Growing up in the 80s, all I heard was how liberal the media was and how we had to fight against it. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, it's clear that the phrase "liberal media" was a conservative talking point that they repeated ad infinitum until people stopped questioning it and just assumed it was true.
The same thing is happening now with claiming scientists are politically or monetarily motivated (the conservative machine hasn't settled on which script to stick with).
Look, I'm a scientist. I know scientists. I know scientists at NOAA, NCAR, NIST, the Labs, in academia, in industry, at biotechs, at agri-science companies, at space exploration companies, and at oil and gas companies. I know conservative scientists, liberal scientists, agnostic scientists, religious scientists, and hedonistic scientists.
You know what motivates scientists? Science. And to a lesser extent, their ego. If someone doesn't love science, there's no way they can cut it as a scientist. There are no political or monetary rewards available to scientists in the same way they're available to lawyers and lobbyists.
Science if hard work for little pay and possibly some recognition. Unfortunately, the conservative noise machine is slowly building a narrative that scientists are all politically and monetarily motivated. The public doesn't really know any better and will believe this to be true if they hear it enough.
This attempt to paint scientists as political actors is pure bullshit and demeans the hard work and great sacrifices working scientists make every day.
Science is a free market of ideas. Like the free market uses distributed information on how to efficiently organize an economy, science is highly distributed and cannot be controlled from the top. Every researcher is a small entrepreneur, trying to search for problems that are interesting and solvable. Science is organized in small groups. If your group does not function, you'd better get out before your reputation and publication record suffer. Multiple such groups are at one university or research institute. In one country you will find many universities and institutes. All these groups in many countries are all competing and collaborating with each other. Competing for the best ideas, because it is fun and get more possibilities to do research. The currency is reputation.
Most scientists don't care that much about money. It is just a means to the end of doing more and better science. If they really cared about money that much they'd be working in finance or something like that. Assuming most scientists are in it for the money probably says more about your motivations being projected on them than anything else.
There are still several figures in Chapter 6 so I'm still not sure what you're talking about. But rather than talking about one specific area in that book wouldn't it be better to consider all of the different observations as a whole?
No, I definitely mean statistically speaking. Tamino is a statistician by trade and as he shows in his post the "pause" is meaningless statistically. Perhaps you'd like to try and present evidence to the contrary.
It's true that the rate of warming over the past 15 years is a bit slower than it was during the 1980's and 1990's particularly in the atmosphere. But the ocean where over 90% of the heat energy goes anyway continue to warm. Don't you think it's reasonable that scientists should investigate why that is true? The more we learn the better our understanding will be.
The studies in question didn't attempt to interact with the damning evidence from the emails, in fact they carefully avoided addressing it.
ROTFLMAO. There was no damning evidence in the Climategate emails as several investigations of them found.
If you throw out data from measurements are not known to be reliable proxies for global temperature, you are left with very little if anything; and certainly not with a thousand year hockey stick shape. The hockey stick is an artifact of cherry picking data.
When you have a number of studies approaching the same thing from different angles and they all agree for the most part in increases your confidence that you're on the right track.
Case in point, take Figure 6...
What Figure 6 are you referring to?
Water vapor's status as the number one greenhouse gas makes it a hard problem because of the water cycle. What is the effect of cloud cover? How is the water cycle affected by more CO2? These are the billion dollar questions.
The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is strictly a reaction to the geophysical conditions present. If increasing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere increases the temperature then water vapor will increase as well as a reaction to the higher temperatures. And no, I haven't forgotten about the oceans. What about them?
Research on clouds has found that the effect on global warming ranges from slightly negative to moderately positive with the most likely value being slightly positive. There is plenty of uncertainty about that and it's an area of active research but unless something is found that radically changes our current knowledge clouds are a minor player in their effect on global warming.
The Pause has shown that the most highly vaunted predictions of carbon sensitivity were mistaken. What we do with that from here is a tricky question. Simply changing the fudge factors for aerosol albedo to keep our predictions "accurate" is a pretty lame response (Mann's, if you hadn't guessed).
Statistically speaking it's a faux pause and warming has continued as expected given the vagaries of natural variation. The pause meme depends on cherry picking 1998, a year that was more than 2 sigmas above the trend.
It's true that water vapor is responsible for the largest chunk of greenhouse warming but it is not a greenhouse gas that can drive warming because the amount of WV in the atmosphere is strictly limited by temperature (and regionally the availability of water to evaporate). The level of WV is not something humans can have any significant direct effect on therefore it is not something to worry about.
The "Pause" is not something that is statistically significant. Here is a statistical analysis that uses several different techniques to try and find some significance to the "Pause" but fails. There is no reason statistically to say the rate of warming since the 1970's has changed significantly.
So you've (you believe) destroyed Mann's original hockey stick graph. When are you going to start going after the more than 1 dozen similar studies done since then by different researchers using different proxies and different techniques that show substantially the same thing? Like I said you can throw out Mann's work but that doesn't change the fact that others had the same results.
You don't need to know the past to determine if climate variability is natural or anthropogenic, you just need to know the present. Knowing the past is interesting but we can observe all of the major factors we know about in the present and it's clear that the increase in CO2 concentration is the leading factor in current climate change. Maybe there's some factor(s) we don't know about but unless someone finds something and can support it scientifically you can't assume there is.
Without limited liability there would be no corporations. That would really stifle the economy because how many people would be willing to take full liability personally for any possible tort?
In the case of emails that are unambiguously embarrassing as they reveal scientific improprieties, "taking what the authors said about them at face value" is a uniquely sycophantic reaction.
You're going to have to explicitly point out to me what scientific improprieties you found because I'm not aware of any.
Regarding truncation of the Briffa series, it was Briffa that said that data should not be used and Mann simply followed his advice.
But in the end you could throw out all of the paleoclimate data and everything that Michael Mann and Phil Jones have done but it wouldn't make a difference to the finding of anthropogenic climate change which is based on physics. Paleo data is merely corroborating evidence.
And it sounds to me like you are determined to find fault with the emails rather than taking what the authors said about them at face value.
You showed me a few negative quotes about Michael Mann. You didn't show me in any way that his reputation has suffered or that he isn't getting grants or getting published in scientific journals. The real test of Mann's reputation would be how often his work is being cited by other scientists in their work. If you can show me that he isn't getting cited by others then I might agree that his reputation is poor but that hasn't happened.
It's difficult to have a functioning market when local municipalities grant monopolies to individual companies and then turn around and get the state to ban municipal networks entirely.
In theory, the FCC shouldn't need to regulate the internet at all, but because other government has created a wholly fucked up system, I agree that it's necessary at this point for them to step in.
The real answer to this is to make the last mile to the customer a public utility open to any ISP who cares to compete in that market. Then there would be no reason for the FCC to regulate ISPs since if you didn't like one you could easily switch to another more to your liking. As long as ISPs like Comcast and Time-Warner hold a monopoly (or duopoly with the local phone company) there is reason for the FCC to regulate them.
And, of course, the FCC has still not release the 300 pages of regulations, so nobody really knows the details yet.
Do you mean this document? FCC Releases Open Internet Order It's closer to 600 pages but most of it is justification for making the rules they made. The actual rules themselves take up about 8 pages.
While I think the reaction to the nipple flash at the Superbowl was way over the top there is a substantial difference between something that is broadcast over the air with no control over who can receive it vs. something sent down a wire at the specific request of the receiver.
Nope. Here's a quote from Wallace Broecker who is a professor of Environmental science at Columbia University:
You left out the line after that quote that didn't fit your narrative:
It should be said that Broecker has a reputation among some scientists for bad-mouthing young researchers.
I wouldn't expect 100% of scientists to have a positive view of Michael Mann. My impression of him is that he has a prickly personality and isn't afraid to stand his ground. As far as his original hockey stick graph being wrong, ok, throw it out. But you still have to contend with over a dozen studies since that show substantially the same thing using different proxies and different techniques. If Mann got it wrong he lucked out and got very close to the right answer anyway.
I would say your examples are the exception that proves the rule. If Mann's reputation was in tatters wouldn't he be having trouble getting published or get fired from his current position at Penn State University?
I have read a few of the Climategate emails and to me it just looks like an exercise in quote mining and much ado about nothing. The quotes like "Hide the decline" and "Mike's nature trick" were taken completely out of context and only people determined to find something wrong would consider them incriminating.
Effectively 3 parties? That's effectively 2 parties more than we have in the US.
Given the current political situation it feels good to say something like that and maybe the differences aren't as great as you would like but there are differences. How many Democrats do you think will be supporting Rand Paul's bill?
The only real limit to Congress is what voters are willing to put up with. Since they have to get reelected every two or 6 years if we decide we don't like what they're doing we can throw the bums out. It doesn't happen much for a variety of reasons but rest assured it will happen if they get enough voters pissed at them.
That tired old meme that the CO2 emitted by animals matters is past it's due date and needs to be retired. If you're serious it just displays your ignorance.
We have less than 60-70? years of observed CO2 concentration records again showing CO2 concentrations have been steadily climbing through that entire record.
Continuous observations of CO2 concentration go back to 1958 but before that there have been measurements taken on a more ad hoc basis since at least the middle of the 1800's. On top of that we have accurate observations of CO2 concentrations going back nearly 800,000 years from Antarctic ice cores.
So who started this global warming cycle 10,000 years ago? Those cavemen must have lit huge bon fires to melt the glaciers.
If you cared to actually do a little research on the subject you would understand that the warming started around 25,000 years ago and ended 6,000-8,000 years ago and that changes in the Earth's orbital parameters (collectively known as Milankovitch Cycles are what drives the changes. Instead you just display your ignorance.
Of course the IPCC is going to find that climate change is caused by human activity, and is a serious threat. The IPCC's mandate is specifically to study mankind's effect on climate, not to look at whether natural climate variability is the cause of any change....
It's not possible to understand the anthropogenic effects on climate without understanding the natural causes of climate change. If you actually read the IPCC report you'll find lots of information about natural effects on climate.
Do you understand anything about how temperatures are derived from satellite measurements? First of all they don't measure surface temperatures at all but rather the general temperature of a rather amorphous blob of the atmosphere somewhere above ground level. What the satellites actually measure is microwave emissions of O2 molecules. Then those measurements have to massaged to account for orbital drift of the satellites, the degradation of the sensors over time, the effects of clouds and high altitudes on the measurements and the effects of changing satellites as they only last about 10 years before they're done. Only after all of that can they derive a temperature from the microwave emission measurements. Even one of the leading RSS researchers says he trusts the surface measurements more than his satellite measurements.
The earth has been warming up for 10,000 years. The solar cycles and volcanoes have a larger impact than human caused combustion. Anyhoo, everybody have made up their minds, so why confuse them with facts?
Actually the Earth hit the peak temperatures of the current interglacial period 6,000-8,000 years ago and there has been a slight cooling trend ever since. This is what an examination of Milankovitch Cycles would lead you to expect. The unprecedented (in the past several million years) rise in CO2 in the atmosphere over the past 2 centuries has interrupted that trend.
It is possible for solar activity or volcanoes to have a larger impact than current human influences but both have been scientifically studied and there current effects are pretty minor compared anthropogenic effects.
DMV works great in my state. Maybe you live in a state where the politicians say government can't run anything well then promptly set out to prove it when they get in power.
You're not paying for SS or Medicare out of line items in your taxes. FICA taxes don't begin to cover those costs, and the shortfall is made up by government borrowing. Those loans are paid back out of the general fund. The government has been lying to you.
How is it that "FICA taxes don't begin to cover those costs" yet at the end of 2011 the SS Trust Fund contained $2.7 trillion? The program is expected to continue to run a surplus until 2021 and the trust fund isn't expected to run out until sometime in the 2030's.
Engineering is nothing without the science behind it. My point still stands. The scientific method is the best technique we have to minimize human failings.
Slashdot Mirror
Growing up in the 80s, all I heard was how liberal the media was and how we had to fight against it. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, it's clear that the phrase "liberal media" was a conservative talking point that they repeated ad infinitum until people stopped questioning it and just assumed it was true.
The same thing is happening now with claiming scientists are politically or monetarily motivated (the conservative machine hasn't settled on which script to stick with).
Look, I'm a scientist. I know scientists. I know scientists at NOAA, NCAR, NIST, the Labs, in academia, in industry, at biotechs, at agri-science companies, at space exploration companies, and at oil and gas companies. I know conservative scientists, liberal scientists, agnostic scientists, religious scientists, and hedonistic scientists.
You know what motivates scientists? Science. And to a lesser extent, their ego. If someone doesn't love science, there's no way they can cut it as a scientist. There are no political or monetary rewards available to scientists in the same way they're available to lawyers and lobbyists.
Science if hard work for little pay and possibly some recognition. Unfortunately, the conservative noise machine is slowly building a narrative that scientists are all politically and monetarily motivated. The public doesn't really know any better and will believe this to be true if they hear it enough.
This attempt to paint scientists as political actors is pure bullshit and demeans the hard work and great sacrifices working scientists make every day.
-Chris
Victor Venema on his blog Variable Variability has a post on the House Science Committee's gutting of NASA's earth sciences programs. In it he wrote this (my emphasis):
Science is a free market of ideas. Like the free market uses distributed information on how to efficiently organize an economy, science is highly distributed and cannot be controlled from the top. Every researcher is a small entrepreneur, trying to search for problems that are interesting and solvable. Science is organized in small groups. If your group does not function, you'd better get out before your reputation and publication record suffer. Multiple such groups are at one university or research institute. In one country you will find many universities and institutes. All these groups in many countries are all competing and collaborating with each other. Competing for the best ideas, because it is fun and get more possibilities to do research. The currency is reputation.
Most scientists don't care that much about money. It is just a means to the end of doing more and better science. If they really cared about money that much they'd be working in finance or something like that. Assuming most scientists are in it for the money probably says more about your motivations being projected on them than anything else.
While Clinton has experience, it's all government experience (most of which is as a first lady).
Don't forget that Clinton was also a Senator and Secretary of State so she has experience in both the legislative and executive branches.
I like Bernie Sanders but he's unlikely to get the nomination.
There are still several figures in Chapter 6 so I'm still not sure what you're talking about. But rather than talking about one specific area in that book wouldn't it be better to consider all of the different observations as a whole?
No, I definitely mean statistically speaking. Tamino is a statistician by trade and as he shows in his post the "pause" is meaningless statistically. Perhaps you'd like to try and present evidence to the contrary.
It's true that the rate of warming over the past 15 years is a bit slower than it was during the 1980's and 1990's particularly in the atmosphere. But the ocean where over 90% of the heat energy goes anyway continue to warm. Don't you think it's reasonable that scientists should investigate why that is true? The more we learn the better our understanding will be.
The studies in question didn't attempt to interact with the damning evidence from the emails, in fact they carefully avoided addressing it.
ROTFLMAO. There was no damning evidence in the Climategate emails as several investigations of them found.
If you throw out data from measurements are not known to be reliable proxies for global temperature, you are left with very little if anything; and certainly not with a thousand year hockey stick shape. The hockey stick is an artifact of cherry picking data.
When you have a number of studies approaching the same thing from different angles and they all agree for the most part in increases your confidence that you're on the right track.
Case in point, take Figure 6 ...
What Figure 6 are you referring to?
Water vapor's status as the number one greenhouse gas makes it a hard problem because of the water cycle. What is the effect of cloud cover? How is the water cycle affected by more CO2? These are the billion dollar questions.
The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is strictly a reaction to the geophysical conditions present. If increasing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere increases the temperature then water vapor will increase as well as a reaction to the higher temperatures. And no, I haven't forgotten about the oceans. What about them?
Research on clouds has found that the effect on global warming ranges from slightly negative to moderately positive with the most likely value being slightly positive. There is plenty of uncertainty about that and it's an area of active research but unless something is found that radically changes our current knowledge clouds are a minor player in their effect on global warming.
The Pause has shown that the most highly vaunted predictions of carbon sensitivity were mistaken. What we do with that from here is a tricky question. Simply changing the fudge factors for aerosol albedo to keep our predictions "accurate" is a pretty lame response (Mann's, if you hadn't guessed).
Statistically speaking it's a faux pause and warming has continued as expected given the vagaries of natural variation. The pause meme depends on cherry picking 1998, a year that was more than 2 sigmas above the trend.
While there may be some in the scientific world who dislike Mann several investigations of him have not turned up any damning evidence of wrongdoing.
Regarding similar studies confirming Mann's hockey stick graph here are some:
Huang 2000
Smith 2006
Oerlemans 2005
Here's a book from the National Academies of Science with more details:
Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years
It's true that water vapor is responsible for the largest chunk of greenhouse warming but it is not a greenhouse gas that can drive warming because the amount of WV in the atmosphere is strictly limited by temperature (and regionally the availability of water to evaporate). The level of WV is not something humans can have any significant direct effect on therefore it is not something to worry about.
The "Pause" is not something that is statistically significant. Here is a statistical analysis that uses several different techniques to try and find some significance to the "Pause" but fails. There is no reason statistically to say the rate of warming since the 1970's has changed significantly.
So you've (you believe) destroyed Mann's original hockey stick graph. When are you going to start going after the more than 1 dozen similar studies done since then by different researchers using different proxies and different techniques that show substantially the same thing? Like I said you can throw out Mann's work but that doesn't change the fact that others had the same results.
You don't need to know the past to determine if climate variability is natural or anthropogenic, you just need to know the present. Knowing the past is interesting but we can observe all of the major factors we know about in the present and it's clear that the increase in CO2 concentration is the leading factor in current climate change. Maybe there's some factor(s) we don't know about but unless someone finds something and can support it scientifically you can't assume there is.
Without limited liability there would be no corporations. That would really stifle the economy because how many people would be willing to take full liability personally for any possible tort?
In the case of emails that are unambiguously embarrassing as they reveal scientific improprieties, "taking what the authors said about them at face value" is a uniquely sycophantic reaction.
You're going to have to explicitly point out to me what scientific improprieties you found because I'm not aware of any.
Regarding truncation of the Briffa series, it was Briffa that said that data should not be used and Mann simply followed his advice.
But in the end you could throw out all of the paleoclimate data and everything that Michael Mann and Phil Jones have done but it wouldn't make a difference to the finding of anthropogenic climate change which is based on physics. Paleo data is merely corroborating evidence.
I think Bernie Sanders would commit suicide before he'd allow himself to be paired with Sarah Palin.
And it sounds to me like you are determined to find fault with the emails rather than taking what the authors said about them at face value.
You showed me a few negative quotes about Michael Mann. You didn't show me in any way that his reputation has suffered or that he isn't getting grants or getting published in scientific journals. The real test of Mann's reputation would be how often his work is being cited by other scientists in their work. If you can show me that he isn't getting cited by others then I might agree that his reputation is poor but that hasn't happened.
It's difficult to have a functioning market when local municipalities grant monopolies to individual companies and then turn around and get the state to ban municipal networks entirely.
In theory, the FCC shouldn't need to regulate the internet at all, but because other government has created a wholly fucked up system, I agree that it's necessary at this point for them to step in.
The real answer to this is to make the last mile to the customer a public utility open to any ISP who cares to compete in that market. Then there would be no reason for the FCC to regulate ISPs since if you didn't like one you could easily switch to another more to your liking. As long as ISPs like Comcast and Time-Warner hold a monopoly (or duopoly with the local phone company) there is reason for the FCC to regulate them.
And, of course, the FCC has still not release the 300 pages of regulations, so nobody really knows the details yet.
Do you mean this document? FCC Releases Open Internet Order It's closer to 600 pages but most of it is justification for making the rules they made. The actual rules themselves take up about 8 pages.
While I think the reaction to the nipple flash at the Superbowl was way over the top there is a substantial difference between something that is broadcast over the air with no control over who can receive it vs. something sent down a wire at the specific request of the receiver.
Nope. Here's a quote from Wallace Broecker who is a professor of Environmental science at Columbia University:
You left out the line after that quote that didn't fit your narrative:
It should be said that Broecker has a reputation among some scientists for bad-mouthing young researchers.
I wouldn't expect 100% of scientists to have a positive view of Michael Mann. My impression of him is that he has a prickly personality and isn't afraid to stand his ground. As far as his original hockey stick graph being wrong, ok, throw it out. But you still have to contend with over a dozen studies since that show substantially the same thing using different proxies and different techniques. If Mann got it wrong he lucked out and got very close to the right answer anyway.
I would say your examples are the exception that proves the rule. If Mann's reputation was in tatters wouldn't he be having trouble getting published or get fired from his current position at Penn State University?
I have read a few of the Climategate emails and to me it just looks like an exercise in quote mining and much ado about nothing. The quotes like "Hide the decline" and "Mike's nature trick" were taken completely out of context and only people determined to find something wrong would consider them incriminating.
Effectively 3 parties? That's effectively 2 parties more than we have in the US.
Given the current political situation it feels good to say something like that and maybe the differences aren't as great as you would like but there are differences. How many Democrats do you think will be supporting Rand Paul's bill?
The only real limit to Congress is what voters are willing to put up with. Since they have to get reelected every two or 6 years if we decide we don't like what they're doing we can throw the bums out. It doesn't happen much for a variety of reasons but rest assured it will happen if they get enough voters pissed at them.
LOL, the only place Michael Mann's reputation has suffered is climate science deniers eyes. His reputation in scientific circles is doing just fine.
That tired old meme that the CO2 emitted by animals matters is past it's due date and needs to be retired. If you're serious it just displays your ignorance.
We have less than 60-70? years of observed CO2 concentration records again showing CO2 concentrations have been steadily climbing through that entire record.
Continuous observations of CO2 concentration go back to 1958 but before that there have been measurements taken on a more ad hoc basis since at least the middle of the 1800's. On top of that we have accurate observations of CO2 concentrations going back nearly 800,000 years from Antarctic ice cores.
So who started this global warming cycle 10,000 years ago? Those cavemen must have lit huge bon fires to melt the glaciers.
If you cared to actually do a little research on the subject you would understand that the warming started around 25,000 years ago and ended 6,000-8,000 years ago and that changes in the Earth's orbital parameters (collectively known as Milankovitch Cycles are what drives the changes. Instead you just display your ignorance.
Of course the IPCC is going to find that climate change is caused by human activity, and is a serious threat. The IPCC's mandate is specifically to study mankind's effect on climate, not to look at whether natural climate variability is the cause of any change. ...
It's not possible to understand the anthropogenic effects on climate without understanding the natural causes of climate change. If you actually read the IPCC report you'll find lots of information about natural effects on climate.
Do you understand anything about how temperatures are derived from satellite measurements? First of all they don't measure surface temperatures at all but rather the general temperature of a rather amorphous blob of the atmosphere somewhere above ground level. What the satellites actually measure is microwave emissions of O2 molecules. Then those measurements have to massaged to account for orbital drift of the satellites, the degradation of the sensors over time, the effects of clouds and high altitudes on the measurements and the effects of changing satellites as they only last about 10 years before they're done. Only after all of that can they derive a temperature from the microwave emission measurements. Even one of the leading RSS researchers says he trusts the surface measurements more than his satellite measurements.
The earth has been warming up for 10,000 years. The solar cycles and volcanoes have a larger impact than human caused combustion. Anyhoo, everybody have made up their minds, so why confuse them with facts?
Actually the Earth hit the peak temperatures of the current interglacial period 6,000-8,000 years ago and there has been a slight cooling trend ever since. This is what an examination of Milankovitch Cycles would lead you to expect. The unprecedented (in the past several million years) rise in CO2 in the atmosphere over the past 2 centuries has interrupted that trend.
It is possible for solar activity or volcanoes to have a larger impact than current human influences but both have been scientifically studied and there current effects are pretty minor compared anthropogenic effects.
DMV works great in my state. Maybe you live in a state where the politicians say government can't run anything well then promptly set out to prove it when they get in power.
You're not paying for SS or Medicare out of line items in your taxes. FICA taxes don't begin to cover those costs, and the shortfall is made up by government borrowing. Those loans are paid back out of the general fund. The government has been lying to you.
How is it that "FICA taxes don't begin to cover those costs" yet at the end of 2011 the SS Trust Fund contained $2.7 trillion? The program is expected to continue to run a surplus until 2021 and the trust fund isn't expected to run out until sometime in the 2030's.
Engineering is nothing without the science behind it. My point still stands. The scientific method is the best technique we have to minimize human failings.