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New Analysis Shows Lamar Smith's Accusations On Climate Data Are Wrong (arstechnica.com)
Layzej writes from a report via Ars Technica: In 2015, NOAA released version 4 of their marine temperature dataset called ERSST. The new dataset accounted for a known cooling bias introduced when ocean temperature measurements transitioned from being taken in ship engine intake valves to buoy-based measurements. The warming of the last couple decades increased ever so slightly in NOAA's new analysis. This was a red flag for U.S. House Science Committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-TX), who rejects the conclusions of climate science -- like the fact that the Earth's climate is warming. Suddenly he wanted to see the researchers' e-mails and echoed the accusations of contrarian blogs about scientists' supposedly nefarious adjustments to sea surface temperature measurements. Rather than invoking scientific conspiracies, issues like this should be settled by analyzing the data. A new study, led by University of California Berkeley's Zeke Hausfather, does just that -- and Rep. Smith won't like these results, either. To test the NOAA dataset, Zeke's team created instrumentally homogeneous temperature records from sensors available only over the last couple decades. As it happens, the Argo float data, the buoy data, and the satellite data each hew closer to the updated dataset that NOAA used. The older version (3b) gives a global average that is too cool in recent years, growing to an offset of about 0.06 degrees Celsius. The researchers repeat this same analysis for two more major sea surface datasets that are used by the UK Met Office and the Japanese Meteorological Agency for their global temperature records. Both of those datasets also drift cooler than the comparison data, but less so than NOAA's old dataset.
You're not going to convince an idiot by providing evidence that he doesn't understand.
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Bullshit.
It's the kind of obvious, blatant, easily disprovable but nonetheless convenient lie that leads to electing bullshit presidents.
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/w...
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/s...
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Right an what is more likely? A sensor on a mostly passive buoy reads cold or sensor on a ship with people, heaters, engines, and everything else near by reads hot?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
From where are you getting your figures?
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/s...
That claims they're down 22% from 1990 levels.
Those exclude LULUCF (land use changes) - perhaps you have inclusive figures? (Although I'd be surprised if LULUCF could be bigger than the significant reductions in everything else.)
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
Suddenly he wanted to see the researchers' e-mails and echoed the accusations of contrarian blogs about scientists' supposedly nefarious adjustments to sea surface temperature measurements. Rather than invoking scientific conspiracies, issues like this should be settled by analyzing the data.
Most people wouldn't understand the data if you clubbed them over the head with it. Doubly so for politicians with no scientific training. The problem in the argument is that one side of this argument isn't arguing with facts and is actually incentivized to demonize any data that contradicts their pre-determined conclusions. They see the argument in one of two ways (sometimes both). A) They see climate change data as a threat to their personal interests - usually financial ones. If you are a politician sponsored by a fossil fuel company, this threatens your self interest. B) They see the climate change argument as something coming from the Other. It's a tribal thing - that Other group supports it ergo it must be bad. Often they frame it as a conspiracy despite the absurdity of that statement.
So in either case you have people who have no incentive whatsoever to acknowledge the data because it threatens what they hold dear. Rationality plays no role in it. The best way to combat this is to frame the argument in such a way as to align their incentives with the data. Point out how much money there is to be made/saved by working on the problem. Put it front and center as an economic issue. Figure out how to align solutions to the problem with economic and political self interest. Until you do that you're going to have this problem of certain politically powerful factions sticking their fingers in their ears and getting in the way.
Exactly what I mean.
The numbers weren't "fudged" in any way.
They were corrected to eliminate a bias, but because you don't understand what that means, you can only label it "fudging".
If you disagree with the method used for correction of the valitidy of the bias claims, then attack those on their merits.
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It popped automatically in the warming ambient air! WIN!
Silence is a state of mime.
Climate scientists haven't established Human caused global warming is real.
You are wrong. It's not even really a debate among climate scientists at this point. So far all the data seems to clearly show that humans are a key factor in recent climate change. And even just on the face of it the notion that we could be dumping so many billions of tons of CO2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere without any effect or consequence is just absurd. If you want to argue that we are still pinning down the exact extent of the effect of our activities then you might have an argument. But to pretend that our activities have had no effect on global climate is ridiculous.
That said, it doesn't really matter anyway. Even if hypothetically speaking humans weren't responsible at all for climate change we still would need to take action to deal with the reality of it. It's going to affect food supplies, energy resources, ecosystems, pollution, geopolitics, etc. The US Department of Defense (hardly a bastion of liberal thinking) considers it real and a significant threat to national security.
So far we just have a gently upward trend starting about 400 years ago, very similar to the previous upward trends that were entirely natural.
Yeah sorry but the data is just a tad more complicated than your little made up and cherry picked sound bite.
The "fudged data" is a core belief in the Church of Climate Denial. The fact that it wasn't fudged could cause serious cognitive dissonance among some of the most devout members. Although to be fair, it won't be reported at Breitbart or InfoWars, so maybe they'll stay blissfully insulated from this information.
It's probably for the best that they be left that way.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Right. During the late 20th century, ocean temperatures readings were primarily taken mechanically through an “engine-intake valve.” Ships pump water into their hull in order to cool the engine room, and a thermometer measures its temperature on the way. This can introduce bias to the numbers, though: Because engine rooms get hot, engine-intake-valve readings are skewed warmer than the actual ocean.
Whereas 95 percent of NOAA’s readings came from ship engine rooms in the early 1990s, 85 percent now come from buoys, which provide a more accurate reading. It turns out that if you don't account for that known bias you get a result that is less accurate.
Who gives a fuck? Seriously. Nobody has demonstrated the small amount of warming we've had and can expect in future isn't beneficial to mankind and the biosphere - especially the biosphere, which quite likes CO2 and expends a lot of energy trying to keep itself warm above and below certain lines of latitude.
It is hard to imagine where you get the impression from, that "the biosphere quite likes" CO2. All we know is that a moderate increase in CO2 concentration and temperature makes certain plant species from certain climate zones grow faster; but I don't think there is anything like agreement about whether that translates into some sort of universal benefit for us all. In fact, it seems to be quite the opposite: the sea-levels will rise, and more importantly, the weather will be more variable - which will cause increased, coastal erosion. Dry areas, like Sahel, Southern Europe and the American Plains, will most likely become drier, which will cause significantly increased migration away from these areas, and it will probably happen faster than, say, Canada's and Siberia's tundras will become able to sustain a large, human population. Coral reefs will be under severe strain and may die - unfortunately this is where far the most of commercial fisheries take place, if I remember correctly (something like that - they are important is the bottom line). All in all, it doesn't sound good to me.
And of course, this is just when we look at a 2 degrees rise; there are serious concerns that if we go above 4 degrees or so, we may start run-away effects, where the warming drives significant rises in greenhouse gases, which may well have been what happened on Venus. This is still speculative, of course, but even the possibility, that we might be not all that far away from such a tipping point ought to warn us to be less stupidly smug about not giving a fuck.
No.
Over time the proportion of data contributed by taking measurements on ships has decreased.
NOAA said "hey guys, this has introduced a systematic error into the data and we need to adjust for it"
Other scientists were skeptical.
This group decided to test it. So they took several independent data sets that each used just one measurement so that each dataset is internally consistent.
They then discovered that all the data sets matched the NOAA adjusted combined data better than the previous unadjusted data.
What their work indicates is that the slow migration from ship thermometer to buoy, satellite etc has hidden an extra 0.06C/decade of warming - and that the warming rate over the last several decades is much closer to the rate over the previous decades than was thought.
(It should be pointed out that some statisticians don't accept that there was any statistically significant change in the warming rate over the last several decades even when using the pre NOAA (3b) data. My statistical knowledge isn't sufficient to be able to independently do the changepoint analysis necessary to confirm or refute this)
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
Nobody has demonstrated the small amount of warming we've had and can expect in future isn't beneficial to mankind and the biosphere
Nobody who is actually informed about the issue agrees with you. Heck the US Department of Defense disagrees with you. Please explain how even the more modest of predicted consequences such as rising sea levels, food supply disruptions, extreme weather events, melting ice caps, etc are beneficial to earth.
especially the biosphere, which quite likes CO2 and expends a lot of energy trying to keep itself warm above and below certain lines of latitude.
Umm, what? The biosphere "quite likes CO2"? Are you trolling or just ignorant? We're releasing billions of tons of CO2 that has been sequestered out of the atmosphere for millions of years and you're arguing that's somehow a good thing? Support your (absurd) statement with a viable hypothesis and actual data.
Aren't they talking about data taken on ships by physically reading thermometers to an accuracy less than the claimed effect?
It isn't about the accuracy. It's about what is actually being measured. It's like the difference between trying to do astronomy in the middle of a light polluted city versus doing it in a dark and remote desert with calm dry air. You're trying to look at the same thing but the noise in the measurements is quite different and has to be accounted for.
Interesting thought...
What if the actual end of humanity is caused, because as an aggregate, we are smart enough to understand and avoid it, but the majority of our biomass isn't smart.
Perhaps, we've got too much of a spread in ability between intelligent folks and those who are constitutionally incapable of understanding the complexities of a large data set. Or the mathematics needed to interpret it. Or lack the desire to do the work that leads to understanding.
There's so many factors involved.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Indeed. This latest paper was from people who were skeptical about the NOAA corrections.
But when they did their own independent analysis they were forced to admit that the NOAA data actually looked better than the previous data.
Ermmmmm. I'm pretty sure these guys aren't being labeled deniers.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
We have many trillions of dollars sunk into infrastructure that depends on the local environment being what it was when the infrastructure was designed and built. If the environment changes significantly in its average or peak temperature levels, or its humidity, or its solar radiation, or any of a range of other environmental factors, then the infrastructure may see reduced functionality, increased wear, or outright failure. As climate changes start to make themselves known in earnest we will have to start chasing them to patch up all of this infrastructure which imposes a tremendous cost on us. Instead of maintaining our existing bridges, road systems and hospitals we will need to come up with a hasty plan to relocate the Netherlands, build sea walls around Manhattan, allocate new areas and develop them to house everyone who needs to leave their old homes on the Equator, etc.
While the Antarctic may eventually become habitable, relocating e.g. a hundred million displaced Chinese there is going to be tremendously expensive and a huge drag on the global economy that we might have avoided with relative ease by simply stopping coal subsidies and letting market forces phase in solar for us.
sigs are hazardous to your health
Outstanding comment!
You've perfectly parodied the "belligerent climate change denier asshole" tone and messaging, right down to calling scientists "ivory tower elitists" and accusing them of calling deniers "backwards rednecks" with zero proof. I've seen a lot of people try to pull off this kind of mockery online without anywhere near your level of success.
Thanks for helping point out just how absurd the deniers are. Well done!
when will you cure your ignorance?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
The evaluation was performed by a third party that is not associated with NOAA. In fact, lead author Zeke is associated with the Berkeley BEST skeptics that were once the darlings of the climate contrarian movement - until the results of their audit were released and ended up confirming the consensus position.
Regarding the graph, what you are looking at is the difference between the reference and the reconstruction. A negative trend means the reconstruction is lower than the reference. A positive trend means that the reconstruction is higher than the reference. A zero trend means that the reconstruction is bang on. You'll notice that the ERSSTv4 matches the instrumentally homogeneous reference datasets quite well. That's a good thing!
Yes we do. So what? Given we like building on flood plains or on the coast it seems to me we don't really care that much. I mean if there's on thing you can guarantee it's that the coast will erode and a flood plain will flood, all else being equal.
OK smart-arse, please tell me what the replication rate is for studies in medicine?
Oh dear.
You miss the point. It's not the planet we need to save. The planet will be fine. It's like how forest fires are great for forests in the long run. But don't tell that to the animals who die from habitat loss while they're waiting for the forest to regrow.
This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Florida is a massive swamp anyway but regardless, these things vary over time and always have. Sod the channel tunnel, I would have been able to walk to France 12,000 years ago.
You've been reading the bollocks on this subject then. They weren't caused by droughts, they were caused by an increase in global commodity prices - mostly food prices. That's what happens when the biggest grain producer in the world is run by credulous fucktard politicians who start mandating a certain percentage of the crop be turned into biofuel rather than bread. People like you probably supported it.
Here's a curvball for you: The Sahara Desert has been greening.
Buttfucked. Bend over more sonny.
The length of a foot used to be anywhere between roughly 250mm and 335mm. Currently a foot is 304.8mm. Do you trust both measurements equally?
Assuming you don't, then why would you trust two temperature measurements equally, even thought the old one is known to be incorrect by a certain amount?
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I don't really care about every individual pea hen. They will evolve and change. The ones well suited will survive and succeed. The ones not well suited will die out. We've had, you know, something like 4 billion years of this crap and suddenly we're scared of change. Imagine that. Your ancestors were little shrews. Your cousins are currently schooling in the Pacific. Strange but true.
1) Lamar Smith for one. He's the one who raised the issue, an issue also known about by everyone involved in the science. And they've now completed their work accounting for it, and presenting their finding back to him.
See, you (and Lamar Smith) are trying to do this:
Skeptic (Denier): What about X? Does X not disprove your entire conclusion?
Scientists: We are aware of X, and studying its impacts on the data so that it can be accounted for.
~~time passed~~
Scientists: We have finished studying X and have accounted for it. However it's effect is negligible, and our original conclusion still stands.
Skeptic (Denier): Well who gives a s*** ?! You're all liars and the climate is fine.
Also:
No, it's not a small amount of warming
No, more CO2 isn't necessarily the boon to the environment you think it is. Problems associated with increased heat and/or CO2 include reduced agricultural output, increased pest infestation of crops, and crops that turn toxic , and others.
2) No, they are not. The devices used to measure have accuracy in the range of 0.001 degree, or better. And even less accurate devices (say, +/-0.1) can still show a trend. The accuracy of the device relates more to each individual reading in a vacuum, not to a series of readings. That is to say, errors are typically linear or progressive in measurement equipment; non-linear or random inaccuracy does occur, but is uncommon (has a lot to do with the type of instrument too....geared instruments, like dial indicators, can more easily appear non-linear if the multiple errors are on a gear that only rotates a single time; note that if the gear rotated twice, you would see the error as cyclical). IE, say your thermometer is rated as +/-0.1 degree accuracy. So when measuring 20.1C, the "true" could be between 20.0 and 20.2. Then say you take a 2nd measurement, of 21.6. The true value is between 21.5 and 21.7. BUT, assuming the true value of measurement 1 was 20.2....it would be very unlikely that the true value of the 2nd measurement is below the indicated value. IE, the trend is still visible. (source: several years of metrology and instrumentation experience)
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Stop using medieval measures, for a start.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
(the very inaccurate ones)
You do realize we're talking about a correction in the trend of .06C/decade over recent decades?
The error bars on the measurements are huge compared to this.
If you plot a graph from 1998 up to 2015 using the best estimate and no error bars without this change, then people will tend, when eyeballing, to say that there's no trend. (the trend is statistically indistinguishable from zero - but it's also statistically indistinguishable from the trend in the prior decades)
I haven't seen an equivalent graph that includes this correction but I'm assuming that people will no longer eyeball "no trend" (although the trend using just these years will still be statistically indistinguishable from zero)
Include more data, at either end, and they no longer come to the conclusion of no trend regardless of whether you include this correction.
Whether this additional .06C/decade is real or imaginary has absolutely zero impact on the science of climate change.
It will make a small difference in where we can expect to be in 50 years time in a BAU scenario but as no climate scientist was saying we can afford BAU for another 5 decades even with the unadjusted data then that's a moot point.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
Obligatory https://xkcd.com/1732/
These people can't tell the difference between "correcting for a known measurement problem" and "lying".
Lets use a car analogy (this is slashdot after all). A car's speedometer is never completely accurate, in fact it has a margin of error of about 10 km/h. This is because it cannot actually measure the distance travelled, and it has to get this value by a proxy: the number of wheel rotations times the circumference of the wheel. Trouble is wheel circumference is not a constant. People put on tyres of different sizes, and the tyres themselves change shape as you drive - stretching and relaxing and all this introduces known errors in the measurement.
Now to prevent this from introducing major safety risks (and getting lots of people undeserved fines) car manufacturers deliberately calibrate speedometers to overestimate speed. This way, if you drive at what the meter says is the speed limit you can be reliably sure that your actual speed is below the limit (by up to 10km/h).
So if I want to know the ACTUAL speed at which I drove, and I don't have a way of measuring the exact distance and time - my best bet is to take the speed that was on the speedometer and subtract 10km/h from it.
It isn't perfectly accurate but it's a lot more accurate than using the number directly (idiots of course, when learning this, subvert this by driving 10km/h ABOVE the speed limit - which would be fine if that margine of error was exact, you have no idea how close you actually are, or even if you are over when you do that).
This is an adjustment like that. You have a measuring device, you know it has a deviation, and you correct for that deviation to get a more accurate answer than the raw device could give.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
But the weird thing is, in order to make the buoy data match the engine water intake data, they decided to "warm" the buoy data rather than "cool" the intake data. That's hard to understand. They could have split the difference, but no. It's all a warming adjustment which makes skeptics wonder why that was chosen when the best guess is that the intake data was too warm, not the buoy data too cool.
>I don't know and neither do you
Yes... we do... because only one of the two options is even POSSIBLE. The other is literally declared impossible by Newton's first law and ALL THREE laws of thermodynamics. Put a ship engine intake thermometer and a buoy thermometer in the same water - it's physically impossible that the ship will NOT measure hotter than the buoy. Because those heaters, engines, people - all those things PRODUCE ENERGY. And energy cannot be destroyed, it cannot dissapear. It's there and it WILL affect the measurement.
Luckily we DO know exactly by how MUCH it affects it - because we DO have buoy's to compare it with.
> I mean I may be thick as a stick in a bucket of pig-shit
There's no may be about it, but congratulations on the closest to true thing you've said all day (it would have been entirely true if you replaced 'may be' with 'am').
>I do at least know these kinds of statistical shenanigans are usually bollocks.
There was nothing statistical about this - and besides which, no they NEVER are - but professional liars like Steve Mcntyre will write screeds declaring the statistics invalid. Not because it is - because he is flat out lying to you about what the numbers mean (or even, on occasion, what those numbers ARE). It's not that he doesn't understand the statistics, he has the training and he does. It's that he knows YOU DO NOT. So he knows if how to tell a convincing lie. And you fall for it.
Probably because of the above stated stick in a bucket of pig-shit problem.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Okay fucknuckle - please educate yourself on why medicine is one of the hardest scientific fields to study - and why that low replication rate tells you NOTHING about other sciences.
Hint: because experimenting on people is very difficult to do ethically and there are a lot of things you OUGHT to do to get reliable scientific results which you CANNOT do because doing them would be considered mass murder.
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No. Therefore DESPITE NO HEATING FROM THE GLASS, the greenhouse heats up.
And therefore one of the simplest and dumbest denier memes "how can it make"things warmer? That breaks the 2nd law of thermodynamics!" is shown to be bollocks.
You see, if it were NOT proposed as an ANALOGY (look the word up, moron), your "complaint" that greenhouse glass isn't made of CO2 would stand up. But it isn't and it doesn't.
The proof of AGW is
1) CO2 causes heat to be trapped
2) If the sun's output remains the same, the earth will warm
3) We are burning fossil fuels, increasing the CO2 content of the atmosphere
The greenhouse is an analogy.
The greenhouse effect is the effect, and no greenhouses are required.
You're right, thanks to global warming we are already seeing mosquito born illnesses like Zika and Malaria massively expanding the ranges where they occur. Think about the poor human killing mosquitos ! Do not let the cold keep them confined to small areas. Let them spread and live long prosperous lives killing babies !
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> The 'R-TX' should be a hint.
I'm an R-TX and I look at the evidence. Evidence indicates:
a) There's been some warming.
b) The rate of warming has been at least twice as fast on earth than on Mars and Venus (meaning solar changes are probably NOT the primary cause on earth).
c) San Francisco was not underwater in 2010
d) San Francisco probably won't be underwater in 2025 either.
> He's being bribed with campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry to be a denier.
There's some truth to that, and the hyperbole from the left, the utter bullshit about "X will be underwater by 20yy" hasn't helped. It's easy to call AGW "bullshit" when some people spout so much bullshit in the name of AGW.
In a poll, I bet most people would say jolly old Saint Nick isn't real. He's actually a real guy, but all the fiction layered on top for various reasons has plenty of people thinking the whole Saint Nick thing is fake. There is some similarity to global warming there. If you want peopel to take it seriously, don't make BS claims like San Francisco will be underwater in five or ten years - because five or ten years later, when SF is still there, people think everything you say is complete bollocks.
It could also have said (and would have been equally true), climate science is like economics. Oh no...
It's not entirely speculative - some are already happening. For example - there are vast swaths of methane (one of the worst greenhouse gasses) trapped below the alpine glaciers. As the glaciers are melting - this methane is escaping.
This is already happening at such a fast rate that the Swedes are using the methane escaping from melting glaciers to burn in power plants.
And they can't even burn it all - there's too much escaping over too wide a region.
When you have CO2 induced melting of glaciers releasing formerly trapped methane which will trigger more severe warming, that's a perfect exanple of a feedback-loop effect, and it's happening right now.
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No, there's another possibility here: (3) the accuracy of the measurement gives us an error that dwarfs the change, therefore comparing the measurements is completely meaningless. That would be my preferred option, mostly because it's the only option that requires you to forgo your grant funding and demonstrate a little scientific integrity.
Knock yourself out with it though.
Btw Steve McIntyre is a mathematician who won the national high school mathematics competition when he was a nipper. He's forgotten more about mathematics than most of the shills working in climate science ever learned. You can have that little factoid for free by the way.
No, They aren't. Because there WAS NO PAUSE.
They ARE saying the warming that DID happen was worse than we thought. Nobody is trying to explain "the pause" for the same reason no scientist is currently publishing theories about unicorn flight dynamics.
Scientists do not write theories to explain things that have never been observed. The pause was a fantasy, made up by a wellfunded team of propaganda artists employed by the fossil fuel industry to tell a lie to the world, and you swallowed their lie hook line and sinker.
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On one hand the per capita CO2 emitted HAS increased from 4.3 tons per person in 1990 to 4.9 tons per person in 2014. This suggests that the world doesn't care.
On the other hand the world is far wealthier than it was twenty-five years ago. If you look at CO2 per dollar of purchasing power (PPP GDP), the world reduced it's CO2 emissions per dollar by fifty-six percent. The per dollar of GDP emissions have declined most markedly in ... Europe. The major industrial countries of Europe scored per dollar reductions on the order of 60% - 80%. (UK 600 g/$ --> 200; France 367 g/$ --> 129; Germany 560->208; Denmar 597->148; UK 557->182). Most European countries emit less CO2 per person, in the cases of the largest industrialized countries (UK, France, Germany) dramatically so. Italy is the only industrialized country to score large increases in C02 over that period.
SO here's the TL;DR: the world has tried and succeeded at becoming dramatically more carbon efficient -- about 2x as efficient on a dollar basis. That efficiency gain have not kept up with a Gross World Product that has more than doubled, and a population increase of over 1/3.
There's a world of difference between doing nothing and not doing quite enough to solve the problem. What we have done is push a number of climate change consequences further into the future, and that makes a big difference. For many of us it means not living to see those changes.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Brilliant, you have discovered the world is complicated. Any other wisps of wisdom fizzing around in your head?
As important, CO2 levels in the oceans are rising making them more acidic. So regardless of whatever the anthropomorphic climate change deniers claim this week, the fact that the food chain disappearing might make them a bit more cautious....hehehehehe...just kidding, nothing could make them change their minds, even hunger.
They did. Now what do you do if you still need to know something about measured lengths when they still used medieval measures? You're just going to pretend those measurements were equally accurate as modern measurements or are you going to adjust those measurements to correct known measurement errors?
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I can't believe I have to explain this to a person who has learned to read and write but okay...
O -- This is an apple. It is red.
o/--\o -- This is a truck, it is red.
The apple is like the truck: they are both red.
BUT You can't drive the apple to work and you can't eat the truck. Just because one thing is like another thing in ONE way it does not mean it's like the other thing in ANY OTHER WAY.
The above poster said climate change was like medicine only in one very specific way - you cannot conclude anything else from that.
And you may also want to learn that DESPITE the difficulties in medical science it is still a thousand times more accurate than any other approach we have. Imperfect science is still MUCH better than non-science.
Climate science is - ultimately - most like physics (in fact, about 90% of the time it IS nothing BUT physics), and anybody who tells you differently is deliberately trying to deceive you.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The new study shows that the NOAA method works quite well. It may be worth trying an alternate and seeing how well it matches the instrumentally homogeneous reference data, but since we're dealing with temperature anomalies and not absolute temperatures It's not clear to me that it would make any difference.
No really, stop tickling my sides. Skeptical Science, a shill front organisation for rent-seeking environmentalists.
Even if that is true it doesn't mean the data they are presenting is wrong. Prove the data wrong or shut up and go away.
It does matter though, imho. It matters for reasons of integrity, especially public trust in science.
The only lack of integrity is coming from the climate change deniers. They refuse to engage in a honest debate about or honest analysis of the evidence. Many of them have clear conflicts of interest (fossil fuel industry ties, etc) and don't even pretend to hide them. All the scientists are doing is presenting the evidence which is mountainous in volume at this point and growing all the time. If the climate deniers had an actual evidence based case they could easily cut through the BS by presenting actual evidence contradicting the current science models. They have no such evidence so they are making a political argument instead of a scientific one.
No one thinks that this is the first time that the earth's climate has changed. What's new this time is the rate at which the change is happening. If you're expecting evolution to solve this problem you're wrong. Evolution doesn't come in leaps, but in small changes with each successive generation.
So there is an actual limit to how fast a species can evolve directly related to how quickly they can produce the next generation from their birth. If you have a fast enough change in climate, species will go extinct. The faster the climate changes the more species will go extinct, depending on how long it takes for them to reproduce from birth, bacteria will most certainly be fine. The only thing that will save any particular species is if they are already able to survive the new stressors via migration or inherent adaptability.
So our species could be fine because of our adaptability, but how many other species will make it? And how many of those do we need for our species to survive? We can't live off of bacteria.
He's 1 of 5 Congressmen that represents the heavily gerrymandered city of Austin.
You can reach him at: https://lamarsmith.house.gov/c...
I just sent him this message: https://cl.ly/3y18020T1A3t
at least intentionally skewed toward "raising awareness". Various researchers have admitted that in emails that leaked or other documents over and over again, a few publicly and openly.
Woah, do you have an actual quote for that?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Uncertainty is an unknown error.
Bias is a known error.
If the range of uncertainty is not "+/- 10" but, for instance, "+ 19/-1", you might as well just add 9 to the data and state uncertainty as "+/- 10".
(I'm aware this example is over-simplified, just trying to explain that bias is not the same as uncertainty).
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Exactly, just because you are doing science does mean you abandon common sense. Most would call me a climate skeptic, but even I will admit there has been a warming trend over the period we have been taking actual measurements. Its not credible to assume a massive conspiracy exists to distort measurements. When the was suggestion of such it was investigated and debunked.
I also know based on other day to day encounters with the observable universe that at least on the atomic/chemical scale I occupy thermodynamics is a reality. Finally I know trends are well trends, they continue unless there is a reason for them them to not continue. So when someone argues there as a been a pause in the warming trend the correct response is actually skepticism. A pause would be caused by something, so there are two possibilities we don't know the cause of the pause or the measurements are not correct. Since the measurement methodology was changed that should be the FIRST place we look. Here the interesting thing isn't the absolute values but the deltas. Allowing for some noise in the older measurements we see similar deltas in the data gather in the new measurements, the correct conclusion is the older absolute values are off but the deltas are probably still accurate.
Think of this way, you have two thermometers in a room, one reads 68F the other 70F you turn the heat on and observe the readings again 30min later. The first now reads 70F the second now reads 72F. You can be pretty certain the room is 2F warmer than before, you might guess the actual temperature is 71F but your confidence in that should be low.
There is a reasonable debate to be had about:
1) Are human activities the primary driver of climate change or are other factors playing a more significant role
2) Are these changes really outside the normal range our planet and ecosystem have experienced in the past
2a) if no, is the rate of change outside the normal range
3) Is this a good or bad thing, in terms of our own best interest?
3a) how do you define 'our'
Those are the real questions where climate change is concerned, not that it has changed since the start of the industrial era or that it is changing.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Duh? That's why everyone wants something done about it. Externalizing pollution to get an easy subsidy isn't merely a scam, it's an old and obvious scam.
The trouble is, everyone does it. If I tell you to stop scamming everyone, then you'll tell me to stop scamming everyone. It's all well and fine for me to try to stop paying for your subsidy, but you better keep on paying mine!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It does matter. Even if you believe, incorrectly, that global warming is mythical, you should still pause to consider the implications if you're wrong.
Massive droughts in some places.
Massive floods in others.
Global upset of food supplies, leading to unrest and possibly war.
Hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Major cities being taken out by storm surges. (NYC and New Orleans are early examples.)
CO2 concentrations have been going up; this is incontrovertible. Temperatures have been rising, which is also unchallenged by any thorough study. There exists a simple and well-understood mechanism why the two should be causally related. There exists geological data showing the two ARE related.
There are subtleties, to be sure, but these are the bare facts, well established past any reasonable doubt.
There's no evidence the rate of change is higher (or indeed lower) than it has been in the past. The difficulty here is there's a divergence between what the models say and what the actual data says (notwithstanding the numerous and highly dubious "adjustments" made to the data).
btw with respect to living off bacteria, we do of course (it's busy in your gut right now), but you'll note with interest the increase in agricultural productivity as the planet has warmed and there's more CO2 about. Now you're free to argue that we're going to reach a "tipping point" and the Earth is going to implode but that would be speculation (modelling) and more than likely completely wrong. Or at least open to debate and question (hence not worthy of the term "denial" - just disagreement).
No amount of data will ever be able to satisfy anti-AGW people. They're just like the anti-vax people, or pretty much any other religious group that prides ignorance over reality.
They are emotionally dependent on their POV, and attempts to prove them wrong just make them dig their heels further. That has been proven as well.
Wouldn't that strategy play directly into the "it's a money grab conspiracy" argument?
Not if you show them how THEY can be the ones to grab the money.
Other fields of scientific research -- paleontology, astronomy, etc. -- don't have to sell themselves with economic windfall arguments.
They don't have to because they don't threaten anyone's meal ticket.
Framing this as a moral argument is understandable but ultimately futile in my opinion. If we really do need to act in a short amount of time then you have to convince people that either they are in imminent danger (difficult in this case) or that they can profit from solving the problem. Point out how all those displaced coal workers can make even more money building wind turbines. That sort of thing. Work on making distributed solar so economically attractive that people stop caring about the oil companies. Work on their economic incentives to move things in the right direction.
In other words, it's politicized.
The climate deniers are the one's making it political. But because they have that's the reality we have to deal with. We can pretend it isn't political or we can deal with the fact that it is and get on with fixing the problem.
Also, I would argue that neither side is actually arguing with facts.
Nonsense. The scientists are arguing with almost nothing BUT facts. The fact that a bunch of mostly right wing fossil fuel shills are standing in the way of those facts is plain enough to see. One side has facts and scientific data. The other has economic self interest and little else. The notion that both sides aren't arguing with facts is just nonsense.
I've long argued that the right dug in their heels and let the left dictate ideas and solutions.
Probably a good point. If the political right REALLY believed in self reliance then they should be pushing for distributed renewable power. Why depend on the power company and government regulators when you can have a solar array or wind turbine and a battery pack and provide most/all of your own power? But instead they persist in acting as thralls to large corporations. Makes very little sense until you realize they don't really believe in self reliance at all.
Right... so you won't show any actual evidence they are wrong, you'll just dismiss this and pretend your completely blatant lie about what the paper said never happened.
Typical denier - get cornered, get your argument disproven - and pretend you never made it.
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All of which would have to be false for climate change theory to be false.
EVERY SINGLE FINDING IN THE HISTORY OF PHYSICS.
None of it can be true, if climate science isn't ALSO true.
Because for climate science to be false, Newton's first law must be ENTIRELY AND ABSOLUTELY FALSE. Human induced climate change is nothing BUT a restatement of newton's first law. It's impossible for one to be true and the other false because they are SAME THING.
Aristotle's first law of logic: the law of identity - a thing cannot be other than itself.
Newton's first law cannot be both true and false. And climate change is JUST Newton's first law applied to a specific system.
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Nope. That never happened. Those "leaked emails" never said that. The bits you were shown which were quoted out of context meant something ENTIRELY different to what you think when read in the context those words were actually written in. Something entirely non-controversial. Which is why the scientists accused in those cases were exonerated by not one but three different independent inquiries.
Your claim has literally been disproven in court. Do you know what it's called when you keep fielding an accusation after somebody has been exonerated ? It's called slander, and it's not free speech, it's not "skepticism", it's not "being critical" - it's a crime.
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Not so funny if you know how scientists think and communicate.
Most of us live in a world where overstatement and oversimplification rule. Politicians certainly do it, but don't forget advertisers. Take that advertisement that says "Four out of five dentists recommend Trident for their patients who chew gum." We know it's bullshit, which is not quite the same as saying it is untrue. Four out of five neurosurgeons probably recommend .22 caliber bullets for their patients that shoot themselves in the head.
Scientists don't communicate that way. My wife is a geophysicist who's believed in AGW since the mid 80s. Yet she's never been happy with the state of the data. Her trained response to something clear as night and day is to point out you've neglected to mention civil and nautical twilight. Although she expected the warming trend of the 90s to happen, the unequivocal nature of the data really irked her because data is supposed to be more contradictory than that.
So it boils down to this: a politician won't change his mind unless the evidence is unequivocal, a scientist is reluctant to change his mind unless there is data to support both sides of a question.
This means there is a huge incentive for a scientist to understate their results and make them seem more equivocal. Faced with a very large and dramatic effect, initial scientific reports will almost always understate it. That's because you have to give every possible benefit of the doubt to the null hypothesis.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Ah, the Spherical Cow argument. I thought you'd come back with something a little more convincing.
I think what's really funny is that moronic scumbags with the intellect of a fruit fly and the integrity of a rabid weasel like to pretend there was ever the slightest chance that they'd be convinced of anything by scientific evidence.
Seriously, dude, calling them "backward rednecks" is flattery. They'd have to study for 10 years to reach that lofty plateau.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
> Are human activities the primary driver of climate change or are other factors playing a more significant role
Science is based on observation. If you want that debate - show us some observable phenomenon, ANY observable phenomenon other than human activities than can account for the change. We KNOW human activities are causing the CO2 rise (unless nuclear physics is also wrong about literally everything) because fossil fuel CO2 has notable isotopic differences from the carbon in living creatures. We can see that most of the CO2 in the atmosphere now comes from fossil fuels - we have done the tests over and over. This also fits in with the American Geophysical union's results. They studied the CO2 output of the next biggest culprit: volcanoes. It turns out all the volcanoes in the world in an average year output a mere 0.25% of the CO2 from coal power plants alone. But even if we suppose that there is no greenhouse effect (which means a lot of physics and chemistry must be wrong) - and the CO2 doesn't matter - then where is the heating coming from ? It's not the sun - if anything the sun has been cooling over the last two decades (so if the sun had been like it was in the 1980s it would be even warmer).
>Are these changes really outside the normal range our planet and ecosystem have experienced in the past
Every piece of data, proxy data or indication we have says it is, by a massive margin. Again - science is based on observation, if you want to have this debate show us any data that suggests otherwise. And even if you do - keep in mind, you're at best giving us some interesting information about a past climate event. You're saying nothing at all about the impact this one is likely to have on our civilization.
> if no, is the rate of change outside the normal range
See above.
> if no, is the rate of change outside the normal range
See above. It really doesn't matter for any practical purpose. It would be valuable as pure knowledge - but it says nothing about the major questions of impact on human civilization.
>Is this a good or bad thing, in terms of our own best interest?
There is absolutely no conceivable "good" outcome for our interests here. None. Having diseases like Malaria and Zika spread to far wider ranges than before ? Not a good thing.
Desertification of formerly good agricultural land? Definitely not a good thing.
Flooding and mass death in island countries and low-lying areas ? Can't see a good thing there.
Resulting mass migration - well look what the fear of a few Mexicans did in America in November... can you imagine if a billion humans suddenly had to migrate ? That's pretty much a guaranteed world war right there.
>how do you define 'our'
The only sensible definition is the entire human race - because there is no impact this can have anywhere that will not also cause negative impacts for everybody else. (for example by suddenly having a good chunk of several billion people demanding you give them refugee status and willing to kill you if you don't let them in because the alternative is to die themselves).
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No. Basic physics.
There is energy entering the system all the time (because we haven't turned off the sun).
If you have energy entering a system, and energy leaving the system.
What happens if you reduce the rate at which it can leave ?
It gets hotter.
It's impossible for this to be wrong - unless Newton's first law is wrong. Because this IS Newton's first law.
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You need to look up the meaning of 'rent-seeking' since it doesn't mean what you think it means.
In fact... fossil fuel companies fit the actual definition more closely than any of the organisations to which you are referring. Though the best example in the US would be cable companies (and this is why they hate the idea of net neutrality as it threatens their rent-seeking capacity).
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Got alu-hats?
Then put one on, now.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
did you ever heard the parable of the guy who jumped off the roof of a skyscraper, and as he blasts by the windows and balconies, nearing the asphalt, everyone tells him "brace for impact!". finally, about the time he flies past the 2nd story, he's fed up with it and screams back "oh shut up already, you ivory tower bastards, you people've been telling me to 'brace for impact' since I've jumped, but guess what: everything' going peaches so far and i'm having fun - so you're all lying idiots with an agenda to trick me! ever herd the story of the boy who called out wolf?"
no? well now you have.
I don't want to get too much into the leaked emails because that'll just cause arguments without accomplishing anything. When the head of the climatic science unit says "I used this trick to hide the reduction in temperature" apparently that's proper scientific procedure. Whatever. Here's an example that's out in the open, there's no argument about taking things out of context:
Richard Tol, professor of the economics of climate change, was coordinating lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report Working Group. As you may know, the IPCC is about the most credible group there is, to those who advocate for AGW policy. Professor Tol resigned his position while writing the UN's Summary for Policy Makers because the IPCC insisted on a report that was "too alarmist" and refused to report on possible adaptations and even benefits of warming. That's one of IPCC's lead scientists saying that his own team was spinning the report to be alarmist. You can read Professor Tol's full and complete statements in articles he has written.
The data needs to stand on its own. No adjustments are needed
Actually no.
Context matters.
consider for example Napoleon.
the age old myth is that Napoleon was short, and stems partly from the fact (verifiable historical fact) that at his death his height was listed as 5ft 2in.
but the reality is that he wasn't, and it arises from an error or mismatch in units used.
specifically, those were French units on his death certificate.
using modern units, we would say he was 5ft 7in tall, which is actually somewhat above the average height for a Frenchman at the time of 5ft 5in (again in modern units). http://www.todayifoundout.com/...
So no.
Data cannot stand always on its own.
Context matters and can change the entire meaning of the "raw data" you present.
Now relate that to climate data.
You have 4 measuring stations within a small radius, say, on an acre of land
small enough that we can consider them to all be measuring the same area.
yet their data doesn't match up.
why?
well, upon examination you discover:
-One sits in an under a lean too (open side, but shaded from above) among some trees.
-One is on the east side of a tree.
-One is on the west side of a building.
-One is on top of a small hill.
Q: which data set is correct?
A: All of them, and none of them.
Because each is biased by different factors.
the first one experiences no direct sunlight. it also experiences no wind, due to the trees.
the second one experiences direct sunlight from sunrise til noon, at which point it becomes shaded by the tree.
the third one experiences no direct sunlight until the afternoon, having been shaded by the building all morning.
the last one experiences direct sunlight all day. its also at a different elevation being on a hill, and being exposed on that hill, it also experiences wind, if its windy.
And that's reality. Different stations will have different biases depending on their installation.
IE, context.
And it matters.
If a direct sunlight on a hill station is replaced by one under a leanto next to a building, the two sets of readings are not directly comparable.
Thus, calibrations of the data so that they are.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Some of the numbers are being continuously corrected. They are still correcting numbers from decades ago. Some of them have been corrected so many times it is hard to know when they are, ahem, correct.........
translation: "my ignorance is as good as and disproves your knowledge"
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
> When an actual climate scientist says ...
Some of the well known climate scientists (apparently not "actual climate scientists") told us that San Francisco would be underwater by now.
If I wanted to use this information in a discussion, could you provide me with a reference so I am not accused of talking out of my ass?
The thesis of your argument is that other people base their opinions on something other than fact. But if we examine what you wrote:
."We need to a different way to communicate the threat" For all the reason stated above, you say the word communicate, but it seems you actually mean that other thing.
1. A. "This whole discussion is irrelevant. " This is purely your opinion. Other people may have read some of the honest parts of this discussion an found something new. Even if you are very smart, you simply can't determine relevancy for all people.
2. B. "They just won the White House, Congress, and the Senate in one swoop." This is just wrong on several levels.
C. In 2008, the democrats had control of all 3 parts of the U.S. government. The republicans won the house in 2010, not 2016. D. The republicans won the senate in 2014 not 2016. This is not one swoop, but three. One could argue that an increasing number of people seem to be growing very angry at something the democrats had done. The republican presidency is clearly not a random hiccup. E. "Facts do not matter." As it turned out, for the election, facts DID matter. Any intelligent person would acknowledge that there has been a disturbing trend of the U.S. press to hide negative facts about the democrat party. When some of these escaped via wikileaks, people's perception on Hillary and some of her policies began to chance. So, the facts really did matter. The question is, why are you so sure you have all the facts when so many indicators show that you probably do not.
F. "We can be here debating the minutiae of this data until the cows come home." In a post about people not examining facts, you make the absolutely hilarious assertion that facts should not be debated....
G. In your argument of facts should not be debated, you also make the amazing assertion that doing so would be a bad thing. In effect, you made a single emotionally charged statement that you feel all should obey.
H. The use of the word THEY means that you committing the sin of tribalism, which is generally bad. This has a tendency to limit ones world view and biases their perception of all ideas. In choosing a tribe, you are setting up an us versus them mentality. Sadly, the history of the world shows us that there are no perfect human institutions or movements. When you zealously identify with a group/cause/idea you lose the ability to deal with criticism or new ideas. In fact, someone usually will come along and warp the message and use the zealots to their own end. With this one word, you are demonstrating that you guilty of exactly what you are protesting about.You may have weighed arguments and decided democrats tend to be more correct, but if you can't see any flaws in any of their ideas or candidates, then you are a zealot.
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
I pointed at a trend, examples to the contrary are not evidence against a trend. Or do you not know the meaning of the phrase "notoriously prone" ?
So no, a few scientists predicting to high is not evidence against my claim that most of time, most the scientists choose to underestimate when speaking to the public or the press. To disprove my claim of such a trend you would have to show evidence that such underestimations are rare, at the very least that the majority of public statements by active climate scientists have made predictions more severe than supported by the data or previous events.
Secondly - science is a group activity. did it ever occur to you that Richard Tol may have been wrong ? That in his dissagreement with the IPCC team - they were representing the findings fairly and he was just wrong about his interpretation ?
More-over do you GET that an IPCC report is NOT an example of "speaking to the public" at all ? Those reports are given to policymakers and the like - they DO tend to use the middle-of-the-range "most likely" figures. They are nothing like press releases - hell they aren't even like the press releases about themselves.
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You need to read both:
-Accusations that climate science is money-driven reveal ignorance of how science is done
-No climate conspiracy: NOAA temperature adjustments bring data closer to pristine
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Beautifully said. I fear, however, that you may be casting pearls before swine.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Yep, but that comic now needs to be revised using the new dataset.
Which are the "corrected" numbers to match observation, because no climate model yet devised fits the observed data.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Game. Set. Match.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Its rather easy to test the CO2 impact on a plant -- put it in a air-tight greenhouse and supply it with your chosen mix of gases. People have done this. The effect is rather variable between different plant species, in many cases it actually decreases their use as a food crop. It certainly doesn't explain any of the 2x - 3x increase in farm productivity that your plot shows since 1948. May I hazard a guess that improved farm equipment, automation, better fertilizers, new chemicals for weed control, are responsible for 99% of the improvement in farm productivity?
These people can't tell the difference between "correcting for a known measurement problem" and "lying".
They're politicians; they can't tell the difference between "lying" and "_____________________".
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Metrology. IE, the science of measurements.
Not meteorology, or the study of weather.
As far as "not being smart enough for engineering school"...
My engineering degree would beg to differ.
And if you don't realize the importance of the science of measurements as it relates to engineering, then it is you who isn't smart enough for engineering.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Ignoring all other points but just focusing on one: The 'corrections' in this data set are, at most, 0.06 degrees C. That is only a couple of pixels on the XKCD comic. Do you know what a pixel is? Hint: it is really small. If you looked at the original comic, and the 'corrected' comic, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference, unless you looked very very closely.
Richard Tol, professor of the economics of climate change, was coordinating lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
I think he may have been upset when they pointed out that that he'd swapped a minus sign for a plus sign in his study. When you use the correct sign the economic outlook is less rosy. He ultimately admitted to the mistake and issued a correction to the original paper.
FUD usually "works" successfully in sales and politics. That's life.
Table-ized A.I.
In fact, humanity is almost certain to not survive even a largish asteroid hit unscathed. Billions could die in the immediate aftermath and most of the rest probably die in the long-term due to starvation.
It's a real possibility that cannot be ignored.
We should be spending our trillions of dollars to prevent that from happening! The argument is the same "Bad things might happen--or will certainly happen if other things happen first--so we should *do* *something* *about* *it*".
Some of us agree with the notion that pollution is bad, that humans have negatively affected the environment, and that human activities are probably (or even almost certainly) affecting the climate with AGW.
But we're still branded as "deniers" becuase we take strong issue with is the proposed "solutions". Few of which are science-based and almost all of which are based not on environmentalism but communism--wealth redistribution and punishment of the West. The elites preach about reducing carbon footprints while they drive a fleet of SUVs 200 yards to get from their hotel to their film festival, after arriving there in their private jets dumping untold tons of carbon into the atmosphere, having left their mansions that consume more resources than 20 of normal citizens' homes. But the rest of us need to live in caves and eat dirt, while they spend trillions. They want the population of the earth to be 500,000 people, assuming that they and theirs constitute the chosen half-million and the rest of us need to be gone.
Most of AGW "solutions" is that they are not science based, e.g. seeking to pump CO2 into subsea sequestration, but simply socialist wealth redistribution efforts, as clearly evidenced by the public statements of any number of high-profile AGW climateers...
Ottmar Edenhofer: "One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole...We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy...the next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated."
Christiana Figueres: "This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution...This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.
Naomi Klein: "What if global warming isn’t only a crisis...What if it's the best chance we’re ever going to get to build a better world?"
> most of time, most the scientists choose to underestimate when speaking to the public
Many scientists try to do a good job. Some scientists think (maybe correctly) that raising awareness and advocating for action is a good thing to do, and they try to do it thoroughly. I don't suppose either of us has evidence of what "most climate scientists" do, so maybe we can agree on this much:
Many climate scientists try to do a good job.
All climate scientists are human.
Some high-profile climate scientists are passionate about these issues.
When humans (including me) are passionate about issues, that affects our judgements.
Some (most?) climate scientists are employed by organisations which advocate political positions.
Agreed?
The point is more that no model is accurate- ever. NONE of our scientific models are accurate with respect to reality, certainly not climateology.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
A car's speedometer is never completely accurate, in fact it has a margin of error of about 10 km/h.
I don't think this is true, at least for newer cars. A quick search of various articles online indicates the error should to be about 1-2%, which is only 1-2 km/h at a 100 km/h speed. You can use your phone GPS to corroborate your speedometer. You can also time your car by driving a known distance at a known speed. So if it your car just happened to have a wildly inaccurate speedometer you can find out.
Practically speaking, if you want to avoid a ticket, just drive a bit slower than the guy passing you on the left, and keep an eye out for any cop cars behind you. If they do ticket you, they'd have a hard time proving their radar didn't pick up the other guy.
http://chem.tufts.edu/answersi...
Even with the Argo buoys, the readings are too sparse for anything other than a cursory survey to see where real monitoring may be needed, 3800 to cover the oceans isn't enough to even worry about.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
It'll keep right on orbiting the sun, and may eventually evolve different life forms long after we're gone.
Yeah, we might kill ourselves off and any number of our contemporary species with us, but the planet doesn't care and will not be put out at all.
The planet went along just fine when the cyanobacteria wiped out almost all other life on the planet by spewing toxic oxygen into the atmosphere.
The planet went along fine after the asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs.
The planet went along fine through multiple "snowball earth" cycles.
Quite aside from the hyperbolic name-calling, this is precisely the kind of nonsensical rhetoric that makes people turn from considering any case for warming.
Sea level rise, even if it is profoundly more than predicted, will "drown" no one. Because it is an extremely slow effect. You could have two broken legs, a large dog sitting on your back, and have your hands slipping in the mud when you tried to pull yourself along and you could still get away from sea level rise without any concerns of drowning. You can see it coming years, even decades, in advance, and you can step back at any time.
The ocean related problems to be concerned with are ocean environmental changes such as acidification and temperature change; the land-related problems to be looking into are temperature change and rainfall pattern change. The data is leading, fairly obviously, to effects in both areas.
Barring technical solutions (likely, frankly) or some forcing that isn't notably in play and is not accounted for, either some action will eventually have to be taken WRT greenhouse gas output, or eventually, there will in fact be serious problems. Which again, will not include drowning.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Do the slashdot denier crowd count as politicians... mmm... now you mention it...
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What a cock-up. I'm afraid your typo has come home to roost. No, the fact is, hen temperature differences are inherent in the environment. I live in Montana, and I can almost guarantee that my hens aren't at the same temperature as your hens. If you even have any hens. You're probably just another non-hen-having Internet recliner pilot / warrior. Bet you're having trouble even trying to coop with this reply, aren't you? Well, relax. I'm only egging you on. Sitting quietly by the sidelines just isn't the happy spiritual experience it was cracked up to be. So I've hatched a few replies like this one. In the hopes of incubating some laying-about to push out some remarks. Pretty hard-boiled, eh? C'mon, shell out some appreciation. That'd be pretty white of you, actually.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If you look honestly at the Minoan warm period (Minoan warm period approximately 3500 years ago was 4C warmer) , the Roman warm period and the Medieval Warm Period(The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) just 1000 years ago was 2C warmer than today), you'll see humans and human civilization did pretty good during the warm periods.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
My data is from when I first started driving (about 16 years ago) and I haven't really kept up. It's possible they've gotten better, but the analogy works even if the specific numbers don't. It is meant to illustrate the idea that compensating for a known imperfect measurement device does not equal dishonesty.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
> Because it is an extremely slow effect. You could have two broken legs, a large dog sitting on your back, and have your hands slipping in the mud when you tried to pull yourself along and you could still get away from sea level rise without any concerns of drowning. You can see it coming years, even decades, in advance, and you can step back at any time.
What happens is that a large storm at high tide, which would normally have been an unpleasant day, is now a Katrina-like $100 billion disaster as miles of coastline is flooded and destroyed.
Except it happened. Every fricking year. So this was actually crying wolf and a wolf showing up each time.
James Hansen director of Goddard Institute, NASA, 1988 by 2008 the West Side Highway will be underwater".
California Energy Commission, 1989 predicted sea level rise of 1.6 to 4.9 feet. Based on this, the National Environmental Trust published a map showing that 3 feet rise puts much of the bay area underwater. The "flooded San Francisco" map "went viral", to use today's terminology.
Some oldies but goodies:
Harvard biologist George Wald claimed that âoecivilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action.
Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich April 1970 âoeat least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.â
Professor Kenneth E.F. Watt at the University of California in 1970:
"The world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but 11 degrees colder by the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age."
More recently:
2005 United Nations Environment Programme:
2010, some 50 million "climate refugees" will flee the Caribbean as islands are inundated with water. (In fact the opposite has occurred - people are moving TO the Caribbean, making it among the fastest growingb regions in the world.)
Also from United Nations Environment Programme, director of the New York office:
"entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000."
October 2015:
Benjamin Strauss, proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says Hollywood is a goner by 2025.
2008:
James Hansen (NASA/Al Gore Science Advisor) says New York will be flooded in 2015, as portrayed by ABC News (this is probably a case of hyperbole on top of hyperbole, with ABC says stretching what Hansen had already stretched).
2006
You may recall Al Gore's ten-year "Doomesday Clock", which expired last year. Gore is not a scientist, he was the number one leader of the global warming movement.
In any case, the whole question here is about sea surface temperatures.
Looking further deeper into the oceans (which has a higher heat capacity of course and therefore shows trends better) always showed an unremitting upward trend with no pause.
https://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
Climate change aside, any island that "drowns" from the centimeter-class sea level rise we're actually talking about here was an incredibly poor place to set up shop.
There's no "environmental imperative" that says you can build or live any bloody unsafe place you want without taking the environment carefully into account. Try building your home on the edge of a swamp and complaining about the alligators on your porch. Or over a massive live cave system and then complaining about sinkholes.
The environment happens. Planning is called for. And if planning won't cut it, or wasn't really part of the original settlement circumstance, then moving is called for. Not whining about the water lapping a tiny bit further up the beach. Anyone who tries to float (hah) the argument that "but the islands are drowning" is an uninformed twerp.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It's not every adjustment, but the ones which make the news.
It's also not surprising that the cleaner and more reliable the dataset, the more the data matches what is understood from laboratory-confirmed laws of physics.
What a pile of horsecock. Science uses adjustments to account for systemic error such as in measuring instruments the entire frigging time.
To give one example from another unrelated field:
https://www.sfu.ca/colloquium/...
You people who think you know something about science. You really are pathetic.
I have absolutely no fucking clue what you're talking about
Great quotes!
But no references. So I have too find them myself? You're not saving me much work!
What am I supposed to say when someone like this guy claims the first Hansen quote "doesn't mean what you say it means"?
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
PPP from what I read in the wiki sounds more like you are measuring inflation and difference of production ,say , between the US and germany, adding confusing factors. PPP is used generally to comapre countries productions/consumptions... In fact there is this sentence in the middle "When PPP comparisons are to be made over some interval of time, proper account needs to be made of inflationary effects". It sounds to me that in constant dollar or constant Euro, inflation removed, the difference is actually not as great as you indicate. Taking the GDP in constant euro ( or whichever currency http://www.tradingeconomics.co...) I get a rise from 500 to 700. Granted this is still good in efficiency, but it is not the meteoric rise you indicate.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Look at the Internet Idiot calling somebody else an imbecile!
The coverage is quite good and more than sufficient for evaluating global temperature trends (and much more besides!). In fact, the ARGO buoys are of sufficient resolution to be used in the study of mesoscale eddies!
Sounds like we agree on a lot.
> Unless you count "universities, museums, private research centers, thinktanks and organisations like the national geographic society and the American Geophysical Union" as "organisations which advocate political positions".
I do count them, in many cases, often based on their written objectives. It's interesting to me you started with "universities". You don't think the ivory towers of academia ever have just a bit of a political bent? Enjoy your safe space, I guess. ;)
You only mentioned two organizations by name, so let's look at one those. Here's what the National Geographic Society says their goals are:
ABOUT THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY
The National Geographic Society is a global nonprofit organization committed to exploring and protecting our planet. We fund hundreds of research and conservation projects around the world each year
Which do you think an organization "committed to protecting our planet [through) conservation projects" is likely to weigh more heavily, protecting the planet or protecting the economy from the costs of misguided policies based on overblown rhetoric? If National Geographic and the Chamber of Commerce issued a joint report on climate change, I would expect that to be fairly balanced between the two concerns.
If a cancer doctor writes an article saying "everybody needs to eat more, and avoid sun exposure", a phys ed coach says "make time to be outdoors more", a pastor says "make more time for prayer and meditation", a self-defense expert says "make more time to learn self-defense", and a financial expert says "make time to write a monthly budget each month, and to review your investments", I won't be surprised, and I won't magically have an extra 8 hours each day to do all of these things. All of those people are trying to be helpful, and they are all focused on what they care about, what THEY think is important. It may be that where I need to spend more time is cuddling with my young child.
I appreciate the tone of your posts.
If James Hansen wants to dispute that quote, fine. You'll notice I included another quote from him, not from the same article. He's very well known, serving on many high-profile committees over many years, and he has a tendency to make predictions that turn out to be wildly incorrect.
Obviously this doesn't mean that everything anyone ever said about AGW is wrong. It just means that there has been some scare-mongering.
Unfortunately, when I removed this section ("Overcoming skepticism due to past hyperbole"), from my paper, I didn't keep the formal references in a place I'm easily able to find them now. I'm sure if you plug any of the quotes above, for which I've named the sources, you can find the formal reference in seconds.
The increase in biomass seems to indicate that burning coal has a positive effect.
BTW, I'm still trying to figure out what the negative effects of warming are (the real ones that are happening now, not the predictions). Everything has been positive so far.
Should read Lamar Smith (R-TX, not a scientist, Christian Scientist, believes that reality is purely spiritual and the material world an illusion)
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Thank you, I did not know that essay was online. I'll be sure to link to it the next time somebody claims their model is accurate.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
wow..
my opinion is your an idiot:
LOL
This isn't just true of PPP GDP, any kind of GDP or price comparison over time needs to take inflation into account. I used a World Bank analysis prepared from ORNL data and presumably the bank knows to adjust for inflation. The reason to use PPP is what matters is the amount of consumption enabled per CO2 emitted. If a bushel of wheat costs 10x in Syria what it costs in Russia, should we value a bushel of wheat produced in Syria 10x as much as one produced in Russia? For some purposes, yes, but for this purpose no.
It's impossible to do a precise comparison of standards of living across time periods because things change. How do you compare the value of computers from 1990 to the value of computers today? However if you look at the major industrial countries of Europe in general they've reduced per capita CO2 while increasing per capita GDP, often dramatically. So it's safe to say they're getting more CO2 efficient, even if we can't be entirely sure how to precisely calculate that.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Not really sure why your post is modded funny. Seems insightful, and not in the least bit amusing?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You wrote a lot of good stuff in these last two posts. I'm going to focus on the one point where we don't see eye-to-eye.
> It's a reality issue. You can't eat, drink or breath money. The world is ALWAYS the more important of the two
Money (and more generally, resources) does in fact buy food, clean water, and less directly clean air. You know those commercials for charities that say "just a dollar a day will feed a hungry child"? They're not lying. They spin, of course, but it's basically true. One example, fertilizers and pesticides help crops grow. If the world used no fertilizers or pesticides, many people would starve. On the other hand, they havev varying degrees of environmental impact. Good policy is about balancing those things.
Washing out a greasy paper towel so you can recycle it would have some benefit to environment, but it's not worth it. Recycling a clean aluminium can *is* worth it. It would be better for the environment if you weren't using electricity to read this, but you've decided that the minor environmental impact isn't worth giving up Slashdot.
With AGW, there is a meta-issue. As discussed, the lead authors of the UN papers on climate change disagree significantly, with one lead author saying the paper is alarmist. We don't KNOW quite what the environmental impact, or the economic impact, of some of these proposals might be. You wouldn't give up half your annual income in order to recycle a bag of cans, the benefit wouldn't be worth the cost. It's all about balancing costs and benefits.
We must be careful about this common pattern:
X is a problem. Something must be done!
Proposal Y is something.
Therefore, Y must be done.
Very often, Y isn't a good way of solving X, sometimes it has nothing to with problem X. (Frequent example: high profile shooting, using a handgun. Proposed solution: ban RIFLES.) Other times, proposal Y may mitigate problem X by $z worth, but cost $z,000. That makes it a bad idea.
I haven't done this in a while, but with my wife pegging the speedometer at about 60mph I'd time the passing of milestones to the second, usually taking the observation over five miles when possible. The speedometer was pretty darn accurate.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
"fucknuckle"
"needledick"
I hope this argument keeps going. I'm learning all sorts of amazing and creative new curses that I've never heard before!
In other words, you believe that grants and funding are handled, worldwide, by people who insist on a particular specific outcome and won't fund anything else? Also, how do you explain all the other physical scientist associations who believe in it (having seen the evidence)? Members of societies of chemists and physicists do tend to have degrees in the hard physical sciences. You're referring to one unidentified study of the number of scientists who think AGW is going on, and there have been several.studies pointing that out.
Your list of scientists who don't agree is short, and many are not talking about their field of expertise. (Where does being former president of Greenpeace Canada count as scientific credentials?) The article also points out that there is an overwhelming consensus that these people don't agree with.
That atmosphere weighs about 5 quadrillion tons, so one part per million is 5 billion tons. Except that carbon dioxide is about half again as heavy as the nitrogen-oxygen mix, so figure about 7.5 billion tons. Multiply that by 400 and that's about three billion tons. When I was looking this up, I found that 7.5 billion tons of coal were mined in 2010, and that would, if burned, produce well over 20 tons of carbon dioxide, enough to raise the atmosphereic concentration by roughly 3 parts per million. Obviously, burning one year's coal production isn't going to do much, but the concentration over about the last 165 years has gone from 280ppm to 400ppm, one ppm at a time. You'll understand why I don't pay attention to your quantitative estimates, because they're seriously wrong where I've checked.
And, yes, this was all in the atmosphere and ocean tens of millions of years ago, when the climate was very significantly different. The Sun has gotten a bit brighter since then, so it would stabilize at a warmer temperature with the same amount of CO2. This is pretty much irrelevant, since our civilization and domesticated plants and animals have evolved in much different circumstances. The planet will adapt. The biosphere will eventually adapt. Bad things (from the human point of view) will happen in the meantime.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Actually, if we burn most of the fossil fuels, the world will eventually settle into a reasonably stable state, and the biosphere is likely to catch up in a few million years, and it may well be better in some ways than what we have now. This isn't very comforting for those wondering how their grandchildren and great-grandchildren will do, barring stupendous advances in longevity.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Define "past".
If you're thinking of the past as a hundred million years, then, no, we're well within those limits. From my petty human perspective, though, I don't see that as being immediately relevant.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Truth is many climate scientists do not agree with global warming; I can point to dozens, and that is not an exhaustive list by any means.
Dozens out of how many thousands?
Every fossil fuel that is burned today was once living matter, either plant or animal (undisputed fact). Thus it was once part of the natural CO2 planetary cycle and at a time when life was flourishing. But somehow, re-adding that carbon to the planetary system after being trapped in coal or oil or natural gas deposits will throw the world out of balance and make the world too hot to be habitable?
Yes, life was flourishing. But what kind of life? And how many of them are still around today? The world was 30 F hotter back in the Cretaceous, and no humans were around. Think about it: if the hottest day in the summer is 100 F, then you'd be baking at 130 F with the Cretaceous climate.
And by the way, even if humans didn't cause global warming, it doesn't mean we shouldn't try to stop it. When lightning sets your house on fire, do you say, "I didn't start it, it's a natural fire," or do you try to put it out?
The rest of us would like to keep our day jobs.
Ah I see, so you work in the fossil fuel industry and are obligated to spout denialist nonsense. I guess there's no point trying to convince you then.
The point is more that no model is accurate- ever. NONE of our scientific models are accurate with respect to reality, certainly not climateology.
So are you claiming because climate models aren't up to your standards of accuracy we should just ignore them? Do you know of anything else that is more accurate than current climate models? They're not perfect but they're better than anything else we have.
Well "cars" is a very wide concept - and "speedometers" technology isn't all made equal. Some are definitely more accurate than others. Saying there can be a margin of error (and there are regulations limiting how big it can be) does not lead to the conclusion that YOUR car is at the edges of it. Even so - your measurement is based on the best-case scenario. The kind of road with milestones is generally a good condition open road like a highway, which is what they are calibrated against. They get a lot less accurate when you deal with things like dirt roads or wet roads. When the friction levels change significantly the distance the CAR moves per rotation is significantly less correlated to the circumference of the wheel.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Unless you read ALL the emails AND had the PHD to understand htem - you haven't read ANY.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
>my opinion is your an idiot:
Thanks for this brilliantly clarifying demonstration of the difference between an opinion and a fact.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I get that impression from the fact that plants absorb it and in current times they're starved of it (compared to paleo history).
I think "some plants" is a more accurate term, since it not only depends on whether they have adequate access to water, nutrients etc, but as I understand it, it is not actually all plants that benefit from this, even if all other needs are met. Here's an article about this subject: https://www.newscientist.com/a...
I think the only thing you can accuse me of here is cherry picking.
Is that not bad enough? Climate change - as indeed science in general - is far to important to be dragged down to the level of politics.
If a cancer doctor tells you "stop smoking" and you respond by saying "I don't have time! I'm gonna cuddle my young child instead" -- you're a muppet.
> If a cancer doctor tells you "stop smoking" and you respond by saying "I don't have time! I'm gonna cuddle my young child instead" -- you're a muppet.
If I'm cuddling the kid, I'm not smoking. Just sayin'. :)
Funny thing is, for me, the next first step to stop smoking is spending time with my daughter - motivation.
Just to start an argument- Windows is more accurate than most climate models.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The "all scientists believe global warming" bullshit came from a cherry picked poll with no scientific methodology and therefore no accuracy and they are following the Nazi path that a lie told long enough and loud enough will be believed.
Says the guy who cherry picks the exception to the norm as proof that the premise is faulty, and Godwins on top of it. Likewise, perhaps you believe that heaping up a steaming pile of logical fallacies and declaring it 'truth!' that you can convince anybody you're right if you keep at it long enough.
Here are a few facts: Every fossil fuel that is burned today was once living matter, either plant or animal (undisputed fact). Thus it was once part of the natural CO2 planetary cycle and at a time when life was flourishing. But somehow, re-adding that carbon to the planetary system after being trapped in coal or oil or natural gas deposits will throw the world out of balance and make the world too hot to be habitable? Completely irrational on the face of it.
Here is a fun experiment you should try: start at the top of a 10 story building, and walk down to the ground floor via the stairwell. Now, from the top of the same building, jump over the side. You start with the same potential energy and are traveling the same vertical distance, but there is a difference in the rate of change in energy levels that may be of interest to you.
Meanwhile, on the west coast, enjoy eating oysters while you still can as the oceans absorbing atmospheric CO2 has already altered the ph of the water to the point their shells dissolve. So it's not just about the potential for disrupting human civilization as we know it by the alteration of habitable areas and crop viability, or making it 'too hot to live' as you put it, but also the massive die off of species for which they are not able to adapt fast enough to the changing conditions that is a problem.
Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent, and discerning if he holds his tongue. -Proverbs 17:28
But do go on trying to convince anyone that releasing billions of tons of CO2 every year for more than a century couldn't possibly have an accumulative effect, that the numbers are all wrong and that the majority of scientists are all lying merely for their own benefit.
Ok: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data...
None of that says *anything* about the complete supposition that all the CO2 comes from manmade sources.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.