Man, if that attitude doesn't hit the bullseye for why our society is falling apart I don't know what does.
Admittedly, there is a spectrum; opinions on one side, incontrovertible facts on the other. And you can armwave frantically about epistemology. Still, whether you choose to philosophize about it or not, we have a rich and precise (though incomplete) mathematical description of reality that is true enough that we can exchange messages on the internet, launch satellites to other planets, design drugs, etc.
The attitude that there is nothing that is for practical purposes incontrovertible subverts the competence of democracy and bizarrely presumes away the existence of science and engineering.
mt
While everyone is entitled to their own opinion, nobody is entitled to their own facts. (I need an atribution for that; it isn't original.)
Muddling the population's grasp of the facts is not hard, as there is too much going on for us all to be an expert on everything. It nevertheless is cheating. There is much organized cheating going on, intended to confuse the population. The effects of this cheating are visible in any online conversation where science impinges on policy, and slashdot is hardly immune.
Whether or not human activity is substantially changing climate, for instance, is not a speculative matter. Its truth or falsehood is established science. Nevertheless there is organized activity to convince you of the plausibility of impossible propositions.
Splitting the difference is not as reasonable as it might appear, as the side which is lying is totally unconstrained by facts.
Any debate on whether humanity is substantially changing climate constitutes a failure of the society to use the information it has, of the scientific community to convey it, and of the special interests to restrain vicious antisocial activity on the part of some of its key members.
I do not specify which side is lying on this matter. It won't be hard for you to track down my opinion, but that's beside the point I'm making here. The point is that we are debating facts and not values or policies, which means that democracy is not functioning effectively.
This is occurring in the context of a number of similar failures to come to grips with reality in the absurd noise that passes for public discourse in America, and the irresponsible power games that pass for politics. Climate change probably isn't the most harmful case, yet, though it's competitive...
Don't forget one other kind of radiation, the infrared radiation that takes a couple extra bounces off our fossil fuel waste floating practically forever in the atmosphere, before it makes its way out to space.
In case you hadn't heard, that changes the temperature and climate of the surface, and the effect is cumulative.
Hell I could throw in stats and references about the decreases in tropical storm activity, but I think I've made my point enough
Maybe, if your point is that you can cherry pick some data and wave in its general direction to confuse people.
If your point is that there is no danger from anthropogenic global warming, no, you haven't made it, but I notice you cleverly haven't even said what your point is, which makes you hard to refute.
Sigh. No, they just don't have ebough data of that type (dated tree rings) from before 800 AD to extend their results back that far. That doesn't mean that the eighth century was warm.
Most likely the world was about as warm as today about 6000 years ago, and not since then. Most likely the year 2100 will be *much* warmer than that. This is just another piece of evidence among many to that effect.
Radiative transfer physics has been pretty much in the bag for sixty years now. The surface temperature of Venus isn't accounted for by its being closer to the sun.
The only problem with your argument is that it is based on false assertions. The unprecedentedly rapid incrase in atmospheric CO2 over the past century can't be accounted for by volcanos. If volcanos were competitive with anthropogenic sources, they would show up in the ice core records as comparable spikes. They don't.
mt
That isn't a guess, that's an unbiased estimate. They explained why the estimate is useful. Would you prefer to ignore that part of the Earth's surface instead ?
The exact temperature of the earth over a year is not measured precisely. We are essentially tied with aa huge El Nino year in '98 for the warmest on record, close to the warmest in the interglacial, and climbing fast. All the measures show this. For a non El Nino year to be a warm outlier is unprecedented. This is a very big deal, but of course people are hung up on records and asterisks like it was baseball.
The IPCC WGI reports are not written by politicians. Don't trust me. Look.
Nothing is non-controversial if someone wants to stir up a controversy. That last year was strong confirmation of accelerating anthropogenic global warming (the point we are supposedly debating) is not controversial among the relevant scientific communities. It wouldn't be controversial elsewhere either, if there weren't a systematic campaign of disinformation by people who have a lot of wealth sunk into fossil fuel reserves.
You have a recipe for any party to disrupt effective use of information by the government. Of course, it isn't original. It's exactly the recipe that is in use. Scientific consensus is meaningless if there is "controversy" or "politics"? Don't like where the science is leading? OK, drum up some controversy.
Consensus isn't "the best that we have", it is simply the political way the scientific community works. Period. So its the ONLY thing we have. That doesn't mean it works or not.
Right, so it's only a coincidence that our packets are reaching each other...
Look, there's plenty of empirical evidence that science usually works. The more prominent failures in the physical sciences are getting pretty old.
don't make public policy based upon that consensus unless the evidence to support it is pretty convincing!
If the evidence weren't pretty convincing there wouldn't be a consensus. That's the point.
Ah, you mean Ruddiman's work on the early anthropocene. He postulates an early start to anthropogenic warming, so you've got him wrong, but that's sort of a red herring, isn't it?
Anyway, how does this "article from SciAm a few months back" support any of your claims?
"I read a pop science article once" does not constitute a reference.
Sure. My point is that your choices #1 and #2 do not form a complete set of alternatives. Whether you dislike my point #3 is a separate matter. I didn't claim the amended list was exhaustive either.
Human emissions are different from non-human ones because human ones are new.
The background CO2 concentrations result fomr natural sources and sinks. They reach a rough equilibrium.
If humans add substantial new sources and no new sinks, the equilibrium will shift. If humans add ever-increasing new sources, the system will not equilibrate until the new sources stop increasing. This is the situation in which we find ourselves today.
> We know perfectly well that non-human greenhouse gas and other emissions have had dramatic effects on the Earth's climate.
Yes.
> We know perfectly well that such events have had terrible economic consquences at times.
No, this is wrong. There have been no climatologically significant shifts in greenhouse gases over the history of civilization until the last half century.
You have a point, but you have your time scales all scrambled. Also, as far as I know, no single-event volcano has had a dramatic effect on CO2 though there are aerosol cooling events caused by volcanoes that have on occasion had serious effects.
Your two possibilities do not constitute an exhaustive list.
Predicting climate is not the same as predicting weather. I do not know whether next year Chicago will have a white Christmas, but I am confident that Christmas will be colder than the fourth of July.
Allow me to offer #3: We have a deep understanding of radiative transfer, thanks in large measure to astrophysicists. We know what causes the mean surface temperature of a planet; it is a consequence in large measure of certain atmospheric constituents. We know we are changing the concentrations of these dramatically. We see roughly the expected warming. Our extrapolations of these phenomena lead to alarming territory. There are enough honest scientists that near unanimity cannot be faked on matters of importance.
Indeed, we could make the earth unsuitable for life except maybe a few clever single-celled organisms. One effective way to do that would be to design a set of greenhouse gases to increase the opacity of the atmosphere across the infrared band.
This simply amounts to changing the color of the atmosphere, which obviously we already have the capacity to do: the Milky Way used to be considered a plainly visible feature of the night sky, for instance. When was the last time you saw it?
Sufficient deliberate darkening of the atmpsphere across the infrared would boil the oceans. This is not farfetched at all. It has already happened on Venus. We have the technology. Should we get started? Any VC's interested?
> Definately a natural cycle is contributing to it, this is known.
Actually the measured natural forcings would indicate that the earth should be cooling slowly, as it has been doing for the past 6K years.Admittedly there are some shallow century scale wobbles, not very well understood, that might be in a warming phase superimposed. However, these might also be in a cooling phase. In any case they are too small to account
for what we are seeing.
So it is a bit more likely than not that over 100% of the observed warming is anthropogenic. We don't say this to the public very much, as they would find it confusing.
In a way, the issue is not that complicated at all. We know that all else equal greenhnouse gases cause warming. We know that greenhouse gas concentrations are increasing rapidly. We know that temperatures are increasing rapidly. The
obvious hypothesis is the same as the consensus.
An alternative hypothesis would have to have two parts. 1) Why the increasing greenhouse gases are ineffective in raising temperature and 2) Why the temperature is rising rapidly anyway, coincident in time with the greenhnouse gas increases. No such theory is being offerred by the so-called skeptics.
The scientific consensus doesn't exist because scientists are immoral or stupid. The scientific consensus exists because
the evidence is pretty much incontrovertible.
There's nothing magical about something frozen that somehow makes it a better heat sink than something that's not frozen. A large body of frozen land at -1C has 2 degrees more capacity than one at 1C, no more, no less. The local ecosystem's going to be different, but not its ability to absorb heat. Its water content is a different matter, but it's an open question whether formerly permafrosted areas will be wetter or drier after they melt.
You really don't know what you are talking about, do you? Heat capacity does not go down by two degrees when temperature goes up by two degrees. At what point is a substance full, then?
Without going any further into how confused your idea of thermodynamics is, the main points about melting the tundra are these: when ice vanishes, the color of the land gets darker, reflecting less solar radiation into space, warming the land, and tending to cause the ice margin to further retreat (or, in a cooling event, advance). So the ice margin is a potent amplifier of trends. Also, when permafrost melts, various forms of carbon taht were sequestered from the fast
geochemical cycles are released. More carbon is in play. Assuming we know anything at all about radiative physics (and
I concede that you, apparently, don't know much personally) that will also exacerbate the situation.
You are entitled to be confused. That is not a crime. Obviously there are a bunch of people out there going out of their way to confuse you. Still, I fail to see why people feel compelled to share their confusion with everyone else in such a brashly confident way.
> Actually overall ice depth in the Antarctic regions has steadily increased with the exception of one small ice shelf.
Actually, the Antarctic interior may be thickening slightly, but the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets and smaller glaciers worldwide are thinning rapidly, and total ice volume is diminishing rapidly.
> Scientists have concluded that will all the C02 emissions from cars and factories it is still a microscopic amount.
Complete nonsense. Atmospheric CO2 is rising faster than at any time in at minimum the last 50 million years, and
its isotopic signature shows that it is of fossil origin. I can explain where this myth comes from but let's get the main point stated first.
> Michael Crichton does some in depth research and wrote a very provoking article upon environmentalism.
The definitive Chrichton debunking is here. As for his rants about consensus, they are so subversive of the scientific method as to be almost criminal.
There is a consensus about evolution. There is a consensus that tobacco is carcinogenic. There is a consensus that the world is a sphere. There are a few people here and there who would argue otherwise. Does that make the consensus disreputable?
To be sure, there are (increasingly rare) cases of a solid scientific consensus that is in error, but to bet against the common opinion of the best informed people on a given matter (in other words, against the scientific consensus) is to take very long odds.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't seen much of his stuff lately, but in the 90s he used to publish stuff about climate change that was pretty much just plain wrong. mt
Voting machines have different numbers of fonts???
Really the idea of using a general purpose OS for this application is incompetent at best.
Man, if that attitude doesn't hit the bullseye for why our society is falling apart I don't know what does. Admittedly, there is a spectrum; opinions on one side, incontrovertible facts on the other. And you can armwave frantically about epistemology. Still, whether you choose to philosophize about it or not, we have a rich and precise (though incomplete) mathematical description of reality that is true enough that we can exchange messages on the internet, launch satellites to other planets, design drugs, etc. The attitude that there is nothing that is for practical purposes incontrovertible subverts the competence of democracy and bizarrely presumes away the existence of science and engineering. mt
While everyone is entitled to their own opinion, nobody is entitled to their own facts. (I need an atribution for that; it isn't original.)
Muddling the population's grasp of the facts is not hard, as there is too much going on for us all to be an expert on everything. It nevertheless is cheating. There is much organized cheating going on, intended to confuse the population. The effects of this cheating are visible in any online conversation where science impinges on policy, and slashdot is hardly immune.
Whether or not human activity is substantially changing climate, for instance, is not a speculative matter. Its truth or falsehood is established science. Nevertheless there is organized activity to convince you of the plausibility of impossible propositions.
Splitting the difference is not as reasonable as it might appear, as the side which is lying is totally unconstrained by facts.
Any debate on whether humanity is substantially changing climate constitutes a failure of the society to use the information it has, of the scientific community to convey it, and of the special interests to restrain vicious antisocial activity on the part of some of its key members.
I do not specify which side is lying on this matter. It won't be hard for you to track down my opinion, but that's beside the point I'm making here. The point is that we are debating facts and not values or policies, which means that democracy is not functioning effectively.
This is occurring in the context of a number of similar failures to come to grips with reality in the absurd noise that passes for public discourse in America, and the irresponsible power games that pass for politics. Climate change probably isn't the most harmful case, yet, though it's competitive...
Don't forget one other kind of radiation, the infrared radiation that takes a couple extra bounces off our fossil fuel waste floating practically forever in the atmosphere, before it makes its way out to space.
In case you hadn't heard, that changes the temperature and climate of the surface, and the effect is cumulative.
Maybe, if your point is that you can cherry pick some data and wave in its general direction to confuse people.
If your point is that there is no danger from anthropogenic global warming, no, you haven't made it, but I notice you cleverly haven't even said what your point is, which makes you hard to refute.
Sigh. No, they just don't have ebough data of that type (dated tree rings) from before 800 AD to extend their results back that far. That doesn't mean that the eighth century was warm.
Most likely the world was about as warm as today about 6000 years ago, and not since then. Most likely the year 2100 will be *much* warmer than that. This is just another piece of evidence among many to that effect.
Decide for yourself whether it's an appropriate lecture for a climate scientist to give: here
Why is credulity stretched?
Radiative transfer physics has been pretty much in the bag for sixty years now. The surface temperature of Venus isn't accounted for by its being closer to the sun.
Greenhouse gases matter.
The only problem with your argument is that it is based on false assertions. The unprecedentedly rapid incrase in atmospheric CO2 over the past century can't be accounted for by volcanos. If volcanos were competitive with anthropogenic sources, they would show up in the ice core records as comparable spikes. They don't. mt
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/306/ 5702/1686
That isn't a guess, that's an unbiased estimate. They explained why the estimate is useful. Would you prefer to ignore that part of the Earth's surface instead ?
The exact temperature of the earth over a year is not measured precisely. We are essentially tied with aa huge El Nino year in '98 for the warmest on record, close to the warmest in the interglacial, and climbing fast. All the measures show this. For a non El Nino year to be a warm outlier is unprecedented. This is a very big deal, but of course people are hung up on records and asterisks like it was baseball.
mt
Nothing is non-controversial if someone wants to stir up a controversy. That last year was strong confirmation of accelerating anthropogenic global warming (the point we are supposedly debating) is not controversial among the relevant scientific communities. It wouldn't be controversial elsewhere either, if there weren't a systematic campaign of disinformation by people who have a lot of wealth sunk into fossil fuel reserves.
You have a recipe for any party to disrupt effective use of information by the government. Of course, it isn't original. It's exactly the recipe that is in use. Scientific consensus is meaningless if there is "controversy" or "politics"? Don't like where the science is leading? OK, drum up some controversy.
Right, so it's only a coincidence that our packets are reaching each other...
Look, there's plenty of empirical evidence that science usually works. The more prominent failures in the physical sciences are getting pretty old.
don't make public policy based upon that consensus unless the evidence to support it is pretty convincing!
If the evidence weren't pretty convincing there wouldn't be a consensus. That's the point.
Ah, you mean Ruddiman's work on the early anthropocene. He postulates an early start to anthropogenic warming, so you've got him wrong, but that's sort of a red herring, isn't it?
Anyway, how does this "article from SciAm a few months back" support any of your claims?
"I read a pop science article once" does not constitute a reference.
Sure. My point is that your choices #1 and #2 do not form a complete set of alternatives. Whether you dislike my point #3 is a separate matter. I didn't claim the amended list was exhaustive either.
Human emissions are different from non-human ones because human ones are new.
The background CO2 concentrations result fomr natural sources and sinks. They reach a rough equilibrium.
If humans add substantial new sources and no new sinks, the equilibrium will shift. If humans add ever-increasing new sources, the system will not equilibrate until the new sources stop increasing. This is the situation in which we find ourselves today.
> We know perfectly well that non-human greenhouse gas and other emissions have had dramatic effects on the Earth's climate.
Yes.
> We know perfectly well that such events have had terrible economic consquences at times.
No, this is wrong. There have been no climatologically significant shifts in greenhouse gases over the history of civilization until the last half century.
You have a point, but you have your time scales all scrambled. Also, as far as I know, no single-event volcano has had a dramatic effect on CO2 though there are aerosol cooling events caused by volcanoes that have on occasion had serious effects.
mt
What's more, volcanos are one of the processes that set the natural equilibrium, while human emissions are a new component.
Comparing human emissions to volcanic emissions is not even the right question.
Your two possibilities do not constitute an exhaustive list.
Predicting climate is not the same as predicting weather. I do not know whether next year Chicago will have a white Christmas, but I am confident that Christmas will be colder than the fourth of July.
Allow me to offer #3: We have a deep understanding of radiative transfer, thanks in large measure to astrophysicists. We know what causes the mean surface temperature of a planet; it is a consequence in large measure of certain atmospheric constituents. We know we are changing the concentrations of these dramatically. We see roughly the expected warming. Our extrapolations of these phenomena lead to alarming territory. There are enough honest scientists that near unanimity cannot be faked on matters of importance.
I don't see this possibility on on your list.
Indeed, we could make the earth unsuitable for life except maybe a few clever single-celled organisms. One effective way to do that would be to design a set of greenhouse gases to increase the opacity of the atmosphere across the infrared band.
This simply amounts to changing the color of the atmosphere, which obviously we already have the capacity to do: the Milky Way used to be considered a plainly visible feature of the night sky, for instance. When was the last time you saw it?
Sufficient deliberate darkening of the atmpsphere across the infrared would boil the oceans. This is not farfetched at all. It has already happened on Venus. We have the technology. Should we get started? Any VC's interested?
Actually the measured natural forcings would indicate that the earth should be cooling slowly, as it has been doing for the past 6K years.Admittedly there are some shallow century scale wobbles, not very well understood, that might be in a warming phase superimposed. However, these might also be in a cooling phase. In any case they are too small to account for what we are seeing.
So it is a bit more likely than not that over 100% of the observed warming is anthropogenic. We don't say this to the public very much, as they would find it confusing.
In a way, the issue is not that complicated at all. We know that all else equal greenhnouse gases cause warming. We know that greenhouse gas concentrations are increasing rapidly. We know that temperatures are increasing rapidly. The obvious hypothesis is the same as the consensus.
An alternative hypothesis would have to have two parts. 1) Why the increasing greenhouse gases are ineffective in raising temperature and 2) Why the temperature is rising rapidly anyway, coincident in time with the greenhnouse gas increases. No such theory is being offerred by the so-called skeptics.
The scientific consensus doesn't exist because scientists are immoral or stupid. The scientific consensus exists because the evidence is pretty much incontrovertible.
You really don't know what you are talking about, do you? Heat capacity does not go down by two degrees when temperature goes up by two degrees. At what point is a substance full, then?
Without going any further into how confused your idea of thermodynamics is, the main points about melting the tundra are these: when ice vanishes, the color of the land gets darker, reflecting less solar radiation into space, warming the land, and tending to cause the ice margin to further retreat (or, in a cooling event, advance). So the ice margin is a potent amplifier of trends. Also, when permafrost melts, various forms of carbon taht were sequestered from the fast geochemical cycles are released. More carbon is in play. Assuming we know anything at all about radiative physics (and I concede that you, apparently, don't know much personally) that will also exacerbate the situation.
You are entitled to be confused. That is not a crime. Obviously there are a bunch of people out there going out of their way to confuse you. Still, I fail to see why people feel compelled to share their confusion with everyone else in such a brashly confident way.
Actually, the Antarctic interior may be thickening slightly, but the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets and smaller glaciers worldwide are thinning rapidly, and total ice volume is diminishing rapidly.
> Scientists have concluded that will all the C02 emissions from cars and factories it is still a microscopic amount.
Complete nonsense. Atmospheric CO2 is rising faster than at any time in at minimum the last 50 million years, and its isotopic signature shows that it is of fossil origin. I can explain where this myth comes from but let's get the main point stated first.
> Michael Crichton does some in depth research and wrote a very provoking article upon environmentalism.
Chrichton is spewing nonsense for reasons of his own
>Check the research!
I will follow up with references. Will you?
There is a consensus about evolution. There is a consensus that tobacco is carcinogenic. There is a consensus that the world is a sphere. There are a few people here and there who would argue otherwise. Does that make the consensus disreputable?
To be sure, there are (increasingly rare) cases of a solid scientific consensus that is in error, but to bet against the common opinion of the best informed people on a given matter (in other words, against the scientific consensus) is to take very long odds.
Don't miss slides 31 and 32.