If you really are serious about this question (doubtful from your tone), then yes, of course the effects of warming have been explored and explained. This diagram sums up the basics nicely.
There are positive effects (e.g. slight increase in cereal productivity at moderate temperature increases in some latitudes), but these are heavily outweighed by the negative effects in health, flooding, freshwater availability and ecosystem impact, to name a few. Beyond that, there's the obvious costs of just changing our infrastructure to adapt (moving coastal cities or building levees, migrating farms further north, moving populations out of floodplains etc). If you'd like more detail, there's plenty in the IPCC AR4 WGII Policymakers' Summary, and of course in the WGII report itself.
OK, sacrificing mod points to reply, because this is just ridiculous.
First of all, please quote the actual studies, not blog pages like El Reg. That keeps things much clearer, and minimises the obvious bias possibilities.
Secondly, you compare one study's "likely" 1.64 degrees Celsius rise for doubled CO2 vs another study's "up to" 7 degree rise Farenheit - by the year 2200. Have you ever thought about comparing apples to other apples, or did you just grab two numbers at random to make your comment look more exciting?
Third, there is still no clear agreement as to how much temperatures will rise with a doubling of CO2. Nearly all scientists agree it will go up, and most agree on a rough range for that value, but there is still much debate on exactly what that value is. This is why the latest IPCC report (which surveys hundreds of studies over many sub-fields, giving a much better picture than any single study) says the "likely" increase is anything between 1.5 to 4.5 degrees C (same as the first three IPCC reports), while the "most likely" figure within that range is between 2.5 and 3.5 degrees C. Cherry-picking a single study that posits the lower bound is not a credible way to present your case.
Fourth, you deliberately (and obviously) mischaracterise a study about increased foliage increasing CO2 uptake as "discovering trees eat CO2". This might be news to you, personally, but climate scientists already have a pretty good idea of how much CO2 is currently being absorbed by current levels of global vegetation, and are more interested in finding out how much this might change - in response to increased CO2, or continuing deforestation.
Fifth, a YouTube video, from some random bloke who edited out bits of some other guy's presentation? I'm not even going to bother. Citations of real studies only, please, if you want anyone to listen.
Yeah, I'd agree with that - framerate is crucial. OTOH I find my brain quickly learns to ignore the pixel size and screendoor to a surprising extent, treating it as visual noise, so resolution is less important than I had thought (within reason).
It's certainly possible, but in order to maintain that 120Hz minimum at all times, your scene would have to be extremely simplistic by modern standards. Still leaves room for some interesting games, but it cuts out a lot of others, and it would limit immersion rather more than a lower resolution would, IMHO. Perhaps in a few more years.
greenhouse gas theory is not based based on a the kind of heating that occurs in real greenhouses
Well yeah. So why do you seem to think an experiment about how real greenhouses work has anything to do with the physics of CO2 blocking radiative transfer in the infrared spectrum? (Leaving aside the question of how one unpublished, non-peer-reviewed experiment can be considered to have "thoroughly discredited" anything).
You really do have a weird idea of science, don't you?
If you're referring to your pet list of papers, sure, many of them do provide useful data about the climate - just not for your blanket claims that there is no significant consensus.
Your insistence that peer-reviewed and published surveys are statistically invalid and "cherry-picked" simply because they were selected for the words "climate change" doesn't exactly help your case either, particularly when the peer reviewers obviously disagreed.
But mostly it's your complete lack of any vaguely comprehensive surveys that support your own personal beliefs. It's as if you think that blogs casting doubt on the multiple studies that have been done, somehow proves the opposite of what those studies show. Even if you managed to find peer-reviewed papers that showed conclusively that each one of those surveys, and the IPCC's own review, were all done incorrectly (which you certainly haven't done), that still wouldn't prove anything about the consensus.
Only a comprehensive, peer-reviewed survey that clearly shows a more even split of opinion can be considered "evidence" for your claims, and even that would have to be weighed against all the other evidence against it.
what it is refuting is that bullshit "97% consensus" claim
ORLY? How does it do that, when it makes no quantitative comparison to the opposing view? That list does not even pretend to be a comparative survey; what leads you to believe it refutes anything? But you keep pointing to it like it's proof that all the other science is unimportant.
The data you cite was cherry-picked...searched for the phrase "climate change"
Ah, so you think a search phrase to exclude papers that don't even mention climate change is "cherry-picking" of papers that support anthropogenic climate change, while also managing to exclude papers that provide evidence against AGW. Got it. And Oreskes too, though you provide even less basis for that claim. And by extension, I should also take your unspoken, evidence-free word that the various other surveys, and the IPCC itself, are also working entirely off biased data, since they happen to arrive at similar conclusions?
Too bad the expert peer reviewers disagreed with you; I think I'll go with their opinions of what constitutes valid statistical methodology, rather than some random commenter's unsourced claims. Like I said, if you have better peer-reviewed data, produce it, as nothing you've come up with so far carries any weight.
That claim is not supported by your link, as far as I can tell from the information available. The survey didn't even aim to measure consensus, only to correlate scientific views with non-scientific beliefs - but the quote "We suggest that AMS should: attempt to convey the widespread scientific agreement about climate change" (emphasis mine) pretty clearly endorses the claim of scientific consensus, despite your insinuations of bias.
I don't have to have access to contrary surveys to know that a particular survey was done using improper statistical methods.
Spoken like a true denialist: "I don't have to have reliable data that supports my position, I just believe your data is wrong." No surprise here.
You keep trotting out that invisionfree list of selected papers, as if that somehow invalidates the entire body of work on climate science over the last few decades ((tens of thousands of papers) - then you actually accuse peer-reviewed surveys of cherry-picking? Your double standards are breathtaking.
a relatively small, rather incestuous group who try to lie with statistics to "prove" their cause to the populace, by doing things like cherry-picking papers in order to claim [the] "97% consensus" [is bogus]
FTFY.
Those "rebuttals" to Cook et al 2013 that try to claim the 97% consensus is bogus? Maybe you should try analysing the data yourself instead of parroting someone else's misinformation; I did. My own findings: 41 times more papers (986) explicitly endorse AGW than explicitly reject it (24); 64 times more papers (3896) implicitly endorse AGW than implicitly reject it (78). That's a crapload of real, peer-reviewed evidence that the deniers are still desperately pretending doesn't exist.
If you truly believe this is not an accurate survey of the state of climate science, despite similar results to half a dozen other surveys and despite agreeing with the positions held by the IPCC's own comprehensive surveys and every reputable scientific institution out there, then do please produce a more accurate survey, and get it peer-reviewed - if you can. Then we can talk.
Eight independent reviews completely cleared the "climategate" scientists of any charges of scientific misconduct.
The only people who still believe there was anything dodgy going on are the deniers who insist that a handful of sentences taken out of context somehow invalidate decades of scientific data from scientists all over the world.
Dr Pielke (the author of the article) actually is a climate scientist, and a relatively respected one. He has published a lot of good work, though his conclusions are sometimes controversial.
But the GP's questions were about what the actual weather was doing, not about the economic side of Pielke's analysis.
Well, here is a major study: 19 different peer-reviewed analyses by 70 climate scientists in 18 separate research groups. Brief summary of their findings:
* Climate change helped raise the temperatures during the run of 100F days in 2012’s American heat wave;
* drove the record loss of Arctic sea ice;
* fueled the devastating storm surge of hurricane Sandy;
* heatwaves are now four times as likely;
However, they also found there are of course still natural events that climate change has not affected, such as:
* Britain’s miserable summer in 2012, which was the rainiest in a century;
* the Netherlands’ cold spell in 2012;
* the drought that devastated America’s corn belt;
* the droughts in Kenya and Somalia.
TL;DR: Climate change IS affecting our weather, but only some things.
Why would a whole branch of science suddenly get untrustworthy? Did the peer review process selectively stop working, or are they all in a massive global conspiracy to sabotage their own careers, perhaps?
Or perhaps it's just uninformed opinion that says it's untrustworthy, which has got to be one of the bigger examples of irony around.
An interesting point I heard about income equality: pretty much everyone in this thread is in the 1%. The 99% are in the developing nations.
We complain that the moneyed elite are exerting undue political influence to keep the money for themselves, yet from a global perspective, anti-immigration laws are doing the exact same thing. The western middle-class has had kind of a raw deal lately, but not nearly as raw as the bottom 6 billion. One could argue that outsourcing, even with low wages by western standards, still brings that extra income to the Indian workers etc, thus improving global equality.
Of course there are still very valid points to be made about how those lower wages benefit the moneyed elite even further, but it's a start - and as money starts to flow towards developing nations, skills will improve, living standards will rise, and so will wages, equalising things further, at least for most people. In the meantime, we ourselves are probably better served by focusing on skill sets that aren't so easily replaced.
Second, how about we draw a line between "education" (which I'll define as evidence-based teaching, and a good thing) and "indoctrination" (which I'll define as belief-based teaching; not automatically bad, unless it conflicts with evidence).
Third, evidence is evidence. You can ignore it if you like, but it won't go away. And you can make whatever tenuous speculative connections you wish to any bizarro conclusion of your choice, but do keep them out of reach of impressionable children.
A shame the kids themselves don't get a say in their indoctrination & skewed education. I know parents need to make choices on behalf of their kids, but it's not always easy to watch.
Education is mandatory in most countries, regardless of religious beliefs, but I wonder how much control that allows over the curriculum.
Maybe it's the part where he makes unsubstantiated claims of bias and corruption against every scientist ever?
You only have to look back through his post history to see it all stems from his personal (and equally unsubstantiated) belief that AGW is a massive, money-grabbing hoax that all those "so-called scientists" have foisted on the unsuspecting public, no doubt at the prompting of the current liberal gubbermint (you know, despite similar research for 30 years). Seems clear to me that the cynicism resulting from climate science not saying what he wants to hear has spilled over into science in general.
When your only objection is some out-of-context and unsubstantiated quote about one of the reports from an unqualified writer, ignoring the actual substance completely, I naturally thought that meant you felt random opinions were actually important.
I guess they're only important if they say what you want to hear. Never mind the opinions of the respected economists and CEOs on my list (how many politicians can you count?), or the credentials of the reports' authors, or gee, the actual contents of the reports and all that cited data that backs them up, you go straight to the first contrary quote you can find, regardless of the total lack of substance or believability. Who exactly are you trying to convince here?
there's this huge majority that say there's not enough data to draw strong conclusions
Where did you get that idea? In fact, where did you get the figure of 4000 articles endorsing AGW? The original link (Powell's study) makes no mention of that.
Perhaps you're confusing it with Cook et al 2013, which does say that 4,014 of 11,944 papers "expressed no position". Reading the actual study however shows that 0.7% of papers examined rejected AGW and a tiny 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming.
Let me repeat: of 11,944 published papers, 66.4% expressed no position on AGW - they concerned themselves only with a specific area of climate science - and no conclusions can be drawn from them. Only 1% felt the evidence was inconclusive OR counter to AGW. Thus, of the papers that did take a position, including that no conclusion was possible yet, 97% supported AGW.
If you've read "analyses" that claim otherwise, they are being deliberately misleading.
Plus of course the half-dozen other studies over the last decade confirm and verify these results.
Slashdot Mirror
If you really are serious about this question (doubtful from your tone), then yes, of course the effects of warming have been explored and explained. This diagram sums up the basics nicely.
There are positive effects (e.g. slight increase in cereal productivity at moderate temperature increases in some latitudes), but these are heavily outweighed by the negative effects in health, flooding, freshwater availability and ecosystem impact, to name a few. Beyond that, there's the obvious costs of just changing our infrastructure to adapt (moving coastal cities or building levees, migrating farms further north, moving populations out of floodplains etc). If you'd like more detail, there's plenty in the IPCC AR4 WGII Policymakers' Summary, and of course in the WGII report itself.
OK, sacrificing mod points to reply, because this is just ridiculous.
First of all, please quote the actual studies, not blog pages like El Reg. That keeps things much clearer, and minimises the obvious bias possibilities.
Secondly, you compare one study's "likely" 1.64 degrees Celsius rise for doubled CO2 vs another study's "up to" 7 degree rise Farenheit - by the year 2200. Have you ever thought about comparing apples to other apples, or did you just grab two numbers at random to make your comment look more exciting?
Third, there is still no clear agreement as to how much temperatures will rise with a doubling of CO2. Nearly all scientists agree it will go up, and most agree on a rough range for that value, but there is still much debate on exactly what that value is. This is why the latest IPCC report (which surveys hundreds of studies over many sub-fields, giving a much better picture than any single study) says the "likely" increase is anything between 1.5 to 4.5 degrees C (same as the first three IPCC reports), while the "most likely" figure within that range is between 2.5 and 3.5 degrees C. Cherry-picking a single study that posits the lower bound is not a credible way to present your case.
Fourth, you deliberately (and obviously) mischaracterise a study about increased foliage increasing CO2 uptake as "discovering trees eat CO2". This might be news to you, personally, but climate scientists already have a pretty good idea of how much CO2 is currently being absorbed by current levels of global vegetation, and are more interested in finding out how much this might change - in response to increased CO2, or continuing deforestation.
Fifth, a YouTube video, from some random bloke who edited out bits of some other guy's presentation? I'm not even going to bother. Citations of real studies only, please, if you want anyone to listen.
Yeah, I'd agree with that - framerate is crucial. OTOH I find my brain quickly learns to ignore the pixel size and screendoor to a surprising extent, treating it as visual noise, so resolution is less important than I had thought (within reason).
It's certainly possible, but in order to maintain that 120Hz minimum at all times, your scene would have to be extremely simplistic by modern standards. Still leaves room for some interesting games, but it cuts out a lot of others, and it would limit immersion rather more than a lower resolution would, IMHO. Perhaps in a few more years.
greenhouse gas theory is not based based on a the kind of heating that occurs in real greenhouses
Well yeah. So why do you seem to think an experiment about how real greenhouses work has anything to do with the physics of CO2 blocking radiative transfer in the infrared spectrum? (Leaving aside the question of how one unpublished, non-peer-reviewed experiment can be considered to have "thoroughly discredited" anything).
You really do have a weird idea of science, don't you?
If you're referring to your pet list of papers, sure, many of them do provide useful data about the climate - just not for your blanket claims that there is no significant consensus.
Your insistence that peer-reviewed and published surveys are statistically invalid and "cherry-picked" simply because they were selected for the words "climate change" doesn't exactly help your case either, particularly when the peer reviewers obviously disagreed.
But mostly it's your complete lack of any vaguely comprehensive surveys that support your own personal beliefs. It's as if you think that blogs casting doubt on the multiple studies that have been done, somehow proves the opposite of what those studies show. Even if you managed to find peer-reviewed papers that showed conclusively that each one of those surveys, and the IPCC's own review, were all done incorrectly (which you certainly haven't done), that still wouldn't prove anything about the consensus.
Only a comprehensive, peer-reviewed survey that clearly shows a more even split of opinion can be considered "evidence" for your claims, and even that would have to be weighed against all the other evidence against it.
I understand science well enough to know that evidence-free claims won't get you far.
what it is refuting is that bullshit "97% consensus" claim
ORLY? How does it do that, when it makes no quantitative comparison to the opposing view? That list does not even pretend to be a comparative survey; what leads you to believe it refutes anything? But you keep pointing to it like it's proof that all the other science is unimportant.
The data you cite was cherry-picked...searched for the phrase "climate change"
Ah, so you think a search phrase to exclude papers that don't even mention climate change is "cherry-picking" of papers that support anthropogenic climate change, while also managing to exclude papers that provide evidence against AGW. Got it. And Oreskes too, though you provide even less basis for that claim. And by extension, I should also take your unspoken, evidence-free word that the various other surveys, and the IPCC itself, are also working entirely off biased data, since they happen to arrive at similar conclusions?
Too bad the expert peer reviewers disagreed with you; I think I'll go with their opinions of what constitutes valid statistical methodology, rather than some random commenter's unsourced claims. Like I said, if you have better peer-reviewed data, produce it, as nothing you've come up with so far carries any weight.
Please cite these half-dozen other surveys
Follow the citations here.
[an AMS survey] found a "consensus" of only 52%
That claim is not supported by your link, as far as I can tell from the information available. The survey didn't even aim to measure consensus, only to correlate scientific views with non-scientific beliefs - but the quote "We suggest that AMS should: attempt to convey the widespread scientific agreement about climate change" (emphasis mine) pretty clearly endorses the claim of scientific consensus, despite your insinuations of bias.
I don't have to have access to contrary surveys to know that a particular survey was done using improper statistical methods.
Spoken like a true denialist: "I don't have to have reliable data that supports my position, I just believe your data is wrong." No surprise here.
You keep trotting out that invisionfree list of selected papers, as if that somehow invalidates the entire body of work on climate science over the last few decades ((tens of thousands of papers) - then you actually accuse peer-reviewed surveys of cherry-picking? Your double standards are breathtaking.
a relatively small, rather incestuous group who try to lie with statistics to "prove" their cause to the populace, by doing things like cherry-picking papers in order to claim [the] "97% consensus" [is bogus]
FTFY.
Those "rebuttals" to Cook et al 2013 that try to claim the 97% consensus is bogus? Maybe you should try analysing the data yourself instead of parroting someone else's misinformation; I did. My own findings: 41 times more papers (986) explicitly endorse AGW than explicitly reject it (24); 64 times more papers (3896) implicitly endorse AGW than implicitly reject it (78). That's a crapload of real, peer-reviewed evidence that the deniers are still desperately pretending doesn't exist.
If you truly believe this is not an accurate survey of the state of climate science, despite similar results to half a dozen other surveys and despite agreeing with the positions held by the IPCC's own comprehensive surveys and every reputable scientific institution out there, then do please produce a more accurate survey, and get it peer-reviewed - if you can. Then we can talk.
You may laugh, but the terrorists are all over that.
[citation needed]. Burden of proof is on you.
Ah, thanks for clearing that up for me.
Eight independent reviews completely cleared the "climategate" scientists of any charges of scientific misconduct.
The only people who still believe there was anything dodgy going on are the deniers who insist that a handful of sentences taken out of context somehow invalidate decades of scientific data from scientists all over the world.
Dr Pielke (the author of the article) actually is a climate scientist, and a relatively respected one. He has published a lot of good work, though his conclusions are sometimes controversial.
But the GP's questions were about what the actual weather was doing, not about the economic side of Pielke's analysis.
Well, here is a major study: 19 different peer-reviewed analyses by 70 climate scientists in 18 separate research groups. Brief summary of their findings:
However, they also found there are of course still natural events that climate change has not affected, such as:
TL;DR: Climate change IS affecting our weather, but only some things.
Why would a whole branch of science suddenly get untrustworthy? Did the peer review process selectively stop working, or are they all in a massive global conspiracy to sabotage their own careers, perhaps?
Or perhaps it's just uninformed opinion that says it's untrustworthy, which has got to be one of the bigger examples of irony around.
The Nexus S was made by Samsung way back in 2010.
It hasn't been on sale for years. I really don't think it's relevant to new buyers.
An interesting point I heard about income equality: pretty much everyone in this thread is in the 1%. The 99% are in the developing nations.
We complain that the moneyed elite are exerting undue political influence to keep the money for themselves, yet from a global perspective, anti-immigration laws are doing the exact same thing. The western middle-class has had kind of a raw deal lately, but not nearly as raw as the bottom 6 billion. One could argue that outsourcing, even with low wages by western standards, still brings that extra income to the Indian workers etc, thus improving global equality.
Of course there are still very valid points to be made about how those lower wages benefit the moneyed elite even further, but it's a start - and as money starts to flow towards developing nations, skills will improve, living standards will rise, and so will wages, equalising things further, at least for most people. In the meantime, we ourselves are probably better served by focusing on skill sets that aren't so easily replaced.
First, what on earth are you on about?
Second, how about we draw a line between "education" (which I'll define as evidence-based teaching, and a good thing) and "indoctrination" (which I'll define as belief-based teaching; not automatically bad, unless it conflicts with evidence).
Third, evidence is evidence. You can ignore it if you like, but it won't go away. And you can make whatever tenuous speculative connections you wish to any bizarro conclusion of your choice, but do keep them out of reach of impressionable children.
A shame the kids themselves don't get a say in their indoctrination & skewed education. I know parents need to make choices on behalf of their kids, but it's not always easy to watch.
Education is mandatory in most countries, regardless of religious beliefs, but I wonder how much control that allows over the curriculum.
Maybe it's the part where he makes unsubstantiated claims of bias and corruption against every scientist ever?
You only have to look back through his post history to see it all stems from his personal (and equally unsubstantiated) belief that AGW is a massive, money-grabbing hoax that all those "so-called scientists" have foisted on the unsuspecting public, no doubt at the prompting of the current liberal gubbermint (you know, despite similar research for 30 years). Seems clear to me that the cynicism resulting from climate science not saying what he wants to hear has spilled over into science in general.
When your only objection is some out-of-context and unsubstantiated quote about one of the reports from an unqualified writer, ignoring the actual substance completely, I naturally thought that meant you felt random opinions were actually important.
I guess they're only important if they say what you want to hear. Never mind the opinions of the respected economists and CEOs on my list (how many politicians can you count?), or the credentials of the reports' authors, or gee, the actual contents of the reports and all that cited data that backs them up, you go straight to the first contrary quote you can find, regardless of the total lack of substance or believability. Who exactly are you trying to convince here?
Wow, what an objection. No wonder you believe the denialists with that kind of genius of your own.
You could just read the Cook 2013 paper for yourself. Even just the abstract - it's pretty clear about that.
there's this huge majority that say there's not enough data to draw strong conclusions
Where did you get that idea? In fact, where did you get the figure of 4000 articles endorsing AGW? The original link (Powell's study) makes no mention of that.
Perhaps you're confusing it with Cook et al 2013, which does say that 4,014 of 11,944 papers "expressed no position". Reading the actual study however shows that 0.7% of papers examined rejected AGW and a tiny 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming.
Let me repeat: of 11,944 published papers, 66.4% expressed no position on AGW - they concerned themselves only with a specific area of climate science - and no conclusions can be drawn from them. Only 1% felt the evidence was inconclusive OR counter to AGW. Thus, of the papers that did take a position, including that no conclusion was possible yet, 97% supported AGW.
If you've read "analyses" that claim otherwise, they are being deliberately misleading.
Plus of course the half-dozen other studies over the last decade confirm and verify these results.