- Oceans are not "water vapour". - They are 70% of the surface, not 80% - The average time a water molecule spends in the atmosphere is 11 days. For CO2 it's 80 years. The CO2 makes up the difference in impact by doing it for a crap load longer. - Heating from CO2 leads to more evaporation which increases the amount of water vapor.
All true. But do note that, just because something is a social construct rather than biological reality does not mean that it doesn't have a very real impact on people's lives.
Lots of things are purely social constructs but their impacts are no less real for it. Money for one.
Well "cars" is a very wide concept - and "speedometers" technology isn't all made equal. Some are definitely more accurate than others. Saying there can be a margin of error (and there are regulations limiting how big it can be) does not lead to the conclusion that YOUR car is at the edges of it. Even so - your measurement is based on the best-case scenario. The kind of road with milestones is generally a good condition open road like a highway, which is what they are calibrated against. They get a lot less accurate when you deal with things like dirt roads or wet roads. When the friction levels change significantly the distance the CAR moves per rotation is significantly less correlated to the circumference of the wheel.
>Suppose a proposal would delay AGW global warming by five years, and cost 80% of your income. Is that a proposal you would support?
Of course not. But no scientist I've read has suggested "delaying" is even a goal. If 80% of my income can PREVENT it ? Yes - take it. I'd rather live in squalor but my daughter gets to LIVE.
> If you wouldn't support such a proposal, you recognize that each proposal is a balance between maybe having some benefit re AGW vs the economic cost No, that does not follow. Not least because reductio et absurdium is a fallacy - it's not a valid argument. But even if I overlook that it still does not follow. Because your example was mere delay. Delay or mitigation isn't the aim. Solving the problem is. The only point where you could argue a solution for THAT isn't worth it - is if the impacts from that solution (which could be consequences of economic impact) are MORE SEVERE than the impacts of the problem being stopped. Lets say there's a real risk of unleashing a massive resource war as people struggle due to the financial impact. Will this resource war be bigger than the global resource war (for which "World War III" would be a seriously euphemistic name) that would be unleashed if even the more moderate potential impacts of climate change happens ? When you add in all the people about to die from massive enlargements to the range of disease carrying mosquitos ? Right now the anestopheles mosquito is the most dangerous animal on the entire planet. It kills millions of people every year - and it's confined to a single continent and even there only about 25% of that continent. Imagine if it is suddenly able to survive in New York ? So the problem with your 'cost-benefit analysis' approach is that it loses. You fear some may starve due to cost increases ? A valid concern - more than would starve if most of our best agrarian land is lost to agriculture ? Considering that the new temperate zones won't have fertile soil magically replacing the tundra overnight - you'll have dead soil with low yields, probably for centuries. Besides, we've got people starving due to costs NOW. We can manage that problem - sure our management of it is atrocious since a good system would eradicate it - but there is actually any evidence that the economic shifts involved would be severe enough to greatly increase the small number of those who can't find *some* way to survive - it is more likely to just redistribute hunger a bit more evenly about the world. Which would make it easier to deal with actually - since most of the new hungry people would be located in countries with lots of resources to help them with. We're going to have to deal with that issue REGARDLESS of what we do with climate change anyway - the gap between rich and poor in the wealthy countries is growing so rapidly that a massive increase in hunger in those countries is utterly unavoidable already. We'll have to sort it or we'll have all the issues you worry about - regardless of what we do or don't do about climate change. So we may has well solve that too.
But I'm going to point out - that if you accept that money is a proxy for resources, then it's unconscionable to not oppose severe wealth inequality to the greatest extent possible. Because control of money is then control of resources. Since people need resources to survive - it represents absolute, dictatorial power over them. When 95% of the world's wealth is in the hands of just 5% of the people - those 5% are the most absolute and horrifying dictators history has ever known.
>. If the only people talking are climatologists (and no economists), you're ignoring half of the problem! Talking about science ? It SHOULD be only scientists. I won't pay much creedence to an economists ideas about evolutionary biology either. That doesn't mean that insights (often great ones) from outside a field can't happen, or should be ignored - but they aren't done from within the person's original field. When a person makes a great contribution to a field from outside it
The hard sciences on the other hand are, fundamentally, apolitical - but that doesn't mean they can't have political consequences. It just means that whenever they don't agree with the politics- it's the politics that are wrong.
Einstein was just trying to understand the universe. And deep inside his paper was a little equation - a tiny and simple one compared to what else is in there. For two decades entirely overlooked - and then somebody realized what that little equation meant ! E=mc^2... the energy in matter is equal to it's mass times the speed of light squared - and the speed of light is a very big number. Squared it's a truly massive number. A little matter contains an enormous amount of energy.
At that moment - it became clear that, thanks to Einstein (and quite unintentionally on his part) - we had the means to build the most powerful weapon in history. But the Germans knew it too. The NAZIs were trying to build one. And then, Einstein - the great Pacifist went to see the President of the United States and encouraged him to develop a program to build that bomb before the NAZIs can do it.
Einstein wasn't concerned with politics when he wrote his theory. He was just trying to explain why Mercury's orbit wasn't where Newton said it should be. But his work ended up having political consequences - and unleashed a terrible threat to humanity. So he did a political thing -and encouraged the good (or at least "less evil") side to pursue that power so they could have it before the other side did.
Hard science isn't political - but sometimes, it's discoveries have urgent consequences which require political action. Einstein's activism that day helped save the free world from one of the gravest threats it had ever faced. There is a time for scientists to engage in political activism - there is a time for them to say to the politicians "What we have discovered represents a grave threat to humanity - and we need you to do the right thing to avert that". There is nothing wrong with that. So - I see Michael Mann right now as far more akin to Einstein that fateful day he requested an audience with the white house, and I see that as a good thing. The science would say the same - regardless of his political beliefs - but he has a duty when what he discovers is a grave threat requiring political action - to become an activist for that action. This does not diminish his work as a science - it merely augments it with his responsibility as a human being.
Politics and science may not often see eye to eye - but they are always, and unfortunately this cannot change, at least somewhat intertwined. The greatest scientific achievement in history - the moon landing, would never have happened if not for the US's desperate desire to outdo the Soviets and prove capitalism superior to communism. Purely political/economic ideas locked in a conflict was why we were willing to give up the massive resources required that led to that achievement.
You can't demand scientists be entirely apolitical. Science should be. Scientists cannot be. They are human beings first, and more importantly - even the most apolitical science can nevertheless have enormous political consequences. That won't change because somebody dislikes those consequences. A lot of so-called skeptics engage in the appeal to consequences fallacy - saying things like "it's a sham to establish a global authoritarian rule and set humanity backwards" and stuff like that. But that's a false argument. Even if a global authoritarian rule or setting humanity backwards was the only way to deal with the threat (and it decidedly is not - on the contrary the best way is to abandon outdated 19th century technology for 21st century technology") - that wouldn't change whether the science is true or not. The truthfulness of an argument has no connection whatsoever with the appeal (or lack there-off) of the consequences of that argument. One libertarian once declared that the kind of massive global cooperation required here would be, in
>I do count them, in many cases, often based on their written objectives. It's interesting to me you started with "universities". You don't think the ivory towers of academia ever have just a bit of a political bent? Enjoy your safe space, I guess.;)
Not in the hard sciences. In the humanities - sure - but that is part of the reason the humanities exist. The human sciences are the birthplace off and bastions for liberalism and have been since at least the renaissance. That's not bias - that's what they are FOR. It's not so much that universities are biassed against conservative ideas as that conservative ideas are fundamentally unfit for purpose in a university. The very reason they were INVENTED was liberalism.
>Which do you think an organization "committed to protecting our planet [through) conservation projects" is likely to weigh more heavily, protecting the planet or protecting the economy from the costs of misguided policies based on overblown rhetoric? That is not a political issue. No really it's not. It's a reality issue. You can't eat, drink or breath money. The world is ALWAYS the more important of the two. Because without a healthy natural world - the economy is doomed ANYWAY. It cannot EXIST without one. A healthy planet is literally a fundamental prerequisite for having an economy in the first place.
> If National Geographic and the Chamber of Commerce issued a joint report on climate change, I would expect that to be fairly balanced between the two concerns. So you would only take a report seriously... if half of it was written by people with absolutely ZERO expertise in the topic it's about ?
My data is from when I first started driving (about 16 years ago) and I haven't really kept up. It's possible they've gotten better, but the analogy works even if the specific numbers don't. It is meant to illustrate the idea that compensating for a known imperfect measurement device does not equal dishonesty.
All but the last one. Unless you count "universities, museums, private research centers, thinktanks and organisations like the national geographic society and the American Geophysical Union" as "organisations which advocate political positions".
In case you were wondering, I do not. In fact, what all those organisations have in common is that their prestige is almost entirely built upon being politically independent and loyal only to what the evidence says - regardless of whether politicians like that. Science, ultimately, is a protection mechanism - it is a tool for human minds to protect themselves. It protects us from a number of very grave threats: - The tendency of authority to try to define truth according to their interests - The strong tendency of humans to believe whatever makes us feel good - The absolutely atrocious abilities most humans have at risk assessment (since our savannah evolved skills don't work in this world).
And that's just the top 3.
Indeed, I pointed out a reason for the trend: when you have a massively well funded propaganda machine trying to convince the world you're just a mad doomsaying prophet it is incredibly bad for your career, status and survival to be alarmist. It's much safer a proposition to undersell your ideas when talking to the lay public. By being as uncontroversial as you can be without actually lying the problem away - you give that massive propaganda machine less ammunition.
I think it's fairly obvious that most scientists in any field should at least be smart enough to do such an elementary calculation as that. Now knowing something is a bad idea doesn't always stop (even smart) people from doing it anyway, but it does have a deterring effect on most people.
I pointed at a trend, examples to the contrary are not evidence against a trend. Or do you not know the meaning of the phrase "notoriously prone" ?
So no, a few scientists predicting to high is not evidence against my claim that most of time, most the scientists choose to underestimate when speaking to the public or the press. To disprove my claim of such a trend you would have to show evidence that such underestimations are rare, at the very least that the majority of public statements by active climate scientists have made predictions more severe than supported by the data or previous events.
Secondly - science is a group activity. did it ever occur to you that Richard Tol may have been wrong ? That in his dissagreement with the IPCC team - they were representing the findings fairly and he was just wrong about his interpretation ? More-over do you GET that an IPCC report is NOT an example of "speaking to the public" at all ? Those reports are given to policymakers and the like - they DO tend to use the middle-of-the-range "most likely" figures. They are nothing like press releases - hell they aren't even like the press releases about themselves.
You need to look up the meaning of 'rent-seeking' since it doesn't mean what you think it means.
In fact... fossil fuel companies fit the actual definition more closely than any of the organisations to which you are referring. Though the best example in the US would be cable companies (and this is why they hate the idea of net neutrality as it threatens their rent-seeking capacity).
There is energy entering the system all the time (because we haven't turned off the sun). If you have energy entering a system, and energy leaving the system.
What happens if you reduce the rate at which it can leave ?
It gets hotter.
It's impossible for this to be wrong - unless Newton's first law is wrong. Because this IS Newton's first law.
> Are human activities the primary driver of climate change or are other factors playing a more significant role
Science is based on observation. If you want that debate - show us some observable phenomenon, ANY observable phenomenon other than human activities than can account for the change. We KNOW human activities are causing the CO2 rise (unless nuclear physics is also wrong about literally everything) because fossil fuel CO2 has notable isotopic differences from the carbon in living creatures. We can see that most of the CO2 in the atmosphere now comes from fossil fuels - we have done the tests over and over. This also fits in with the American Geophysical union's results. They studied the CO2 output of the next biggest culprit: volcanoes. It turns out all the volcanoes in the world in an average year output a mere 0.25% of the CO2 from coal power plants alone. But even if we suppose that there is no greenhouse effect (which means a lot of physics and chemistry must be wrong) - and the CO2 doesn't matter - then where is the heating coming from ? It's not the sun - if anything the sun has been cooling over the last two decades (so if the sun had been like it was in the 1980s it would be even warmer).
>Are these changes really outside the normal range our planet and ecosystem have experienced in the past Every piece of data, proxy data or indication we have says it is, by a massive margin. Again - science is based on observation, if you want to have this debate show us any data that suggests otherwise. And even if you do - keep in mind, you're at best giving us some interesting information about a past climate event. You're saying nothing at all about the impact this one is likely to have on our civilization.
> if no, is the rate of change outside the normal range See above.
> if no, is the rate of change outside the normal range See above. It really doesn't matter for any practical purpose. It would be valuable as pure knowledge - but it says nothing about the major questions of impact on human civilization.
>Is this a good or bad thing, in terms of our own best interest? There is absolutely no conceivable "good" outcome for our interests here. None. Having diseases like Malaria and Zika spread to far wider ranges than before ? Not a good thing. Desertification of formerly good agricultural land? Definitely not a good thing. Flooding and mass death in island countries and low-lying areas ? Can't see a good thing there. Resulting mass migration - well look what the fear of a few Mexicans did in America in November... can you imagine if a billion humans suddenly had to migrate ? That's pretty much a guaranteed world war right there.
>how do you define 'our' The only sensible definition is the entire human race - because there is no impact this can have anywhere that will not also cause negative impacts for everybody else. (for example by suddenly having a good chunk of several billion people demanding you give them refugee status and willing to kill you if you don't let them in because the alternative is to die themselves).
Oh and while there has been excessive alarmism in reporting - scientist have called that out consistently.
If anything climate scientists are notoriously prone, in their public statements, to grossly underestimate their findings for fear of being called alarmist. When an actual climate scientist says "My analys shows X meters of sea level rise in 20 years" he is NOT telling you the top range possibility. He is not telling you most likely MIDDLE of the range either.
He is telling you the lowest possible value supported by the data -and maybe rounding down a bit.
Nope. That never happened. Those "leaked emails" never said that. The bits you were shown which were quoted out of context meant something ENTIRELY different to what you think when read in the context those words were actually written in. Something entirely non-controversial. Which is why the scientists accused in those cases were exonerated by not one but three different independent inquiries.
Your claim has literally been disproven in court. Do you know what it's called when you keep fielding an accusation after somebody has been exonerated ? It's called slander, and it's not free speech, it's not "skepticism", it's not "being critical" - it's a crime.
All of which would have to be false for climate change theory to be false.
EVERY SINGLE FINDING IN THE HISTORY OF PHYSICS.
None of it can be true, if climate science isn't ALSO true.
Because for climate science to be false, Newton's first law must be ENTIRELY AND ABSOLUTELY FALSE. Human induced climate change is nothing BUT a restatement of newton's first law. It's impossible for one to be true and the other false because they are SAME THING.
Aristotle's first law of logic: the law of identity - a thing cannot be other than itself. Newton's first law cannot be both true and false. And climate change is JUST Newton's first law applied to a specific system.
Right... so you won't show any actual evidence they are wrong, you'll just dismiss this and pretend your completely blatant lie about what the paper said never happened. Typical denier - get cornered, get your argument disproven - and pretend you never made it.
I can't believe I have to explain this to a person who has learned to read and write but okay...
O -- This is an apple. It is red.
o/--\o -- This is a truck, it is red.
The apple is like the truck: they are both red.
BUT You can't drive the apple to work and you can't eat the truck. Just because one thing is like another thing in ONE way it does not mean it's like the other thing in ANY OTHER WAY.
The above poster said climate change was like medicine only in one very specific way - you cannot conclude anything else from that.
And you may also want to learn that DESPITE the difficulties in medical science it is still a thousand times more accurate than any other approach we have. Imperfect science is still MUCH better than non-science.
Climate science is - ultimately - most like physics (in fact, about 90% of the time it IS nothing BUT physics), and anybody who tells you differently is deliberately trying to deceive you.
They ARE saying the warming that DID happen was worse than we thought. Nobody is trying to explain "the pause" for the same reason no scientist is currently publishing theories about unicorn flight dynamics. Scientists do not write theories to explain things that have never been observed. The pause was a fantasy, made up by a wellfunded team of propaganda artists employed by the fossil fuel industry to tell a lie to the world, and you swallowed their lie hook line and sinker.
It's not entirely speculative - some are already happening. For example - there are vast swaths of methane (one of the worst greenhouse gasses) trapped below the alpine glaciers. As the glaciers are melting - this methane is escaping. This is already happening at such a fast rate that the Swedes are using the methane escaping from melting glaciers to burn in power plants.
And they can't even burn it all - there's too much escaping over too wide a region.
When you have CO2 induced melting of glaciers releasing formerly trapped methane which will trigger more severe warming, that's a perfect exanple of a feedback-loop effect, and it's happening right now.
You're right, thanks to global warming we are already seeing mosquito born illnesses like Zika and Malaria massively expanding the ranges where they occur. Think about the poor human killing mosquitos ! Do not let the cold keep them confined to small areas. Let them spread and live long prosperous lives killing babies !
Okay fucknuckle - please educate yourself on why medicine is one of the hardest scientific fields to study - and why that low replication rate tells you NOTHING about other sciences.
Hint: because experimenting on people is very difficult to do ethically and there are a lot of things you OUGHT to do to get reliable scientific results which you CANNOT do because doing them would be considered mass murder.
>I don't know and neither do you Yes... we do... because only one of the two options is even POSSIBLE. The other is literally declared impossible by Newton's first law and ALL THREE laws of thermodynamics. Put a ship engine intake thermometer and a buoy thermometer in the same water - it's physically impossible that the ship will NOT measure hotter than the buoy. Because those heaters, engines, people - all those things PRODUCE ENERGY. And energy cannot be destroyed, it cannot dissapear. It's there and it WILL affect the measurement. Luckily we DO know exactly by how MUCH it affects it - because we DO have buoy's to compare it with.
> I mean I may be thick as a stick in a bucket of pig-shit There's no may be about it, but congratulations on the closest to true thing you've said all day (it would have been entirely true if you replaced 'may be' with 'am').
>I do at least know these kinds of statistical shenanigans are usually bollocks. There was nothing statistical about this - and besides which, no they NEVER are - but professional liars like Steve Mcntyre will write screeds declaring the statistics invalid. Not because it is - because he is flat out lying to you about what the numbers mean (or even, on occasion, what those numbers ARE). It's not that he doesn't understand the statistics, he has the training and he does. It's that he knows YOU DO NOT. So he knows if how to tell a convincing lie. And you fall for it. Probably because of the above stated stick in a bucket of pig-shit problem.
These people can't tell the difference between "correcting for a known measurement problem" and "lying".
Lets use a car analogy (this is slashdot after all). A car's speedometer is never completely accurate, in fact it has a margin of error of about 10 km/h. This is because it cannot actually measure the distance travelled, and it has to get this value by a proxy: the number of wheel rotations times the circumference of the wheel. Trouble is wheel circumference is not a constant. People put on tyres of different sizes, and the tyres themselves change shape as you drive - stretching and relaxing and all this introduces known errors in the measurement. Now to prevent this from introducing major safety risks (and getting lots of people undeserved fines) car manufacturers deliberately calibrate speedometers to overestimate speed. This way, if you drive at what the meter says is the speed limit you can be reliably sure that your actual speed is below the limit (by up to 10km/h).
So if I want to know the ACTUAL speed at which I drove, and I don't have a way of measuring the exact distance and time - my best bet is to take the speed that was on the speedometer and subtract 10km/h from it. It isn't perfectly accurate but it's a lot more accurate than using the number directly (idiots of course, when learning this, subvert this by driving 10km/h ABOVE the speed limit - which would be fine if that margine of error was exact, you have no idea how close you actually are, or even if you are over when you do that).
This is an adjustment like that. You have a measuring device, you know it has a deviation, and you correct for that deviation to get a more accurate answer than the raw device could give.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you read ALL the emails AND had the PHD to understand htem - you haven't read ANY.
- Oceans are not "water vapour".
- They are 70% of the surface, not 80%
- The average time a water molecule spends in the atmosphere is 11 days. For CO2 it's 80 years. The CO2 makes up the difference in impact by doing it for a crap load longer.
- Heating from CO2 leads to more evaporation which increases the amount of water vapor.
All true. But do note that, just because something is a social construct rather than biological reality does not mean that it doesn't have a very real impact on people's lives.
Lots of things are purely social constructs but their impacts are no less real for it. Money for one.
Well "cars" is a very wide concept - and "speedometers" technology isn't all made equal. Some are definitely more accurate than others. Saying there can be a margin of error (and there are regulations limiting how big it can be) does not lead to the conclusion that YOUR car is at the edges of it. Even so - your measurement is based on the best-case scenario. The kind of road with milestones is generally a good condition open road like a highway, which is what they are calibrated against. They get a lot less accurate when you deal with things like dirt roads or wet roads. When the friction levels change significantly the distance the CAR moves per rotation is significantly less correlated to the circumference of the wheel.
>Suppose a proposal would delay AGW global warming by five years, and cost 80% of your income. Is that a proposal you would support?
Of course not. But no scientist I've read has suggested "delaying" is even a goal. If 80% of my income can PREVENT it ? Yes - take it. I'd rather live in squalor but my daughter gets to LIVE.
> If you wouldn't support such a proposal, you recognize that each proposal is a balance between maybe having some benefit re AGW vs the economic cost
No, that does not follow. Not least because reductio et absurdium is a fallacy - it's not a valid argument. But even if I overlook that it still does not follow. Because your example was mere delay. Delay or mitigation isn't the aim. Solving the problem is. The only point where you could argue a solution for THAT isn't worth it - is if the impacts from that solution (which could be consequences of economic impact) are MORE SEVERE than the impacts of the problem being stopped. Lets say there's a real risk of unleashing a massive resource war as people struggle due to the financial impact. Will this resource war be bigger than the global resource war (for which "World War III" would be a seriously euphemistic name) that would be unleashed if even the more moderate potential impacts of climate change happens ? When you add in all the people about to die from massive enlargements to the range of disease carrying mosquitos ? Right now the anestopheles mosquito is the most dangerous animal on the entire planet. It kills millions of people every year - and it's confined to a single continent and even there only about 25% of that continent. Imagine if it is suddenly able to survive in New York ? So the problem with your 'cost-benefit analysis' approach is that it loses. You fear some may starve due to cost increases ? A valid concern - more than would starve if most of our best agrarian land is lost to agriculture ? Considering that the new temperate zones won't have fertile soil magically replacing the tundra overnight - you'll have dead soil with low yields, probably for centuries. Besides, we've got people starving due to costs NOW. We can manage that problem - sure our management of it is atrocious since a good system would eradicate it - but there is actually any evidence that the economic shifts involved would be severe enough to greatly increase the small number of those who can't find *some* way to survive - it is more likely to just redistribute hunger a bit more evenly about the world. Which would make it easier to deal with actually - since most of the new hungry people would be located in countries with lots of resources to help them with.
We're going to have to deal with that issue REGARDLESS of what we do with climate change anyway - the gap between rich and poor in the wealthy countries is growing so rapidly that a massive increase in hunger in those countries is utterly unavoidable already. We'll have to sort it or we'll have all the issues you worry about - regardless of what we do or don't do about climate change. So we may has well solve that too.
But I'm going to point out - that if you accept that money is a proxy for resources, then it's unconscionable to not oppose severe wealth inequality to the greatest extent possible. Because control of money is then control of resources. Since people need resources to survive - it represents absolute, dictatorial power over them. When 95% of the world's wealth is in the hands of just 5% of the people - those 5% are the most absolute and horrifying dictators history has ever known.
>. If the only people talking are climatologists (and no economists), you're ignoring half of the problem!
Talking about science ? It SHOULD be only scientists. I won't pay much creedence to an economists ideas about evolutionary biology either. That doesn't mean that insights (often great ones) from outside a field can't happen, or should be ignored - but they aren't done from within the person's original field. When a person makes a great contribution to a field from outside it
The hard sciences on the other hand are, fundamentally, apolitical - but that doesn't mean they can't have political consequences. It just means that whenever they don't agree with the politics- it's the politics that are wrong.
Einstein was just trying to understand the universe. And deep inside his paper was a little equation - a tiny and simple one compared to what else is in there. For two decades entirely overlooked - and then somebody realized what that little equation meant ! E=mc^2 ... the energy in matter is equal to it's mass times the speed of light squared - and the speed of light is a very big number. Squared it's a truly massive number.
A little matter contains an enormous amount of energy.
At that moment - it became clear that, thanks to Einstein (and quite unintentionally on his part) - we had the means to build the most powerful weapon in history. But the Germans knew it too. The NAZIs were trying to build one. And then, Einstein - the great Pacifist went to see the President of the United States and encouraged him to develop a program to build that bomb before the NAZIs can do it.
Einstein wasn't concerned with politics when he wrote his theory. He was just trying to explain why Mercury's orbit wasn't where Newton said it should be. But his work ended up having political consequences - and unleashed a terrible threat to humanity. So he did a political thing -and encouraged the good (or at least "less evil") side to pursue that power so they could have it before the other side did.
Hard science isn't political - but sometimes, it's discoveries have urgent consequences which require political action. Einstein's activism that day helped save the free world from one of the gravest threats it had ever faced. There is a time for scientists to engage in political activism - there is a time for them to say to the politicians "What we have discovered represents a grave threat to humanity - and we need you to do the right thing to avert that". There is nothing wrong with that. So - I see Michael Mann right now as far more akin to Einstein that fateful day he requested an audience with the white house, and I see that as a good thing. The science would say the same - regardless of his political beliefs - but he has a duty when what he discovers is a grave threat requiring political action - to become an activist for that action. This does not diminish his work as a science - it merely augments it with his responsibility as a human being.
Politics and science may not often see eye to eye - but they are always, and unfortunately this cannot change, at least somewhat intertwined. The greatest scientific achievement in history - the moon landing, would never have happened if not for the US's desperate desire to outdo the Soviets and prove capitalism superior to communism. Purely political/economic ideas locked in a conflict was why we were willing to give up the massive resources required that led to that achievement.
You can't demand scientists be entirely apolitical. Science should be. Scientists cannot be. They are human beings first, and more importantly - even the most apolitical science can nevertheless have enormous political consequences. That won't change because somebody dislikes those consequences. A lot of so-called skeptics engage in the appeal to consequences fallacy - saying things like "it's a sham to establish a global authoritarian rule and set humanity backwards" and stuff like that. But that's a false argument. Even if a global authoritarian rule or setting humanity backwards was the only way to deal with the threat (and it decidedly is not - on the contrary the best way is to abandon outdated 19th century technology for 21st century technology") - that wouldn't change whether the science is true or not. The truthfulness of an argument has no connection whatsoever with the appeal (or lack there-off) of the consequences of that argument.
One libertarian once declared that the kind of massive global cooperation required here would be, in
>I do count them, in many cases, often based on their written objectives. It's interesting to me you started with "universities". You don't think the ivory towers of academia ever have just a bit of a political bent? Enjoy your safe space, I guess. ;)
Not in the hard sciences. In the humanities - sure - but that is part of the reason the humanities exist. The human sciences are the birthplace off and bastions for liberalism and have been since at least the renaissance. That's not bias - that's what they are FOR. It's not so much that universities are biassed against conservative ideas as that conservative ideas are fundamentally unfit for purpose in a university. The very reason they were INVENTED was liberalism.
>Which do you think an organization "committed to protecting our planet [through) conservation projects" is likely to weigh more heavily, protecting the planet or protecting the economy from the costs of misguided policies based on overblown rhetoric?
That is not a political issue. No really it's not. It's a reality issue. You can't eat, drink or breath money. The world is ALWAYS the more important of the two. Because without a healthy natural world - the economy is doomed ANYWAY. It cannot EXIST without one. A healthy planet is literally a fundamental prerequisite for having an economy in the first place.
> If National Geographic and the Chamber of Commerce issued a joint report on climate change, I would expect that to be fairly balanced between the two concerns.
So you would only take a report seriously... if half of it was written by people with absolutely ZERO expertise in the topic it's about ?
My data is from when I first started driving (about 16 years ago) and I haven't really kept up. It's possible they've gotten better, but the analogy works even if the specific numbers don't. It is meant to illustrate the idea that compensating for a known imperfect measurement device does not equal dishonesty.
All but the last one. Unless you count "universities, museums, private research centers, thinktanks and organisations like the national geographic society and the American Geophysical Union" as "organisations which advocate political positions".
In case you were wondering, I do not. In fact, what all those organisations have in common is that their prestige is almost entirely built upon being politically independent and loyal only to what the evidence says - regardless of whether politicians like that. Science, ultimately, is a protection mechanism - it is a tool for human minds to protect themselves.
It protects us from a number of very grave threats:
- The tendency of authority to try to define truth according to their interests
- The strong tendency of humans to believe whatever makes us feel good
- The absolutely atrocious abilities most humans have at risk assessment (since our savannah evolved skills don't work in this world).
And that's just the top 3.
Indeed, I pointed out a reason for the trend: when you have a massively well funded propaganda machine trying to convince the world you're just a mad doomsaying prophet it is incredibly bad for your career, status and survival to be alarmist. It's much safer a proposition to undersell your ideas when talking to the lay public. By being as uncontroversial as you can be without actually lying the problem away - you give that massive propaganda machine less ammunition.
I think it's fairly obvious that most scientists in any field should at least be smart enough to do such an elementary calculation as that. Now knowing something is a bad idea doesn't always stop (even smart) people from doing it anyway, but it does have a deterring effect on most people.
Do the slashdot denier crowd count as politicians... mmm... now you mention it...
I pointed at a trend, examples to the contrary are not evidence against a trend. Or do you not know the meaning of the phrase "notoriously prone" ?
So no, a few scientists predicting to high is not evidence against my claim that most of time, most the scientists choose to underestimate when speaking to the public or the press. To disprove my claim of such a trend you would have to show evidence that such underestimations are rare, at the very least that the majority of public statements by active climate scientists have made predictions more severe than supported by the data or previous events.
Secondly - science is a group activity. did it ever occur to you that Richard Tol may have been wrong ? That in his dissagreement with the IPCC team - they were representing the findings fairly and he was just wrong about his interpretation ?
More-over do you GET that an IPCC report is NOT an example of "speaking to the public" at all ? Those reports are given to policymakers and the like - they DO tend to use the middle-of-the-range "most likely" figures. They are nothing like press releases - hell they aren't even like the press releases about themselves.
You need to look up the meaning of 'rent-seeking' since it doesn't mean what you think it means.
In fact... fossil fuel companies fit the actual definition more closely than any of the organisations to which you are referring. Though the best example in the US would be cable companies (and this is why they hate the idea of net neutrality as it threatens their rent-seeking capacity).
No. Basic physics.
There is energy entering the system all the time (because we haven't turned off the sun).
If you have energy entering a system, and energy leaving the system.
What happens if you reduce the rate at which it can leave ?
It gets hotter.
It's impossible for this to be wrong - unless Newton's first law is wrong. Because this IS Newton's first law.
> Are human activities the primary driver of climate change or are other factors playing a more significant role
Science is based on observation. If you want that debate - show us some observable phenomenon, ANY observable phenomenon other than human activities than can account for the change. We KNOW human activities are causing the CO2 rise (unless nuclear physics is also wrong about literally everything) because fossil fuel CO2 has notable isotopic differences from the carbon in living creatures. We can see that most of the CO2 in the atmosphere now comes from fossil fuels - we have done the tests over and over. This also fits in with the American Geophysical union's results. They studied the CO2 output of the next biggest culprit: volcanoes. It turns out all the volcanoes in the world in an average year output a mere 0.25% of the CO2 from coal power plants alone. But even if we suppose that there is no greenhouse effect (which means a lot of physics and chemistry must be wrong) - and the CO2 doesn't matter - then where is the heating coming from ? It's not the sun - if anything the sun has been cooling over the last two decades (so if the sun had been like it was in the 1980s it would be even warmer).
>Are these changes really outside the normal range our planet and ecosystem have experienced in the past
Every piece of data, proxy data or indication we have says it is, by a massive margin. Again - science is based on observation, if you want to have this debate show us any data that suggests otherwise. And even if you do - keep in mind, you're at best giving us some interesting information about a past climate event. You're saying nothing at all about the impact this one is likely to have on our civilization.
> if no, is the rate of change outside the normal range
See above.
> if no, is the rate of change outside the normal range
See above. It really doesn't matter for any practical purpose. It would be valuable as pure knowledge - but it says nothing about the major questions of impact on human civilization.
>Is this a good or bad thing, in terms of our own best interest?
There is absolutely no conceivable "good" outcome for our interests here. None. Having diseases like Malaria and Zika spread to far wider ranges than before ? Not a good thing.
Desertification of formerly good agricultural land? Definitely not a good thing.
Flooding and mass death in island countries and low-lying areas ? Can't see a good thing there.
Resulting mass migration - well look what the fear of a few Mexicans did in America in November... can you imagine if a billion humans suddenly had to migrate ? That's pretty much a guaranteed world war right there.
>how do you define 'our'
The only sensible definition is the entire human race - because there is no impact this can have anywhere that will not also cause negative impacts for everybody else. (for example by suddenly having a good chunk of several billion people demanding you give them refugee status and willing to kill you if you don't let them in because the alternative is to die themselves).
Oh and while there has been excessive alarmism in reporting - scientist have called that out consistently.
If anything climate scientists are notoriously prone, in their public statements, to grossly underestimate their findings for fear of being called alarmist. When an actual climate scientist says "My analys shows X meters of sea level rise in 20 years" he is NOT telling you the top range possibility. He is not telling you most likely MIDDLE of the range either.
He is telling you the lowest possible value supported by the data -and maybe rounding down a bit.
Nope. That never happened. Those "leaked emails" never said that. The bits you were shown which were quoted out of context meant something ENTIRELY different to what you think when read in the context those words were actually written in. Something entirely non-controversial. Which is why the scientists accused in those cases were exonerated by not one but three different independent inquiries.
Your claim has literally been disproven in court. Do you know what it's called when you keep fielding an accusation after somebody has been exonerated ? It's called slander, and it's not free speech, it's not "skepticism", it's not "being critical" - it's a crime.
All of which would have to be false for climate change theory to be false.
EVERY SINGLE FINDING IN THE HISTORY OF PHYSICS.
None of it can be true, if climate science isn't ALSO true.
Because for climate science to be false, Newton's first law must be ENTIRELY AND ABSOLUTELY FALSE. Human induced climate change is nothing BUT a restatement of newton's first law. It's impossible for one to be true and the other false because they are SAME THING.
Aristotle's first law of logic: the law of identity - a thing cannot be other than itself.
Newton's first law cannot be both true and false. And climate change is JUST Newton's first law applied to a specific system.
Right... so you won't show any actual evidence they are wrong, you'll just dismiss this and pretend your completely blatant lie about what the paper said never happened.
Typical denier - get cornered, get your argument disproven - and pretend you never made it.
I can't believe I have to explain this to a person who has learned to read and write but okay...
O -- This is an apple. It is red.
o/--\o -- This is a truck, it is red.
The apple is like the truck: they are both red.
BUT You can't drive the apple to work and you can't eat the truck. Just because one thing is like another thing in ONE way it does not mean it's like the other thing in ANY OTHER WAY.
The above poster said climate change was like medicine only in one very specific way - you cannot conclude anything else from that.
And you may also want to learn that DESPITE the difficulties in medical science it is still a thousand times more accurate than any other approach we have. Imperfect science is still MUCH better than non-science.
Climate science is - ultimately - most like physics (in fact, about 90% of the time it IS nothing BUT physics), and anybody who tells you differently is deliberately trying to deceive you.
No, They aren't. Because there WAS NO PAUSE.
They ARE saying the warming that DID happen was worse than we thought. Nobody is trying to explain "the pause" for the same reason no scientist is currently publishing theories about unicorn flight dynamics.
Scientists do not write theories to explain things that have never been observed. The pause was a fantasy, made up by a wellfunded team of propaganda artists employed by the fossil fuel industry to tell a lie to the world, and you swallowed their lie hook line and sinker.
It's not entirely speculative - some are already happening. For example - there are vast swaths of methane (one of the worst greenhouse gasses) trapped below the alpine glaciers. As the glaciers are melting - this methane is escaping.
This is already happening at such a fast rate that the Swedes are using the methane escaping from melting glaciers to burn in power plants.
And they can't even burn it all - there's too much escaping over too wide a region.
When you have CO2 induced melting of glaciers releasing formerly trapped methane which will trigger more severe warming, that's a perfect exanple of a feedback-loop effect, and it's happening right now.
You're right, thanks to global warming we are already seeing mosquito born illnesses like Zika and Malaria massively expanding the ranges where they occur. Think about the poor human killing mosquitos ! Do not let the cold keep them confined to small areas. Let them spread and live long prosperous lives killing babies !
Okay fucknuckle - please educate yourself on why medicine is one of the hardest scientific fields to study - and why that low replication rate tells you NOTHING about other sciences.
Hint: because experimenting on people is very difficult to do ethically and there are a lot of things you OUGHT to do to get reliable scientific results which you CANNOT do because doing them would be considered mass murder.
>I don't know and neither do you
Yes... we do... because only one of the two options is even POSSIBLE. The other is literally declared impossible by Newton's first law and ALL THREE laws of thermodynamics. Put a ship engine intake thermometer and a buoy thermometer in the same water - it's physically impossible that the ship will NOT measure hotter than the buoy. Because those heaters, engines, people - all those things PRODUCE ENERGY. And energy cannot be destroyed, it cannot dissapear. It's there and it WILL affect the measurement.
Luckily we DO know exactly by how MUCH it affects it - because we DO have buoy's to compare it with.
> I mean I may be thick as a stick in a bucket of pig-shit
There's no may be about it, but congratulations on the closest to true thing you've said all day (it would have been entirely true if you replaced 'may be' with 'am').
>I do at least know these kinds of statistical shenanigans are usually bollocks.
There was nothing statistical about this - and besides which, no they NEVER are - but professional liars like Steve Mcntyre will write screeds declaring the statistics invalid. Not because it is - because he is flat out lying to you about what the numbers mean (or even, on occasion, what those numbers ARE). It's not that he doesn't understand the statistics, he has the training and he does. It's that he knows YOU DO NOT. So he knows if how to tell a convincing lie. And you fall for it.
Probably because of the above stated stick in a bucket of pig-shit problem.
These people can't tell the difference between "correcting for a known measurement problem" and "lying".
Lets use a car analogy (this is slashdot after all). A car's speedometer is never completely accurate, in fact it has a margin of error of about 10 km/h. This is because it cannot actually measure the distance travelled, and it has to get this value by a proxy: the number of wheel rotations times the circumference of the wheel. Trouble is wheel circumference is not a constant. People put on tyres of different sizes, and the tyres themselves change shape as you drive - stretching and relaxing and all this introduces known errors in the measurement.
Now to prevent this from introducing major safety risks (and getting lots of people undeserved fines) car manufacturers deliberately calibrate speedometers to overestimate speed. This way, if you drive at what the meter says is the speed limit you can be reliably sure that your actual speed is below the limit (by up to 10km/h).
So if I want to know the ACTUAL speed at which I drove, and I don't have a way of measuring the exact distance and time - my best bet is to take the speed that was on the speedometer and subtract 10km/h from it.
It isn't perfectly accurate but it's a lot more accurate than using the number directly (idiots of course, when learning this, subvert this by driving 10km/h ABOVE the speed limit - which would be fine if that margine of error was exact, you have no idea how close you actually are, or even if you are over when you do that).
This is an adjustment like that. You have a measuring device, you know it has a deviation, and you correct for that deviation to get a more accurate answer than the raw device could give.