There have been cases in science where 40,000 papers by experts had to be considered questionable. It is possible for a large number of experts to be wrong.
What you always fail to mention in noting this factoid is that the vast majority of them are in the medical or social sciences field. When you get into the physical sciences the number of retractions is far smaller. I think that is a distinction worth making.
Florida was supposed to be underwater by the 90s, and last time I checked it is still there.
Show me any oceanographer with scientific credentials who ever said that. You're paying attention to the wrong people if you think that was an actual prediction.
Except that you're still going to end up paying to bail them out. Not all of them will be bailed out but it will be enough that it's going to cost you as well.
Coastal homes are flooding because you have destroyed the buffer zones (marshlands/swamplands) that stopped the water from entering the area. What did you think would happen when you destroy the buffer zones for housing? It has nothing to do with climate change/whatever. But no one wants to address that issue, because there is no money in it.
You are right that destroying the buffer zones doesn't help the situation but that doesn't change the fact that sea level is rising and those buffer zones would be under water sooner or later anyway.
Battery Park in Manhattan shows effectively ZERO acceleration over the last 150 years or so, but I guess that's not an exciting Gloom And Doom headline...
So Battery Park is a suitable proxy for sea level rise around the world? I think not. Meanwhile sea level measurements from satellites do show an acceleration in SLR.
Al Gore recently (well, a few years ago...) purchased a fairly large beachfront home here in California. That's ONE of the reasons why I discount claims that the sea level will rise more than a few inches per century.
I checked out that home on google maps and it's located at about 450 feet above sea level. I don't think sea level rise is going to cause any problems there for the foreseeable future.
If every bit of land-based ice melted, the oceans would rise about 160 ft.
I think that number is only for all of Antarctica. The number I've seen most often and what I got when I calculated it myself is more like 210 feet.
Greenland has about 2,850,000 cubic kilometers of ice. Antarctica has about 26,500,000 cubic kilometers of ice. I'm going to ignore the rest of the ice because it's practically at rounding error levels. So the two of them together add up to 29,350,000 km^3 of ice. The surface area of the worlds oceans is about 361,000,000 km^2.
So 29,350,000 km^3 divided by 360,000,000 km^2 equals 0.081527 km or about 267 feet. Of course the ocean spreads out as it rises so you have to take that into account so that's how they get 210 feet.
Also that doesn't take into account sea level rise from thermal expansion. That is currently causing about 1/3 of the sea level rise we see.
CO2 absorbs infrared photons then distributes most of that energy by collisions to other molecules in the atmosphere. Those molecules eventually give off IR photons in random directions so approximately half of them go back toward the surface of the Earth. So the total amount of energy impinging on the surface of the Earth is the part of sunlight that gets absorbed plus the IR energy from the atmosphere. In order for the temperature of the Earth to be at (a dynamic state of) equilibrium it has to emit as much energy as it has coming in. Increasing the concentration of a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere will cause it to intercept more of the IR energy from the surface of the Earth. That will increase the IR energy emitted from the atmosphere including back toward the surface of the Earth. In order for the surface of the Earth to increase the energy it emits it has to heat up.
So CO2 doesn't directly heat of the surface of the Earth, it just changes the balance of incoming and outgoing energy in such a way that a higher concentration in the atmosphere forces the surface to heat up (from absorbed sunlight) in order to reject enough energy to reach a new balance.
It's hilarious how the climate science deniers passing memes around becomes like a game of telephone. I don't think Al Gore ever said anything about snow being a thing of the past. That was a scientist in Britain making an off the cuff remark that wasn't a scientific publication.
Just more bullshit, there's no such thing as a greenhouse gas, it's a failed theory that doesn't make sense at all. The additional warmth of the earth's surface is due to adiabatic compression of the atmosphereby gravity. This is why Venus' surface is much hotter; it has 90 times the atmospheric pressure of Earth.
You can keep telling yourself that all you want to and it still won't make it true. If it was how could an air conditioner work? After all it compresses a gas to liquid form which causes it to heat up but then the heat energy is removed and when the liquid becomes a gas again it's cold enough to cool down your air.
Hard to argue with them when they constantly re-adjust data to fit theories, which when run backwards can't even fit past climate behavior without further massaging datasets.... or when so many studies published are found to be bunk when anyone tries to replicate results. After reading something like that, how can you not assume a lot of scientists are faking things?
Since scientists publish papers that explain exactly what they did to adjust the temperature data how come someone like you doesn't take that information and explain exactly how the algorithms they use to adjust the data make it fit the theories. It's easy to make that claim but it never gets backed up with solid data to support it.
As far as replicating results, yes it's a problem in medicine and social sciences but not so much in physical sciences like climatology. Again if it's such a problem why aren't guys like you actually doing the science to prove it's a problem.
Now, come back when you have an actual, scientific ENGINEERING PLAN to combat it in a way that doesn't involve
Destroying the planet's economy
Call for massive depopulation of the planet
Cause us to revert to shivering savages living in caves
Until then, POLITELY FUCK THE HELL OFF!
That's quite a set of straw men you have there. Never mind that if the worst of the potential harms from anthropogenic global warming actually happen they may come to pass anyway when our complex modern civilization collapses.
By Henry's law the amount of gas dissolved in a liquid is proportional to the partial pressure of the gas in the atmosphere above the liquid. As the temperature of the liquid increases the amount of gas it can hold drops. But human emissions of CO2 have increased the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere by over 40% in the past 200 years which is enough to overcome the reduction in solubility from temperature increases. The increase in dissolved CO2 in the oceans has been measured so we know it's happening.
I'm just reporting what scientists have found that there has been a slight cooling trend since about 8,000 years ago. Try to find a temperature record that says something different.
For about the last million years the cycle of glacial periods has been a little over 100,000 years long between interglacial periods. There is some evidence that this current interglacial period was going to be longer than the average of around 10,000-20,000 years but it's not known for sure that that is true. But you are correct, at current CO2 levels there is no chance of a new glacial period commencing. CO2 would have to get below 250 ppm for that to happen.
Pretty much all of the records of Holocene temperatures I've see show a slight cooling trend from about 8,000 years ago. It's not a lot, less than 1 degree C but it's definitely a cooling trend.
As we came out of the latest ice age the earth has been warming up continuously and will keep doing so.
No, as we came out of the last glaciation temperatures hit a peak about 8,000 years ago during the Holocene climatic optimum as you would expect from an examination of Milankovitch cycles. Since then temperatures were slowly cooling toward the next glacial maximum. They stopped cooling when human emissions of greenhouse gases (primarily CO2) increased to the point of overriding the current cooling effects of Milankovitch cycles. The increase in ocean acidification shows that the oceans are still absorbing more CO2 than they release.
If average global temperatures increase to 3.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, as researchers currently project
The write-up claims, the 3.5 degrees is the current projections by some unspecified researchers. There no "ifs" about that write-up's claims — SuperKendall is correct, while your narrative falls apart.
Remember to logout.
Considering that we're already about 1 degree C above pre-industrial levels then 3.5 C is only another 2.5C on top of that which is well within the range of IPCC projections for some of the scenarios.
You know the rules. Pulling the ever-changing talking points out of thin air is not going to do. You gotta list pairs of links: one element in each pair would be a link to a practical falsifiable prediction, the other — describing it coming to pass, within 20% of the predicted value(s), if the prediction itself was quantifiable.
Um... no. I'm not going to waste my time doing homework for you. As I said, temperatures continue to rise, ice continues to melt, sea level continues to rise and the oceans continue to acidify. Climate scientists have done their homework and explained in great detail the reasoning behind their findings. At this point it's up to you to come up with explanations for those things that don't involve anthropogenic global warming.
You misread it. The piece — correctly — argues, that the motivation most of the climate-alarmists is not any genuine concern for the environment, but rather the desire to destroy capitalism.
That's a pretty broad assumption on your part that the motivation of most "climate-alarmists" is a desire to destroy capitalism. Do you have any real evidence to back that up or are you just projecting your ideology on the matter?
You seem to have a quite rigid view about what science is. There isn't any existing rule book for science, just a bunch of methodologies that work to achieve reasonable results. The methodologies for lab science are quite different than those for observational science. Just because they don't follow your supposed rules doesn't mean they aren't good science.
So you can expect to be fighting this battle for the rest of your life. The evidence for anthropogenic global warming is a strong if not stronger than the evidence for evolution. You're not going to win unless you can explain the observations better than existing science without involving anthropogenic global warming. Just nit picking at the parts that aren't perfect isn't enough.
The Hockey Stick Graph from Mann, et. al. (1999) are the bits in blue. They are simply based on the observations that Mann used to make the graph, nothing involving a model. All of the other parts were tacked onto the original graph by others. The original Hockey Stick graph is not a model of anything and was never used as a model of anything.
My apologies to Sophie. I'm a little familiar with her work so I should have paid more attention and avoided such an egregious error.
But I don't think it's necessary that climate models in and of themselves need to be falsifiable. They are merely tools that help us analyze whether our understanding of the interactions of the various components of the climate system is realistic or not. They are not primary evidence for anthropogenic global warming which occurs at a much lower level than climate models. It is at that lower level that you need to focus your falsification work.
To quote Sophie:
This difficulty doesn’t mean that climate models or climate science are invalid or untrustworthy. Climate models are carefully developed and evaluated based on their ability to accurately reproduce observed climate trends and processes. This is why climatologists have confidence in them as scientific tools, not because of ideas around falsifiability.
The "peoplescube" straw man is that doing something about global warming requires that we destroy capitalism. It's a pretty ridiculous argument. All that is really necessary is that we internalize the externalities of global warming then capitalism will fix it just fine. As far as I'm concerned the Pascal's Wager argument is pretty meaningless because we're well past the point where you can argue that anthropogenic global warming is not a real thing. The evidence just keeps piling on brick after brick as time goes on.
As far as falsifiable predictions of climate science how about temperatures continue to rise, ice continues to melt, sea level continues to rise, the oceans continue to acidify? We may not always get the predictions exactly right in the quantifiable sense but if any of those things turned out not to be true it would require a substantial reassessment of the science behind them.
You should go read and comprehend the IPCC reports because they are the best summary of the current science. I don't think they have ever predicted the complete melting of the polar ice caps yet but if they did they would rightly note that it would take thousands of years for that to happen, particularly in Antarctica. Coastal cities will eventually be underwater but if you look at the IPCC projections for sea level rise they've had to be revised upwards because observations have outpaced projections. Same thing with Arctic sea ice. The IPCC projections for the complete disappearance of summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean have pointed to that happening in the 2040s or 2050s at the earliest. Now that appears to be more likely to happen in the late 2020s or the 2030s.
So like I say, rather than believe everything you read on the internet you should dive in and find the actual predictions that scientists have really made rather than the hyperbolic ranting of climate science deniers who are just trying to make it appear that scientists got it wrong.
If you're saying they use data from say for instance the temperature records in the model then you would be wrong. There is almost no data input into a climate model. They do input some things like the expected change in the level of greenhouse gases but that's about it.
They are physical models in the sense that they use the physics of the atmosphere to model how climate will evolve. They use equations for fluid dynamics, for radiative transfer of energy and tons of other stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been cases in science where 40,000 papers by experts had to be considered questionable. It is possible for a large number of experts to be wrong.
What you always fail to mention in noting this factoid is that the vast majority of them are in the medical or social sciences field. When you get into the physical sciences the number of retractions is far smaller. I think that is a distinction worth making.
Florida was supposed to be underwater by the 90s, and last time I checked it is still there.
Show me any oceanographer with scientific credentials who ever said that. You're paying attention to the wrong people if you think that was an actual prediction.
Not my problem. Some rich motherfucker's problem.
Except that you're still going to end up paying to bail them out. Not all of them will be bailed out but it will be enough that it's going to cost you as well.
Coastal homes are flooding because you have destroyed the buffer zones (marshlands/swamplands) that stopped the water from entering the area. What did you think would happen when you destroy the buffer zones for housing? It has nothing to do with climate change/whatever. But no one wants to address that issue, because there is no money in it.
You are right that destroying the buffer zones doesn't help the situation but that doesn't change the fact that sea level is rising and those buffer zones would be under water sooner or later anyway.
Battery Park in Manhattan shows effectively ZERO acceleration over the last 150 years or so, but I guess that's not an exciting Gloom And Doom headline...
So Battery Park is a suitable proxy for sea level rise around the world? I think not. Meanwhile sea level measurements from satellites do show an acceleration in SLR.
Al Gore recently (well, a few years ago...) purchased a fairly large beachfront home here in California. That's ONE of the reasons why I discount claims that the sea level will rise more than a few inches per century.
I checked out that home on google maps and it's located at about 450 feet above sea level. I don't think sea level rise is going to cause any problems there for the foreseeable future.
If every bit of land-based ice melted, the oceans would rise about 160 ft.
I think that number is only for all of Antarctica. The number I've seen most often and what I got when I calculated it myself is more like 210 feet.
Greenland has about 2,850,000 cubic kilometers of ice. Antarctica has about 26,500,000 cubic kilometers of ice. I'm going to ignore the rest of the ice because it's practically at rounding error levels. So the two of them together add up to 29,350,000 km^3 of ice. The surface area of the worlds oceans is about 361,000,000 km^2.
So 29,350,000 km^3 divided by 360,000,000 km^2 equals 0.081527 km or about 267 feet. Of course the ocean spreads out as it rises so you have to take that into account so that's how they get 210 feet.
Also that doesn't take into account sea level rise from thermal expansion. That is currently causing about 1/3 of the sea level rise we see.
CO2 absorbs infrared photons then distributes most of that energy by collisions to other molecules in the atmosphere. Those molecules eventually give off IR photons in random directions so approximately half of them go back toward the surface of the Earth. So the total amount of energy impinging on the surface of the Earth is the part of sunlight that gets absorbed plus the IR energy from the atmosphere. In order for the temperature of the Earth to be at (a dynamic state of) equilibrium it has to emit as much energy as it has coming in. Increasing the concentration of a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere will cause it to intercept more of the IR energy from the surface of the Earth. That will increase the IR energy emitted from the atmosphere including back toward the surface of the Earth. In order for the surface of the Earth to increase the energy it emits it has to heat up.
So CO2 doesn't directly heat of the surface of the Earth, it just changes the balance of incoming and outgoing energy in such a way that a higher concentration in the atmosphere forces the surface to heat up (from absorbed sunlight) in order to reject enough energy to reach a new balance.
It's hilarious how the climate science deniers passing memes around becomes like a game of telephone. I don't think Al Gore ever said anything about snow being a thing of the past. That was a scientist in Britain making an off the cuff remark that wasn't a scientific publication.
Just more bullshit, there's no such thing as a greenhouse gas, it's a failed theory that doesn't make sense at all. The additional warmth of the earth's surface is due to adiabatic compression of the atmosphereby gravity. This is why Venus' surface is much hotter; it has 90 times the atmospheric pressure of Earth.
You can keep telling yourself that all you want to and it still won't make it true. If it was how could an air conditioner work? After all it compresses a gas to liquid form which causes it to heat up but then the heat energy is removed and when the liquid becomes a gas again it's cold enough to cool down your air.
Hard to argue with them when they constantly re-adjust data to fit theories, which when run backwards can't even fit past climate behavior without further massaging datasets.... or when so many studies published are found to be bunk when anyone tries to replicate results. After reading something like that, how can you not assume a lot of scientists are faking things?
Since scientists publish papers that explain exactly what they did to adjust the temperature data how come someone like you doesn't take that information and explain exactly how the algorithms they use to adjust the data make it fit the theories. It's easy to make that claim but it never gets backed up with solid data to support it.
As far as replicating results, yes it's a problem in medicine and social sciences but not so much in physical sciences like climatology. Again if it's such a problem why aren't guys like you actually doing the science to prove it's a problem.
Now, come back when you have an actual, scientific ENGINEERING PLAN to combat it in a way that doesn't involve
Until then, POLITELY FUCK THE HELL OFF!
That's quite a set of straw men you have there. Never mind that if the worst of the potential harms from anthropogenic global warming actually happen they may come to pass anyway when our complex modern civilization collapses.
I will be dead by the time I give a fuck.
Unless your expected continued life span is less than 10 years I wouldn't count on that. And even 10 years might be too optimistic.
By Henry's law the amount of gas dissolved in a liquid is proportional to the partial pressure of the gas in the atmosphere above the liquid. As the temperature of the liquid increases the amount of gas it can hold drops. But human emissions of CO2 have increased the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere by over 40% in the past 200 years which is enough to overcome the reduction in solubility from temperature increases. The increase in dissolved CO2 in the oceans has been measured so we know it's happening.
I'm just reporting what scientists have found that there has been a slight cooling trend since about 8,000 years ago. Try to find a temperature record that says something different.
For about the last million years the cycle of glacial periods has been a little over 100,000 years long between interglacial periods. There is some evidence that this current interglacial period was going to be longer than the average of around 10,000-20,000 years but it's not known for sure that that is true. But you are correct, at current CO2 levels there is no chance of a new glacial period commencing. CO2 would have to get below 250 ppm for that to happen.
Pretty much all of the records of Holocene temperatures I've see show a slight cooling trend from about 8,000 years ago. It's not a lot, less than 1 degree C but it's definitely a cooling trend.
As we came out of the latest ice age the earth has been warming up continuously and will keep doing so.
No, as we came out of the last glaciation temperatures hit a peak about 8,000 years ago during the Holocene climatic optimum as you would expect from an examination of Milankovitch cycles. Since then temperatures were slowly cooling toward the next glacial maximum. They stopped cooling when human emissions of greenhouse gases (primarily CO2) increased to the point of overriding the current cooling effects of Milankovitch cycles. The increase in ocean acidification shows that the oceans are still absorbing more CO2 than they release.
The write-up claims, the 3.5 degrees is the current projections by some unspecified researchers. There no "ifs" about that write-up's claims — SuperKendall is correct, while your narrative falls apart.
Remember to logout.
Considering that we're already about 1 degree C above pre-industrial levels then 3.5 C is only another 2.5C on top of that which is well within the range of IPCC projections for some of the scenarios.
You know the rules. Pulling the ever-changing talking points out of thin air is not going to do. You gotta list pairs of links: one element in each pair would be a link to a practical falsifiable prediction, the other — describing it coming to pass, within 20% of the predicted value(s), if the prediction itself was quantifiable.
Um... no. I'm not going to waste my time doing homework for you. As I said, temperatures continue to rise, ice continues to melt, sea level continues to rise and the oceans continue to acidify. Climate scientists have done their homework and explained in great detail the reasoning behind their findings. At this point it's up to you to come up with explanations for those things that don't involve anthropogenic global warming.
You misread it. The piece — correctly — argues, that the motivation most of the climate-alarmists is not any genuine concern for the environment, but rather the desire to destroy capitalism.
That's a pretty broad assumption on your part that the motivation of most "climate-alarmists" is a desire to destroy capitalism. Do you have any real evidence to back that up or are you just projecting your ideology on the matter?
You seem to have a quite rigid view about what science is. There isn't any existing rule book for science, just a bunch of methodologies that work to achieve reasonable results. The methodologies for lab science are quite different than those for observational science. Just because they don't follow your supposed rules doesn't mean they aren't good science.
So you can expect to be fighting this battle for the rest of your life. The evidence for anthropogenic global warming is a strong if not stronger than the evidence for evolution. You're not going to win unless you can explain the observations better than existing science without involving anthropogenic global warming. Just nit picking at the parts that aren't perfect isn't enough.
Let's try that again:
Here is the original 1999 version of the Hockey Stick Graph.
Here is the original 1999 version of the
The Hockey Stick Graph from Mann, et. al. (1999) are the bits in blue. They are simply based on the observations that Mann used to make the graph, nothing involving a model. All of the other parts were tacked onto the original graph by others. The original Hockey Stick graph is not a model of anything and was never used as a model of anything.
My apologies to Sophie. I'm a little familiar with her work so I should have paid more attention and avoided such an egregious error.
But I don't think it's necessary that climate models in and of themselves need to be falsifiable. They are merely tools that help us analyze whether our understanding of the interactions of the various components of the climate system is realistic or not. They are not primary evidence for anthropogenic global warming which occurs at a much lower level than climate models. It is at that lower level that you need to focus your falsification work.
To quote Sophie:
This difficulty doesn’t mean that climate models or climate science are invalid or untrustworthy. Climate models are carefully developed and evaluated based on their ability to accurately reproduce observed climate trends and processes. This is why climatologists have confidence in them as scientific tools, not because of ideas around falsifiability.
The "peoplescube" straw man is that doing something about global warming requires that we destroy capitalism. It's a pretty ridiculous argument. All that is really necessary is that we internalize the externalities of global warming then capitalism will fix it just fine. As far as I'm concerned the Pascal's Wager argument is pretty meaningless because we're well past the point where you can argue that anthropogenic global warming is not a real thing. The evidence just keeps piling on brick after brick as time goes on.
As far as falsifiable predictions of climate science how about temperatures continue to rise, ice continues to melt, sea level continues to rise, the oceans continue to acidify? We may not always get the predictions exactly right in the quantifiable sense but if any of those things turned out not to be true it would require a substantial reassessment of the science behind them.
You should go read and comprehend the IPCC reports because they are the best summary of the current science. I don't think they have ever predicted the complete melting of the polar ice caps yet but if they did they would rightly note that it would take thousands of years for that to happen, particularly in Antarctica. Coastal cities will eventually be underwater but if you look at the IPCC projections for sea level rise they've had to be revised upwards because observations have outpaced projections. Same thing with Arctic sea ice. The IPCC projections for the complete disappearance of summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean have pointed to that happening in the 2040s or 2050s at the earliest. Now that appears to be more likely to happen in the late 2020s or the 2030s.
Here's an interesting analysis of the IPCC's projected sea level rise from the 1990 report that has held up remarkably well. Some of the details are different than expected but the overall rise has followed the best estimate pretty well.
So like I say, rather than believe everything you read on the internet you should dive in and find the actual predictions that scientists have really made rather than the hyperbolic ranting of climate science deniers who are just trying to make it appear that scientists got it wrong.
The fact that they tacked on model predictions for the future onto the hockey stick graph of observations doesn't make it a model.
If you're saying they use data from say for instance the temperature records in the model then you would be wrong. There is almost no data input into a climate model. They do input some things like the expected change in the level of greenhouse gases but that's about it.
They are physical models in the sense that they use the physics of the atmosphere to model how climate will evolve. They use equations for fluid dynamics, for radiative transfer of energy and tons of other stuff.