Honestly, this explanation doesn't sit well with me. I'd love to get in their heads, because I don't get them. But this explanation of their behavior doesn't seem to mesh with how they act.
They seem like people who want to imagine cynicism and naive skepticism lets them see further than everyone else. You know, like truther types do.
Of course, we have to define "screwed". It's incautious statements like that that fuel their paranoia and claims of "alarmism". We can quantify that harm, and it's not civilization ending.
But it's way way way way costlier than doing nothing. From lower productivity of farms, to relocation of productive areas near sea level, to the fact the human workers get less done per day in hotter climates, to the diseases that spread better in warmer temperatures(ebola is one such disease), to the fact that warmer temperatures measurably provoke violence.
And anyone who's done a conservative estimate of how much that will "cost" in terms of economic productivity(at 5 C) ends up coming up with much larger number than those generously analyzing the cost of infrastructure conversion.
You don't say. Honest question to deniers: when you see this "hiatus" point, do you all go "ha very clever"? Or do any of you recognize extraordinarily short term thinking that doesn't honestly reflect the reality of statistical analysis of noise affected datapoints?
Please I'd like to think there's at least one among your number who has enough hope to see the extraordinary dishonesty in this point.
The climate is changing (Has the climate ever been constant?) The current trend is warming (Was it warming before humans started affecting climate?) It appears that the warming is increasing (How much is due to human causes?) The warming will likely cause damage to human settlements (Is it more cost effective to move the humans? How catastrophic will it be? Are there potential benefits that might offset the damage to civilization? Might we be better off on a warmer planet?)
So... exactly what I said. you dumb fucker.
This is exactly what I meant when I said you assholes go "but what if [thing that has been taken into account by real scientists] is involved?"
The non-human factors for climate shift are negative. A geologically consistent rate of cooling almost entirely dwarfed by existing anthropogenic change.
So when you ask "has climate changed before" or "is it always changing" you're willfully ignoring that YES we know about that. And the rate of change is so dramatically large compared to that it's unprecedented in our planets history I know a half dozen degrees per century seems slow to you, but that's so amazingly and ballsbustingly fast that it's already causing extinctions.
And human settlements aren't the real concern. I'll freely admit that laypeople make a big deal of rising sea levels, as if you won't have time to deal with it. Which is silly. But the actual estimated costs to things like agriculture and industry and medical costs are on the order of tens of trillions of dollars over the next century. Versus only a few trillion for the (non even being considered) plan of converting to universal solar power.
You could look at the second most IPCC report that answers everyone of your JAQqing off questions, with so many references you couldn't even read them all.
Or you can repeat, mindlessly, these stupid-as-fuck already answered questions, pretending you're cleverer than anyone around.
Personally, in spite of how polite you were being, I'm sick of your shit.
Okay. You're wrong. If people are convinced by your quite fallacious arguments, that's not my problem, that's theirs. I hoped you'd reconsider such an inane approach, but I don't control you.
You've got an unhealthy attitude towards information, tossing classes of it whole sale because of other examples with superficial similarities that are flawed for intuitive reasons.
You've got an unhealthy attitude towards debate, being quick to develop a persecution complex and invent easier to dismantle criticism going as far as to pretend that your imaginary PC police were out to get you.
You've got an unhealthy approach to identifying zealotry, because, I'm not even a postmodernist. I just deconstructed an obviously flawed argument about it. If you can't distinguish disagreement from zealots locked into an ideology, it's not good.
What I'm getting at here, is that you've manifested some serious personal problems into a debate you think you "win" by screaming that you win. I know it's not good for me to waste time making amateur psychological deconstructions of slashdot posters, but I'd like to think it was worth it if it provokes even a moment of introspection.
Oh, no. The policy isn't anywhere near settled. But we could do without the people coming into every conversation you have about fixing it and saying "I don't believe there's a problem".
The wedge theory is the best tool I've heard to talk about solutions, but we can't get that far.
No, I'm accusing you of dismissing multiple entire fields of study due to one author you clearly have a stick up your ass about.
There's nothing actually intelligent about this. I'm sorry if you imagined an accusation of misogyny. Methinks the dude doth protest to much, but that's not what I accused you of.
I accused you of turning a hatred of an academic into hatred of academia, which is about as anti-intellectual as ideas come.
The fact that some idiots take, say, evo-psych to crazyland, and some of them are even in academia, doesn't mean I reject the field wholesale. It means those points are ones I think need due consideration.
There isn't a field, scientific or otherwise, where someone hasn't gone off the deep end. Does the book "The physics of immortality" really make me dismiss physics? No. Does that same douchebag writing an essay in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences about how the Copenhagen interpretation is wrong sour me on physics?
No. Of course not. Because that's stupid. Don't be stupid.
Given that you have to specifically go out of your way to set a font on a post on slashdot, it's a bit like the green ink phenomenon, in that someone thinks that it will somehow help establish their argumentative credibility if they make the text itself more unusual.
It's subtle, but if you just conjoin that with allegations of conspiracy, it makes for the perfect brew of "not quite sane", which I took as an art piece. I mean, it's not like the "point" you're referencing actually exists.
Not necessarily. I'm sure this is still not nuanced enough, and someone with a better knowledge of anatomy is going to come in and correct me, but I seem to recall from middle school biology(yeah that's the level I'm working on here) that striated skeletal muscle strands work cooperatively naturally, without all them needing to be stimulated by nerves independently.
So, naturally you'd need some nerves in order to stimulate the chemical pathways that induce contraction and expansion among the muscle group, but if you only lost some of the muscle it might still work?
I don't have to agree with clearly wrong people to point out why this is dumb.
The real criminal is postmodernism for being all like "have you considered the implications of [thing] on society and its interactions with thought?"
Because I gotta tell you, postmodernism isn't even that common among those "academic leftists" you so blindly hate. I'm sure you could acknowledge that, for example, gender studies has real scientific journals that use evidence based objective data*. But... it's easier to just toss an entire field into the rubbish bin and go "I read that one stupid essay one time it must all be like that".
*yeah yeah, in addition to the postmodernist ones that never get any citations.
They aren't asking clever, insightful questions though.
I change my mind because of good points. I consider new data. I don't do it perfectly, but this is a case where douchebags regurgitate the same 10 points forever.
And if those points were anything resembling reality based, it'd be cause for reflection. It's really really really not. It's like creationists claiming a volcano shot species all over the planet. It's just too stupid to seriously address.
Those tossing those things out are therefor liars. And liars are, again, the problem.
We know how much oil and coal has been burned. We know this because we can watch how much is sold and used in conventially burned forms. Simple chemistry tells us how much CO2 that produces.
It lines up very well with directly observed changes in atmospheric concentrations.
Of course I do. Clear explanations are not the problem here.
Climate change science can be turned into an executive summary quickly and easily. These summaries are essentially a bunch of incontestable facts that still get contested.
A. Carbon dioxide provably has much stronger absorption bands in the infra-red wavelengths than Nitrogen, and Oxygen, and a little more than water. These are the only compounds more prevalent in the atmosphere than CO2. You can run experiments in the lab seeing different radiative rates of cooling from different mixtures of "air" and CO2. B. Paleoclimate reconstructions have show than CO2 concentrations consistently acts as a primary moderator of temperature on earth after the first occurrence of plantlife. C. Naive modeling shows that substantially increasing the CO2 concentrations from current levels of the atmosphere shift the equilibrium temperatures of the planet substantially. More complex models incorporating other known factors, within the entire range of their uncertainty levels, show the same thing. D. Human activity has almost doubled CO2 levels.
None of these 4 points are really scientifically questionable, and only naive skepticism(that is, pseudoskepticism) or ignorance leaves much room for debate on them.
Their implications are obvious, and we still get denial, and the problem is not with the structuring, but the behaviors of the deniers.
The problem, of course, is that "my" evidence is subtle, nuanced, quite voluminous, and requiring a reasonable level of backing in the details of atmospheric science to tackle.
This doesn't work well in an environment where dozens of people will post fairly identical posts that draw attention to one easily noticeable thing that doesn't actually demonstrate their point, but can appear to without examination of how that point is selected.
So... you see a couple dozen primary coping strategies in the climate change discussions. One is linking to careful debunking and explanation. To the kind of person who might be "on the fence", these are often lumped in as TL;DR equivalents to inane links to wattsupwiththat. And the balance fallacy strikes again.
And another coping strategy is to have big copy/pastes available to fully delineate why each given point is stupid. Except that requires an extraordinary library of precisely targeted rebuttals available at a moments notice. And due to the increased verbal complexity of these rebuttals they can, and do, come off as talking down in an impolite manner. On top of that they suffer the TL;DR problem above.
And the objectively wrong side cloaks itself in principle. Pretending to be morally superior in following the precepts of science, while doing the opposite. And all criticism can and is framed in this regard.
Most importantly, as a lay person who just happens to have a dash of meteorological education, it becomes difficult to formulate responses in a way I know to be perfectly in line with the science. This means any mistakes I make while trying to clear up disruptively misrepresntative statements can be structured as a "You were wrong about that, therefor everything" argument.
All this, collectively, points to suggesting the experts arguments as perhaps the most relevant, and thus should be deferred to.
And people who emotionally never grew past rebellious teenager will reject them outright without a moment of critical examination.
Osama bin Laden was only a couple blocks off from your target.
Seriously though, people alleging a world finance conspiracy to screw the little guy is exactly why the World Trade Organization was targeted. And a perceived American military hegemony was why the pentagon was targeted. I'm not trying to discredit you by comparing you to an international terrorist responsible for thousands of deaths, but instead trying to highlight that someone has acted on exactly this idea before.
Slashdot Mirror
Except, of course, we're talking about a phenomenon that doesn't operate on a year-to-year basis.
just this century is still warming. You have to cherry pick hard to find otherwise.
Honestly, this explanation doesn't sit well with me. I'd love to get in their heads, because I don't get them. But this explanation of their behavior doesn't seem to mesh with how they act.
They seem like people who want to imagine cynicism and naive skepticism lets them see further than everyone else. You know, like truther types do.
Of course, we have to define "screwed". It's incautious statements like that that fuel their paranoia and claims of "alarmism". We can quantify that harm, and it's not civilization ending.
But it's way way way way costlier than doing nothing. From lower productivity of farms, to relocation of productive areas near sea level, to the fact the human workers get less done per day in hotter climates, to the diseases that spread better in warmer temperatures(ebola is one such disease), to the fact that warmer temperatures measurably provoke violence.
And anyone who's done a conservative estimate of how much that will "cost" in terms of economic productivity(at 5 C) ends up coming up with much larger number than those generously analyzing the cost of infrastructure conversion.
You know that there's a drop down right there at the top that lets you look at previous years' reports
Because you're damn well an idiot who didn't read the link, and how this is in keeping with the models?
You don't say. Honest question to deniers: when you see this "hiatus" point, do you all go "ha very clever"? Or do any of you recognize extraordinarily short term thinking that doesn't honestly reflect the reality of statistical analysis of noise affected datapoints?
Please I'd like to think there's at least one among your number who has enough hope to see the extraordinary dishonesty in this point.
Some "hiatus" with 2013 and 2012 and 2010 and 2009 and 2008 and 2007 and 2006 and 2005 and 2004 and 2003 all making the list of top 10 hottest years since we started measuring.
Not that it matters, because you repetitive dolts have exactly zero null hypotheses that you've got any hope of establishing.
The climate is changing (Has the climate ever been constant?)
The current trend is warming (Was it warming before humans started affecting climate?)
It appears that the warming is increasing (How much is due to human causes?)
The warming will likely cause damage to human settlements (Is it more cost effective to move the humans? How catastrophic will it be? Are there potential benefits that might offset the damage to civilization? Might we be better off on a warmer planet?)
So... exactly what I said. you dumb fucker.
This is exactly what I meant when I said you assholes go "but what if [thing that has been taken into account by real scientists] is involved?"
The non-human factors for climate shift are negative. A geologically consistent rate of cooling almost entirely dwarfed by existing anthropogenic change.
So when you ask "has climate changed before" or "is it always changing" you're willfully ignoring that YES we know about that. And the rate of change is so dramatically large compared to that it's unprecedented in our planets history I know a half dozen degrees per century seems slow to you, but that's so amazingly and ballsbustingly fast that it's already causing extinctions.
And human settlements aren't the real concern. I'll freely admit that laypeople make a big deal of rising sea levels, as if you won't have time to deal with it. Which is silly. But the actual estimated costs to things like agriculture and industry and medical costs are on the order of tens of trillions of dollars over the next century. Versus only a few trillion for the (non even being considered) plan of converting to universal solar power.
You could look at the second most IPCC report that answers everyone of your JAQqing off questions, with so many references you couldn't even read them all.
Or you can repeat, mindlessly, these stupid-as-fuck already answered questions, pretending you're cleverer than anyone around.
Personally, in spite of how polite you were being, I'm sick of your shit.
Oh shut up, MR cloud-based-albedo-doesn't-exist.
So, no.
Okay. You're wrong. If people are convinced by your quite fallacious arguments, that's not my problem, that's theirs. I hoped you'd reconsider such an inane approach, but I don't control you.
You've got an unhealthy attitude towards information, tossing classes of it whole sale because of other examples with superficial similarities that are flawed for intuitive reasons.
You've got an unhealthy attitude towards debate, being quick to develop a persecution complex and invent easier to dismantle criticism going as far as to pretend that your imaginary PC police were out to get you.
You've got an unhealthy approach to identifying zealotry, because, I'm not even a postmodernist. I just deconstructed an obviously flawed argument about it. If you can't distinguish disagreement from zealots locked into an ideology, it's not good.
What I'm getting at here, is that you've manifested some serious personal problems into a debate you think you "win" by screaming that you win. I know it's not good for me to waste time making amateur psychological deconstructions of slashdot posters, but I'd like to think it was worth it if it provokes even a moment of introspection.
Everyone is capable of being reasonable.
Oh, no. The policy isn't anywhere near settled. But we could do without the people coming into every conversation you have about fixing it and saying "I don't believe there's a problem".
The wedge theory is the best tool I've heard to talk about solutions, but we can't get that far.
Uh huh.
Got anything else to say, or is it just "you forgot Poland"?
No, I'm accusing you of dismissing multiple entire fields of study due to one author you clearly have a stick up your ass about.
There's nothing actually intelligent about this. I'm sorry if you imagined an accusation of misogyny. Methinks the dude doth protest to much, but that's not what I accused you of.
I accused you of turning a hatred of an academic into hatred of academia, which is about as anti-intellectual as ideas come.
The fact that some idiots take, say, evo-psych to crazyland, and some of them are even in academia, doesn't mean I reject the field wholesale. It means those points are ones I think need due consideration.
There isn't a field, scientific or otherwise, where someone hasn't gone off the deep end. Does the book "The physics of immortality" really make me dismiss physics? No. Does that same douchebag writing an essay in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences about how the Copenhagen interpretation is wrong sour me on physics?
No. Of course not. Because that's stupid. Don't be stupid.
Given that you have to specifically go out of your way to set a font on a post on slashdot, it's a bit like the green ink phenomenon, in that someone thinks that it will somehow help establish their argumentative credibility if they make the text itself more unusual.
It's subtle, but if you just conjoin that with allegations of conspiracy, it makes for the perfect brew of "not quite sane", which I took as an art piece. I mean, it's not like the "point" you're referencing actually exists.
It's just a voice shouting in the wilderness bro.
Okay, so you have a book you hate, and an author.
Congrats for brewing that into anti-intellectualism.
You must've let that hate fester for years to ferment that mindlessness.
Not necessarily. I'm sure this is still not nuanced enough, and someone with a better knowledge of anatomy is going to come in and correct me, but I seem to recall from middle school biology(yeah that's the level I'm working on here) that striated skeletal muscle strands work cooperatively naturally, without all them needing to be stimulated by nerves independently.
So, naturally you'd need some nerves in order to stimulate the chemical pathways that induce contraction and expansion among the muscle group, but if you only lost some of the muscle it might still work?
I don't know for sure.
Uh huh. Yep. Sure.
I don't have to agree with clearly wrong people to point out why this is dumb.
The real criminal is postmodernism for being all like "have you considered the implications of [thing] on society and its interactions with thought?"
Because I gotta tell you, postmodernism isn't even that common among those "academic leftists" you so blindly hate. I'm sure you could acknowledge that, for example, gender studies has real scientific journals that use evidence based objective data*. But... it's easier to just toss an entire field into the rubbish bin and go "I read that one stupid essay one time it must all be like that".
*yeah yeah, in addition to the postmodernist ones that never get any citations.
Oh look. A moron hating newspapers.
That's new.
They aren't asking clever, insightful questions though.
I change my mind because of good points. I consider new data. I don't do it perfectly, but this is a case where douchebags regurgitate the same 10 points forever.
And if those points were anything resembling reality based, it'd be cause for reflection. It's really really really not. It's like creationists claiming a volcano shot species all over the planet. It's just too stupid to seriously address.
Aww... you didn't like that piece of art?
It was brilliant though.
Philistines gonna philist, I guess.
D is easily observed and calculated.
Those tossing those things out are therefor liars. And liars are, again, the problem.
We know how much oil and coal has been burned. We know this because we can watch how much is sold and used in conventially burned forms. Simple chemistry tells us how much CO2 that produces.
It lines up very well with directly observed changes in atmospheric concentrations.
Yeah, you say that's a caricature, but can you give me any evidence it's not?
Prominent deniers not engaged in these tactics?
Of course I do. Clear explanations are not the problem here.
Climate change science can be turned into an executive summary quickly and easily. These summaries are essentially a bunch of incontestable facts that still get contested.
A. Carbon dioxide provably has much stronger absorption bands in the infra-red wavelengths than Nitrogen, and Oxygen, and a little more than water. These are the only compounds more prevalent in the atmosphere than CO2. You can run experiments in the lab seeing different radiative rates of cooling from different mixtures of "air" and CO2.
B. Paleoclimate reconstructions have show than CO2 concentrations consistently acts as a primary moderator of temperature on earth after the first occurrence of plantlife.
C. Naive modeling shows that substantially increasing the CO2 concentrations from current levels of the atmosphere shift the equilibrium temperatures of the planet substantially. More complex models incorporating other known factors, within the entire range of their uncertainty levels, show the same thing.
D. Human activity has almost doubled CO2 levels.
None of these 4 points are really scientifically questionable, and only naive skepticism(that is, pseudoskepticism) or ignorance leaves much room for debate on them.
Their implications are obvious, and we still get denial, and the problem is not with the structuring, but the behaviors of the deniers.
The problem, of course, is that "my" evidence is subtle, nuanced, quite voluminous, and requiring a reasonable level of backing in the details of atmospheric science to tackle.
This doesn't work well in an environment where dozens of people will post fairly identical posts that draw attention to one easily noticeable thing that doesn't actually demonstrate their point, but can appear to without examination of how that point is selected.
So... you see a couple dozen primary coping strategies in the climate change discussions. One is linking to careful debunking and explanation. To the kind of person who might be "on the fence", these are often lumped in as TL;DR equivalents to inane links to wattsupwiththat. And the balance fallacy strikes again.
And another coping strategy is to have big copy/pastes available to fully delineate why each given point is stupid. Except that requires an extraordinary library of precisely targeted rebuttals available at a moments notice. And due to the increased verbal complexity of these rebuttals they can, and do, come off as talking down in an impolite manner. On top of that they suffer the TL;DR problem above.
And the objectively wrong side cloaks itself in principle. Pretending to be morally superior in following the precepts of science, while doing the opposite. And all criticism can and is framed in this regard.
Most importantly, as a lay person who just happens to have a dash of meteorological education, it becomes difficult to formulate responses in a way I know to be perfectly in line with the science. This means any mistakes I make while trying to clear up disruptively misrepresntative statements can be structured as a "You were wrong about that, therefor everything" argument.
All this, collectively, points to suggesting the experts arguments as perhaps the most relevant, and thus should be deferred to.
And people who emotionally never grew past rebellious teenager will reject them outright without a moment of critical examination.
Osama bin Laden was only a couple blocks off from your target.
Seriously though, people alleging a world finance conspiracy to screw the little guy is exactly why the World Trade Organization was targeted. And a perceived American military hegemony was why the pentagon was targeted. I'm not trying to discredit you by comparing you to an international terrorist responsible for thousands of deaths, but instead trying to highlight that someone has acted on exactly this idea before.
It didn't turn out well for anyone.