there is no consensus on what the level of warming will be
nor is there consensus on the idea that the changes are harmful/damaging to our interests
There is an enormous amount of disagreement here, scientific disagreement
honest truth is we do not know what impacts are likely to be
None of the above is true - except about the precise numbers involved. The IPCC AR5 report widely surveyed the published studies to date, and shows very clearly and with "high confidence" that business-as-usual emissions will result in a temperature rise of 2 to 4 degrees. This conclusion is not disputed by any scientific organisation, nor are there any studies showing anything short of broad agreement among climatologists about this.
Likewise, the WG2 section shows with "high confidence" that many unique and threatened ecosystems are at "very high risk" once warming reaches 2 degrees, that heat waves and coastal flooding will increase further, that we risk extensive biodiversity loss and economic damage at 3 degrees as well as risking large-scale tipping points, plus high risks of decreasing crop yields and water availability with particular impact for disadvantaged communities. Again, there are no large scientific groups disputing these results, as it is merely a summary of their own published work.
Climate science discussion is so slippery, constantly confusing
That I agree with, if you're talking about the political and layman's discussion. But that is not relevant to the science, where the evidence has been piling up and the debate has long since reached agreement on "will it be bad" and moved on to "exactly how bad will it get?"
It's actually mostly correct - which is my entire point. Few things are so black & white.
They already state why incorrectness matters
Limitations and assumptions do matter of course, but misleading usage of the term "incorrect" is the issue I'm referring to. Unless if by "incorrectness" you mean "the degree to which this differs from perfectly correct in all cases", in which case you could maybe try out the term "accuracy" instead.
To the contrary, it is more often a valid, scientific reason for rejecting the model in question.
I still feel you're arguing about something I'm not. To restate, declaring something to be "incorrect" because it's not 100% perfect in every way is not a valid, scientific reason to reject a model.
a universal problem with climate modelling is the lack of empirical testing of these models
Well, except their predictions are empirically tested against new observations constantly. Of course no scientist expects them to match perfectly, since they are of course simply approximations that make well-understood assumptions like "short-term weather and cyclical patterns such as ENSO and PDO by their nature do not affect long-term trends". That does not make them useless for predicting long-term trends, which is why said empirical testing usually leads to further refinement instead of rejection due to not being 100% perfectly correct.
You may even find that actual, practising climatologists understand the limitations of their own models far better than you do. So you may have to come up with a more accurate reason than "your models are incorrect because you don't test them empirically" to be convincing.
This is not a useful assertion, as you could say that about everything outside of pure mathematics. Newton's model of gravity turns out to be still quite useful, as it is mostly correct - good enough for most terrestrial uses. Likewise, we already know General Relativity isn't perfect either, but it's a better approximation, sufficient for most non-terrestrial uses too.
Most people are well aware that there no absolutes in reality (certainly most scientists), so declaring commonly-used models to be "incorrect" or "disproven" does not advance the discussion - rather, it seems to more often be used in attempts to undermine the scientific case against the declarator's beliefs.
Models aren't "proven or disproven", they're not found to be 100% correct or 0% correct, they're approximations. They can of course be tested by making predictions - which will also not be 100% or 0% correct. The only relevant question is, are the predictions accurate enough to be useful?
Your model of how science works appears to be a poor approximation, as science has indeed turned out to be useful.
The point of subsidising a new technology is to kick start adoption while the market is still small. You won't see the real gains and benefits until the market scales up (which is clearly well underway with solar, and at an earlier stage with EVs). Try to take a longer view.
If you ask me, that right there is a huge hole in the security - for everyone else.
Way too many people are unfit to be in control of that much inertia, most people at least occasionally. And since cars have so far killed over 3.5 million people in the US alone, it's past time we did something about that.
And while all-in-one integrated machines are popular, and tablets etc are taking on the low end of usage, the familiar modular PC is still massively useful and very necessary for a large part of the market. There are extra challenges in doing this in a mobile device, but none of what you said is a dealbreaker.
There has certainly been interest in modular phones, and while they will inevitably require tradeoffs, whether those are insurmountable or how much they reduce its potential market still remains to be seen. History has seen many cases where niche products have grown in popularity as their engineering gets refined. Personally I'm glad to see someone trying something very different, rather than just tiny refinements to what we already have.
Not that I expect anyone to RTFA of course, but the article is actually a report on Berkeley Earth's study on the 1500-site national air-reporting system, and most of the figures given are for all of China. The only specific Beijing reference is the "40 packs a day" metaphor.
Then there's other potential-energy solutions like lumps of concrete on inclined rails (if you have hills but no water), kinetic storage flywheels on magnetic bearings, flow batteries with arbitrary-sized tanks of electrolyte, compressed-air storage, reversible hydrogen fuel cells, UltraBatteries.. the list goes on.
Nearly all of these are well-established technologies. All have an efficiency cost, of course, but the cheaper the solar/wind input gets the less this matters. Renewable + storage is absolutely an effective and reliable baseload solution, and already competitive with coal in many cases (even before you factor in coal's huge external costs).
Let's see, gasoline costs 3 times as much, eggs cost double, bread is almost double.
At a rough 3% CPI index, it'd take 24 years for consumer prices to double. If that's the sort of time frame you're referring to, and your wages have risen only 25%, then yeah - you're getting screwed - but we already knew that.
shouldn't that be going after the upper class instead of the middle class?
There's certainly a good argument for that, yeah. Many feel upper-class incomes should be reducing, while lower & middle incomes should increase - but you'd still expect lower-class incomes to increase more than your own. It's notable that concerns about minimum-wage increases often come from slightly higher incomes who are afraid of ending up on minimum wage themselves as a result, even if their own wage doesn't decrease.
That said, there's a lot of evidence behind your views, so you're not alone, but perhaps minimum-wage earners aren't the ones deserving of complaints.
It's fine to want a good wage for yourself, of course. It's less fine to grumble about how people on minimum wage have managed a higher percentage gain than you have.
Their income != your buying power. How much has inflation gone up over that same period?
US income inequality is a hot topic these days. It's good to see the people struggling at the bottom doing a little better - but if all the higher income jobs also saw the same gains, that wouldn't be addressing the inequality at all.
Turns out, high up in the stratosphere the winds are predictable and have just the patterns they need. They did simulations using real-world wind data and found it was quite feasible to navigate balloons effectively to maintain coverage using only prevailing winds.
Since 2012 they've been trialling in New Zealand, Brazil and other places, they've increased balloon flight times from 50 days to over 6 months (despite expert scepticism), and now they're close to ready to roll out a commercial service. Pretty sure they've done their research by now.
Sure, certainly premature to declare it "100% confirmed" at this stage.
But every lab that reproduces the effect successfully, and eliminates more possible sources of error, bumps the confirmation percentage a little closer towards something we could actually use. It's encouraging.
Nevertheless, we do observe thrusts close to the magnitude of the actual predictions after eliminating many possible error sources that should warrant further investigation into the phenomena.
Pretty sure the GP wasn't being quite so black & white. All scientific models are an approximation of reality, as you say, and the only real question is are they "good enough to be useful" for your situation. Newton wasn't incorrect, Relativity just better approximates reality at scales outside Newton's experience.
GP's post isn't "very wrong"; it's correct for to a "good enough" approximation of the question: established physics is virtually never disproved, merely improved at wider scales.
There's clearly a distinction between the government mandating my self-improvement vs preventing others from reducing the length and quality of my life. I'd say the latter is firmly in the constitution's purview.
Thanks, it's been fun & all, but I can see this is going nowhere. If you feel peer-review results can be challenged, then you better come up with even more solid data - not your own inexpert "reality check". If you think a consensus of experts is meaningless (or merely "political") without stopping to consider why the majority might be in agreement, then I can't see how me citing more data will help you.
As to the corrections... this is common knowledge:
Yes, you gave that link already, and I responded. This conversation is going around in circles.
did you look at the spread sheet I sent you?
Yes, and responded with a link to a graph of it.
while you accuse me of cherry picking that hasn't stopped you from doing it
If you can find datasets that are more complete than the ones I've cited, please do link to them. I gave you all the data I could find, including pH & sea level, and I even found different proxy data for you that went back further. Your turn.
As to Vermeer, I don't know why you're taking about him instead of defending the church graph.
It's the same graph! Same dataset, same values, same time period (1870-2010) = same graph.
If you still think it doesn't show an accelerating trend, draw a straight line on it and see how well that fits.
the graph of increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is linear
No, it isn't. Here is the full Mauna Loa CO2 record. And yes, it's accelerating - look at the graph directly below it, which shows atmospheric CO2 growth rate. See how it's now around double what it was in the 60s?
Your "issues" seem to be based around wondering why the results aren't quite what you think they should be. Perhaps it's all just not as simple as that?
I won't defer to people that I see as increasingly compromised
Right, there's my answer. You've found reasons to distrust the experts (though strangely not the few who are saying what you want to hear), so you've decided your own conclusions are more valid, despite your total lack of expertise.
By the calculations I did the actual rate of increase in CO2 shows that about 2/3rds of that is absorbed by the biosphere at least because the rate of change in the atmosphere has been less than 1/3rd our emissions.
Humans emit around 26 Gt/year of CO2. Annual atmospheric CO2 increase is currently about 2.1ppm, which works out to about 15 Gt. The difference is being absorbed, primarily by oceans (causing acidification), but clearly it's not enough.
Volcano eruptions are a tiny blip on this process, as I pointed out in the other post.
So this covers 5 years during a solar minimum.... and the imbalance figure is significantly lower than previously thought.
Is it? It's still a significant imbalance - and the overall imbalance figure is of course higher, when the sun is not at a minimum.
An imbalance I would point out does not prove causation
A measurable net influx of energy is precisely what's causing global warming.
What's causing most of this net influx of energy? CO2 has a well-established mechanism, and the calculated effect correlates surprisingly well with our observations. Unless and until someone proposes a new cause that better fits the data, we'd be foolish not to act on what is by far the most likely cause.
whether or not any of this is actually bad is debatable.
It's been studied extensively. The conclusions remain clear - it's bad for our food and water security, it's bad for our health, it's bad for our weather, and it's bad for our coastal communities. There are some upsides (more in the long term), but they are greatly outweighed by the negatives - which will be particularly harsh for the world's poor, who cannot pay the cost of adapting.
The [peer review] process is not infallible.
Nor is it meaningless.
Just because something goes through that process doesn't mean it can't be questioned.
Of course it is questioned - before, during & after peer review - by experts. But when numerous experts have questioned it, and found no cause for doubt, what makes you think a layman is likely to find something they missed?
If you, or me or any layman, thinks we've discovered a mistake in a peer-reviewed paper for any complex scientific field - it's far more likely that it's us that has made the mistake, than the paper's authors AND all the experts who reviewed it, including after publication. Wouldn't you agree?
Dunning-Kruger effect...appeal to authority... You want to call me stupid?
No, not stupid, never said that. Ignorant of the field, yes - just like me. We are both profoundly ignorant of climate science, at least compared to any practicing climatologist. Dunning-Kruger is the assumption that one already knows all one needs to know about a field to make a valid judgement, and says nothing about intelligence. Why do you assume that it's an insult? It's an unconscious bias that we all need to strive to avoid.
I'm deferring to expertise, not appealing to authority. If someone thinks expertise is meaningless, that would be Dunning-Kruger.
Do you want science or politics? I'm not interested in attempts to conflate the two.
Seems to me you're the one conflating scientific consensus with politics.
Slashdot Mirror
there is no consensus on what the level of warming will be
nor is there consensus on the idea that the changes are harmful/damaging to our interests
There is an enormous amount of disagreement here, scientific disagreement
honest truth is we do not know what impacts are likely to be
None of the above is true - except about the precise numbers involved. The IPCC AR5 report widely surveyed the published studies to date, and shows very clearly and with "high confidence" that business-as-usual emissions will result in a temperature rise of 2 to 4 degrees. This conclusion is not disputed by any scientific organisation, nor are there any studies showing anything short of broad agreement among climatologists about this.
Likewise, the WG2 section shows with "high confidence" that many unique and threatened ecosystems are at "very high risk" once warming reaches 2 degrees, that heat waves and coastal flooding will increase further, that we risk extensive biodiversity loss and economic damage at 3 degrees as well as risking large-scale tipping points, plus high risks of decreasing crop yields and water availability with particular impact for disadvantaged communities. Again, there are no large scientific groups disputing these results, as it is merely a summary of their own published work.
Climate science discussion is so slippery, constantly confusing
That I agree with, if you're talking about the political and layman's discussion. But that is not relevant to the science, where the evidence has been piling up and the debate has long since reached agreement on "will it be bad" and moved on to "exactly how bad will it get?"
That statement is logically incorrect.
It's actually mostly correct - which is my entire point. Few things are so black & white.
They already state why incorrectness matters
Limitations and assumptions do matter of course, but misleading usage of the term "incorrect" is the issue I'm referring to. Unless if by "incorrectness" you mean "the degree to which this differs from perfectly correct in all cases", in which case you could maybe try out the term "accuracy" instead.
To the contrary, it is more often a valid, scientific reason for rejecting the model in question.
I still feel you're arguing about something I'm not. To restate, declaring something to be "incorrect" because it's not 100% perfect in every way is not a valid, scientific reason to reject a model.
a universal problem with climate modelling is the lack of empirical testing of these models
Well, except their predictions are empirically tested against new observations constantly. Of course no scientist expects them to match perfectly, since they are of course simply approximations that make well-understood assumptions like "short-term weather and cyclical patterns such as ENSO and PDO by their nature do not affect long-term trends". That does not make them useless for predicting long-term trends, which is why said empirical testing usually leads to further refinement instead of rejection due to not being 100% perfectly correct.
You may even find that actual, practising climatologists understand the limitations of their own models far better than you do. So you may have to come up with a more accurate reason than "your models are incorrect because you don't test them empirically" to be convincing.
Newton's model of gravity was incorrect
This is not a useful assertion, as you could say that about everything outside of pure mathematics. Newton's model of gravity turns out to be still quite useful, as it is mostly correct - good enough for most terrestrial uses. Likewise, we already know General Relativity isn't perfect either, but it's a better approximation, sufficient for most non-terrestrial uses too.
Most people are well aware that there no absolutes in reality (certainly most scientists), so declaring commonly-used models to be "incorrect" or "disproven" does not advance the discussion - rather, it seems to more often be used in attempts to undermine the scientific case against the declarator's beliefs.
Making up strawmen actually falls within point 2.
Models aren't "proven or disproven", they're not found to be 100% correct or 0% correct, they're approximations. They can of course be tested by making predictions - which will also not be 100% or 0% correct. The only relevant question is, are the predictions accurate enough to be useful?
Your model of how science works appears to be a poor approximation, as science has indeed turned out to be useful.
The point of subsidising a new technology is to kick start adoption while the market is still small. You won't see the real gains and benefits until the market scales up (which is clearly well underway with solar, and at an earlier stage with EVs). Try to take a longer view.
manually drive
If you ask me, that right there is a huge hole in the security - for everyone else.
Way too many people are unfit to be in control of that much inertia, most people at least occasionally. And since cars have so far killed over 3.5 million people in the US alone, it's past time we did something about that.
All these points apply to PCs as well.
And while all-in-one integrated machines are popular, and tablets etc are taking on the low end of usage, the familiar modular PC is still massively useful and very necessary for a large part of the market. There are extra challenges in doing this in a mobile device, but none of what you said is a dealbreaker.
There has certainly been interest in modular phones, and while they will inevitably require tradeoffs, whether those are insurmountable or how much they reduce its potential market still remains to be seen. History has seen many cases where niche products have grown in popularity as their engineering gets refined. Personally I'm glad to see someone trying something very different, rather than just tiny refinements to what we already have.
Not that I expect anyone to RTFA of course, but the article is actually a report on Berkeley Earth's study on the 1500-site national air-reporting system, and most of the figures given are for all of China. The only specific Beijing reference is the "40 packs a day" metaphor.
Then there's other potential-energy solutions like lumps of concrete on inclined rails (if you have hills but no water), kinetic storage flywheels on magnetic bearings, flow batteries with arbitrary-sized tanks of electrolyte, compressed-air storage, reversible hydrogen fuel cells, UltraBatteries.. the list goes on.
Nearly all of these are well-established technologies. All have an efficiency cost, of course, but the cheaper the solar/wind input gets the less this matters. Renewable + storage is absolutely an effective and reliable baseload solution, and already competitive with coal in many cases (even before you factor in coal's huge external costs).
Hence the GP's closing sentence. You've been informed; the rest is up to you.
Let's see, gasoline costs 3 times as much, eggs cost double, bread is almost double.
At a rough 3% CPI index, it'd take 24 years for consumer prices to double. If that's the sort of time frame you're referring to, and your wages have risen only 25%, then yeah - you're getting screwed - but we already knew that.
shouldn't that be going after the upper class instead of the middle class?
There's certainly a good argument for that, yeah. Many feel upper-class incomes should be reducing, while lower & middle incomes should increase - but you'd still expect lower-class incomes to increase more than your own. It's notable that concerns about minimum-wage increases often come from slightly higher incomes who are afraid of ending up on minimum wage themselves as a result, even if their own wage doesn't decrease.
That said, there's a lot of evidence behind your views, so you're not alone, but perhaps minimum-wage earners aren't the ones deserving of complaints.
It's fine to want a good wage for yourself, of course. It's less fine to grumble about how people on minimum wage have managed a higher percentage gain than you have.
Their income != your buying power. How much has inflation gone up over that same period?
US income inequality is a hot topic these days. It's good to see the people struggling at the bottom doing a little better - but if all the higher income jobs also saw the same gains, that wouldn't be addressing the inequality at all.
Turns out, high up in the stratosphere the winds are predictable and have just the patterns they need. They did simulations using real-world wind data and found it was quite feasible to navigate balloons effectively to maintain coverage using only prevailing winds.
Since 2012 they've been trialling in New Zealand, Brazil and other places, they've increased balloon flight times from 50 days to over 6 months (despite expert scepticism), and now they're close to ready to roll out a commercial service. Pretty sure they've done their research by now.
By raising & lowering the balloons between opposing jetstreams.
Been a while since I needed this, but: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=project+loon&l=1.
Sure, certainly premature to declare it "100% confirmed" at this stage.
But every lab that reproduces the effect successfully, and eliminates more possible sources of error, bumps the confirmation percentage a little closer towards something we could actually use. It's encouraging.
How about the very next sentence?
Nevertheless, we do observe thrusts close to the magnitude of the actual predictions after eliminating many possible error sources that should warrant further investigation into the phenomena.
Pretty sure the GP wasn't being quite so black & white. All scientific models are an approximation of reality, as you say, and the only real question is are they "good enough to be useful" for your situation. Newton wasn't incorrect, Relativity just better approximates reality at scales outside Newton's experience.
GP's post isn't "very wrong"; it's correct for to a "good enough" approximation of the question: established physics is virtually never disproved, merely improved at wider scales.
There's clearly a distinction between the government mandating my self-improvement vs preventing others from reducing the length and quality of my life. I'd say the latter is firmly in the constitution's purview.
Compromise is when you get some of what you wanted, but not all.
Horse trading is when you support something you don't care about in exchange for something you do.
Hypocrisy is when you claim to dislike something, then support it anyway.
I see no reason why politics cannot function with only the first two.
I just know
Say no more.
Thanks, it's been fun & all, but I can see this is going nowhere. If you feel peer-review results can be challenged, then you better come up with even more solid data - not your own inexpert "reality check". If you think a consensus of experts is meaningless (or merely "political") without stopping to consider why the majority might be in agreement, then I can't see how me citing more data will help you.
As to the corrections... this is common knowledge:
Yes, you gave that link already, and I responded. This conversation is going around in circles.
did you look at the spread sheet I sent you?
Yes, and responded with a link to a graph of it.
while you accuse me of cherry picking that hasn't stopped you from doing it
If you can find datasets that are more complete than the ones I've cited, please do link to them. I gave you all the data I could find, including pH & sea level, and I even found different proxy data for you that went back further. Your turn.
As to Vermeer, I don't know why you're taking about him instead of defending the church graph.
It's the same graph! Same dataset, same values, same time period (1870-2010) = same graph.
If you still think it doesn't show an accelerating trend, draw a straight line on it and see how well that fits.
the graph of increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is linear
No, it isn't. Here is the full Mauna Loa CO2 record. And yes, it's accelerating - look at the graph directly below it, which shows atmospheric CO2 growth rate. See how it's now around double what it was in the 60s?
Your "issues" seem to be based around wondering why the results aren't quite what you think they should be. Perhaps it's all just not as simple as that?
I won't defer to people that I see as increasingly compromised
Right, there's my answer. You've found reasons to distrust the experts (though strangely not the few who are saying what you want to hear), so you've decided your own conclusions are more valid, despite your total lack of expertise.
That's Northern Hemisphere data, not global. Cherry picking? or honest mistake?
By the calculations I did the actual rate of increase in CO2 shows that about 2/3rds of that is absorbed by the biosphere at least because the rate of change in the atmosphere has been less than 1/3rd our emissions.
Humans emit around 26 Gt/year of CO2. Annual atmospheric CO2 increase is currently about 2.1ppm, which works out to about 15 Gt. The difference is being absorbed, primarily by oceans (causing acidification), but clearly it's not enough.
Volcano eruptions are a tiny blip on this process, as I pointed out in the other post.
So this covers 5 years during a solar minimum.... and the imbalance figure is significantly lower than previously thought.
Is it? It's still a significant imbalance - and the overall imbalance figure is of course higher, when the sun is not at a minimum.
An imbalance I would point out does not prove causation
A measurable net influx of energy is precisely what's causing global warming.
What's causing most of this net influx of energy? CO2 has a well-established mechanism, and the calculated effect correlates surprisingly well with our observations. Unless and until someone proposes a new cause that better fits the data, we'd be foolish not to act on what is by far the most likely cause.
whether or not any of this is actually bad is debatable.
It's been studied extensively. The conclusions remain clear - it's bad for our food and water security, it's bad for our health, it's bad for our weather, and it's bad for our coastal communities. There are some upsides (more in the long term), but they are greatly outweighed by the negatives - which will be particularly harsh for the world's poor, who cannot pay the cost of adapting.
The [peer review] process is not infallible.
Nor is it meaningless.
Just because something goes through that process doesn't mean it can't be questioned.
Of course it is questioned - before, during & after peer review - by experts. But when numerous experts have questioned it, and found no cause for doubt, what makes you think a layman is likely to find something they missed?
If you, or me or any layman, thinks we've discovered a mistake in a peer-reviewed paper for any complex scientific field - it's far more likely that it's us that has made the mistake, than the paper's authors AND all the experts who reviewed it, including after publication. Wouldn't you agree?
Dunning-Kruger effect...appeal to authority... You want to call me stupid?
No, not stupid, never said that. Ignorant of the field, yes - just like me. We are both profoundly ignorant of climate science, at least compared to any practicing climatologist. Dunning-Kruger is the assumption that one already knows all one needs to know about a field to make a valid judgement, and says nothing about intelligence. Why do you assume that it's an insult? It's an unconscious bias that we all need to strive to avoid.
I'm deferring to expertise, not appealing to authority. If someone thinks expertise is meaningless, that would be Dunning-Kruger.
Do you want science or politics? I'm not interested in attempts to conflate the two.
Seems to me you're the one conflating scientific consensus with politics.