenario, with 95% confidence levels cited sea level rise relative to today of no more than 3ft by 2100
2.Adam Fenech, a Nobel Prize-winning climate scientist and the director of the Climate Research Lab at the University of Prince Edward Island:"A lot of the most recent science is telling us it could rise as much as three metres during that time," says Fenech. "Probably in about 50 years, with a three-metre increase, we'd probably lose about half the island under water completely."
So we have a Nobel winning committee declaring no more than 3 feet in 100 years, and a Nodel winning research director predicting 3 metres in 50 years. One of these are gonna be falsified, and the scope of difference in their predictions makes an outrageous difference to what our responses should be.
Map the two major sides in the GW debate to research grant funding.
Hmm, I tow the line, I get money.
I do real research, I may or may not get money.
Oh, and I have an expensive wife and a Porsche payment in a week.
What side will I lean towards?
Well, yeah, it's called science.
Is there a data set for global temperatures for the last 100 years that doesn't show a sharp rise at the end? Is there one that would have continued the rather prosaic rate of change displayed in the rest of the XKCD comic?
You are missing the point. The data trend of the last 100 years on the graph coincides not just with the industrial age, it coincides with the data source for the graph changing too. The proxy data reconstruction ends at 1900, and from 1900 on the data source changes to the instrumental record.
There's plenty of reason to argue it's a reasonable step to take, but you can't exactly say it's unfair to point out that the change in data source might also play a role in the sharp delta starting at that exact point in the graph.
XKCD produced this graph http://xkcd.com/1732/ to shows how temperature has changed over the last 22,000 years
xkcd is great, but the data he referenced follows the infamous "hide the decline" trick. The 'trick' is nothing more than using the instrumental temperature record to fill in gaps or quality in data. For the proxy records cited going back 20k years, the accuracy and precision over the last 100 is poor and the authors themselves state as much. Thus, to complete the data set through to today the instrumental record is included from 1900 onwards.
Nothing really wrong with that. The only caveat is in how you interpret the graph. If you look at the graph and observe that there is an unprecedented trend set off at 1900, the beginning of the industrial era you have to be careful. The unprecedented trend ALSO coincides with a change in methodology and data source in the graph. Ruling out how sensitive the proxy data is to short term spikes like today is vitally important to interpreting that part of the graph well, and we're still working that.
Religion will be the end of us all!
Christians condemn those that believe the world is flat and the Earth is NOT the center of the Universe.
The Christian Inquisition murdered those failing to believe in their religion.
So do Islamic extremists.
Republican Bible thumpers insist climate change is not happening, and 'God' will save believers.
On the other hand, all you science fact twisters need to stop lying or you will burn in hell!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Scientists agree the earth was hotter before man was around so saying recent years are hottest known are simply not true.
"So if you want an additional tip as to why people (including scientists, for I am one) reject climate change "science" - here's a big hint: follow the scientific method" "Perhaps the confusion arises because social sciences people are actually starting to believe that they are "scientists" because they took Poli Sci."
Here's Adam Fenech, a Nobel Prize-winning climate scientist and the director of the Climate Research Lab at the University of Prince Edward Island:"A lot of the most recent science is telling us it could rise as much as three metres during that time," says Fenech. "Probably in about 50 years, with a three-metre increase, we'd probably lose about half the island under water completely."
That's a claim being made TODAY, by a well credentialed leader of a climate research lab. I'm thinking that's not gonna pan out, the IPCC vehemently agrees.
The point is that a lot of the gloom and doom forecasts being used to push policy changes are CONTRARY to the IPCC projections, and are still coming from 'scientists'. Guys like Hansen aren't much better and get a lot of press.
I don't deny warming, I just do not give a chit. I OPPOSE reducing access to cheap abundant reliable energy, NO MATTER THE CONSEQUENCES. New York rebuilt 200 feet uphill is NO BIG DEAL. War, injustice, poverty - THOSE are big deals and fossil fuel powers the REDUCTION in the REAL problems.
Idiotic to think that "This is a change that could harm us, therefor we must act" makes any sense at all.
You communist ecolotarians just hate the fact that we change your world without your consent.
Well, WE HATE THE FACT THAT SOME OF YOU THINK WE NEED YOUR PERMISSSION.
So far, the solution to climate change has been to let other countries continue to increase their CO2 output. Just as long as they aren't Western countries.
Do you see why people might be pissed off about that? If it were really such a problem, China should have been restricted long ago. Effectively, the export of manufacturing to China has been an export of pollution.
It all seems like a sham so some offshoring investors could make a bit of cash.
Scientists on GMO : GMO are incredibly beneficial to mankind and unharmful
Liberals : Monsanto must die
Climate scientists on climate change : the Earth is warming
Liberals : let's do a study on criminal deniers
The bible is a collection of stories that are really lessons - all designed to guide people away from common life mistakes and to help them lead a good and fulfilling life. Most are not meant to be "Non-fiction" stories. Think of it in the vain of generalized lessons like "Live by the sword, die by the sword." As for climate change denial, I've decided that nothing will wake them up until they see something unexplainable happen in their lives. I denied climate change until I personally witnessed 2 mass extinction events. The second of which completely devastated my local environment. There was nothing I could do be research "why" it happened. But, by then, it was too late to do anything about it except cry over what was lost.
For me it all comes down to a lack of evidence. Scientists only have 100 years worth of weather data to model patterns against millions of years of existence on the planet. That's like comparing a software bug that happens 0.000001% of the time and saying that is the norm for that program.
Another factor is, that for giant reptiles to have been able to roam the earth, it would have had to of been a lot warmer than it is now. There wasn't any cars or human induced CO2 then, so why was it warmer then? No one can definitively prove that a warming cycle isn't just that, a warming cycle. We've clearly had cooling cycles, with known ice ages as a result, so why wouldn't it be commonsense to assume the opposite could happen as well?
Liberals, put the shoe on the other foot. Why do you deny when life begins? Scientists point to conception. No scientist says that the third trimester has any event as significant. Abortion is (scientifically and semantically) murder, but we choose a non-scientific event to say what is morally and legally acceptable.
When I "deny" Global Warming (oops - I mean Global Climate Change), I am simply asserting that it isn't "settled science." Sure, CO2 levels rising is scary, but is it as scary as the 1970 fuel shortage or the 2008 housing crisis? Why don't the predictions hold true? Why are the headlines false? For example, you all know the ice caps are melting. But in fact, that's only the Arctic. 2014 saw record Antarctic ice, and 2016 is running just a bit above average. Islands going under? Sure, some are going away. But a recent study says that while 20% have eroded, 40% have stayed the same size while 40% have gained.
Climate science is entirely falsifiable - it just hasn't been falsified despite all the fortunes spent on trying to do so. Nobody has yet managed to do a real experiment that showed CO2 NOT acting as a greenhouse gas (that would falsify it). Nobody has yet found a single shred of evidence that disproves the theory - while there are thousands of independent sources of evidence that all support it, and nobody has yet come up with a better explanation for the observations than that offered by climate change theory.
Any of these things would:
1) Falsify the theory
2) Win you a nobel prize
3) Guarantee you tenure and an endless supply of grant money for the rest of your life at any academic institution of your choosing.
Basically EVERY incentive is to disprove climate change.
The failure of those trying to actually falsify something does not imply it is not falsifiable. It implies the theory is almost certainly correct.
At this stage, the most single most tested scientific theory in the history of science is so unlikely to be false - that we will almost certainly never see it replaced, modified and gradually improved - yes, replaced probably not. At least not for the next several centuries. Because at this point the only thing that could do so is an observation that actually does not fit the theory. It took 500 years for technology to give us a measuring device that could pick up the things that didn't quite follow Newton, and I'd say it will take about twice that long before something fundamentally alters climate science.
If you set the bar at CO2 causing warming, humans raising CO2 levels and things getting warmer, you are right about those being well established. We aren't gonna upset or falsify that anytime soon.
News flash, policy and behaviour changes aren't really driven by any of those points. What's the severity of the future we face is the question. On that we have two examples below:
1.The IPCC worst case scenario, with 95% confidence levels cited sea level rise relative to today of no more than 3ft by 2100
2.Adam Fenech, a Nobel Prize-winning climate scientist and the director of the Climate Research Lab at the University of Prince Edward Island:"A lot of the most recent science is telling us it could rise as much as three metres during that time," says Fenech. "Probably in about 50 years, with a three-metre increase, we'd probably lose about half the island under water completely."
So we have a Nobel winning committee declaring no more than 3 feet in 100 years, and a Nodel winning research director predicting 3 metres in 50 years. One of these are gonna be falsified, and the scope of difference in their predictions makes an outrageous difference to what our responses should be.
downvoted as over rated, with zero votes with a post that consists virtually nothing more than 2 statements of fact backed with a link to an external quote of a highly credentialed scientist. Thanks for the reminder why I so rarely bother posting anything here anymore.
Let's see...the question is not whether the climate is changing but how fast. It normally doesn't make large global changes in decades or centuries.
Your opinion of the politics involved is irrelevant to the truth. In fact, it's really really hard to run a global scientific conspiracy, and the data has been verified all over the place.
What we know: global temperature has been rising really fast. There's more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and it got there by people burning fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, so if there's more in the atmosphere you'd expect the global temperature to go up.
Nature does tend to create equilibrium, but not necessarily the one we want. It certainly isn't the pre-industrial one, since carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has gone up from about 280 parts per million in 1850 to over 400 today. There are things that do sequester excess carbon dioxide, and they're overwhelmed by the rate we're releasing it. (If you like, you can verify that we're putting significant numbers of parts per million of carbon dioxide into the air. It requires a few quick facts and a very basic knowledge of chemistry.)
You're making up the stuff about more evaporation bouncing all the excess heat; if that were the case, we'd still have pretty much the same global temperature as in 1850. Storms turn thermal energy into kinetic energy to some extent, true, but when the storm is over the kinetic energy is gone, and kinetic energy has a habit of winding up as heat.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Yes, there are many scientists out there who support the climate change theory; however, there are a few scientists who are out there who deny this theory. I'm not talking wacko, basement-dwelling, shade-tree scientists, I'm talking PhDs, people who have gone through the schooling. There are orders of magnitude more of us who have no schooling in the climate sciences whatsoever. So, how can we, as laypeople, possibly know which accredited scientists are correct and which ones are not? The only way to really know is to go through all of the schooling and do the research ourselves. Even then, this is not 100% certain. I know this sounds like tinfoil-hat wearing, conspiracy theorist fear-mongering, but it is the truth.
Catholic Inquisitors study why the blasphemers deny the empirical evidence of God.
We just replace the implements of torture with other reputation, career and financial tortures.
> "I think that people who deny basic science will continue to do so, no matter how contradictory their arguments may be,"
Tell me, what's contradictory about thinking that the UNCC has been caught fudging their data and covered it up, leaving the same people running it, that the NOAA has been changing their measurement protocols and then fudging pre and post data together, and that Liberals chose Clinton to be their nominee because they are comfortable with lying and corruption? You love to throw around the label "climate change denier" but you won't bother to study why people don't trust what you are telling them. Between Clinton lying her head off while spouting about the need for half a million new solar panels (which will be a huge boon for China but will pauper the United States and remove hundreds of thousands more jobs, and drive the economy, already a subject of major lying and retconning of statistics to make them look less dire) and the UN's frank admission that "global warming" is "a good way to combat capitalism" why do you THINK we are no longer buying what you are selling? You are judged by the company you keep, Bub, and you are keeping company with some of the most corrupt organizations in the world.
"Global warming" is probably happening. Where you are going wrong is this smug assumption on your part that that means Americans have to transfer trillions of dollars they don't have into the pockets of Democrat interests. When you start requiring China to toe that line, MAYBE it will be time to take you more seriously. Because cleaning up the clean spot on the planet while ignoring the dirtiest spots is akin to the drunk searching for his keys under the light post, not because he dropped them there, but because the light is better.
Oh - and one more thing: when you come clean about how "clean power" is going to really affect the environment, I might listen a little better. The fact of the matter is, the high-power solar systems are cooking birds so badly that they have to clean up the charred corpses before they allow filming of the sites, and Obama himself has quietly signed an Executive Order allowing wind turbines to continue to shred up to 4400 raptors a year. How long do we figure they can take those kinds of losses before we admit "clean power" is cleaning out the eagle and hawk populations? Let's hear you admit those "inconvenient truths" the the animal-rights people before making us listen to your pointless, exploitive lectures.
Changing the status quo == costing me money.