So as a Marxism* denier but a climate change believer what is your proposed solution? To me the free market solution is to impose the full cost of using fossil fuels on their use (including an amortization of the future costs of the global warming that causes) and see who wins. I see no entity other than the government to impose that cost. I realize determining all those external costs is difficult but it would result in a more real market.
* I'm just using your terminology, not agreeing with your characterization.
AC, you are that one that needs modding up. Balance is the key.
In the real world no pure ideology will ever work if for no other reason than that not everyone will go along with it. The free marketers defend their ideology with religious zeal but it can never work practically in the real world without government regulation. Communists defend their ideology with religious zeal but fail to account for the greed and venality normal to the human condition. I reject both extremes. The solution usually is a compromise somewhere in the middle and mostly what we argue about is where the line should be.
If you're going to consider all climate change data then you need to include ocean temperatures too (and geosphere temperature changes although they're small enough to be ignored at the first order) because it's all part of a continuum and rather than temperatures in any one part of the whole it makes more sense to consider the total energy captured in the system. If you look at it that way the warming continues apace with no noticeable slow down. Over 90% of the energy being captured by the increase in greenhouse gases goes in to heating the oceans.
It will probably happen if temperature starts falling significantly again. Even then they will probably find explanations to prolong their beliefs, as is they way of all true believers;-)
How about you, if temperatures continue to rise as expected will you give up on your rationalization and accept maybe they were right?
Raw data is more available today than ever before. I don't know what raw data you're looking for but there are links to a lot of it here.
With all of the eyes that have been on this subject for the past 20-30 years it's hard for me to believe that anyone can get away with hiding anything in the field.
How dense are you? The data was anomalous because it no longer tracked well with actual thermometer readings as it had for the previous 100+ years.
Your car analogy is pretty laughable because you're assuming they changed their methodology when they didn't. A better analogy would be that they surveyed a limited area on the popularity of NASCAR and all of a sudden the popularity starts to drop. When they investigate why it turns out the limited area they've been surveying is being gentrified with a bunch of snobbish yuppies moving in. When they broaden the survey area to include more places with a better overall demographic spread they find out that NASCAR's popularity in fact is not dropping.
Paleoclimatology was still pretty young back in the 1990's and Michael Mann's paper in which the data was dropped (containing the infamous Hockey Stick graph) was really ground breaking research that hadn't been done before. The tree ring series he used was one of a very limited number available at the time. Since then there as been a lot of work building on that including many more tree ring series which confirms the basic premises in the paper and support the decision to drop that specific data.
It's not a matter of using different methods. As far as I know the methods haven't changed but no doubt they've been refined somewhat. It's a matter of an increase in the total amount of data available from a much wider spread of locations. The location from which the anomalous results were obtained still shows the anomaly but it's overwhelmed by the mass of newer data.
Nor would people rush to conclude that a one-time one foot rise in sea level was a high price to pay with what humanity has achieved in the last one hundred years.
What makes you think sea level won't continue to rise, that it's a one-time thing? The last time CO2 levels were as high as they are now sea level was over 60 feet higher than it is now.
They threw out one set of data that was showing anomalous results. Since that paper was published there are many new tree ring datasets that don't show an anomaly past the 1960's. If you read the paper they fully explain the anomalous data and what they did about it.
As I said there are some scientists who would do that but to me it's not believable that thousands of climate scientists around the world are doing that and getting away with it especially if what they're saying is false. Usually when you hear about a scientist doing something like that it's in a pretty obscure area of the science because once others start looking at it they're going to find out it was wrong.
If you're more worried about the money than the science you're doing it wrong. Do you really think that the vast majority of climate scientists from around the world are falsifying science for the sake of money when they're smart enough to know that their falsification will eventually be discovered utterly destroying their scientific reputations? I don't doubt there are a few scientists around who are that venal but not enough in the long run to overcome the vast majority who are honestly seeking to understand our physical world better. To think they're all in on falsifying climate science is to postulate conspiracy on an impossible level.
The science is nearly 200 years old now starting with Fourier who discovered the greenhouse effect in 1824 and it's just been building since then. In the past 20-30 years it's been subject to intense scrutiny yet no one has come up with that magic bullet that explains the current climate change better than the current explanations. If somebody does I'll pay attention.
Of course I know that, I was going for funny. I think it'll take getting computers a lot closer to the complexity of the human brain (and maybe something totally different than the current digital computers) before AI really starts working.
Of course I meant it to be a flippant remark but I'll reply to you seriously.
Hasn't the pro side already "denied" global warming enough to rename it "climate change"?
It was climate change before it was global warming. For instance this paper [PDF] published in October 1970 by George Benton titled "Carbon Dioxide and its Role in Climate Change".
Don't just assume that the causes of climate change now has to be the same as historical causes. According to paleoclimatologists what we're seeing now doesn't match up very well with what happened in the past. The closest is probably the PETM 55 million years ago but the rise in carbon and temperature were much slower (~20,000 years) than now (probably less than 300 years if we don't do something).
The Earth and life will certainly recover and keep going until the Sun gets too hot. The question is how much of human civilization will survive?
Our high school got a teletype/paper tape reader/punch in the math lab and all of us who were interested got 5 minutes of computer time on the Cyber over at the Oregon State campus through a 150 baud acoustic modem. I fooled around with FORTRAN a bit but mostly we played a Star Trek game* that one of my classmates had written. When I actually got to OSU I took a regular FORTRAN class where we used punched card decks for our programs. But I didn't really get serious about programming until the early 1980's when I went back to school after my ski bum years.
*The Star Trek game was a pretty amazing piece of work by a guy who went on to MIT and got a Masters in Aerospace Engineering in under 4 years. It was played in a hemispherical space with stars and gravity in it. There were 4 ships, the Enterprise, the Vulcans, the Klingons and the Romulans. They all had limited fuel and photon torpedoes as well as phasers. Gravity affected the flight of the photon torpedoes as well as the ships. Each team would put in the moves for their ship then the program would take that in and send back a representation of the new situation printed on the teletype and wait for the next moves. We wasted hours on that thing.
Because the ice melting is not an instantaneous response it's not necessarily true that it was as warm 400 years ago as it is now. Just that it was warm enough over a long enough period of time before 400 years ago to have melted that ice.
All Federal loan programs like that one that Solyndra took part in have a budgeted failure rate (usually between 10 and 15% I believe). Last I heard the program that Solyndra was in was still under 5% even with them. Perhaps you are asking for a level of perfection that is not attainable.
Solyndra's product was an interesting concept and they might still be alive if not for the advent of cheap solar cells from China.
If local bookstores and video stores had the same amount of political clout as auto dealers then Amazon and NetFlix wouldn't be able to sell in those states either.
Slashdot Mirror
So as a Marxism* denier but a climate change believer what is your proposed solution? To me the free market solution is to impose the full cost of using fossil fuels on their use (including an amortization of the future costs of the global warming that causes) and see who wins. I see no entity other than the government to impose that cost. I realize determining all those external costs is difficult but it would result in a more real market.
* I'm just using your terminology, not agreeing with your characterization.
Then how come 2010 is the hottest year on record?
AC, you are that one that needs modding up. Balance is the key.
In the real world no pure ideology will ever work if for no other reason than that not everyone will go along with it. The free marketers defend their ideology with religious zeal but it can never work practically in the real world without government regulation. Communists defend their ideology with religious zeal but fail to account for the greed and venality normal to the human condition. I reject both extremes. The solution usually is a compromise somewhere in the middle and mostly what we argue about is where the line should be.
If you're going to consider all climate change data then you need to include ocean temperatures too (and geosphere temperature changes although they're small enough to be ignored at the first order) because it's all part of a continuum and rather than temperatures in any one part of the whole it makes more sense to consider the total energy captured in the system. If you look at it that way the warming continues apace with no noticeable slow down. Over 90% of the energy being captured by the increase in greenhouse gases goes in to heating the oceans.
Isn't the Sun essentially a massive central power source?
Oh, so that's what GMO organisms are for, so big business can own our ass (even more than they already do).
Ah, 4.7 was where I started with it. I wasn't aware of the earlier history.
It will probably happen if temperature starts falling significantly again. Even then they will probably find explanations to prolong their beliefs, as is they way of all true believers ;-)
How about you, if temperatures continue to rise as expected will you give up on your rationalization and accept maybe they were right?
Raw data is more available today than ever before. I don't know what raw data you're looking for but there are links to a lot of it here.
With all of the eyes that have been on this subject for the past 20-30 years it's hard for me to believe that anyone can get away with hiding anything in the field.
How dense are you? The data was anomalous because it no longer tracked well with actual thermometer readings as it had for the previous 100+ years.
Your car analogy is pretty laughable because you're assuming they changed their methodology when they didn't. A better analogy would be that they surveyed a limited area on the popularity of NASCAR and all of a sudden the popularity starts to drop. When they investigate why it turns out the limited area they've been surveying is being gentrified with a bunch of snobbish yuppies moving in. When they broaden the survey area to include more places with a better overall demographic spread they find out that NASCAR's popularity in fact is not dropping.
Paleoclimatology was still pretty young back in the 1990's and Michael Mann's paper in which the data was dropped (containing the infamous Hockey Stick graph) was really ground breaking research that hadn't been done before. The tree ring series he used was one of a very limited number available at the time. Since then there as been a lot of work building on that including many more tree ring series which confirms the basic premises in the paper and support the decision to drop that specific data.
Last time I heard VMS had never been hacked. Is that still the case?
It was the best OS I ever worked with. It'd be nice if they open sourced it.
It's not a matter of using different methods. As far as I know the methods haven't changed but no doubt they've been refined somewhat. It's a matter of an increase in the total amount of data available from a much wider spread of locations. The location from which the anomalous results were obtained still shows the anomaly but it's overwhelmed by the mass of newer data.
Nor would people rush to conclude that a one-time one foot rise in sea level was a high price to pay with what humanity has achieved in the last one hundred years.
What makes you think sea level won't continue to rise, that it's a one-time thing? The last time CO2 levels were as high as they are now sea level was over 60 feet higher than it is now.
They threw out one set of data that was showing anomalous results. Since that paper was published there are many new tree ring datasets that don't show an anomaly past the 1960's. If you read the paper they fully explain the anomalous data and what they did about it.
As I said there are some scientists who would do that but to me it's not believable that thousands of climate scientists around the world are doing that and getting away with it especially if what they're saying is false. Usually when you hear about a scientist doing something like that it's in a pretty obscure area of the science because once others start looking at it they're going to find out it was wrong.
If you're more worried about the money than the science you're doing it wrong. Do you really think that the vast majority of climate scientists from around the world are falsifying science for the sake of money when they're smart enough to know that their falsification will eventually be discovered utterly destroying their scientific reputations? I don't doubt there are a few scientists around who are that venal but not enough in the long run to overcome the vast majority who are honestly seeking to understand our physical world better. To think they're all in on falsifying climate science is to postulate conspiracy on an impossible level.
The science is nearly 200 years old now starting with Fourier who discovered the greenhouse effect in 1824 and it's just been building since then. In the past 20-30 years it's been subject to intense scrutiny yet no one has come up with that magic bullet that explains the current climate change better than the current explanations. If somebody does I'll pay attention.
I wasn't being serious, I was just carrying they logic of the post to an absurd extreme for comic reasons.
Of course I know that, I was going for funny. I think it'll take getting computers a lot closer to the complexity of the human brain (and maybe something totally different than the current digital computers) before AI really starts working.
Of course I meant it to be a flippant remark but I'll reply to you seriously.
Hasn't the pro side already "denied" global warming enough to rename it "climate change"?
It was climate change before it was global warming. For instance this paper [PDF] published in October 1970 by George Benton titled "Carbon Dioxide and its Role in Climate Change".
Don't just assume that the causes of climate change now has to be the same as historical causes. According to paleoclimatologists what we're seeing now doesn't match up very well with what happened in the past. The closest is probably the PETM 55 million years ago but the rise in carbon and temperature were much slower (~20,000 years) than now (probably less than 300 years if we don't do something).
The Earth and life will certainly recover and keep going until the Sun gets too hot. The question is how much of human civilization will survive?
I was going to say, your computer trying to understand you is probably like a man trying to understand a woman. Not likely to happen any time soon.
Hmm... I guess that means we just haven't been alarmist enough about global warming to bring the deniers over to the science side yet.
The oceans have gone up and down over time. Now they're rising again and the big cities which have too many people in them are going to suffer.
Actually sea levels have been remarkably stable for about the last 6,000 years, essentially since we started building port cities.
Our high school got a teletype/paper tape reader/punch in the math lab and all of us who were interested got 5 minutes of computer time on the Cyber over at the Oregon State campus through a 150 baud acoustic modem. I fooled around with FORTRAN a bit but mostly we played a Star Trek game* that one of my classmates had written. When I actually got to OSU I took a regular FORTRAN class where we used punched card decks for our programs. But I didn't really get serious about programming until the early 1980's when I went back to school after my ski bum years.
*The Star Trek game was a pretty amazing piece of work by a guy who went on to MIT and got a Masters in Aerospace Engineering in under 4 years. It was played in a hemispherical space with stars and gravity in it. There were 4 ships, the Enterprise, the Vulcans, the Klingons and the Romulans. They all had limited fuel and photon torpedoes as well as phasers. Gravity affected the flight of the photon torpedoes as well as the ships. Each team would put in the moves for their ship then the program would take that in and send back a representation of the new situation printed on the teletype and wait for the next moves. We wasted hours on that thing.
Because the ice melting is not an instantaneous response it's not necessarily true that it was as warm 400 years ago as it is now. Just that it was warm enough over a long enough period of time before 400 years ago to have melted that ice.
All Federal loan programs like that one that Solyndra took part in have a budgeted failure rate (usually between 10 and 15% I believe). Last I heard the program that Solyndra was in was still under 5% even with them. Perhaps you are asking for a level of perfection that is not attainable.
Solyndra's product was an interesting concept and they might still be alive if not for the advent of cheap solar cells from China.
If local bookstores and video stores had the same amount of political clout as auto dealers then Amazon and NetFlix wouldn't be able to sell in those states either.