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National Geographic Releases Alarming Climate Change Movie 'Before the Flood' On YouTube (youtube.com)
dryriver writes: National Geographic's Climate Change movie "Before The Flood," featuring actor-activist Leonardo DiCaprio, can now be viewed freely on Youtube. One of the most interesting points in the movie comes at around the 23 minute mark. At 23 minutes, scientist Michael E. Mann, famous for co-discovering the "hockey stick graph" via eigenvector based climate field reconstruction (CFR), recounts how media like the Wall Street Journal demonized him for his research, how he received death threats from unknown sources, how Congress grilled him about whether his scientific methods are credible, and how he even received an envelope in the mail with strange white powder in it. The movie is worth watching because it shows very clearly that a) man-made climate change is happening and that b) the negative effects of climate change are already impacting many areas of the world.
Just dropping three points here:
* Sea levels *are* rising, and its negatively impacting the lives of people already, today: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/...
* greenland ice is melting http://www.independent.co.uk/e...
* glaciers are melting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
All three of these things are hopefully undisputable.
Yes, science isn't sure about everything, but it is quite sure about this, sure enough that it should be trusted. And please do base your political decision on what the scientific consensus provides, everything else would be totally irresponsible.
Well said. I'd just like to add:
Disputes over the key scientific facts of global warming are more prevalent in the popular media than in the scientific literature, where such issues are treated as resolved, and more prevalent in the United States than globally.
source
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
http://www.washingtontimes.com...
Alternative Right.
There are literally 303 references to back up the information in the article linked by GP. I'd say there's a lot more credibility there than there is in your random internet comment.
Yes, and those are entirely reasonable things to do when people come up with "new statistical methods" and demand immediate action.
I'm sorry, but no.
Death threats are never an appropriate response.
If your side thinks that they need to issue death threats to rebut a scientific argument, this is basically evidence that they are not arguing with the science.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
No one (except the really silly) deny climate change. They are skeptical of the MAN MADE portion of that.
If they were in fact skeptical, that would be fine. But there are far too many people who have one-sided skepticism: they are not merely skeptical but completely unwilling to listen to one side-- the actual science--but completely credulous to claims by people with no actual expertise at all saying that they science is wrong.
In fact, there are good reasons to think that human-produced carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gasses emitted into the atmosphere, has an effect on climate. The current measurements of about 1C increase in average global temperature is well in line with what you'd expect from the basic physics. So far, there really isn't a credible alternate model.
...We emit orders of magnitude more CO2 than volcanism and nobody questions whether volcanism influences the climate.
Well, yes... but primarily volcanoes affect climate by emitting volcanic aerosols, which reduce sunlight and cause temporary cooling. It's not due to their carbon dioxide emissions, which are (as you point out) very small compared to human emissions. The aerosols are, actually, an excellent natural experiment that allows us to see the effects of a reduction in solar input.
[snip] ... If you want to be taken for anything but a troll, your trolls are going to have to address these points directly, and not just go on a rant about Al Gore. That shit is old.
I will agree with that! Al Gore isn't a climate scientist, he isn't cited by climate scientists, he isn't even talked about by climate scientists. He's a politician who held the vice presidency, a not-very-important office, two decades ago. Really, if somebody's only contribution to talking about climate is to bring up Al Gore, about all I can think is that they don't know anything and don't have anything substantive to say about the subject.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Science is never settled. It's always open to re-evaluation upon presentation of new evidence.
You don't seem to understand what "settled" means. "Settled" doesn't mean that new evidence is rejected; it means we've reached the point where the burden of proof is clearly on one side of a question.
If you invent a perpetual motion machine, a physicist isn't obliged to consider your position carefully. He just says, "That violates conservation of energy." and he's done. This is useful, and indeed necessary feature of the way science works; otherwise scientists would spend all their time re-litigating well-established results because some crackpot had a brainstorm.
Nonetheless it is possible to mount a credible attack on settled science. Retroviruses turned the whole "central dogma of molecular biology" on its head. Yes, they actually called it that. And there are serious attempts at overturning conservation of momentum using quantum theory. An attack on a well-established theory has to be narrow in its specific claims and impeccably supported. If it succeeds, then the burden of proof is subsequently altered.
We've reached the point where it's unreasonable to demand scientists spend their disproving your beliefs about what is happening to climate and why. It doesn't mean you can't attack the theory of anthropogenic climate change, you just do it from a point where the burden of proof is on you.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Maybe the best way to get certain folks on board is to present information with a sense of self-skepticism and talk about the uncertainties rather than having movie starts tell us disaster is upon us and not even acknowledge those uncertainties.
Right there you're showing that you're not familar with the actual science. If you would read, for example, the IPCC Working Group 1 report, there is exhaustive discussion of the uncertainties-- the whole report repeatedly addresses how well do we know what we know, what are the sources of uncertainty, how much uncertainty is there, and what do we need to do to reduce our uncertainty.
If you want "talk about uncertainties", look at the actual science, where uncertainties are laid out in detail, not at the popular media (and certainly not at the blogger commentary.)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
http://leonardodicaprio.org/
What's your contribution?
Perhaps an example would help.
Suppose you write a scientific paper which states, offhand, that T-Rex was a cold-blooded theropod dinosaur of the late Cretaceous period, about 70 million years ago. Since the thermoregulation of dinosaurs is currently still an open question, you have to support any definite an unqualified claim of cold-bloodlessness with evidence. However you don't have a burden of proof on the taxonomic classification or geological period because those questions are currently settled and everyone knows the evidence supporting those conclusions.
Now suppose I write a paper that says T-Rex was a warm-blooded theropod dinosaur which went extinct 4000 years ago because it wouldn't fit on Noah's ark. I could actually do that. I wouldn't have to justify saying T-Rex was a theropod dinosaur, but if I wanted people to take me seriously (i.e., publish me in an actual scientific journal), I'd have to supply proof for every other claim in that sentence. I'd have a burden of proof to show that dinosaurs are warm-blooded (because that's an open question), that they lived 4000 years ago (because that contradicts settled science) and that the Noah's ark story is factually true (because that contradicts settled science).
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"You judged something as either good or bad on the basis of where it comes from, or from whom it came.
I'm not sure that is a logical fallacy. Breitbart has very little credibility. I've encountered tried fact checking a few articles in the past and every time they seem to boil down to unsourced facts or experts who appear to have little expertise. Sometimes you get blog posts with no backing too.
Once you've debunked the first 5 Breitbart articles and not had a single one which comes up as vaguely sound, one can entirely reasonably conclude that the source is unsound and so anything pointing to Breitbart as a source has no credibility.
That doesn't of course prove the claim it false, it just means the claim has no veracity, much as if there was no corroborating source.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The current trend is no statisically significant warming for about 18 years,
No, it's not. You're quoting denier talking points from several years ago. The purported "pause"-- which never reached the level of statistical significance-- went back to a rising trend years ago. http://blogs.discovermagazine.... Get some up-to-date talking points, why not?
and considering how few sunspots there have been lately, it's likely to cool down a bit as well.
Considering that meteorologists and climate scientists have been looking for a link between sunspots and temperature for over a hundred years now, and have still failed to find any link, this is a speculation that doesn't seem to have any evidence. The latest solar cycle (24) was lower than the previous one... but the temperature rise during this cycle was more than during the previous one. So, if anything, the most recent solar cycles show the opposite from what you suggest.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com