Great program, I ignored disparaging references to the disabled but never noticed the connection to Pulp Fiction and will probably never get it out of my mind now.
GP here or "useless git" as my farther used to say. The word originaly comes from foundry workers in the north of England, a "git" is the bit of metal left on the cast where the hole in the mold was. The original metalic git was useless and in the way. - At least that's how BBC's Time Team tells it.
Those members are geologists, enough members (scientists) thought that the AAPG was making an unsupported statement that threatening to quit changed said statement but obviously not the opinion of their president (for whatever reason). To answer the devil's implied question I find a conspracy of one easier to belive than a conspiracy of many.
Just to be clear the second list is made up from individuals while the first only contains scientific organizations, it excludes universities and individuals, including them would make the list unmanageably large. I don't know of a single reputable scientific organisation or university that is seriously at odds with "the consensus", certainly none appear in the list I offered although some of the individuals do hold respectable positions. An interesting excersice is to cross-check the claims of the individual skeptic with the organisations they work for.
As to your questions both have been around for many years and have been thouroughly debunked, but I will have a go. The first one about CO2 levels rising after the ice melts in an ice age is true but the claim that it is evidence against AGW is false. The regularly reccuring ice ages are caused by Earth's orbit (solar forcing), as the ice melts so does the permafrost. The melting permafrost relaeses methane which rapidly breaks down into CO2. Therefore CO2 goes up (feeds back) and ADDS to the warming caused by the shift in orbit. In otherwords CO2 is normally a feedback and that feedback mechanisim will compound the warming from our emmissions (human forcing). None of this refutes the physics that says CO2 is a GHG, nor does it refute the temprature rise expected from increased CO2. What it does tell us is that nature will add to our CO2 spike as the permafrost melts because of our CO2 spike. Personally I think the last sentance is the reason psudeo-skeptics continue to push this particular red-herring in the media.
The medieval warm period and the little icse age are different events and are the favorite fodder of media outlets such as the WSJ, they were real questions at one time and are much harder to debunk, so other than saying the conclusions are from proxy records I will just point to the RC links.
As for accuracy of the models, they have error bars but have a skim though the IPCC reports particlularly the SPM. Being a computer scientists my favorite model link is this movie of a single simulated year from Japan's Earth simulator.
"if you can explain these issues convincingly why do you let the media get away with not covering the counter argument?"
Good question, it's not from lack of trying by those involved and coverage by the media is usually a bit better outside the US (eg:BBC). The two questions you asked are not easy to understand for many people, maybe a better question is why do some people in the skeptics list get so much repeated media attention for their red-herrings and esoteric but misinformed details, despite both points being thouroughly debunked time and again? For instance why do we currently keep hearing about how cold it is the last couple of years when the fact is the hottest 10yrs on record (global average) have all occured in the last 12yrs? Why are the opinion columns (eg: WSJ) full of people who deny the Arctic sea ice is dissapearing when half of it's area and most of it's volume has already gone in just under half my lifetime? Why does the media constantly focus on rising oceans and hurricanes when (IMHO) the major threat from AGW is to agriculture and marine stocks?
I have been refering to the consensus in ambiguious terms above, however when a climatologists refers to "the consensus" they are usually referring to the falsifyable (and IMHO conservative) assertions in the IPCC reports. For seven years now many media outlets have failed to pick that up as
I think you are confusing "Consensus" with "repeating experimental results"
No, I contend "repeating experimental results" is the same thing as "scientific consensus".
There are many versions of "the consensus on AGW" to be found on the net, but in climate science "the consensus" specifically refers to a set of assertions in the IPCC reports derived from "repeating experimental results". The idea that humans can alter the climate via CO2 emmissions (AGW) is over a hundered years old and the basic experimental evidence of the physics that gave rise to the idea is slighly older. The research that has been conducted since then by scientific organisations and universities dwarfs the effort expended on the LHC. Even so it took until the 90's before a clear consesus on AGW emerged amoungst those doing the experiments and thier peers, due in no small part to the advent of sattelites and super-computing.
In other words, the specific assertions contained in "the consensus" serve as a challenge to real skeptics (scientists) and an inconvienience to psuedo-skeptics.
Nowhere have I said or implied 'it must be true', nor would any scientist, including the ones who drafted the consensus we are talking about.
Science is NOT the road to "truth", that would imply certainty and thus science would be just another religion. Science does not "prove" anything, it supplies us with the most usefull and elegant model of the universe we have and is constantly working to improve that model using testable hypothisis'. The "best answer" for any scientific question at any point in time is found in the current consensus which in the case of AGW is periodically derived from the continually improving body of evidence science builds up over time.
When climatologists refer to "the consensus" they mean the explicitly stated consensus found in the latest IPCC assesment. These statements actualy tend to be conservative since that is the nature of any agreement made by 2500 scientists who are representing scientific organizations such as those in the WP list I posted in another comment in this thread.
If you want raw data to look for yourself, as I have, then the internet is littered with the stuff these days. Some obvious places to start are the IPCC, UK Met office, NASA, NOAA, NISDC, WMO, CSIRO and virtually any university you can think of. The scientific method demands you falsify the assertions in the current consensus or admit you can't, all the "authorities" I have just pointed out would love to falsify any one of them because that's the way science (and this thread) can progress.
Well yeah, I'm newer than you and a bit of an optimist. Normally I would ignore it but this particular thread is currently spawning more astroturf than usual.
"Very few/.ers have any knowledge of science."
All the more reason to keep posting (see sig below).;)
Can someone explain to me how timmarthy's rhetorical bullshit is insightfull?
My assertion is "every national science body of the planet agrees with the [IPCC] consensus", my assertion is not original but it is falsifyable and therefore testable.
I have done my homework and looked for counter examples over several years but that was to satisfy my own curiosity - after all that is how scientific skepticisim deals with an assertion - you don't try to prove it, you try to falsify it! No matter how many lists I throw at timmarthy I cannot "prove" the list is complete, let alone get him to read all their statements.
Therfore according to the scientific method it's up to timmarthy (or anyone else who wants to "call me on it") to falsify my assertion if they can (ie:peer review). Just one counter-example is all the "proof" we need but are yet to see. In the unlikely event that we do see a counter example then we will have learned something via the scientific method. The elegance of this method is that the more people who try but fail to find a counter example the more robust my assertion becomes.
Imperfect does not mean useless. Science is the art of building models, the models must be such that a resonable person can be pursuaded to agree that the model reflecs reality by using logic and observations, it does not and never has claimed certainty. The greek model of which you speak remaind more accurate than Copernicus for several decades, which model would you have used to navigate with?
Since you claim consensus has no place in science I can only assume you have never heard of the republic of science?
[The phrase "scientists say"] is one which only tends to come out of the mouths of people who can't distinguish between 'scientific' and 'sciencey.'
No, it comes from rational people who understand they cannot possible know every question let alone all the answers. These people are pointing to the current state of knowledge in said republic.
BTW: How do you distinguish between 'scientific' and 'sciencey' because all you have offered so far are platitudes, unsupported assertions, and ad-homs?
For the half century I have been on this planet NIMBYisim has been a constant, however it failed to stop us building every single coal plant that exists today. Every one of those plants will also need replacing over the next half century. If we continue the practice of ignoring the NIMBY's and replace those plants with something cleaner then everything should pan out ok for my grandkids.
Congratulations, a well reasoned and genuinely skeptical post. Your self-confesed ignorance also implies you are intellectually honest but unfortunately it has let you down in a few places.
"So far I have not heard an expert on either side of the debate come up with convincing arguments to explain the other side's evidence." - Try here or here. There are very slim picking on the other side of the fence, but here is a list of individual scientists that disagree with all or part of the consensus.
"The problem with global warming (as I understand it) is that there is conflicting evidence as to the cause." - Multiple uncertainties are catered for by the error bars in this graph of known forcings. There is generally more uncertainty and possibly unknowns in the +ve/-ve feedbacks caused by these forcings although some such as water vapour are well known.
To cut a long story short, humans are NOT responsible for ALL the changes (eg solar flux in the graph above) but we are responsible for most of it. Most so called "skeptics" I have read over the last 25yrs or so subscribe to the "single cause" idea and build their strawmen by painting climatologists with the same brush.
Note that the list of skeptics link also defines the "the consensus" and is worth quoting...
The scientific consensus was summarized in the 2001 Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as follows:
1. The global average surface temperature has risen 0.6 ± 0.2 C since the late 19th century, and 0.17 C per decade in the last 30 years.
2.There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities", in particular emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane.
3.If greenhouse gas emissions continue the warming will also continue, with temperatures projected to increase by 1.4 C to 5.8 C between 1990 and 2100. Accompanying this temperature increase will be increases in some types of extreme weather and a projected sea level rise of 9 cm to 88 cm, excluding "uncertainty relating to ice dynamical changes in the West Antarctic ice sheet". On balance the impacts of global warming will be significantly negative, especially for larger values of warming.
Yes and the aggregate is ~10Gt/yr, whereas the aggregate capacity of natural sinks is ~3Gt/yr. For carbon cap and trade to work and get us back to 3Gt/yr we need to quantify the individual emissions and sinks, the capacity of vegatation to act a sink is not an easy thing to measure and varies wildly, same with the idea of dumping iron into the ocean. Neither should be used as a "carbon offset".
It's much, much, simpler to quantify (and control through taxes/regulation) the main sources, ie: fossil fuels and concrete. Replacing coal with a non-emmitting source of energy would get us most of the way to the target.
Slashdot Mirror
Great program, I ignored disparaging references to the disabled but never noticed the connection to Pulp Fiction and will probably never get it out of my mind now.
GP here or "useless git" as my farther used to say. The word originaly comes from foundry workers in the north of England, a "git" is the bit of metal left on the cast where the hole in the mold was. The original metalic git was useless and in the way. - At least that's how BBC's Time Team tells it.
I wonder if Linus knows?
In the UK and to a lesser extent here in Australia a "git" is akin to a moron.
You have posted a list of conclusions. For future reference this is what evidence looks like.
Those members are geologists, enough members (scientists) thought that the AAPG was making an unsupported statement that threatening to quit changed said statement but obviously not the opinion of their president (for whatever reason). To answer the devil's implied question I find a conspracy of one easier to belive than a conspiracy of many.
Afraid you have been seriously misinformed....dood.
Just to be clear the second list is made up from individuals while the first only contains scientific organizations, it excludes universities and individuals, including them would make the list unmanageably large. I don't know of a single reputable scientific organisation or university that is seriously at odds with "the consensus", certainly none appear in the list I offered although some of the individuals do hold respectable positions. An interesting excersice is to cross-check the claims of the individual skeptic with the organisations they work for.
As to your questions both have been around for many years and have been thouroughly debunked, but I will have a go. The first one about CO2 levels rising after the ice melts in an ice age is true but the claim that it is evidence against AGW is false. The regularly reccuring ice ages are caused by Earth's orbit (solar forcing), as the ice melts so does the permafrost. The melting permafrost relaeses methane which rapidly breaks down into CO2. Therefore CO2 goes up (feeds back) and ADDS to the warming caused by the shift in orbit. In otherwords CO2 is normally a feedback and that feedback mechanisim will compound the warming from our emmissions (human forcing). None of this refutes the physics that says CO2 is a GHG, nor does it refute the temprature rise expected from increased CO2. What it does tell us is that nature will add to our CO2 spike as the permafrost melts because of our CO2 spike. Personally I think the last sentance is the reason psudeo-skeptics continue to push this particular red-herring in the media.
The medieval warm period and the little icse age are different events and are the favorite fodder of media outlets such as the WSJ, they were real questions at one time and are much harder to debunk, so other than saying the conclusions are from proxy records I will just point to the RC links.
As for accuracy of the models, they have error bars but have a skim though the IPCC reports particlularly the SPM. Being a computer scientists my favorite model link is this movie of a single simulated year from Japan's Earth simulator.
"if you can explain these issues convincingly why do you let the media get away with not covering the counter argument?"
Good question, it's not from lack of trying by those involved and coverage by the media is usually a bit better outside the US (eg:BBC). The two questions you asked are not easy to understand for many people, maybe a better question is why do some people in the skeptics list get so much repeated media attention for their red-herrings and esoteric but misinformed details, despite both points being thouroughly debunked time and again? For instance why do we currently keep hearing about how cold it is the last couple of years when the fact is the hottest 10yrs on record (global average) have all occured in the last 12yrs? Why are the opinion columns (eg: WSJ) full of people who deny the Arctic sea ice is dissapearing when half of it's area and most of it's volume has already gone in just under half my lifetime? Why does the media constantly focus on rising oceans and hurricanes when (IMHO) the major threat from AGW is to agriculture and marine stocks?
I have been refering to the consensus in ambiguious terms above, however when a climatologists refers to "the consensus" they are usually referring to the falsifyable (and IMHO conservative) assertions in the IPCC reports. For seven years now many media outlets have failed to pick that up as
I think you are confusing "Consensus" with "repeating experimental results"
No, I contend "repeating experimental results" is the same thing as "scientific consensus".
There are many versions of "the consensus on AGW" to be found on the net, but in climate science "the consensus" specifically refers to a set of assertions in the IPCC reports derived from "repeating experimental results". The idea that humans can alter the climate via CO2 emmissions (AGW) is over a hundered years old and the basic experimental evidence of the physics that gave rise to the idea is slighly older. The research that has been conducted since then by scientific organisations and universities dwarfs the effort expended on the LHC. Even so it took until the 90's before a clear consesus on AGW emerged amoungst those doing the experiments and thier peers, due in no small part to the advent of sattelites and super-computing.
In other words, the specific assertions contained in "the consensus" serve as a challenge to real skeptics (scientists) and an inconvienience to psuedo-skeptics.
And here's the bit you are missing:
Nowhere have I said or implied 'it must be true', nor would any scientist, including the ones who drafted the consensus we are talking about.
Science is NOT the road to "truth", that would imply certainty and thus science would be just another religion. Science does not "prove" anything, it supplies us with the most usefull and elegant model of the universe we have and is constantly working to improve that model using testable hypothisis'. The "best answer" for any scientific question at any point in time is found in the current consensus which in the case of AGW is periodically derived from the continually improving body of evidence science builds up over time.
When climatologists refer to "the consensus" they mean the explicitly stated consensus found in the latest IPCC assesment. These statements actualy tend to be conservative since that is the nature of any agreement made by 2500 scientists who are representing scientific organizations such as those in the WP list I posted in another comment in this thread.
If you want raw data to look for yourself, as I have, then the internet is littered with the stuff these days. Some obvious places to start are the IPCC, UK Met office, NASA, NOAA, NISDC, WMO, CSIRO and virtually any university you can think of. The scientific method demands you falsify the assertions in the current consensus or admit you can't, all the "authorities" I have just pointed out would love to falsify any one of them because that's the way science (and this thread) can progress.
Well yeah, I'm newer than you and a bit of an optimist. Normally I would ignore it but this particular thread is currently spawning more astroturf than usual.
/.ers have any knowledge of science."
;)
"Very few
All the more reason to keep posting (see sig below).
"You want sources do your own research. It's out there, stop looking for the rubber stamps."
Out whe...,is that you Mulder?
Can someone explain to me how timmarthy's rhetorical bullshit is insightfull?
My assertion is "every national science body of the planet agrees with the [IPCC] consensus", my assertion is not original but it is falsifyable and therefore testable.
I have done my homework and looked for counter examples over several years but that was to satisfy my own curiosity - after all that is how scientific skepticisim deals with an assertion - you don't try to prove it, you try to falsify it! No matter how many lists I throw at timmarthy I cannot "prove" the list is complete, let alone get him to read all their statements.
Therfore according to the scientific method it's up to timmarthy (or anyone else who wants to "call me on it") to falsify my assertion if they can (ie:peer review). Just one counter-example is all the "proof" we need but are yet to see. In the unlikely event that we do see a counter example then we will have learned something via the scientific method. The elegance of this method is that the more people who try but fail to find a counter example the more robust my assertion becomes.
This is wonderfull, I get modded troll for firing back at an insult and the parent's "No it isn't" argument is modded +5 insightfull.
I think you have hold of the wrong end of the stick. The words "There is no consensus" was a quote from the GP, the link was an easy refutation.
Imperfect does not mean useless. Science is the art of building models, the models must be such that a resonable person can be pursuaded to agree that the model reflecs reality by using logic and observations, it does not and never has claimed certainty. The greek model of which you speak remaind more accurate than Copernicus for several decades, which model would you have used to navigate with?
Since you claim consensus has no place in science I can only assume you have never heard of the republic of science?
[The phrase "scientists say"] is one which only tends to come out of the mouths of people who can't distinguish between 'scientific' and 'sciencey.'
No, it comes from rational people who understand they cannot possible know every question let alone all the answers. These people are pointing to the current state of knowledge in said republic.
BTW: How do you distinguish between 'scientific' and 'sciencey' because all you have offered so far are platitudes, unsupported assertions, and ad-homs?
For the half century I have been on this planet NIMBYisim has been a constant, however it failed to stop us building every single coal plant that exists today. Every one of those plants will also need replacing over the next half century. If we continue the practice of ignoring the NIMBY's and replace those plants with something cleaner then everything should pan out ok for my grandkids.
Congratulations, a well reasoned and genuinely skeptical post. Your self-confesed ignorance also implies you are intellectually honest but unfortunately it has let you down in a few places.
There is no consensus: just plain wrong
"So far I have not heard an expert on either side of the debate come up with convincing arguments to explain the other side's evidence." - Try here or here. There are very slim picking on the other side of the fence, but here is a list of individual scientists that disagree with all or part of the consensus.
"The problem with global warming (as I understand it) is that there is conflicting evidence as to the cause." - Multiple uncertainties are catered for by the error bars in this graph of known forcings. There is generally more uncertainty and possibly unknowns in the +ve/-ve feedbacks caused by these forcings although some such as water vapour are well known.
To cut a long story short, humans are NOT responsible for ALL the changes (eg solar flux in the graph above) but we are responsible for most of it. Most so called "skeptics" I have read over the last 25yrs or so subscribe to the "single cause" idea and build their strawmen by painting climatologists with the same brush.
Note that the list of skeptics link also defines the "the consensus" and is worth quoting...
The scientific consensus was summarized in the 2001 Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as follows:
1. The global average surface temperature has risen 0.6 ± 0.2 C since the late 19th century, and 0.17 C per decade in the last 30 years.
2.There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities", in particular emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane.
3.If greenhouse gas emissions continue the warming will also continue, with temperatures projected to increase by 1.4 C to 5.8 C between 1990 and 2100. Accompanying this temperature increase will be increases in some types of extreme weather and a projected sea level rise of 9 cm to 88 cm, excluding "uncertainty relating to ice dynamical changes in the West Antarctic ice sheet". On balance the impacts of global warming will be significantly negative, especially for larger values of warming.
How about you do your own research and find a counter example, just one will do.
"Frankly, I don't think the coming Ice Age (methane + global warming) will give a frozen rat's ass in Hell about carbon offsets."
Methane + global warming = faster global warming. That is until the methane decomposes into CO2 and we revert back to regular global warming.
Funny yes, insightful no.
"When did CO2, which is an absolute necessity for the foliage that covers this planet, become a pollutant?"
About 200yrs ago, when we started burning coal in sufficient quantities to significantly alter the composition of Earth's atmosphere.
Define: pollutant - "A resource out of place, that causes unwanted or undesirable changes in the environment."
What is really ridiculous and somewhat ironic is your economic "alarmisim".
Yes and the aggregate is ~10Gt/yr, whereas the aggregate capacity of natural sinks is ~3Gt/yr. For carbon cap and trade to work and get us back to 3Gt/yr we need to quantify the individual emissions and sinks, the capacity of vegatation to act a sink is not an easy thing to measure and varies wildly, same with the idea of dumping iron into the ocean. Neither should be used as a "carbon offset".
It's much, much, simpler to quantify (and control through taxes/regulation) the main sources, ie: fossil fuels and concrete. Replacing coal with a non-emmitting source of energy would get us most of the way to the target.
"Noone mentions it though. Why?"
Same reason that phrenology is not mentioned, ie: it's utter bullshit.
"Here's an idea - Let's ban the release of Oxygen into the atmosphere!"
Here's a different idea, get a clue.