Have you noticed that all of the complaints are from IPCC WGII and WGIII? Not like you know the difference, so let me explain. WGI is about the science of climate change. WGII is about impacts, while WGIII is about how to avert it.
In all of its reports, the IPCC is explicitly not limited to peer-reviewed materials. They can use, and I quote:
"Peer reviewed and internationally available scientific technical and socio-economic literature, manuscripts made available for IPCC review and selected non peer-reviewed literature produced by other relevant institutions including industry".
(I bolded the last part because you'll never see the deniers complaining about that, so I thought it deserved particular emphasis!). They can quote peer-reviewed material, governmental material, NGO material, and industry studies. The reason for this is because not everything on the planet is peer-reviewed. Peer-review is for science.
WG1 is almost entirely peer-reviewed. It's about science, so that's what you do. WGII is mostly about "news". While a good chunk of what it mentions is peer reviewed, it does include a number of non-peer-reviewed reports. The same goes with WGIII (which has more of a focus on policy and industry).
Most of the IPCC review effort, likewise, goes into WG1. WGII and WGIII review is much less emphasized. But the real key is that if you find something wrong with WGII or WGIII, you're not attacking the science of climate change, because those reports aren't about science. The science is in WGI. And if you find a non-peer-reviewed report anywhere in the IPCC, it is *not* violating its guidelines. WG1 just avoids them.
Sadly, some of the people who know better (Watts, I'm looking at you) love to spread misconceptions about all of this.
Want to know how badly the people you've been listening to have been misleading you? Take a look at a temperature graph. To get that "decrease" in temperature, they have to:
1) Cherry-pick the hottest year they can as the starting point (1998 -- one of the most intense El Nino events on record) and use that as a starting point. See the huge one-year spike in 1998? That's what they're picking as their starting point. 2) Pick a lower subsequent year and use that as an end point (often 2008, a La Nina year) 3) Pick the one (of three) major global temperature datasets that makes 1998 hotter than 2005. 4) Ignore the actual way you create a trend line (you don't just look at the start and end points -- you also include a weighted average of the intermediary points.
If you skip any one of those things, you get the opposite result. Let me explicit: anyone who pushes that point who's not just passing along something they heard from someone else is deliberately trying to hoodwink you.
In case you're curious about El Nino/La Nina: El Nino involves the weakening of the Walker Circulation, an equatorial atmospheric wind pattern. This slows the upwelling of deep, cold water in the Pacific. So the equatorial Pacific in an El Nino year has a big splotch of warm water across it, which heats the atmosphere more than usual. In a La Nina year, the Walker Circulation increases, leading to a big splotch of cold water across the equatorial Pacific, cooling the atmosphere.
Exactly. And the whole argument they're making ignores the fact that the IPCC isn't strictly limited to peer-reviewed papers. I'll quote:
"Peer reviewed and internationally available scientific technical and socio-economic literature, manuscripts made available for IPCC review and selected non peer-reviewed literature produced by other relevant institutions including industry".
Yes, the overwhelming majority of what gets cited is peer-reviewed, and anyone who looks through the references can confirm that. In the most important technical report (IMHO), Ch. 2, there's not a single WWF reference out of the many hundreds -- it's all things like Nature, Science, etc. But the IPCC is explicitly allowed to use governmental, NGO, and industry reports where there are no peer-reviewed references available. Not that you'll ever hear Watts complaining about the IPCC's use of industry reports, mind you, but that's a different story.
For example of what they're like, one of the WWF reports they cite is used to reference the following:
"The rapidly expanding tourism industry is driving much of the transformation of natural coastal areas, paving the way for resorts, marinas and golf courses"
And then:
"Recently, dredging for a massive port expansion has resulted in the destruction of more mangroves and the free ecosystem services they provided"
How many peer-reviewed reports do you think there are on tourism's effects on golf courses in Latin America? It's not like they're making a claim, "The first principles forcing for XXX is YYY" or whatnot. What they're citing is news and general knowledge from the region. Hell, if someone *tried* to fund a study on whether a port expansion in a mangrove swamp destroyed mangroves, the same people criticizing this would call it pork!
One major volcanic eruption would affect global climate more than any variance in solar activity, and much more than any supposed "man-made climate change" with drastic amounts of particulate matter being expelled into the atmosphere that utterly dwarf the impact of all of us.
If by that you mean supervolcanic eruption, yes. If by that you mean major but ordinary volcanic eruption, no. Not even close. Even the worst conventional eruptions cause a couple year blip. And it's only temporary masking of the greenhouse effect, not actual reduction of the greenhouse effect.
Oh, and for the record: volcanoes primarily cool by ejecting SOx into the upper atmosphere, not PM.
Here, apophenia kicks in, and after you've seen that BPM and GDP are correlated, you'll have no problem inventing a model for it.
The first problem with that argument is that the hypothesis of CO2 causing warming came from *before* worldwide datasets were even availabl3e. It was first proposed in the late 1800s based on laboratory experiments showing that some gasses absorb heavily in the infrared range but minimally in the visible range. Secondly, "you'll have no problem inventing a model" for how beats per minute of a Billboard 100 song affects GDP? Really? Um, no.
There's also the problem that it is very difficult to write down a model for which there isn't another model with the causation the other way `round
Which is ludicrous in the context of CO2, since we can measure isotopic ratio changes (indicating the change in old carbon versus fresh carbon) and have good accounting for human inputs to the system versus sources and sinks. Is warming supposed to make us want to dig up more coal?
Without a model to say anything about the extra variables
Too bad we have nothing more than first principles itself to rely on...
(Actually, we do have other things beyond first principles as well! But that's another story)
For example, for many types of game, if you have two players repeating the game a thousand times, the distribution of actions that player one took will have nothing at all to do with the distribution of actions that player two took
If you're using that as an analogy for global warming, it corresponds to claiming that the laws of physics have changed. Fat luck with that.
And seriously -- do you honestly think that statisticians aren't involved in these papers? Really?
Yes, we've studied the Sun intently. Is that supposed to mean that we have a complete understanding of its effect on the climate? Really?
Yes. Read the papers (if you need a starting point, you can find them all referenced in AR4, Ch.02). All of the sun's impacts but one (upper-atmospheric GCR shielding's role in cloud seeding) are very easily measured and straightforward on Earth, with the massive variety of different datasets matching each other. GCR provided the only degree of uncertainty to constraining the influences of the sun, and has since been much better constrained. Even the difference between peak and minimum output doesn't provide anywhere even in the same ballpark as much forcing as CO2.
After all, even most of the die-hard warming advocates admit that they can't explain the current cooling trend in their models.
Yeah, that's called argumentum ad hominem. Fine, India has a ton of issues - water, poverty etc.
Then it's not ad hominem. It's a real issue. India has a huge issue with making environmental and health irresponsibility in engineering and growth decisions. Worse than China.
Wow! That'd be such a zinger if I hadn't repeatedly written "a couple errors". If I had written "a single error", I would be so dissed right now!
These reports are NOT peer reviewed science and DO NOT belong in the IPCC report, which claims to be properly peer reviewed.
You know, do you ever bother to check any of this stuff out by yourself?
I just went to the reports and loaded what is probably the most important from a scientific perspective -- Ch. 2: Changes in Atmospheric Constituents and in Radiative Forcing (the Summary for Policymakers is just a summary of the technical reports, in plain English, and doesn't do refs on its own). If you read Watts, this is all based on WWF reports. Load it. Search for WWF. And enjoy your zero hits. The references run from pages 89 to 106, hundreds of them in this single document alone, and not a single one of them is from the WWF.
No, I don't think anyone thinks that a 3000 page set of documents can be invalidated by a handful of errors.
Ding ding ding! Talking point broken; you get a cookie! On to the next one:
The problem is that you (and people like you) try to make the reductive claim that all that was wrong with the documents were "a handful of errors." That is being disingenuous, and I am pretty sure you know it.
The obvious implication of your notion that there's more than just a handful of errors is that either all of the scientists whose work is being misquoted don't care that it's being misquoted, or that neither the scientists nor anyone who knows bothered to read the single most influential summary of science in their field -- even the mere sections where their work was mentioned.
The easiest way to get modded up on Slashdot is to claim that someone's going to mod you down for your "controversial opinion". It works 9 times out of 10.
Because that's exactly what the CRU data is: mystical mumbo-jumbo.
Just because you're too stupid to read how the data is processed or compare it to what naive processing would yield... oh who the f*** am I kidding? Yes, it's mystical mumbo-jumbo. They're just trying to make the lightning-power that walks through wires into your house and runs your picture box and your clickety email machine cost more. CARBON GOOD!
First of all, there were more than just "a couple" of errors. That report is full of just plain shitty science.
Citation needed.
or caused by some other factor (the sun, for instance)
The sun? Oh my god, what a brilliant idea! Nobody has ever thought of that one before! Quick, young lad, make haste! Inform the world that people ought to consider the sun -- the single most widely studied object outside of Earth, monitored by thousands of ground-based instruments, satellites in various Earth orbits, and even custom satellites in our Lagrangian points. That data might be useful! Perhaps a couple dozen people people should write several dozen papers studying what sort of direct and indirect effects the sun might have on our climate! And then perhaps they should be summarized in the IPCC report!.... oh wait....
Yeah a couple of errors in a scientific document that happens to impact everyone on the planet
0.2 pages erroneous. 2999.8 pages not erroneous.
What a travesty!
And yes, some science does affect the entire planet, there's no getting around that. But saying "I need complete perfection or we never act on anything", you'll never act on anything.
along with emails implicating some of those scientists were "massaging" the results to prove their hypothesis.
Oh please. The decade-old emails involving two scientists, one quoted wildly out of context (the "decline" issue mentioned by Mann -- the paper the data came from *explicitly stated* that the data was invalid after that point, and what idiot would think that dendrochronology data trumps thermometer data anyway?) and the other trying to avoid having to hand over data to a bunch of amateurs who he viewed as deliberately trying to waste his time by filing spurious requests, and one of whom had previously tried to get his partner arrested?
You're not even barking up the wrong tree; you're barking up a paper cutout of a tree.
Kind of important to ensure accuracy.
I can thus only assume that if you wrote a 3,000 page document, there wouldn't be a single error in it.
No, putting in primary claims which are known to be suspect from a non-peer-reviewed journal with an agenda, for the ADMITTED purpose of 'influencing policymakers'... THAT is evangelism.
Let's be more succinct: Do you or do you not believe that a 3,000 page set of documents written by hundreds of people quoting from thousands of authors and tens of thousands of research papers can be invalidated by a handful of errors? And if so, how can *ANY* set of documents that big ever be considered valid? There *always* will be at least a couple mistakes.
Yes, there were a couple mistakes in a 3,000 page document written by hundreds of people quoting from thousands of authors and tens of thousands of research papers. While you're at it, you might as well find that the friend of one of the author's sons once downloaded an MP3, and thus they're a family of criminal enablers, and thus untrustworthy, and thus all of the other authors who work with them are equally untrustworthy, and the entire report is invalidated. That might be an equally useful tack for you.
I take it that you're dropping the ridiculous notion that a couple errors in a 3,000 page document written by hundreds of people somehow means that the whole thing is invalid?
preaching something that doesn't exist and then claiming that science supports what you preach is "climate evangelism".
Yeah. I mean, only ~97% of the world's publishing climate scientists believe in it. Who cares about those who actually do the research and keep up on all of the (very extensive) literature? It's all a socialist conspiracy anyway.
In case anyone's curious how different mountain glaciers are changing, here's a nice graph.
Man: Of course, since the Green House Gases are still building up, it takes more & more ice each time. Thus solving the problem once and for all. Suzy: But... Man: ONCE AND FOR ALL!
5. Head back-country for some extended camping. Alaska, Montana, Idaho, Minnesota or the Dakotas come to mind.
Bah, you call that backcountry? Go to Nahanni;) Under 1,000 people visit the ~11,500 mi^2 park each year, and the only realistic way to get in is by bushplane. Most of the people who do visit stay clustered around the river. It's a place so remote that they actually *encourage* you to not camp or hike in the same places as other people, in order to spread the impact around. Infrared would be pretty worthless at finding you (unless high resolution) due to the high population of large mammal species (bear, moose, etc). And the presence of geothermal features could be used to hide against IR as well. The place has the biggest glaciers in the Northwest Territory, as well as Canada's biggest mountains and deepest canyons, as well as caves, sinkholes, etc -- again, making it hard to find you. And it's highly wooded in most places. You could hike the park naked and as long as you stayed away from the rivers, most people would never know.
Come in with a PLB, 40 pounds of dehydrated food (~4 weeks worth), and backpacking gear. Get everything to a secluded location. Once your food mass is down enough to do so, move around every day (preferably from day 1 if you can carry all of your gear and food at once). Once the time is up, activate the PLB.
Public transportation is only a partial solution. It's great at dealing with the high-density legs. It sucks at reaching specific endpoints. In areas where population traffic is very dense, it can be a 100% solution. Elsewhere... not so much.
Out here in your average town of 60k people, with one of the best public transportation systems in the region, it just doesn't work well. To catch a bus from my home, I have to walk about five blocks. In Iowa (think of our winters). When I go to work and come home, they only show up hourly -- if I miss it, I'm in *big* trouble. The bus averages about 8 passengers onboard. It meanders all over the place to pick up and drop off passengers, increasing the length of the route and adding way more stops and starts and idling, reducing efficiency. The bus probably averages about 3 1/2 mpg diesel in the sort of drivecycle they put it through -- which is the CO2 equivalent of about 3mpg gasoline. 8 passengers, that's 24mpg equivalent if each person drove by themself... but you have to go perhaps 50% more miles you reach your actual destination, so it's really more like 16mpg. So if everyone drove by themself in an SUV, that'd be about the equivalent.
And it takes 4 times as long for me to get to my destination (I have to do one transfer).
What's the solution?
* More frequent bus trips -- but even fewer passengers per trip, and thus even worse per-passenger mpg?
* Less frequent bus trips -- *2 hours* between stops? Yeah, that'll up your ridership...
Really... it just doesn't work effectively. And I say this as someone who generally enjoys subway and rail travel. On high-density legs, public transit works well (and that's what subways and rail are typically used for). Public transit is great for downtown areas and high residential density areas (apartments, etc). But in other places... no.
I'm kind of fond of a concept I haven't seen much mentioned -- CAT (Carbon-Added Tax). It's like VAT, but for carbon. The way VAT works is that at each step of the chain where value is added to a product, it is taxed based on the value added. Imports and exports are taxed based on their full value -- unless they've already paid VAT, wherein they're exempt).
CAT would work the same way. At each step of the way where the product gains embodied carbon (that is, either carbon that's emitted in the process of making it or ends up in the product in such a way that it will be directly emitted when the product is used), it's charged CAT.
The benefit of this to cap & trade is that it addresses the common question of, "What if India and China don't join us?" Well, then all of their goods get taxed CAT at the port. Since Europe would almost certainly join a CAT agreement if that was the standard, agreed-upon way to fight climate change, their goods -- having already paid CAT -- would not be taxed CAT upon import.
Ideally, the program would be structured as a "feebate", with all CAT tax revenue being compensated for by, say, cutting payroll taxes.
Really, though, you don't need any sort of carbon tax or cap to fight climate change in the biggest ways. Even charging for the other externalities would be enough. For example, the average coal power plant in the US causes about 3 1/2 cents/kWh worth of direct health-related damages to the economy, and the worst ones cause over 12 cents. This is from particulate matter, NOx, SOx, etc. The production tax credit for wind is only 2.1 cents/kWh. So if coal merely had to pay for its health costs, it'd rapidly disappear from our grid (primarily replaced by wind, natural gas, and possibly nuclear). Such a tax on health externalities would again be best structured as a feebate -- this time, as a subsidy for healthcare, weighted by county on a revenue-proportional basis (i.e., place with dirty power = pays the most tax = gets the most subsidy). You'd want to phase it in over 10 years so that there's time for the generation mix to adapt, of course.
If someone says, "I'm on welfare", do most people assume that they're talking about social security? No. If someone says, "I'm on welfare", do most people assume that they're talking about medicare? No. If someone says, "I'm on welfare", do most people assume that they're talking about medicaid? No. If someone says, "I'm on welfare", do most people assume that they're talking about unemployment? No. If someone says, "I'm on welfare", do most people assume that they're talking about interest on national debt? No.
Nice try. "Welfare" as 99% of people in this country recognize the word is TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) at the federal level.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you noticed that all of the complaints are from IPCC WGII and WGIII? Not like you know the difference, so let me explain. WGI is about the science of climate change. WGII is about impacts, while WGIII is about how to avert it.
In all of its reports, the IPCC is explicitly not limited to peer-reviewed materials. They can use, and I quote:
"Peer reviewed and internationally available scientific technical and socio-economic literature, manuscripts made available for IPCC review and selected non peer-reviewed literature produced by other relevant institutions including industry".
(I bolded the last part because you'll never see the deniers complaining about that, so I thought it deserved particular emphasis!). They can quote peer-reviewed material, governmental material, NGO material, and industry studies. The reason for this is because not everything on the planet is peer-reviewed. Peer-review is for science.
WG1 is almost entirely peer-reviewed. It's about science, so that's what you do. WGII is mostly about "news". While a good chunk of what it mentions is peer reviewed, it does include a number of non-peer-reviewed reports. The same goes with WGIII (which has more of a focus on policy and industry).
Most of the IPCC review effort, likewise, goes into WG1. WGII and WGIII review is much less emphasized. But the real key is that if you find something wrong with WGII or WGIII, you're not attacking the science of climate change, because those reports aren't about science. The science is in WGI. And if you find a non-peer-reviewed report anywhere in the IPCC, it is *not* violating its guidelines. WG1 just avoids them.
Sadly, some of the people who know better (Watts, I'm looking at you) love to spread misconceptions about all of this.
So why the decrease when the CO2 keeps increasing year after year?
I swear, it's like a whack-a-mole game sometimes.
No, it hasn't.
Want to know how badly the people you've been listening to have been misleading you? Take a look at a temperature graph. To get that "decrease" in temperature, they have to:
1) Cherry-pick the hottest year they can as the starting point (1998 -- one of the most intense El Nino events on record) and use that as a starting point. See the huge one-year spike in 1998? That's what they're picking as their starting point.
2) Pick a lower subsequent year and use that as an end point (often 2008, a La Nina year)
3) Pick the one (of three) major global temperature datasets that makes 1998 hotter than 2005.
4) Ignore the actual way you create a trend line (you don't just look at the start and end points -- you also include a weighted average of the intermediary points.
If you skip any one of those things, you get the opposite result. Let me explicit: anyone who pushes that point who's not just passing along something they heard from someone else is deliberately trying to hoodwink you.
In case you're curious about El Nino/La Nina: El Nino involves the weakening of the Walker Circulation, an equatorial atmospheric wind pattern. This slows the upwelling of deep, cold water in the Pacific. So the equatorial Pacific in an El Nino year has a big splotch of warm water across it, which heats the atmosphere more than usual. In a La Nina year, the Walker Circulation increases, leading to a big splotch of cold water across the equatorial Pacific, cooling the atmosphere.
Exactly. And the whole argument they're making ignores the fact that the IPCC isn't strictly limited to peer-reviewed papers. I'll quote:
"Peer reviewed and internationally available scientific technical and socio-economic literature, manuscripts made available for IPCC review and selected non peer-reviewed literature produced by other relevant institutions including industry".
Yes, the overwhelming majority of what gets cited is peer-reviewed, and anyone who looks through the references can confirm that. In the most important technical report (IMHO), Ch. 2, there's not a single WWF reference out of the many hundreds -- it's all things like Nature, Science, etc. But the IPCC is explicitly allowed to use governmental, NGO, and industry reports where there are no peer-reviewed references available. Not that you'll ever hear Watts complaining about the IPCC's use of industry reports, mind you, but that's a different story.
For example of what they're like, one of the WWF reports they cite is used to reference the following:
"The rapidly expanding tourism industry is driving much of the transformation of natural coastal areas, paving the way for resorts, marinas and golf courses"
And then:
"Recently, dredging for a massive port expansion has resulted in the destruction of more mangroves and the free ecosystem services they provided"
How many peer-reviewed reports do you think there are on tourism's effects on golf courses in Latin America? It's not like they're making a claim, "The first principles forcing for XXX is YYY" or whatnot. What they're citing is news and general knowledge from the region. Hell, if someone *tried* to fund a study on whether a port expansion in a mangrove swamp destroyed mangroves, the same people criticizing this would call it pork!
One major volcanic eruption would affect global climate more than any variance in solar activity, and much more than any supposed "man-made climate change" with drastic amounts of particulate matter being expelled into the atmosphere that utterly dwarf the impact of all of us.
If by that you mean supervolcanic eruption, yes.
If by that you mean major but ordinary volcanic eruption, no. Not even close. Even the worst conventional eruptions cause a couple year blip. And it's only temporary masking of the greenhouse effect, not actual reduction of the greenhouse effect.
Oh, and for the record: volcanoes primarily cool by ejecting SOx into the upper atmosphere, not PM.
Let's look at "fluff.info", shall we?
Here, apophenia kicks in, and after you've seen that BPM and GDP are correlated, you'll have no problem inventing a model for it.
The first problem with that argument is that the hypothesis of CO2 causing warming came from *before* worldwide datasets were even availabl3e. It was first proposed in the late 1800s based on laboratory experiments showing that some gasses absorb heavily in the infrared range but minimally in the visible range. Secondly, "you'll have no problem inventing a model" for how beats per minute of a Billboard 100 song affects GDP? Really? Um, no.
There's also the problem that it is very difficult to write down a model for which there isn't another model with the causation the other way `round
Which is ludicrous in the context of CO2, since we can measure isotopic ratio changes (indicating the change in old carbon versus fresh carbon) and have good accounting for human inputs to the system versus sources and sinks. Is warming supposed to make us want to dig up more coal?
Without a model to say anything about the extra variables
Too bad we have nothing more than first principles itself to rely on...
(Actually, we do have other things beyond first principles as well! But that's another story)
For example, for many types of game, if you have two players repeating the game a thousand times, the distribution of actions that player one took will have nothing at all to do with the distribution of actions that player two took
If you're using that as an analogy for global warming, it corresponds to claiming that the laws of physics have changed. Fat luck with that.
And seriously -- do you honestly think that statisticians aren't involved in these papers? Really?
Oh, and for the record: check the mod history on this article. You'll find that the deniers are *way* more active modders.
But if it makes you feel better, continue to consider yourself persecuted.
Yes, we've studied the Sun intently. Is that supposed to mean that we have a complete understanding of its effect on the climate? Really?
Yes. Read the papers (if you need a starting point, you can find them all referenced in AR4, Ch.02). All of the sun's impacts but one (upper-atmospheric GCR shielding's role in cloud seeding) are very easily measured and straightforward on Earth, with the massive variety of different datasets matching each other. GCR provided the only degree of uncertainty to constraining the influences of the sun, and has since been much better constrained. Even the difference between peak and minimum output doesn't provide anywhere even in the same ballpark as much forcing as CO2.
After all, even most of the die-hard warming advocates admit that they can't explain the current cooling trend in their models.
Who the heck are you listening to? First off, there is no cooling trend. There is a small (25%) decrease in how rapidly it's risen due to stratospheric water vapor, a decadal-scale factor.
Seriously, stop listening to people who don't know what the f*** they're talking about.
Yeah, that's called argumentum ad hominem. Fine, India has a ton of issues - water, poverty etc.
Then it's not ad hominem. It's a real issue. India has a huge issue with making environmental and health irresponsibility in engineering and growth decisions. Worse than China.
Wow! That'd be such a zinger if I hadn't repeatedly written "a couple errors". If I had written "a single error", I would be so dissed right now!
These reports are NOT peer reviewed science and DO NOT belong in the IPCC report, which claims to be properly peer reviewed.
You know, do you ever bother to check any of this stuff out by yourself?
I just went to the reports and loaded what is probably the most important from a scientific perspective -- Ch. 2: Changes in Atmospheric Constituents and in Radiative Forcing (the Summary for Policymakers is just a summary of the technical reports, in plain English, and doesn't do refs on its own). If you read Watts, this is all based on WWF reports. Load it. Search for WWF. And enjoy your zero hits. The references run from pages 89 to 106, hundreds of them in this single document alone, and not a single one of them is from the WWF.
No, I don't think anyone thinks that a 3000 page set of documents can be invalidated by a handful of errors.
Ding ding ding! Talking point broken; you get a cookie! On to the next one:
The problem is that you (and people like you) try to make the reductive claim that all that was wrong with the documents were "a handful of errors." That is being disingenuous, and I am pretty sure you know it.
The obvious implication of your notion that there's more than just a handful of errors is that either all of the scientists whose work is being misquoted don't care that it's being misquoted, or that neither the scientists nor anyone who knows bothered to read the single most influential summary of science in their field -- even the mere sections where their work was mentioned.
Yeah. Sure.
Then modded back up by a greater margin.
The easiest way to get modded up on Slashdot is to claim that someone's going to mod you down for your "controversial opinion". It works 9 times out of 10.
Because that's exactly what the CRU data is: mystical mumbo-jumbo.
Just because you're too stupid to read how the data is processed or compare it to what naive processing would yield... oh who the f*** am I kidding? Yes, it's mystical mumbo-jumbo. They're just trying to make the lightning-power that walks through wires into your house and runs your picture box and your clickety email machine cost more. CARBON GOOD!
First of all, there were more than just "a couple" of errors. That report is full of just plain shitty science.
Citation needed.
or caused by some other factor (the sun, for instance)
The sun? Oh my god, what a brilliant idea! Nobody has ever thought of that one before! Quick, young lad, make haste! Inform the world that people ought to consider the sun -- the single most widely studied object outside of Earth, monitored by thousands of ground-based instruments, satellites in various Earth orbits, and even custom satellites in our Lagrangian points. That data might be useful! Perhaps a couple dozen people people should write several dozen papers studying what sort of direct and indirect effects the sun might have on our climate! And then perhaps they should be summarized in the IPCC report! .... oh wait....
An XKCD comic comes to mind.
Yeah a couple of errors in a scientific document that happens to impact everyone on the planet
0.2 pages erroneous.
2999.8 pages not erroneous.
What a travesty!
And yes, some science does affect the entire planet, there's no getting around that. But saying "I need complete perfection or we never act on anything", you'll never act on anything.
along with emails implicating some of those scientists were "massaging" the results to prove their hypothesis.
Oh please. The decade-old emails involving two scientists, one quoted wildly out of context (the "decline" issue mentioned by Mann -- the paper the data came from *explicitly stated* that the data was invalid after that point, and what idiot would think that dendrochronology data trumps thermometer data anyway?) and the other trying to avoid having to hand over data to a bunch of amateurs who he viewed as deliberately trying to waste his time by filing spurious requests, and one of whom had previously tried to get his partner arrested?
You're not even barking up the wrong tree; you're barking up a paper cutout of a tree.
Kind of important to ensure accuracy.
I can thus only assume that if you wrote a 3,000 page document, there wouldn't be a single error in it.
No, putting in primary claims which are known to be suspect from a non-peer-reviewed journal with an agenda, for the ADMITTED purpose of 'influencing policymakers'... THAT is evangelism.
Let's be more succinct: Do you or do you not believe that a 3,000 page set of documents written by hundreds of people quoting from thousands of authors and tens of thousands of research papers can be invalidated by a handful of errors? And if so, how can *ANY* set of documents that big ever be considered valid? There *always* will be at least a couple mistakes.
Yes, there were a couple mistakes in a 3,000 page document written by hundreds of people quoting from thousands of authors and tens of thousands of research papers. While you're at it, you might as well find that the friend of one of the author's sons once downloaded an MP3, and thus they're a family of criminal enablers, and thus untrustworthy, and thus all of the other authors who work with them are equally untrustworthy, and the entire report is invalidated. That might be an equally useful tack for you.
I take it that you're dropping the ridiculous notion that a couple errors in a 3,000 page document written by hundreds of people somehow means that the whole thing is invalid?
preaching something that doesn't exist and then claiming that science supports what you preach is "climate evangelism".
Yeah. I mean, only ~97% of the world's publishing climate scientists believe in it. Who cares about those who actually do the research and keep up on all of the (very extensive) literature? It's all a socialist conspiracy anyway.
In case anyone's curious how different mountain glaciers are changing, here's a nice graph.
Reminds me of this:
Man: Of course, since the Green House Gases are still building up, it takes more & more ice each time. Thus solving the problem once and for all.
Suzy: But...
Man: ONCE AND FOR ALL!
The sad thing is that some people with platform are basically proposing this approach.
Come on people -- when you think of clean water, clean air, and sustainable living, doesn't your mind immediately jump to India? ;)
Perhaps their new research group could use this as a slogan: "India: #1 In Environmental Stewardship Since The Bhopal Disaster".
... written by hundreds of individuals = "climate evangelism". Apparently.
5. Head back-country for some extended camping. Alaska, Montana, Idaho, Minnesota or the Dakotas come to mind.
Bah, you call that backcountry? Go to Nahanni ;) Under 1,000 people visit the ~11,500 mi^2 park each year, and the only realistic way to get in is by bushplane. Most of the people who do visit stay clustered around the river. It's a place so remote that they actually *encourage* you to not camp or hike in the same places as other people, in order to spread the impact around. Infrared would be pretty worthless at finding you (unless high resolution) due to the high population of large mammal species (bear, moose, etc). And the presence of geothermal features could be used to hide against IR as well. The place has the biggest glaciers in the Northwest Territory, as well as Canada's biggest mountains and deepest canyons, as well as caves, sinkholes, etc -- again, making it hard to find you. And it's highly wooded in most places. You could hike the park naked and as long as you stayed away from the rivers, most people would never know.
Come in with a PLB, 40 pounds of dehydrated food (~4 weeks worth), and backpacking gear. Get everything to a secluded location. Once your food mass is down enough to do so, move around every day (preferably from day 1 if you can carry all of your gear and food at once). Once the time is up, activate the PLB.
I can't stop laughing at your post. Next to Lampshade Hanging, my favorite trope has to be Explaining the Joke. Joss, is that you?
Public transportation is only a partial solution. It's great at dealing with the high-density legs. It sucks at reaching specific endpoints. In areas where population traffic is very dense, it can be a 100% solution. Elsewhere... not so much.
Out here in your average town of 60k people, with one of the best public transportation systems in the region, it just doesn't work well. To catch a bus from my home, I have to walk about five blocks. In Iowa (think of our winters). When I go to work and come home, they only show up hourly -- if I miss it, I'm in *big* trouble. The bus averages about 8 passengers onboard. It meanders all over the place to pick up and drop off passengers, increasing the length of the route and adding way more stops and starts and idling, reducing efficiency. The bus probably averages about 3 1/2 mpg diesel in the sort of drivecycle they put it through -- which is the CO2 equivalent of about 3mpg gasoline. 8 passengers, that's 24mpg equivalent if each person drove by themself... but you have to go perhaps 50% more miles you reach your actual destination, so it's really more like 16mpg. So if everyone drove by themself in an SUV, that'd be about the equivalent.
And it takes 4 times as long for me to get to my destination (I have to do one transfer).
What's the solution?
* More frequent bus trips -- but even fewer passengers per trip, and thus even worse per-passenger mpg?
* Less frequent bus trips -- *2 hours* between stops? Yeah, that'll up your ridership...
Really... it just doesn't work effectively. And I say this as someone who generally enjoys subway and rail travel. On high-density legs, public transit works well (and that's what subways and rail are typically used for). Public transit is great for downtown areas and high residential density areas (apartments, etc). But in other places... no.
I'm kind of fond of a concept I haven't seen much mentioned -- CAT (Carbon-Added Tax). It's like VAT, but for carbon. The way VAT works is that at each step of the chain where value is added to a product, it is taxed based on the value added. Imports and exports are taxed based on their full value -- unless they've already paid VAT, wherein they're exempt).
CAT would work the same way. At each step of the way where the product gains embodied carbon (that is, either carbon that's emitted in the process of making it or ends up in the product in such a way that it will be directly emitted when the product is used), it's charged CAT.
The benefit of this to cap & trade is that it addresses the common question of, "What if India and China don't join us?" Well, then all of their goods get taxed CAT at the port. Since Europe would almost certainly join a CAT agreement if that was the standard, agreed-upon way to fight climate change, their goods -- having already paid CAT -- would not be taxed CAT upon import.
Ideally, the program would be structured as a "feebate", with all CAT tax revenue being compensated for by, say, cutting payroll taxes.
Really, though, you don't need any sort of carbon tax or cap to fight climate change in the biggest ways. Even charging for the other externalities would be enough. For example, the average coal power plant in the US causes about 3 1/2 cents/kWh worth of direct health-related damages to the economy, and the worst ones cause over 12 cents. This is from particulate matter, NOx, SOx, etc. The production tax credit for wind is only 2.1 cents/kWh. So if coal merely had to pay for its health costs, it'd rapidly disappear from our grid (primarily replaced by wind, natural gas, and possibly nuclear). Such a tax on health externalities would again be best structured as a feebate -- this time, as a subsidy for healthcare, weighted by county on a revenue-proportional basis (i.e., place with dirty power = pays the most tax = gets the most subsidy). You'd want to phase it in over 10 years so that there's time for the generation mix to adapt, of course.
Henry Darger, is that you?
If someone says, "I'm on welfare", do most people assume that they're talking about social security? No.
If someone says, "I'm on welfare", do most people assume that they're talking about medicare? No.
If someone says, "I'm on welfare", do most people assume that they're talking about medicaid? No.
If someone says, "I'm on welfare", do most people assume that they're talking about unemployment? No.
If someone says, "I'm on welfare", do most people assume that they're talking about interest on national debt? No.
Nice try. "Welfare" as 99% of people in this country recognize the word is TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) at the federal level.