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Leaked Federal Climate Report Finds Link Between Climate Change, Human Activity (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report from The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years, according to a sweeping federal climate change report awaiting approval by the Trump administration. The draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies, which has not yet been made public, concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now. It directly contradicts claims by President Trump and members of his cabinet who say that the human contribution to climate change is uncertain, and that the ability to predict the effects is limited. "Evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans," a draft of the report states. A copy of it was obtained by The New York Times. The authors note that thousands of studies, conducted by tens of thousands of scientists, have documented climate changes on land and in the air. "Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse (heat-trapping) gases, are primarily responsible for recent observed climate change," they wrote. The report was completed this year and is a special science section of the National Climate Assessment, which is congressionally mandated every four years. The National Academy of Sciences has signed off on the draft report, and the authors are awaiting permission from the Trump administration to release it. "The report concludes that even if humans immediately stopped emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the world would still feel at least an additional 0.50 degrees Fahrenheit (0.30 degrees Celsius) of warming over this century compared with today," reports The New York Times. "The projected actual rise, scientists say, will be as much as 2 degrees Celsius." Given the Trump administration's stance on climate change, some of the scientists who worked on the report are concerned that the report will be suppressed.
The globe gets warmer and cooler and has since it formed, life goes on.
So prove that the current warming is natural. You've made a statement that can be proven, but it never is. You can't just say the earth has been warmer therefore it's natural. That's like if my car breaks down with smoke pouring from under the hood I think it's just out of gas, because it's happened before. I could check gauges and see, but I'm relying not on current data but instead an historical anecdote. Really, the only evidence you have is that the earth was warmer at periods before. Yeah, no shit, no scientist has ever said it wasn't. What the research shows is that this warming is unprecedented in the earth's history. So your statement is nothing but an unproven guess with no evidence of support. What natural processes are at work here that do account for the warming?
I hate to break this to you, bro, but actual scientists are also a little bit ashamed when you call yourself a "scientist" with your associate's degree in CS from DeVry.
You could take everything "average people" know and understand about science and fit it in a Fox & Friends chyron. Don't believe me? When you're on the bus going to the call center tomorrow morning, ask them the difference between "average" and "mean" and see what the average answers are. If we're going to start using "average people's" knowing and understanding as any kind of metric in science, we might as well just give up as a species and elect a reality TV host as president.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Absent proof of man's forcing of warming - we're left with only one conclusion: it's natural.
Nonsense. Lack of proof for X does not mean "not X" must be true. It just means that X is unproven.
Also, outside of mathematics, there is no such thing as "proof". Just evidence.
You do realize what you're doing is comparing the global climate, an actual physical planetary wide system that's been here for millenia before any man was ever born, to man made social constructs and saying that because we cannot predict the latter we surely can't predict the former.
This is not sound logic. The climate and the stock market are both extremely chaotic systems meaning that small changes in some values can have huge impacts on the stability of the whole system. However what you and others making this argument always conveniently forget is that underlying the study of climate and the mathematical models themselves are actual natural sciences like chemistry. We don't have to 'guess' how the greenhouse effect works, or how much heat is absorbed/reflected by different gasses, these are all things that can be measured and tested in a lab.
Obviously because the amount of metrics that needs to be factored in to model something as vast as the global climate is so high that the models cannot be 100 % certain, and obviously there are human components in the equation that increase this uncertainty but the core of your argument is still not correct. The stock market can crash at any given time due to any number of actions and the prices plummet. For you to be able to argue that the climate is the same way, you'd have to argue that at any given moment way may spontaneously enter into an ice age, which is clearly not true.
There's also never been a time in the history of the species when we've had access to as much computing power, machine learning and actual hard data about the state of the climate.
No. You see, the thing with the climate is: we have to make predictions because the future state of the climate has a direct impact on the survival of the species. The models that we do have reflect our current, best understanding of the climate, and they're getting better as more data come in and machine learning steps in.
If you ignore the models there's essentially nothing to base our decisions on and you could argue that it's just fine for us to start burning up all the remaining oil and gas because 'who knows what's going to happen'. But that's just BS. We obviously don't know the future of the climate with certainty, but we do know enough to know that certain actions are going to make things a lot worse.
You also mentioned disease outbreak models, so think about it in this light: should we throw out our current understanding of epidemiology because the outbreak models are not (yet) all that precise? Should the doctors stop wearing gloves, should we stop vaccinations, sanitation and all these things which have a demonstrable and proven effect on lowering the rates of outbreak and infection because we're not 100 % omniscient about the time and place of future outbreaks? Huh?
So either you can listen to the people with the most information and understanding about the climate and its current state, or you can keep telling yourself that corporations and atmospheric gasses are equally unp
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Humans aren't the only, or most important things, on the planet. We're fucking up ecosystems that have taken millions of years to stabilize and balance, and cannot react fast enough to survive the rapid changes we are causing.
How a generally pro-science forum like slashdot can have a good chunk of its posters revert to fox news talking points on politically charged issues.
The same, tired, debunked, denier arguments again and again..