a computer model that takes every potential factor into consideration
Every potential factor? I'm going to assume you mean this, since you tend to write precisely. You have already said there are "innumerable potential theories" for why the Earth is warming. I assume you mean that too. (Potential, n., the possibility of something happening in the future.)
Is there any way that anyone could build a computer model of any complex system that changes over time that takes into account every possible contributing variable or formula that anyone could ever think of? My answer is "clearly no." Is that your answer too? If your answer is "yes," can you give an example of how you would write a computer model of any complex system that "takes every potential factor into consideration"?
the unassailable fact is that there has never been causation actually shown. Only correlation. The "hockey stick graph," even if upheld, shows no causation whatsoever. To say the debate has ended because of correlation is, simply, a very stupid thing to do.... With global-warming-caused-by-man, there are innumerable potential theories, and right at the top of the list is "it's merely coincidental."
The claim being made is that man causes global warming, but the data does not show that. It shows only correlation, not causation. This is true. If you disagree, show me one paper that actually shows causation. I'll wait.
Yes, I said those things, and they are all true, and I am still waiting. It's quite telling that you've all this time still failed to provide such a paper. You challenged me to find a paper backing up what I said. I did. Now it's your turn.
Is there any possible way that a scientific paper on this subject could, to your mind, show causation? If so please provide a hypothetical example.
Is that seriously your argument for not trying to reduce the teratons of greenhouse gases we humans dump into the Earth's atmosphere every year?
(Sorry, I did some math in my head when I wrote that, and I multiplied wrong. We emit gigatons of carbon dioxide annually, about 24 gigatons. I've seen some sources saying 8 gigatons but I think that's just the weight of the carbon, a different way of measuring.)
Sorry to disappoint, but the amount of gas put into the atmosphere by human beings per year represents something like 0.06% of the total. The Mt. Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines, for example, put ten times that much into the atmosphere in a single belch.
Volcanoes release about 150-250 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually. That's 0.9% of the total that humans emit. Pinatubo's contribution to carbon dioxide was not the equivalent of 10 years of human emissions; if my math is right, more like 10 hours.
Global Warming is a religion. It is based on the belief that human beings are impacting the Earth's atmosphere in such a way as to cause THE ENTIRE PLANET to heat up. But to believe that this is happening, we must ignore the fact that the other planets are warming up as well and that the Sun is very active during a period when it should not be.
Incorrect. There are several ways to refute this. One might note that sunlight reaching the Earth's surface dimished significantly from 1970-1990, during a period of steep global warming (both those facts being firmly established by countless highly accurate measurements).
Or one might point out that even the proponents of this idea admit that there is no possible way it can account for even most of the observed increase in global temperature.
Oh, and while you're studying that graph, observe that CO2 levels for the past 400,000 years -- actually we now know for almost a million years thanks to new data -- have fluctuated between around 180 and 300 ppmv. At the lower end of that range, the planet experienced ice ages; at the upper end, the temperate climate we humans have enjoyed for the past 10,000 years.
Then notice that the CO2 level today is nearing 400 ppmv, and is expected to easily reach 500 during the 21st century unless substantial policy changes reduce human carbon emissions. Two points here. One, your concept that we humans cannot possibly disturb our environnment with noticeable quantities of CO2 is, to use your word, rubbish -- or perhaps I should call it, since it has no relation to science, "religion."
Two, if the ~100 ppmv variance of the past 400,000 years is the difference between ice age and livable Earth, do you suppose it might be significant that we humans have added an extra 100 on top of that, and, within my lifetime and maybe yours, another 100 still?
Pudge, you still blew it. After citing one of McIntyre and McKitrick's papers in a peer-reviewed social-science journal (I would have picked their one example from a more serious journal, the Geophysical Research Letters 2005 paper, but OK), you went straight to:
In fact, out of M&M's 10 claims, only one was sortof discredited...
Your link proving that "fact" was to a webpage set up by McIntyre and McKitrick themselves. I thought we were talking about science and how we know scientific debate is occurring or not. You apparently still don't understand that scientists self-publishing doesn't count; by that standard the jury is still out on whether humans evolved from animals and whether the earth goes around the sun. You might as well just point out that McIntyre has a website. Not every word that comes out of a scientist's mouth is a work of science; the peer-review check is critical to the scientific process.
Anyway, to avoid further digression, I'll allow that the scientific debate over the "hockey stick" graph has not quite ended yet. Give that just a few years, probably. From what I've read, McIntyre and McKitrick's analysis on that topic is so flawed, and has been dissected so thoroughly, that, real soon now, it's going to turn into an embarrassment for any serious journal that publishes their work.
But the "hockey stick" graph is just one way of reconstructing temperature, and it corroborates the many other ways that we know the earth is warming. Maybe the methods used to draw the "hockey stick" were flawed (though it's not looking that way). Getting back to what I actually said in the review of the movie, that has no impact on what I identified as Gore's main point:
There are minor errors. They don't detract from Gore's main point, on which the scientific debate has ended.
And the main point is scary, and almost too big to think about or talk about. The earth is warming, because of us. Sometime in the next hundred years, our environment is going to change in big ways. We can't predict it with much accuracy yet, but the best estimates we have are that it's going to be -- measured in lives and dollars -- really bad.
(a) The earth is warming, (b) because of humans, (c) big changes are coming, (d) we can't predict them very well yet but (e) our best estimates are that it's going to be really bad. You're welcome to try to find a single recent paper that argues with any of that. As a hint: McIntyre and McKitrick's "alternative" reconstructions all clearly show substantial global warming throughout the 20th century and they at no point deny that global warming is anthropogenic via CO2 emissions. There's not just scientific consensus on this, but, as far as anyone can tell, unanimity.
And while nobody has a crystal ball, the lack of substantial negative-feedback mechanisms found for this planet's greenhouse effect (quite the contrary, apparently), the ties between CO2 and temperature, and the current CO2 levels being far outside the norm for the past almost-million-years point to really bad stuff starting sometime this century.
With global-warming-caused-by-man, there are innumerable potential theories, and right at the top of the list is "it's merely coincidental." [...] The claim being made is that man causes global warming, but the data does not show that. It shows only correlation, not causation. This is true. If you disagree, show me one paper that actually shows causation. I'll wait.
Oooo. Since some people disagree, therefore McIntyre and McKitrick are wrong. No.
That was quick: we arrived almost immediately at the part about science that you don't understand. I am not pointing out merely that "some people disagree." You may be used to philosophical and religious discussions, where disagreements are not resolvable definitively and argumentation is a matter of superior persuasion.
But this is science; your sarcasm has no power here. It is not that "some people disagree." It is that the experts you cite have been shown to be incorrect in peer-reviewed journals, and to my knowledge there has been no response in kind. I've invited you to correct me on that and I invite you again.
The academy essentially upholds Mann's findings, although the panel concluded that systematic uncertainties in climate records from before 1600 were not communicated as clearly as they could have been. The NAS also confirmed some problems with the statistics. But the mistakes had a relatively minor impact on the overall finding...
The "excellent primer" was debunked a week or two ago. That was linked from this site called Slashdot, you may have heard of it?:) It's the link just after my review, "Global Warming Debunker Debunked."
My point was that Gore was not, as claimed, "still arguing over the existence of the medieval warming period." He acknowledged it and, in the film, called attention to it, using a graph of the best scientific figures available. I'm not sure why my pointing this out amuses you.
Your concern for uncertainty of measurement prior to the past 50 years is noted. I'm not sure why you think you understand the accuracy of temperature measurements better than, oh, let's say, climate scientists.
Ten years ago, the same group of scientists predicted that the ocean levels would rise 12 inches (actual levels rose something like 1 inch).
You're mistaken. You're probably thinking of
this essay,
which falsely claimed:
In 1988, James Hansen, a climatologist, told the US Congress that temperature would rise 0.3C by the end of the century (it rose 0.1C), and that sea level would rise several feet (no, one inch).
As for James Hansen, he did not tell the US Congress that temperatures would rise by 0.3C by the end of the past century. He presented three possible scenarios to the US Senate -- high, medium, and low. Both the high and low scenarios, he explained, were unlikely to materialise. The middle one was 'the most plausible.' As it happens, the middle scenario was almost exactly right. He did not claim, under any scenario, that sea levels would rise by several feet by 2000.
And what if global warming (on Earth) is due entirely to increased energy output from the Sun? This seems unlikely due to a number of reasons, but what if for the sake of argument it were true?
The effects on the Earth we leave to our grandchildren will be the same. If reducing greenhouse gas emissions can mitigate higher temperatures on the planet they will inherit, or at least buy them more time to deal with the problem, reducing the negative impact of the increased temperature, isn't that still worth doing? If we can save millions of people from being displaced, diseased, or killed due to global warming, then don't we owe it to them to try, regardless of warming's cause?
If an asteroid is going to hit the Earth in 100 years, we still need to find a way to deflect it, even though we aren't the ones who put it up there...
Note that the Reason article basically agrees with Gore on every major point. Global warming is happening. It's caused to some extent by human activity. Glaciers are melting because of global warming. Predictions are that polar bears "will have a problem," he says euphemistically, and he cites a very conservative estimate whose severity has been upgraded within the past few months.
The Reason article even paraphrases Gore as saying "global warming is increasing the intensity of hurricanes," and retorts "that claim is hotly contested by climate scientists." The paper it links to says right in its abstract, "There has been a small increase in global Category 4-5 hurricanes" in the past 20 years -- a 10% increase actually -- and it says not all of that 10% can be explained away. And the only significant correlations that it finds between wind strength and sea surface temp are positive: a 0.39 correlation in the North Atlantic and 0.59 in the NE Pacific (table 3).
In other words, far from being an exaggerator, Gore's presentation of the science in the movie has been pretty much spot-on. Note in particular that when Gore talks about sea levels rising 20 feet, he clearly says, in the movie, that this will only happen if the Greenland or Antarctic ice melts completely, which he points out is speculation. Rent the movie:)
Nobody knows to precisely what extent humans have caused the global warming problem, but clearly we are some part of the problem. Does it matter if our fossil fuel usage has caused 20% of the problem, or 80%, or even 150%? (Maybe the Earth would be cooling if not for our carbon emissions.) Even if it were 0% -- if our net emissions cancelled each other out and the Earth were heating up exactly the same as if we were not here -- we would still have to reduce carbon emissions to buy our grandchildren time to solve the problem of living on a warming Earth.
"State of Fear" is a work of fiction, yes, and should be treated as such. It's been debunked pretty thoroughly, with even Crichton's supporters admitting he botched some key facts.
I was speaking with care (and I knew people would take exception in the comments).
The scientific debate about whether the earth is warming, and whether humans have played a role in that, is over. Just like the debate about whether the earth goes around the sun is over, and the debate about whether humans and other primates evolved from a common ancestor is over. There is just far too much evidence for these things for any reasonable, intelligent scientist to have serious doubt.
OK, I may exaggerate here a bit. Global climate science is not as old a field as astronomy or biology, nor is global warming established to the umpteen-9's degree of certainty that the other two I mentioned are (but then again, few things in science are, I picked two rock-solid examples). Maybe I should have said the debate about global warming is over just like the debate about Big Bang theory is over; those are probably more closely matched examples. It's very remotely possible that a revolution in cosmology could uncover an alternative to the Big Bang -- it would be the scientific masterpiece of the century if that did happen -- and it's approximately as possible that the agreed-upon climate models which show human production of carbon dioxide being responsible for the Earth's increasing temperature to be completely incorrect.
But I hope you get my point. It's fine to say the scientific debate is over regarding whether the solar system follows the laws of Aristotle or those of Copernicus, Kepler and Einstein. It's true, it's over, and it does not diminish the science of Kepler's theories one bit to say so.
Re:The scientific debate has ended?
on
An Inconvenient Truth
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Last I heard, they were still arguing over the existence of the medieval warming period
Watch the movie. It did exist. Gore points to it on a graph. You may be surprised.
Please use "!proved" to mean the opposite of "proved" -- we'll eventually implement synonyms for tags and those two forms of opposites will join together anyway.
And of course if you want to express the opposite of the suggested tags or any others, prepend a "!", e.g. "!notscience !notproved !fud". Of course, categorizational tags ("globalwarming algore") are just as welcome as opinion tags and ultimately help Slashdot even more...
Yes, I was suggesting that you watch something important, like the movie, rather than latch onto something unimportant, like whether its cast and crew drove four blocks on one occasion.
We are in danger of becoming a society where science is the new priesthood, universities are the new temples, and PhDs are the new bishops of a timid and trusting flock. I'd say this corruption of science is almost as alarming as global warming, and far easier to demonstrate. Any true follower of science must reject "consensus" for what it is: argument by authority.
Incorrect. Argument by authority "is fallacious only when the person [cited] is not a legitimate authority in a particular context." Climate scientists are, of course, exactly the authority one should cite about matters of climate science.
Comparing science to religion is very much the rage but the simple fact is that science produces testable theories which seek to correctly describe the world around us, while religion does not. Anyone with education and intelligence who studies scientific research or does their own scientific experiments can correct scientific errors, and this is not true for religion.
I'm not sure why you went off and attacked the concept of consensus because I wrote (correctly) that the scientific debate on this matter had ended. The vast majority of climate scientists acknowledge that the Earth is getting warmer and that one of the causes is human production of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. It is virtually impossible to find any respectable scientist who will disagree, anymore.
What this means is that we -- lay readers like you and I, and scientists alike -- can move on to other questions. Maverick scientists are of course welcome to try to disprove the existing consensus belief, and the wonderful thing about science is that they are always welcome to do so (and will receive great acclaim if they are right and everyone else is wrong). But it is correct, and significant, and important to say that there is consensus and the scientific debate on this particular question is over.
Want to know my favorite part of the movie? When at the premier, the entire "cast" got into big Lincoln SUV's.
I would suggest you actually watch the movie.
Re:Did Al Gore buy advertising on this site?
on
An Inconvenient Truth
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I have no idea whether Al Gore or anyone affiliated with the film bought advertising on this site. The content/editorial side and the advertising side are kept separate on Slashdot as well or better than any other news website out there.
And it already is filed under both politics and science (check the icons near the top of the story). Both are clearly applicable.
I know Mars' atmosphere is thin. But wouldn't having a patch of dirt heated 120 deg C warmer than the rest of the planet force the air to rise over that spot, basically forming a permanent tornado?
Just ask Michael Steele, the Republican that ran for a senate seat in Maryland, and just barely lost. He's black and Republican, so he has had his party identification mislabelled on CNN (D vs. R), and he's had Oreos thrown at him (Oreos are black on the outside, white on the inside).
Most witnesses there don't remember it happening; the two who claim it happened didn't mention it in interviews shortly afterwards; their "Oreo" claim didn't crop up until five days after the event; the original story was quite different, changing in significant detail in the retelling; Steele's own versions outright contradict the other alleged witnesses; and the building manager who helped clean up that evening found "no cookies or anything else abnormal." It seems unlikely that the alleged Oreo incident ever occurred.
I understand why you'd think it did, though; indeed, why you apparently think this has happened more than once. The media is happy to hype this allegation despite the evidence to the contrary.
Slashdot Mirror
Every potential factor? I'm going to assume you mean this, since you tend to write precisely. You have already said there are "innumerable potential theories" for why the Earth is warming. I assume you mean that too. (Potential, n., the possibility of something happening in the future.)
Is there any way that anyone could build a computer model of any complex system that changes over time that takes into account every possible contributing variable or formula that anyone could ever think of? My answer is "clearly no." Is that your answer too? If your answer is "yes," can you give an example of how you would write a computer model of any complex system that "takes every potential factor into consideration"?
The claim being made is that man causes global warming, but the data does not show that. It shows only correlation, not causation. This is true. If you disagree, show me one paper that actually shows causation. I'll wait.
Yes, I said those things, and they are all true, and I am still waiting. It's quite telling that you've all this time still failed to provide such a paper. You challenged me to find a paper backing up what I said. I did. Now it's your turn.
Is there any possible way that a scientific paper on this subject could, to your mind, show causation? If so please provide a hypothetical example.
(Sorry, I did some math in my head when I wrote that, and I multiplied wrong. We emit gigatons of carbon dioxide annually, about 24 gigatons. I've seen some sources saying 8 gigatons but I think that's just the weight of the carbon, a different way of measuring.)
Volcanoes release about 150-250 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually. That's 0.9% of the total that humans emit. Pinatubo's contribution to carbon dioxide was not the equivalent of 10 years of human emissions; if my math is right, more like 10 hours.
Incorrect. There are several ways to refute this. One might note that sunlight reaching the Earth's surface dimished significantly from 1970-1990, during a period of steep global warming (both those facts being firmly established by countless highly accurate measurements).
Or one might point out that even the proponents of this idea admit that there is no possible way it can account for even most of the observed increase in global temperature.
Probably the best way to refute it is with data. Look at a plot of historical temperature overlaid with historical CO2 levels. If you can't see the correlation there you need new glasses.
Oh, and while you're studying that graph, observe that CO2 levels for the past 400,000 years -- actually we now know for almost a million years thanks to new data -- have fluctuated between around 180 and 300 ppmv. At the lower end of that range, the planet experienced ice ages; at the upper end, the temperate climate we humans have enjoyed for the past 10,000 years.
Then notice that the CO2 level today is nearing 400 ppmv, and is expected to easily reach 500 during the 21st century unless substantial policy changes reduce human carbon emissions. Two points here. One, your concept that we humans cannot possibly disturb our environnment with noticeable quantities of CO2 is, to use your word, rubbish -- or perhaps I should call it, since it has no relation to science, "religion."
Two, if the ~100 ppmv variance of the past 400,000 years is the difference between ice age and livable Earth, do you suppose it might be significant that we humans have added an extra 100 on top of that, and, within my lifetime and maybe yours, another 100 still?
Pudge, you still blew it. After citing one of McIntyre and McKitrick's papers in a peer-reviewed social-science journal (I would have picked their one example from a more serious journal, the Geophysical Research Letters 2005 paper, but OK), you went straight to:
Your link proving that "fact" was to a webpage set up by McIntyre and McKitrick themselves. I thought we were talking about science and how we know scientific debate is occurring or not. You apparently still don't understand that scientists self-publishing doesn't count; by that standard the jury is still out on whether humans evolved from animals and whether the earth goes around the sun. You might as well just point out that McIntyre has a website. Not every word that comes out of a scientist's mouth is a work of science; the peer-review check is critical to the scientific process.
Anyway, to avoid further digression, I'll allow that the scientific debate over the "hockey stick" graph has not quite ended yet. Give that just a few years, probably. From what I've read, McIntyre and McKitrick's analysis on that topic is so flawed, and has been dissected so thoroughly, that, real soon now, it's going to turn into an embarrassment for any serious journal that publishes their work.
But the "hockey stick" graph is just one way of reconstructing temperature, and it corroborates the many other ways that we know the earth is warming. Maybe the methods used to draw the "hockey stick" were flawed (though it's not looking that way). Getting back to what I actually said in the review of the movie, that has no impact on what I identified as Gore's main point:
(a) The earth is warming, (b) because of humans, (c) big changes are coming, (d) we can't predict them very well yet but (e) our best estimates are that it's going to be really bad. You're welcome to try to find a single recent paper that argues with any of that. As a hint: McIntyre and McKitrick's "alternative" reconstructions all clearly show substantial global warming throughout the 20th century and they at no point deny that global warming is anthropogenic via CO2 emissions. There's not just scientific consensus on this, but, as far as anyone can tell, unanimity.
And while nobody has a crystal ball, the lack of substantial negative-feedback mechanisms found for this planet's greenhouse effect (quite the contrary, apparently), the ties between CO2 and temperature, and the current CO2 levels being far outside the norm for the past almost-million-years point to really bad stuff starting sometime this century.
I guess I recognize that you aren't going to accept any of this, because you don't really understand what the science is saying:
That was quick: we arrived almost immediately at the part about science that you don't understand. I am not pointing out merely that "some people disagree." You may be used to philosophical and religious discussions, where disagreements are not resolvable definitively and argumentation is a matter of superior persuasion.
But this is science; your sarcasm has no power here. It is not that "some people disagree." It is that the experts you cite have been shown to be incorrect in peer-reviewed journals, and to my knowledge there has been no response in kind. I've invited you to correct me on that and I invite you again.
Bradley 2003, Rutherford 2005, Wahl 2006, ...
I don't think you can point to any peer-reviewed papers which demonstrate any of the significant facts you just claimed.
Your claims are wrong. You may want to start reading here:
False Claims by McIntyre and McKitrick regarding the Mann et al. (1998) reconstruction (Dec. 4, 2004)
Myth vs. Fact Regarding the "Hockey Stick" (Dec. 4, 2004)
On Yet Another False Claim by McIntyre and McKitrick (Jan. 6, 2005)
Dummies guide to the latest "Hockey Stock" controversy (Feb. 18, 2005)
and
Academy affirms hockey-stick graph
Is that seriously your argument for not trying to reduce the teratons of greenhouse gases we humans dump into the Earth's atmosphere every year?
Seriously?!
The FCC has made it clear that banning certain types of traffic -- as at least one ISP has already tried -- won't be tolerated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality#Legal_ history
The "excellent primer" was debunked a week or two ago. That was linked from this site called Slashdot, you may have heard of it? :) It's the link just after my review, "Global Warming Debunker Debunked."
My point was that Gore was not, as claimed, "still arguing over the existence of the medieval warming period." He acknowledged it and, in the film, called attention to it, using a graph of the best scientific figures available. I'm not sure why my pointing this out amuses you.
Your concern for uncertainty of measurement prior to the past 50 years is noted. I'm not sure why you think you understand the accuracy of temperature measurements better than, oh, let's say, climate scientists.
You're mistaken. You're probably thinking of this essay, which falsely claimed:
Slashdot linked to that essay when it was published, but we also linked to its debunking by George Monbiot a week later:
And what if global warming (on Earth) is due entirely to increased energy output from the Sun? This seems unlikely due to a number of reasons, but what if for the sake of argument it were true?
The effects on the Earth we leave to our grandchildren will be the same. If reducing greenhouse gas emissions can mitigate higher temperatures on the planet they will inherit, or at least buy them more time to deal with the problem, reducing the negative impact of the increased temperature, isn't that still worth doing? If we can save millions of people from being displaced, diseased, or killed due to global warming, then don't we owe it to them to try, regardless of warming's cause?
If an asteroid is going to hit the Earth in 100 years, we still need to find a way to deflect it, even though we aren't the ones who put it up there...
Note that the Reason article basically agrees with Gore on every major point. Global warming is happening. It's caused to some extent by human activity. Glaciers are melting because of global warming. Predictions are that polar bears "will have a problem," he says euphemistically, and he cites a very conservative estimate whose severity has been upgraded within the past few months.
The Reason article even paraphrases Gore as saying "global warming is increasing the intensity of hurricanes," and retorts "that claim is hotly contested by climate scientists." The paper it links to says right in its abstract, "There has been a small increase in global Category 4-5 hurricanes" in the past 20 years -- a 10% increase actually -- and it says not all of that 10% can be explained away. And the only significant correlations that it finds between wind strength and sea surface temp are positive: a 0.39 correlation in the North Atlantic and 0.59 in the NE Pacific (table 3).
In other words, far from being an exaggerator, Gore's presentation of the science in the movie has been pretty much spot-on. Note in particular that when Gore talks about sea levels rising 20 feet, he clearly says, in the movie, that this will only happen if the Greenland or Antarctic ice melts completely, which he points out is speculation. Rent the movie :)
Nobody knows to precisely what extent humans have caused the global warming problem, but clearly we are some part of the problem. Does it matter if our fossil fuel usage has caused 20% of the problem, or 80%, or even 150%? (Maybe the Earth would be cooling if not for our carbon emissions.) Even if it were 0% -- if our net emissions cancelled each other out and the Earth were heating up exactly the same as if we were not here -- we would still have to reduce carbon emissions to buy our grandchildren time to solve the problem of living on a warming Earth.
"State of Fear" is a work of fiction, yes, and should be treated as such. It's been debunked pretty thoroughly, with even Crichton's supporters admitting he botched some key facts.
Michael Crichton's State of Confusion, by Gavin Schmidt, Earth Institute climate scientist and RealClimate.org contributor
Michael Crichton and Global Warming, by David B. Sandalow
I addressed similar issues in other threads, here and here.
I was speaking with care (and I knew people would take exception in the comments).
The scientific debate about whether the earth is warming, and whether humans have played a role in that, is over. Just like the debate about whether the earth goes around the sun is over, and the debate about whether humans and other primates evolved from a common ancestor is over. There is just far too much evidence for these things for any reasonable, intelligent scientist to have serious doubt.
OK, I may exaggerate here a bit. Global climate science is not as old a field as astronomy or biology, nor is global warming established to the umpteen-9's degree of certainty that the other two I mentioned are (but then again, few things in science are, I picked two rock-solid examples). Maybe I should have said the debate about global warming is over just like the debate about Big Bang theory is over; those are probably more closely matched examples. It's very remotely possible that a revolution in cosmology could uncover an alternative to the Big Bang -- it would be the scientific masterpiece of the century if that did happen -- and it's approximately as possible that the agreed-upon climate models which show human production of carbon dioxide being responsible for the Earth's increasing temperature to be completely incorrect.
But I hope you get my point. It's fine to say the scientific debate is over regarding whether the solar system follows the laws of Aristotle or those of Copernicus, Kepler and Einstein. It's true, it's over, and it does not diminish the science of Kepler's theories one bit to say so.
Watch the movie. It did exist. Gore points to it on a graph. You may be surprised.
Please use "!proved" to mean the opposite of "proved" -- we'll eventually implement synonyms for tags and those two forms of opposites will join together anyway.
And of course if you want to express the opposite of the suggested tags or any others, prepend a "!", e.g. "!notscience !notproved !fud". Of course, categorizational tags ("globalwarming algore") are just as welcome as opinion tags and ultimately help Slashdot even more...
Yes, I was suggesting that you watch something important, like the movie, rather than latch onto something unimportant, like whether its cast and crew drove four blocks on one occasion.
Incorrect. Argument by authority "is fallacious only when the person [cited] is not a legitimate authority in a particular context." Climate scientists are, of course, exactly the authority one should cite about matters of climate science.
Comparing science to religion is very much the rage but the simple fact is that science produces testable theories which seek to correctly describe the world around us, while religion does not. Anyone with education and intelligence who studies scientific research or does their own scientific experiments can correct scientific errors, and this is not true for religion.
I'm not sure why you went off and attacked the concept of consensus because I wrote (correctly) that the scientific debate on this matter had ended. The vast majority of climate scientists acknowledge that the Earth is getting warmer and that one of the causes is human production of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. It is virtually impossible to find any respectable scientist who will disagree, anymore.
What this means is that we -- lay readers like you and I, and scientists alike -- can move on to other questions. Maverick scientists are of course welcome to try to disprove the existing consensus belief, and the wonderful thing about science is that they are always welcome to do so (and will receive great acclaim if they are right and everyone else is wrong). But it is correct, and significant, and important to say that there is consensus and the scientific debate on this particular question is over.
Incorrect.
I would suggest you actually watch the movie.
I have no idea whether Al Gore or anyone affiliated with the film bought advertising on this site. The content/editorial side and the advertising side are kept separate on Slashdot as well or better than any other news website out there.
And it already is filed under both politics and science (check the icons near the top of the story). Both are clearly applicable.
Maybe it's time for MythBusters to RE-revisit cutting a sword with a sword...
I know Mars' atmosphere is thin. But wouldn't having a patch of dirt heated 120 deg C warmer than the rest of the planet force the air to rise over that spot, basically forming a permanent tornado?
Most witnesses there don't remember it happening; the two who claim it happened didn't mention it in interviews shortly afterwards; their "Oreo" claim didn't crop up until five days after the event; the original story was quite different, changing in significant detail in the retelling; Steele's own versions outright contradict the other alleged witnesses; and the building manager who helped clean up that evening found "no cookies or anything else abnormal." It seems unlikely that the alleged Oreo incident ever occurred.
I understand why you'd think it did, though; indeed, why you apparently think this has happened more than once. The media is happy to hype this allegation despite the evidence to the contrary.