When you try to convince people to do something, that is politics.
I think you've got something of a false dichotomy fallacy going on there.
Science communication is increasingly considered an aspect of science. It's not a required aspect of science, but it is an allowable and increasingly encouraged aspect of science.
So when you try to convince people to understand science, that is science.
When the increased necessity for communicating that science is because people are communication anti-science for political reasons, that can affect how you communicate science, but it doesn't affect that what you are doing is science.
Mann mentions the implication that we need to reduce emissions only to describe the misinformation out there.:
But faced with this overwhelming scientific consensus about the threat of
human-caused climate change - and, by
implication, the necessity to reduce
global carbon emissions - fossil fuel
interests have in many cases chosen not
to accept the evidence, nor to engage in
good-faith discussion about possible
solutions. Instead, they have opted to
deny the problem exists.
What Mann is doing is communicating science. The reason that you're mistaking it for politics is because there are voices trying to miscommunicate science that need to be understood by the public to understand the science.
Michael Mann has a clear political goal. He wants America (and the world) to act to avoid the risks of AGW.
I think that he has a clear scientific goal, he wants people to understand climate science.
A consequence of that understanding is an understanding of the need to reduce greenhouse emissions, but lots of science has policy consequences. Epidemiology shows that we should vaccinate. Physics shows that we should put the front doors of buildings on the ground floor. It's only political if you enter the discussion of how to do it.
In other words, the models don't work at all, what is the excuse that the rubes will buy so we can keep draining science funds for a few more years?
I see someone is upset with science.
Can you show me on the doll where the science touched you?
Science progresses. It is already known that the climate models will improve with improved resolution.
Astronomer's don't know what makes up 90% of the universe. Go attack them for extracting funds for a few more years so you don't look like a climate change denier.
And thoroughly debunked (in peer-reviewed journals, natch) by McIntyre and McKitrick as an artifact of one proxy (Sheep Mountain) being artificially weighted hundreds of times more than any of the others.
It is pretty unusual for a Mining consultant with no higher degree and an economist to be able to publish in a peer reviewed scientific journal. Was it highly regarded?
It's even more unusual for such a publication to thoroughly debunk a scientific paper that has been corroborated over a dozen times.
Are you certain that that's a correct description of what happened?
Mann is communicating science. The fact that for this aspect of science there are PR groups funded to miscommunication the science affects how the science has to be communicated.
That doesn't make him a political strategist. For that he would need some political end. (And the public understanding of science isn't political, unless you're Boko Haram or Inhofe.)
I clearly misunderstood your point. Sorry for that.
CO2 causes damage to the environment because of its action as a greenhouse gas, and by causing acidification of the oceans.
Things that causes undesirable effects in the environment are called pollutants, so most people would count CO2 as a pollutant. What I'm not understanding is:
(1) On what basis do you claim that "However CO2 doesn't play a role in [keeping air and water quality good]"?
(2) What is creating CO2 by breathing an example of?
But the temperature rise it predicted has not occurred.
The hockey stick was a reconstruction of past temperatures.
You are quite mistaken in your belief that it made predictions.
His model and those which corroborated it are at the edge of the error bands, if the temperature does not start rising rapidly the models will fail soon.
Who is making up these claims about something that doesn't exist. MBH 1998 did not study future temperatures. It will not fail, because it has been corroborated by over a dozen more recent studies, with more data.
He doesn't have a model that does prediction. If he did in 1998 we would do prediction with one of today's models, as we have made advances in the past 17 years. Interpreting some proxies does require modelling, but that information doesn't allow what you wrote to make sense.
It isn't corroborated by reality since global average temperatures have not followed the predictions of that model.
You seem to think that MBH 1998 made predictions. What they did was a reconstruction of past temperatures. As you can see from the paper.
They are now too busy coming up with theories for where the missing heat went and saying it went down a whole (literally).
I'm not aware of work by any of the authors of MBH that look at energy balance. Dr Trenberth is an important researcher in that field. This Nature news article might be as good a place as any to start reading about that. Note that 2014 was the hottest year on record when you read the end: “You can’t keep piling up warm water in the western Pacific,” Trenberth says. “At some point, the water will get so high that it just sloshes back.” And when that happens, if scientists are on the right track, the missing heat will reappear and temperatures will spike once again.
Well why didn't it go down a hole before too?
If you mean why haven't the oceans changed temperature before, or ice melted, then the answer is that they have.
A lot of us think this is much more easily explained by solar activity but of course what matters to these people is an insignificant amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
I suspect that you're over-counting if you think that "a lot" of people think a lower solar activity, and particularly the current very weak solar cycle would cause a warming.
But there are other reasons why it is obviously not the sun.
The current warming is greater at night and winter, in line with greenhouse warming, but the opposite of what you would expect from solar activity, as the sun warms things when it is shining.
The current warming is accompanied by a cooling of the stratosphere, an obvious consequence of trapping the heat below, but impossible to explain with solar activity.
The spatial distribution of the warming, being greater at the poles and less at the tropics, also aligns better with the greenhouse effect than the sun.
Do you know there is some evidence that if global temperatures went up the world's deserts would actually recede?
I know that rainfall requires evaporation or transpiration, so it will generally be heavier in a warmer world. This is not generally true on a regional scale, where changes to wind patterns have a dominating effect on precipitation.
Even if the temperature wouldn't rise as much the arctic would become navigable just like it was in the Middle Ages when the Novgorod Republic was a major trading power and Iceland was colonized. That's what the scaremongerers won't tell you.
A navigable Arctic is of some economic benefit. But there are many economic disbenefits, that greatly outweigh the benefits plus the cost of moving to a low carbon economy.
For example, we've still yet to figure out why the periods with higher CO2 composition than we have today (about 20 times as much) have been found to be cooler using the same methods that Michael Mann uses to argue his hockey stick graph.
Which periods are these?
There have been no periods of time for which the Proxies from MBH 1998 were available that had 20 times as much CO2.
However CO2 doesn't play a role in that. I mean shit, we create it simply by breathing.
Your claim is that not a pollutant because we create it by breathing?
I don't follow that logic. What is it about breathing that requires the things created by it not to be pollutants?
No, it wasn't. It was essentially asking for a cap on greenhouse emissions.
Mann's claims were fraudulent because he deliberately used screwy statistical methods and selective sampling to make a modest rise look like impeding doom.
If the work is corroborated, then the rise that he showed is quite correct.
Your claims of screwy statistical methods and selective sampling are therefore complete bollocks too.
You'd hope this was true, but I see the anti-vax movement and religious extremism both gaining momentum. And consumer protection against "alternative medicine" as we're forced to call heath fraud nowadays, was much stronger in the 40s.
I hope and trust that Mann is right in this case, but the denialist movement has fucked us all.
and the religion of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change is alive and well... unfortunately
Ahh, the anti-science movement calling the pro-scientific movement a "religion".
This is one of the lies that the anti-science's PR movement pays people to tell. If you have a fault, it is a good idea to accuse the other side of that fault so that the perception develops that both sides are as bad as each other.
Only about 20% of scholarly papers that are cutting edge science are still corroborated 5 years later.
One example of research that has been particularly well corroborated by later papers is the temperature reconstructions by Mann, Bradley and Hughes.
There is no higher standard of affirmation than reproduction by independent lines of evidence.
How can this possibly be fraud?
Neither is he self-promoting. He is science promoting. That is to be admired. Even if you're a Bush or Murdoch, so that you've an interest in not promoting it.
We've got a galaxy passing through in about 4 billion years.
So if you're up to star hopping, it'll be a good opportunity to colonize a whole stack of systems getting flung in a whole stack of directions... assuming we're not sterilized by Gamma Ray Bursts from Andromeda.
> Remember, Hydrogen is really just a battery when you think about it, the power still has to come from somewhere else like coal (though ideally wind or solar). In most cases hydrogen is generated from natural gas, generating, you guessed it, carbon dioxide in the process.
The great thing about the Hydrogen economy, is you can increase the amount of renewable on the grid, and convert excess to hydrogen, when you have an excess, like in the middle of the day and the middle of the night.
Slashdot Mirror
When you try to convince people to do something, that is politics.
I think you've got something of a false dichotomy fallacy going on there.
:
Science communication is increasingly considered an aspect of science. It's not a required aspect of science, but it is an allowable and increasingly encouraged aspect of science.
So when you try to convince people to understand science, that is science.
When the increased necessity for communicating that science is because people are communication anti-science for political reasons, that can affect how you communicate science, but it doesn't affect that what you are doing is science.
Mann mentions the implication that we need to reduce emissions only to describe the misinformation out there.
But faced with this overwhelming scientific consensus about the threat of human-caused climate change - and, by implication, the necessity to reduce global carbon emissions - fossil fuel interests have in many cases chosen not to accept the evidence, nor to engage in good-faith discussion about possible solutions. Instead, they have opted to deny the problem exists.
What Mann is doing is communicating science. The reason that you're mistaking it for politics is because there are voices trying to miscommunicate science that need to be understood by the public to understand the science.
Michael Mann has a clear political goal. He wants America (and the world) to act to avoid the risks of AGW.
I think that he has a clear scientific goal, he wants people to understand climate science.
A consequence of that understanding is an understanding of the need to reduce greenhouse emissions, but lots of science has policy consequences. Epidemiology shows that we should vaccinate. Physics shows that we should put the front doors of buildings on the ground floor. It's only political if you enter the discussion of how to do it.
In other words, the models don't work at all, what is the excuse that the rubes will buy so we can keep draining science funds for a few more years?
I see someone is upset with science.
Can you show me on the doll where the science touched you?
Science progresses. It is already known that the climate models will improve with improved resolution.
Astronomer's don't know what makes up 90% of the universe. Go attack them for extracting funds for a few more years so you don't look like a climate change denier.
And thoroughly debunked (in peer-reviewed journals, natch) by McIntyre and McKitrick as an artifact of one proxy (Sheep Mountain) being artificially weighted hundreds of times more than any of the others.
It is pretty unusual for a Mining consultant with no higher degree and an economist to be able to publish in a peer reviewed scientific journal. Was it highly regarded?
It's even more unusual for such a publication to thoroughly debunk a scientific paper that has been corroborated over a dozen times.
Are you certain that that's a correct description of what happened?
The scientific press seemed to be reporting the opposite:
Academy affirms hockey-stick graph.
Mann is communicating science. The fact that for this aspect of science there are PR groups funded to miscommunication the science affects how the science has to be communicated.
That doesn't make him a political strategist. For that he would need some political end. (And the public understanding of science isn't political, unless you're Boko Haram or Inhofe.)
I clearly misunderstood your point. Sorry for that.
CO2 causes damage to the environment because of its action as a greenhouse gas, and by causing acidification of the oceans.
Things that causes undesirable effects in the environment are called pollutants, so most people would count CO2 as a pollutant.
What I'm not understanding is:
(1) On what basis do you claim that "However CO2 doesn't play a role in [keeping air and water quality good]"?
(2) What is creating CO2 by breathing an example of?
But the temperature rise it predicted has not occurred.
The hockey stick was a reconstruction of past temperatures.
You are quite mistaken in your belief that it made predictions.
His model and those which corroborated it are at the edge of the error bands, if the temperature does not start rising rapidly the models will fail soon.
Who is making up these claims about something that doesn't exist. MBH 1998 did not study future temperatures. It will not fail, because it has been corroborated by over a dozen more recent studies, with more data.
(But since you're here, the world is warming:
2014 was the hottest year on record Global temperatures hit new high with no boost from El Niño.)
It is unlikely that his model is adequate.
He doesn't have a model that does prediction. If he did in 1998 we would do prediction with one of today's models, as we have made advances in the past 17 years. Interpreting some proxies does require modelling, but that information doesn't allow what you wrote to make sense.
And yet, it is denounced by the earth scale experiment.
Do you mean that you don't think that current temperatures aren't showing a rise?
Because they do.
It isn't corroborated by reality since global average temperatures have not followed the predictions of that model.
You seem to think that MBH 1998 made predictions. What they did was a reconstruction of past temperatures. As you can see from the paper.
They are now too busy coming up with theories for where the missing heat went and saying it went down a whole (literally).
I'm not aware of work by any of the authors of MBH that look at energy balance. Dr Trenberth is an important researcher in that field.
This Nature news article might be as good a place as any to start reading about that. Note that 2014 was the hottest year on record when you read the end: “You can’t keep piling up warm water in the western Pacific,” Trenberth says. “At some point, the water will get so high that it just sloshes back.” And when that happens, if scientists are on the right track, the missing heat will reappear and temperatures will spike once again.
Well why didn't it go down a hole before too?
If you mean why haven't the oceans changed temperature before, or ice melted, then the answer is that they have.
A lot of us think this is much more easily explained by solar activity but of course what matters to these people is an insignificant amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
I suspect that you're over-counting if you think that "a lot" of people think a lower solar activity, and particularly the current very weak solar cycle would cause a warming.
But there are other reasons why it is obviously not the sun.
The current warming is greater at night and winter, in line with greenhouse warming, but the opposite of what you would expect from solar activity, as the sun warms things when it is shining.
The current warming is accompanied by a cooling of the stratosphere, an obvious consequence of trapping the heat below, but impossible to explain with solar activity.
The spatial distribution of the warming, being greater at the poles and less at the tropics, also aligns better with the greenhouse effect than the sun.
Do you know there is some evidence that if global temperatures went up the world's deserts would actually recede?
I know that rainfall requires evaporation or transpiration, so it will generally be heavier in a warmer world. This is not generally true on a regional scale, where changes to wind patterns have a dominating effect on precipitation.
Even if the temperature wouldn't rise as much the arctic would become navigable just like it was in the Middle Ages when the Novgorod Republic was a major trading power and Iceland was colonized. That's what the scaremongerers won't tell you.
A navigable Arctic is of some economic benefit. But there are many economic disbenefits, that greatly outweigh the benefits plus the cost of moving to a low carbon economy.
There's nothing pseudo about the effects of small %'s of vaccines.
There's nothing pseudo about the effects of the vast majority of vaccines.
The anti-vaxers claim that vaccines cause a whole stack of problems, particularly autism. That claim is provably bullshit.
the hockey stick is bullshit
It has been corroborated by a metric shitload of papers.
So, to the best of our knowledge, it is quite correct.
For example, we've still yet to figure out why the periods with higher CO2 composition than we have today (about 20 times as much) have been found to be cooler using the same methods that Michael Mann uses to argue his hockey stick graph.
Which periods are these?
There have been no periods of time for which the Proxies from MBH 1998 were available that had 20 times as much CO2.
However CO2 doesn't play a role in that. I mean shit, we create it simply by breathing.
Your claim is that not a pollutant because we create it by breathing?
I don't follow that logic. What is it about breathing that requires the things created by it not to be pollutants? No, it wasn't. It was essentially asking for a cap on greenhouse emissions.
Mann's claims were fraudulent because he deliberately used screwy statistical methods and selective sampling to make a modest rise look like impeding doom.
If the work is corroborated, then the rise that he showed is quite correct.
Your claims of screwy statistical methods and selective sampling are therefore complete bollocks too.
You'd hope this was true, but I see the anti-vax movement and religious extremism both gaining momentum. And consumer protection against "alternative medicine" as we're forced to call heath fraud nowadays, was much stronger in the 40s.
I hope and trust that Mann is right in this case, but the denialist movement has fucked us all.
You think Fox news is crap only if you're on the left of politics?
The thing you seem to have failed to grasp is "Truth is objective."
and the religion of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change is alive and well... unfortunately
Ahh, the anti-science movement calling the pro-scientific movement a "religion".
This is one of the lies that the anti-science's PR movement pays people to tell. If you have a fault, it is a good idea to accuse the other side of that fault so that the perception develops that both sides are as bad as each other.
How's that working out for you with the audience of http://science.slashdot.org/ ?
That's because it doesn't work on people who are actually following what's going on.
Only about 20% of scholarly papers that are cutting edge science are still corroborated 5 years later.
One example of research that has been particularly well corroborated by later papers is the temperature reconstructions by Mann, Bradley and Hughes.
There is no higher standard of affirmation than reproduction by independent lines of evidence.
How can this possibly be fraud?
Neither is he self-promoting. He is science promoting. That is to be admired. Even if you're a Bush or Murdoch, so that you've an interest in not promoting it.
Apparently the collision has become more serious than when I was at school, and now it's not going to pass through, but whack together, merging the super-massive black holes into a doubly super-massive black hole.
So get your popcorn ready, it's going to be a show.
We've got a galaxy passing through in about 4 billion years.
... assuming we're not sterilized by Gamma Ray Bursts from Andromeda.
So if you're up to star hopping, it'll be a good opportunity to colonize a whole stack of systems getting flung in a whole stack of directions
That would have gutted me when I was at uni.
huge amounts of deforestation (nine thousand acres worth),
Really?
It looks from the aerial photography you link to that they just cut tracks to each turbine.
Wind power is a joke regardless of how you look at it.
I look at it from price per unit, insulation from oscillating fuel prices, greenhouse emissions, and production of harmful waste.
It's not as funny as you seem to think.
Men also would rather shock themselves than not shock themselves, if there's nothing else to do for 15 minutes.
> Remember, Hydrogen is really just a battery when you think about it, the power still has to come from somewhere else like coal (though ideally wind or solar). In most cases hydrogen is generated from natural gas, generating, you guessed it, carbon dioxide in the process.
The great thing about the Hydrogen economy, is you can increase the amount of renewable on the grid, and convert excess to hydrogen, when you have an excess, like in the middle of the day and the middle of the night.
Go troops!
I hope no one mentions to them Ebola is in DRC.
I heard that now that the Republicans control the Senate, the US will soon be invading Ebola.