Policy is best when it's based on sound science, and unbiased economic analysis: and that aspect of it is political.
But there are things that we know from the science alone, not from policy bodies deciding what should be done in response to it.
The Globe is warming, It is due to anthropogenic activity. There are no sides on those facts. Unless there are sides on vaccinations not causing autism, or HIV causing AIDS.
Yes. Sea level also rose over the end of the last glaciation. That was because of the melting glaciers and ice sheets. Note that except for the meltwater pulse, current sea level rise is faster.
The sky is falling!
Ahh, the reference to chicken little that paid denialists use as an argument that people should ignore science, when scientific arguments are failing.
You get some of your information from counter-scientific blogs rather than reliable sources don't you?
The sea level is rising, and it is very fast geologically speaking. The rise several thousand years ago didn't affect coastal cites and infrastructure because they weren't build yet. The changing climate did affect species ranges. Including Homo Sap.
Exactly, and that is why the number of people defending a theory means nothing.
Well, it's how facts end up as facts, and so progress to school texts books.
When scientists start agreeing that the speed of light is constant, then we know it is true. This may change in the future, but truth's like that.
It is not that case that it means nothing.
The arguments and the data should stand on their own, and in this case they fall very short of doing that.
Well, if you're going to take the time to get yourself a PhD in atmospheric physics, and a few years of postgraduate research so that you personally understand the arguments, and don't have to rely on other experts, sure, then you should be looking at the data. And you and every other scientist in the field will be looking with the most skepticism that can be mustered, because overturning a paradigm is the way to make a name for yourself in science.
But if you think that the data doesn't stand on it's own with respect to the fact that most of the current warming is anthropogenic then you've noticed something that has been missed by the tens of thousands of researchers in the field.
Or you've made a mistake.
One of the two.
I don't want to steal your thunder in the case that you're about to publish, but if you want to go through your findings here, I'd be interested to read your arguments.
My claim is that no one was able to make a model that can quantitatively predict the actual results of releasing CO2 in the atmosphere, and it is very true.
Sure. Modelling the economy and technological changes is difficult. But you can put ballpark limits on it. We're not going to turn off new coal power generation, and we're not going to put new ones out much faster than they're being built now.
And because the climate's response to a change in CO2 takes 25-50 years for 60% of the effect to occur, much of the warming in the time scale of our lifetimes will be because of CO2 already in the atmosphere. And that can be measured.
And no 99% is not moderate unanimity
100% of scientific organizations. That's unanmity, right? And 99.8% of scholarly papers. Science attracts not just skeptics, but also contrarians. There's a much more dilute consensus for findings we consider fact such as smoking causes cancer, or that species arise by evolution.
and articles you cite do not say the same things, do not make the same predictions (many do not make predictions or try to take conclusions at all), and many are inconsistent with each other.
Obviously if there were consensus on the entire field there wouldn't be the thousands of papers on climate change each month that you see appearing in the journals. But there is consensus on this point: The current warming is mostly anthropogenic.
Most of the conclusions do not follow from the articles you cite and are mainly the result of intellectual dishonesty of people trying to use insufficient data to take conclusions that couldn`t be taken from this data.
For instance?
Oh and the distinct scientists are VERY existent. This is just a small list of the most prominent:
That you can list them in a list that can be read shows that they're practically non-existent. There were 35,000 scholarly papers published in 2012 returned by the search term "global warming". There will be tens of thousands of scientists that contributed to them.
So your list of 22 scientists that claim that the current warming is mostly natural. (Including at least some who haven't published any science in many years), is a little bit laughable.
But, no doubt, if you scour the world for current and previous scientists from any field, you could find 22 that know little enough about it to claim that any standard wisdom is false.
Their arguments are sound and consistent enough.
Really. Could you link me to this consistent argument of theirs?
Their models are based on fitting many curves, not a single curve.
No they're not.
They're based on calculating the changes in the atmosphere, oceans and earth's surface, and the effect of that on each other.
This is not curve fitting.
And due to the chaotic nature of the environment being modeled, the extrapolation they do is very, very far from being as useful as a model you could put together from measuring let's say F=ma in the real world and using your model to predict simple kinetics.
They are not extrapolating. Extrapolation is when you are fitting a curve and extend the curve fit beyond the limit of the data.
Modeling is one of the useful ways to investigate a chaotic system. It's poor at specific prediction due to sensitive dependence on initial conditions, but the shape of the attractors and the nature of the tipping points between them are very very usefully investigated by modeling.
F=ma, is certainly used in a climate model, as convection currents are calculated.
Sure, but anyone who claims something without outstanding evidence cannot be considered a skeptic...
It depends on prior plausibility.
If the claim is that throughout the global educational and research institutions there is a broad conspiracy to produce fraudulent research, on the basis that this is somehow connected to funding in all cases, you're going to need extraordinary evidence.
If, on the other hand, your claim is that releasing CO into the atmosphere is the cause of an observed increase in atmosphericCO, and that increasing the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gasses will increase the greenhouse effect, then the evidence doesn't need to be extraordinary.
And even those guys you mention, or at least a good part of them, decided to believe in the other equally distinct scientists that say that most of what we hear about climate changes is alarmist.
Skeptics do not contend that there are climate changes, they defy the notion that human factors are as significant as the alarmists say, and the theory that what is happenign now is outside the bounds of what already happened to Earth many many times.
There are as many counterscientific positions on climate as there are climate conspiracy theorists.
Many claim there is no warming, and that it is manufactured by the manipulation of the temperature records
Many claim that there is warming, but that it is due to solar irradience
Many claim that the warming is due to the CO2 greenhouse effect, but that it is good
Many claim that the warming is due to the CO2 greenhouse effect, and it's bad, but not as bad as moving parts of the economy to renewables
The only consistent thing is that they claim that the scientists are lying about it.
Unfortunately, scientists have to present explanations that people without advanced degrees have to understand.
No they don't. The university press room might have a go, but it is not the job of researchers to do outreach communication. It is certainly encouraged by scientists who want to, these days, but most don't, and the job is to present explanations that people with advanced degrees can either understand or reproduce. Or disagree with and try to prove are wrong.
If the climate scientists have a model that accurately predicted the past 16 years then we can talk about the future.
There are no models that did prediction 16 years ago. The Hadley Centre's had DePreSys predicts a decade, but that only came online in 2007, not 1997.
So your requirement for talking about the future is set at impossible.
That is stupid and dangerous. Talking about the future is both sensible and important.
Until then the predictions of gloom and doom are about as believable as the heavens-gate cult.
0.8C temperature rise over the past 100 years, all in a spatial and temporal distribution that matches the CO2 greenhouse effect.
Measured energy imbalance at the top of the atmosphere, demonstrating warming.
Continued sea level rise, demonstrating energy absorbance, either my melting ice sheets or my warming oceans, and thermal expansion.
Extinction pressure on many ecosystems because of changing rainfall, temperature, and phenological changes.
As noted above, the black market organ trade exists.
In China, a trade in criminal's (such as those evil Falun Gong practitioners) organs isn't even black. It's a Government backed industry.
Availability of organs from a willing (and paid) supplier with drop the price, and this is probably a good thing, as it will reduce the profit margin for taking an organ from an unwilling donor.
Sometimes driverless trains derail. Somebody's insurance company pays: either the manufacturers or the rail owners or the operators.
In the case of a car it probably makes sense to have the owner of the car buy the insurance, because this will be a lot lower than the insurance for non-driverless cars, because by the time they go mainstream, they won't crash as much as a person, because they don't get fatigued, drunk or thrill-seeky.
If one student's application to study was considered inferior to another's when the only difference was the name, then that's not stupid. That's evidence of bias that is reducing the overall quality of students able to enter the field.
As you've observed, women gravitate less toward a certain field, more toward others. Men gravitate less toward daycare and more toward bashing shit with a hammer.
Maybe, but it is difficult to decouple that from cultural effects. In any case if a particular women gravitates towards hitting things with a hammer, her contribution to that field and her recognition should be based on how well she hits things with a hammer. Otherwise you're not getting the best people to the best places.
It really isn't as easy as the blame game might seem at first
This isn't a blame game. Its about being aware of what sexism is so that you know how to level the field: hide the gender of applications to science courses.
The young ladies almost universally did not want to go into tech.
How do you decouple that from being less valued in those fields?
And interestingly enough, some of the women engineers I worked with noted that the biggest opposition they ever received was from other women.
Yes. The PNAS paper did not find that sexism was less from women. Did you follow my link?
Which is why I have become convinced that if we decide that gender balance must be obtained, we will have to force young women into the field, and likewise keep young men out of the field.
The objective should be that an identical application, barring the gender of the applicant, should be given equal worth, equal chance of being accepted, and considered equal for mentoring. It is not necessary that the objective be gender balance in terms of numbers. (Although you would expect that better balance would be a consequence).
I think that if "not-sexist" and "not-racist" are reduced to "not physically threatened because of gender or colour", then you're going to miss a discussion that's important to have.
Women are no less sexist than men. So is it a problem? We are not selecting or encouraging exactly the best people. This has economic and scientific consequences, and it has social consequences. If the work "sexism" doesn't apply to this, then you need a word that does, because there's plenty to discuss here.
But everyone else is using "sexism". It might be quicker to use that one.
(Because the article I link to references work on sexism, I use that term in this post, but racism acts on the same level.)
With this labour saving device to do your tedious social interaction for you, we're starting to really make some inroads into automating the most boring parts of our lives.
I wonder how long after the extinction of the species it will be before the social media traffic starts to slow down.
If science has a role in developing policy, then legislation requiring unscientific calculations of sea level rise should be responded to by the scientific community.
And such propositions policy is not constructed from reason, and so a reasoned response is no response. Ridicule really is the only response in this case.
I agree it shouldn't appear in a scholarly paper, but I think that science should include science outreach.
I would consider the extinction of the North American megafauna during the pleistocene to be worse.
While true, this is changing the subject, because it doesn't contradict the claim that "the single largest environmental disaster in U.S. history." The Pleistocene was prehistoric.
Those nutjobs as you so eloquently put it just might be right.
No, they're not.
There has been plenty of conjecture over evolution on both sides.
No, there hasn't.
I think we can agree that change over time and adaptation occurs within species and I'd totally agree that science supports that.
Fine.
The idea that we all evolved from some primordial soup out of a single celled organism has absolutely not been proven
Well, you get some guys touting exogenesis theories to get to the first cell, but getting to the first cell isn't evolution.
Once you're there, it's just that adaptation thing within a species, but over and over again until it becomes between species.
and is a whole lot less plausible in my mind than the biblical story of creation.
The problem with comments like this is it looks like obvious satire, but there are Americans that actually believe that. Poe's Law.
Suffice it to say, God creating all the animals and birds and then taking them to Adam to be named, and God making all the animals, and then man is not only inconsistent with itself, it's also inconsistent with the fossil record.
And, the fossil record shows that 99% of species are extinct, so if there is a creator that hand made all of them, the main thing that we can infer about him is that he's monumentally incompetent.
Re:Anti-science? See, now you have proof!
on
How Science Goes Wrong
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Possibly more importantly, pseudoscience is the articles worst nightmare.
The defensiveness now built into some fields (and here I'm thinking climate science), because of unrelenting, personal attacks does put important discussions like this into a defensive context.
And this is another bitter fruit produced by the anti-science industry, because these discussions are important to have. There are a lot of mistakes in science, but (seeming to me increasingly) there is also data falsification and fraud. [Retraction watch](http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/) is a great website, but it makes sickening reading, and I suspect that it only scratches the surface.
Remember this letter to Nature (FFS!) pointing out that 70% of the papers in one of their issues didn't say what the error bar represented. How that got past the reviewers is mind boggling. Imagining how it got past the authors requires mental gymnastics. (Since the letter, Nature articles are much better, but Peer Review is not what is catching the errors).
So, lets talk about errors in scientific research, and lets talk about scientific fraud. It's important because its rampant, and despite that there are nutjobs seeing it in their peculiar light lets not be put off. This conversation needs to be had more often, because the problem is dug in at the highest levels of academic prestige.
Props to the Economist for bringing this up. I'd like to see this discussed in Cell, Nature and Science. And I'd like to see credible career protection for whistle-blowers.
Linus isn't just a good C programmer. After half a decade of watching him catch stuff like this in just his public LKML messages, I'm convinced he would have seen this if he were reading braille hardcopy of it from across the room while drunk.
Slashdot Mirror
Policy is best when it's based on sound science, and unbiased economic analysis: and that aspect of it is political.
But there are things that we know from the science alone, not from policy bodies deciding what should be done in response to it.
The Globe is warming, It is due to anthropogenic activity. There are no sides on those facts. Unless there are sides on vaccinations not causing autism, or HIV causing AIDS.
Yes. Sea level rise.
Yes. Sea level also rose over the end of the last glaciation. That was because of the melting glaciers and ice sheets. Note that except for the meltwater pulse, current sea level rise is faster.
Ahh, the reference to chicken little that paid denialists use as an argument that people should ignore science, when scientific arguments are failing.
You get some of your information from counter-scientific blogs rather than reliable sources don't you?
The sea level is rising, and it is very fast geologically speaking. The rise several thousand years ago didn't affect coastal cites and infrastructure because they weren't build yet. The changing climate did affect species ranges. Including Homo Sap.
Well, it's how facts end up as facts, and so progress to school texts books.
When scientists start agreeing that the speed of light is constant, then we know it is true. This may change in the future, but truth's like that.
It is not that case that it means nothing.
Well, if you're going to take the time to get yourself a PhD in atmospheric physics, and a few years of postgraduate research so that you personally understand the arguments, and don't have to rely on other experts, sure, then you should be looking at the data. And you and every other scientist in the field will be looking with the most skepticism that can be mustered, because overturning a paradigm is the way to make a name for yourself in science.
But if you think that the data doesn't stand on it's own with respect to the fact that most of the current warming is anthropogenic then you've noticed something that has been missed by the tens of thousands of researchers in the field.
Or you've made a mistake.
One of the two.
I don't want to steal your thunder in the case that you're about to publish, but if you want to go through your findings here, I'd be interested to read your arguments.
Sure. Modelling the economy and technological changes is difficult. But you can put ballpark limits on it. We're not going to turn off new coal power generation, and we're not going to put new ones out much faster than they're being built now.
And because the climate's response to a change in CO2 takes 25-50 years for 60% of the effect to occur, much of the warming in the time scale of our lifetimes will be because of CO2 already in the atmosphere. And that can be measured.
100% of scientific organizations. That's unanmity, right? And 99.8% of scholarly papers. Science attracts not just skeptics, but also contrarians. There's a much more dilute consensus for findings we consider fact such as smoking causes cancer, or that species arise by evolution.
Obviously if there were consensus on the entire field there wouldn't be the thousands of papers on climate change each month that you see appearing in the journals. But there is consensus on this point: The current warming is mostly anthropogenic.
For instance?
That you can list them in a list that can be read shows that they're practically non-existent. There were 35,000 scholarly papers published in 2012 returned by the search term "global warming". There will be tens of thousands of scientists that contributed to them.
So your list of 22 scientists that claim that the current warming is mostly natural. (Including at least some who haven't published any science in many years), is a little bit laughable. But, no doubt, if you scour the world for current and previous scientists from any field, you could find 22 that know little enough about it to claim that any standard wisdom is false.
Really. Could you link me to this consistent argument of theirs?
No they're not.
They're based on calculating the changes in the atmosphere, oceans and earth's surface, and the effect of that on each other.
This is not curve fitting.
They are not extrapolating. Extrapolation is when you are fitting a curve and extend the curve fit beyond the limit of the data. Modeling is one of the useful ways to investigate a chaotic system. It's poor at specific prediction due to sensitive dependence on initial conditions, but the shape of the attractors and the nature of the tipping points between them are very very usefully investigated by modeling.
F=ma, is certainly used in a climate model, as convection currents are calculated.
It depends on prior plausibility.
If the claim is that throughout the global educational and research institutions there is a broad conspiracy to produce fraudulent research, on the basis that this is somehow connected to funding in all cases, you're going to need extraordinary evidence.
If, on the other hand, your claim is that releasing CO into the atmosphere is the cause of an observed increase in atmosphericCO, and that increasing the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gasses will increase the greenhouse effect, then the evidence doesn't need to be extraordinary.
"Equally distinct" or "non-existent"?
With respect to the claim that most of the current warming is anthropogenic, there are no scientific organsiations (As of 2007, when the American Association of Petroleum Geologists released a revised statement, no scientific body of national or international standing rejected the findings of human-induced effects on climate change.), and only 0.2% of scholarly papers (Why Climate Deniers Have No Scientific Credibility - In One Pie Chart), that refute the consensus.
Most people would say 100% of scientific organisations, and 99.8% of scholarly papers is moderate unanimity.
No, A model is not a curve-fitting exercise.
Why don't you read up a bit on HadGEM3: Design and implementation of the infrastructure of HadGEM3: the next-generation Met Office climate modelling system, Hewitt et al, Geosci. Model Dev (2011).
As you can see, it is not an extrapolated curve fit, but an imitation of the global atmosphere, ocean and biosphere, based on physics.
For instance?
There are as many counterscientific positions on climate as there are climate conspiracy theorists.
Many claim there is no warming, and that it is manufactured by the manipulation of the temperature records
Many claim that there is warming, but that it is due to solar irradience
Many claim that the warming is due to the CO2 greenhouse effect, but that it is good
Many claim that the warming is due to the CO2 greenhouse effect, and it's bad, but not as bad as moving parts of the economy to renewables
The only consistent thing is that they claim that the scientists are lying about it.
No they don't. The university press room might have a go, but it is not the job of researchers to do outreach communication. It is certainly encouraged by scientists who want to, these days, but most don't, and the job is to present explanations that people with advanced degrees can either understand or reproduce. Or disagree with and try to prove are wrong.
They have predicted an increase in global mean surface temperature.
This has been observed
The have predicted increased warming at the poles,
This has been observed.
They have predicted a decrease in the diurnal temperature range.
This has been observed.
They have predicted greater warming in winter than summer.
This has been observed.
The surprise is how well models have been reproducing the global mean surface temperature: Why are climate models reproducing the observed global surface warming so well?, Reto Knutti, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol 35 Issue 18 (2008)
Do you have any basis for this claim that they are "downright terrible at predicting anything, because it really needs a citation.
If the climate scientists have a model that accurately predicted the past 16 years then we can talk about the future.
There are no models that did prediction 16 years ago. The Hadley Centre's had DePreSys predicts a decade, but that only came online in 2007, not 1997.
So your requirement for talking about the future is set at impossible.
That is stupid and dangerous. Talking about the future is both sensible and important.
Until then the predictions of gloom and doom are about as believable as the heavens-gate cult.
0.8C temperature rise over the past 100 years, all in a spatial and temporal distribution that matches the CO2 greenhouse effect.
Measured energy imbalance at the top of the atmosphere, demonstrating warming.
Continued sea level rise, demonstrating energy absorbance, either my melting ice sheets or my warming oceans, and thermal expansion.
Extinction pressure on many ecosystems because of changing rainfall, temperature, and phenological changes.
And you claim these observations are from predictions as believable as heavens-gate cult, because the last 16 years, the warming trend has only been about 0.05C per decade.
Much like the "pauses" in warming in 1978, 1987, 1997 and 2003?
I don't think you've thought this through.
As noted above, the black market organ trade exists.
In China, a trade in criminal's (such as those evil Falun Gong practitioners) organs isn't even black. It's a Government backed industry.
Availability of organs from a willing (and paid) supplier with drop the price, and this is probably a good thing, as it will reduce the profit margin for taking an organ from an unwilling donor.
Sometimes driverless trains derail. Somebody's insurance company pays: either the manufacturers or the rail owners or the operators.
In the case of a car it probably makes sense to have the owner of the car buy the insurance, because this will be a lot lower than the insurance for non-driverless cars, because by the time they go mainstream, they won't crash as much as a person, because they don't get fatigued, drunk or thrill-seeky.
Do you think the PNAS paper was mistaken?
This isn't what the study found. Do you have any evidence that that is occurring?
If one student's application to study was considered inferior to another's when the only difference was the name, then that's not stupid. That's evidence of bias that is reducing the overall quality of students able to enter the field.
Maybe, but it is difficult to decouple that from cultural effects. In any case if a particular women gravitates towards hitting things with a hammer, her contribution to that field and her recognition should be based on how well she hits things with a hammer. Otherwise you're not getting the best people to the best places.
This isn't a blame game. Its about being aware of what sexism is so that you know how to level the field: hide the gender of applications to science courses.
How do you decouple that from being less valued in those fields?
Yes. The PNAS paper did not find that sexism was less from women. Did you follow my link?
The objective should be that an identical application, barring the gender of the applicant, should be given equal worth, equal chance of being accepted, and considered equal for mentoring. It is not necessary that the objective be gender balance in terms of numbers. (Although you would expect that better balance would be a consequence).
Really? Insightful?
I think that if "not-sexist" and "not-racist" are reduced to "not physically threatened because of gender or colour", then you're going to miss a discussion that's important to have.
If computer science is like other science, then your competence, your hire-ability and whether you are considered to be mentored are reduced if you are thought to be female compared to male.
Women are no less sexist than men. So is it a problem? We are not selecting or encouraging exactly the best people. This has economic and scientific consequences, and it has social consequences. If the work "sexism" doesn't apply to this, then you need a word that does, because there's plenty to discuss here.
But everyone else is using "sexism". It might be quicker to use that one.
(Because the article I link to references work on sexism, I use that term in this post, but racism acts on the same level.)
With this labour saving device to do your tedious social interaction for you, we're starting to really make some inroads into automating the most boring parts of our lives.
I wonder how long after the extinction of the species it will be before the social media traffic starts to slow down.
If science has a role in developing policy, then legislation requiring unscientific calculations of sea level rise should be responded to by the scientific community.
And such propositions policy is not constructed from reason, and so a reasoned response is no response. Ridicule really is the only response in this case.
I agree it shouldn't appear in a scholarly paper, but I think that science should include science outreach.
I would consider the extinction of the North American megafauna during the pleistocene to be worse.
While true, this is changing the subject, because it doesn't contradict the claim that "the single largest environmental disaster in U.S. history." The Pleistocene was prehistoric.
I think that he means all over the Western Pacific.
There seems to be another every few days.
Those nutjobs as you so eloquently put it just might be right.
No, they're not.
There has been plenty of conjecture over evolution on both sides.
No, there hasn't.
I think we can agree that change over time and adaptation occurs within species and I'd totally agree that science supports that.
Fine.
The idea that we all evolved from some primordial soup out of a single celled organism has absolutely not been proven
Well, you get some guys touting exogenesis theories to get to the first cell, but getting to the first cell isn't evolution.
Once you're there, it's just that adaptation thing within a species, but over and over again until it becomes between species.
and is a whole lot less plausible in my mind than the biblical story of creation.
The problem with comments like this is it looks like obvious satire, but there are Americans that actually believe that. Poe's Law. Suffice it to say, God creating all the animals and birds and then taking them to Adam to be named, and God making all the animals, and then man is not only inconsistent with itself, it's also inconsistent with the fossil record.
And, the fossil record shows that 99% of species are extinct, so if there is a creator that hand made all of them, the main thing that we can infer about him is that he's monumentally incompetent.
Possibly more importantly, pseudoscience is the articles worst nightmare.
The defensiveness now built into some fields (and here I'm thinking climate science), because of unrelenting, personal attacks does put important discussions like this into a defensive context.
And this is another bitter fruit produced by the anti-science industry, because these discussions are important to have. There are a lot of mistakes in science, but (seeming to me increasingly) there is also data falsification and fraud. [Retraction watch](http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/) is a great website, but it makes sickening reading, and I suspect that it only scratches the surface.
I mean, sometimes, no fucks whatsoever are given. How that got past peer review blows the mind. And any of these.
Remember this letter to Nature (FFS!) pointing out that 70% of the papers in one of their issues didn't say what the error bar represented. How that got past the reviewers is mind boggling. Imagining how it got past the authors requires mental gymnastics. (Since the letter, Nature articles are much better, but Peer Review is not what is catching the errors).
So, lets talk about errors in scientific research, and lets talk about scientific fraud. It's important because its rampant, and despite that there are nutjobs seeing it in their peculiar light lets not be put off. This conversation needs to be had more often, because the problem is dug in at the highest levels of academic prestige.
Props to the Economist for bringing this up. I'd like to see this discussed in Cell, Nature and Science. And I'd like to see credible career protection for whistle-blowers.
And this comment amused me:
Linus isn't just a good C programmer. After half a decade of watching him catch stuff like this in just his public LKML messages, I'm convinced he would have seen this if he were reading braille hardcopy of it from across the room while drunk.
The phone manufacturers should not be dicks.