Maybe the best way to get certain folks on board is to present information with a sense of self-skepticism and talk about the uncertainties rather than having movie starts tell us disaster is upon us and not even acknowledge those uncertainties.
Right there you're showing that you're not familar with the actual science. If you would read, for example, the IPCC Working Group 1 report, there is exhaustive discussion of the uncertainties-- the whole report repeatedly addresses how well do we know what we know, what are the sources of uncertainty, how much uncertainty is there, and what do we need to do to reduce our uncertainty.
If you want "talk about uncertainties", look at the actual science, where uncertainties are laid out in detail, not at the popular media (and certainly not at the blogger commentary.)
No one (except the really silly) deny climate change. They are skeptical of the MAN MADE portion of that.
If they were in fact skeptical, that would be fine. But there are far too many people who have one-sided skepticism: they are not merely skeptical but completely unwilling to listen to one side-- the actual science--but completely credulous to claims by people with no actual expertise at all saying that they science is wrong.
In fact, there are good reasons to think that human-produced carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gasses emitted into the atmosphere, has an effect on climate. The current measurements of about 1C increase in average global temperature is well in line with what you'd expect from the basic physics. So far, there really isn't a credible alternate model.
...We emit orders of magnitude more CO2 than volcanism and nobody questions whether volcanism influences the climate.
Well, yes... but primarily volcanoes affect climate by emitting volcanic aerosols, which reduce sunlight and cause temporary cooling. It's not due to their carbon dioxide emissions, which are (as you point out) very small compared to human emissions. The aerosols are, actually, an excellent natural experiment that allows us to see the effects of a reduction in solar input.
[snip]... If you want to be taken for anything but a troll, your trolls are going to have to address these points directly, and not just go on a rant about Al Gore. That shit is old.
I will agree with that! Al Gore isn't a climate scientist, he isn't cited by climate scientists, he isn't even talked about by climate scientists. He's a politician who held the vice presidency, a not-very-important office, two decades ago. Really, if somebody's only contribution to talking about climate is to bring up Al Gore, about all I can think is that they don't know anything and don't have anything substantive to say about the subject.
... recounts how media like the Wall Street Journal demonized him for his research, how he received death threats from unknown sources, how Congress grilled him about whether his scientific methods are credible,
Yes, and those are entirely reasonable things to do when people come up with "new statistical methods" and demand immediate action.
I'm sorry, but no. Death threats are never an appropriate response.
If your side thinks that they need to issue death threats to rebut a scientific argument, this is basically evidence that they are not arguing with the science.
None of the things you list as things that were predicted but have not happened were predicted to have happened by 2016.
Some of them weren't predicted at all, and some were predicted as things that would happen by 2050, and quite a few were predictions for "by the end of the century."
(1) How bad is it going to be if the current trend continues?
(2) Can the effects be reasonably limited or reversed?
(3) What is the least/cheapest amount of work to keep humanity alive?
You do not even know whether trying to prevent climate change is cheaper then just live with it.
I would say that question is covered by the answering the first three. Before you can address the question of whether it's "cheaper to just live with it", first you need to know "how bad is it going to be if the current trend continues."
And realize that any country which drastically limits the use of the cheapest energy (the one which emits most CO) will disadvantage itself compared to the countries which do not care.
That's an assertion. It is not at all clear if it's true. Burning coal is 18th century technology. Moving on to more efficient 21st century technologies may well be an advantage, not a disadvantage, and being early in adopting technologies that the rest of the world will move to could have significant advantages.
Reducing carbon usage required more technology, not less. In general, developing and improving technologies-- for almost anything-- seems, in the past, to be something that has had benefits.
So, I compare a theoretical model, that I have created, against historical data, and decide that what everyone else has been using as evidence was wrong.
Enough said.
No. You took a data set that consisted of spotty records at irregularly spaced points, and asked the question "how do I derive the average sea level rise from irregularly spaced data points?" You answered this question by saying "we will fit the theoretical model to the data points, and derive the best fit."
This is what scientists do: fit theory to data. Really. This is how science works.
You can tell a denier from a skeptic from the fact that a skeptic would be equally critical of both sides of a question. Deniers, on the other hand, already have the opinion that they are advocating: they are saying the science is wrong regardless of the facts; in fact, they aren't even interested in the facts.
Deniers aren't skeptics-- they are, in fact, the exact opposite of skeptics. They are completely credulous: they repeat any argument saying that the science is wrong, no matter how silly, with no trace of skepticism or analysis.
In a real sense, deniers are the enemies of skeptics, since by continuously attacking the science regardless of whether the attacks have even a trace of merit, they end up discrediting any analysis that might have actual merit by burying it under garbage.
Yes, the various article on this topic shift back and forth from mm per year to cm per decade, sometimes even in the same paragraph. And the popular articles add inches per decade and feet per century. It's not hard to convert back and forth, but it is disconcerting.
The error range is not a factor of 1.4, it is no lower than 1.4 cm/decade.
Specifically, the text in the AGU release was: "As a result, the authors place a lower bound on 20th century sea level rise of about 1.4 millimeters per year during the 20th century, and the most likely "true" global rate was closer to 1.7 millimeters per year.
NASA is once again figuring out how to doctor data to make you panic.
A university study has analyzed data to result in a very minor change (about a 6% correction) in average rate of sea level rise and the media has figured out how to make you panic. By the way, if you look at the "funded by" part of the abstract, the study was funded by NOAA.
Nice link, but I'm not sure why you say that this is "other thoughts"-- that's a link to the raw data. The University of Manoa/Old Dominion University/Caltech study takes these readings as input data to calculate the average.
What a shame that NASA, an organization once devoted to science, has fallen so far to become essentially the national enquirer of climate. sea level rise is the new Bat Boy...
What a shame that even very minor reanalysis papers get politicized. This wasn't even primarily a NASA study: the first author is funded by the University of Hawaii Sea Level Center, which is a NOAA program.
The headline is quite misleading. What the story actually says is that the previous estimate was 1.6 cm per decade, and the new number is 1.7 cm per decade--with an error range that it might be as low as 1.4.
Really this isn't "We've been wrong!"-- it's more "we have a slightly better estimate now."
...Sweden is destroyed. Germany is destroyed. I guess UK and France also are. Yay!
Haven't been to Sweden-- Norway is as close as I've gotten--but I'm told it's in good shape. For the ones I've been to, Germany doesn't seem to be "destroyed", nor UK nor France-- they're in fine shape. (So far. We'll see what Brexit does).
Muslims.
Despite "Muslims" being present in Sweden, Germany, UK, and France, they all have 1/4 the murder rate of the U.S., so you're a lot safer in any of them than you are here.
People in Sweden, Germany, UK, and France are all afraid of the U.S., because we have so many "gun-totin Texans". Everybody's afraid of something.
That's a cute speculation. What I posted, however, is observational data. Demographics shows that affluent people, on the whole, have fewer children than poor people. Period. Independent of "advanced" societies, or "cultural programming."
People need to realize that the effects of global warming are at this point unstoppable. No conservation effort and certainly no carbon dioxide removal program could possibly show an effect for decades. At which point the damage will already be done.
You have just written a false dichotomy; dividing "damage" into a binary: either there's damage or there's no damage, with no significance to degree of damage. That's not the real world. There can be more and less effect; less damage or worse damage.
Some effects of global warming are unstoppable.
At which point the damage will already be done..
Some damage will already be done.
Money would be much better spent preparing for sea level rise etc than trying to prevent it.
False dichotomy: you can do both. Or, more particularly, different people and different organizations can do either, or both.
But the real problem here is that this simply isn't news. Even the quotation in the article is from 2015. And the curve of carbon dioxide has been known for decades-- it is zero surprise.
I haven't seen any evidence of a "panic attack" by politicians where they "open the flood gates to immigration from the poorest excuses for countries."
So far, exactly the opposite has been true: recently there has been panic attacks by politicians where they close all the borders to immigration from the poorest countries.
I'm not sure what you think you're talking about, but, yes, many recent years have been the warmest on record. If you want graphs, they're available many places. Try, for example, looking here: http://berkeleyearth.org/summa...
This argument just needs to die. It's not going to happen unless we're talking about some sci-fi book/movie. China does this, but they are a communist country too, so their people gave up their choice in any matter what so ever just simply by being born in the country.
To the contrary. You do not need to "give up choice" to limit population. Demographic studies have demonstrated that there are three things that have been shown to reduce population growth. 1. Prosperity. Demographics shows that affluent people, on the whole, have fewer children than poor people. You want to reduce population growth in poor countries? Address the poverty. 2. Education. Demographics shows that educating people reduces the birth rate. Most effectively, educating girls (who in many countries with high population growth have no access to education at all)-- but in general: population growth rate decreases with education. 3. Access to birth control techniques. This actually surprised the demographers, who hadn't predicted it, but the data is pretty firm. Independent of the first two factors, simply give people access to means of control over their own reproduction... and they, in general, have fewer children.
So, that's it: how to save the world: bring people out of poverty, give them education, and give them access to birth control.
and stop telling us that while every cold year did not refute anything, the hot ones are, in fact, confirming.
No single year that's colder than average in one particular place is significant, nor one that's hotter than average in one particular place. The important feature about global warming (or, if you prefer, global climate change) is the global part.
A year that's warmer than average averaged across the whole Earth is indicative... but not conclusive.
A whole sequence of years that are all unusually warm, averaged across the whole Earth, however: that is significant.
And to keep the plants powered. Mars is at 1.5AU, which gives less than half the sunlight intensity of earth - your crop would grow very slowly and very small.
Plants grow fine in places that are cloudy. Mars will get on the order of ~250 to 300 w/m2 averaged over a day. Here's a map of the incident solar radiation ("insolation") on Earth: geosun.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/GHI-Solar-map-World.png Mars insolation levels correspond to the light green color. It's no worse the Europe in terms of sunlight, and plants grow in Europe
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the best way to get certain folks on board is to present information with a sense of self-skepticism and talk about the uncertainties rather than having movie starts tell us disaster is upon us and not even acknowledge those uncertainties.
Right there you're showing that you're not familar with the actual science. If you would read, for example, the IPCC Working Group 1 report, there is exhaustive discussion of the uncertainties-- the whole report repeatedly addresses how well do we know what we know, what are the sources of uncertainty, how much uncertainty is there, and what do we need to do to reduce our uncertainty.
If you want "talk about uncertainties", look at the actual science, where uncertainties are laid out in detail, not at the popular media (and certainly not at the blogger commentary.)
No one (except the really silly) deny climate change. They are skeptical of the MAN MADE portion of that.
If they were in fact skeptical, that would be fine. But there are far too many people who have one-sided skepticism: they are not merely skeptical but completely unwilling to listen to one side-- the actual science--but completely credulous to claims by people with no actual expertise at all saying that they science is wrong.
In fact, there are good reasons to think that human-produced carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gasses emitted into the atmosphere, has an effect on climate. The current measurements of about 1C increase in average global temperature is well in line with what you'd expect from the basic physics. So far, there really isn't a credible alternate model.
...We emit orders of magnitude more CO2 than volcanism and nobody questions whether volcanism influences the climate.
Well, yes... but primarily volcanoes affect climate by emitting volcanic aerosols, which reduce sunlight and cause temporary cooling. It's not due to their carbon dioxide emissions, which are (as you point out) very small compared to human emissions. The aerosols are, actually, an excellent natural experiment that allows us to see the effects of a reduction in solar input.
[snip] ... If you want to be taken for anything but a troll, your trolls are going to have to address these points directly, and not just go on a rant about Al Gore. That shit is old.
I will agree with that! Al Gore isn't a climate scientist, he isn't cited by climate scientists, he isn't even talked about by climate scientists. He's a politician who held the vice presidency, a not-very-important office, two decades ago. Really, if somebody's only contribution to talking about climate is to bring up Al Gore, about all I can think is that they don't know anything and don't have anything substantive to say about the subject.
Yes, and those are entirely reasonable things to do when people come up with "new statistical methods" and demand immediate action.
I'm sorry, but no.
Death threats are never an appropriate response.
If your side thinks that they need to issue death threats to rebut a scientific argument, this is basically evidence that they are not arguing with the science.
None of the things you list as things that were predicted but have not happened were predicted to have happened by 2016.
Some of them weren't predicted at all, and some were predicted as things that would happen by 2050, and quite a few were predictions for "by the end of the century."
(1) How bad is it going to be if the current trend continues?
(2) Can the effects be reasonably limited or reversed?
(3) What is the least/cheapest amount of work to keep humanity alive?
You do not even know whether trying to prevent climate change is cheaper then just live with it.
I would say that question is covered by the answering the first three. Before you can address the question of whether it's "cheaper to just live with it", first you need to know "how bad is it going to be if the current trend continues."
And realize that any country which drastically limits the use of the cheapest energy (the one which emits most CO) will disadvantage itself compared to the countries which do not care.
That's an assertion. It is not at all clear if it's true. Burning coal is 18th century technology. Moving on to more efficient 21st century technologies may well be an advantage, not a disadvantage, and being early in adopting technologies that the rest of the world will move to could have significant advantages.
Reducing carbon usage required more technology, not less. In general, developing and improving technologies-- for almost anything-- seems, in the past, to be something that has had benefits.
The second one is German, with the name of an icelandic singer at the end (with the ümlaut missing, but that's just slashdot.)
So, I compare a theoretical model, that I have created, against historical data, and decide that what everyone else has been using as evidence was wrong.
Enough said.
No. You took a data set that consisted of spotty records at irregularly spaced points, and asked the question "how do I derive the average sea level rise from irregularly spaced data points?" You answered this question by saying "we will fit the theoretical model to the data points, and derive the best fit."
This is what scientists do: fit theory to data. Really. This is how science works.
Deniers and skeptics are different people.
You can tell a denier from a skeptic from the fact that a skeptic would be equally critical of both sides of a question. Deniers, on the other hand, already have the opinion that they are advocating: they are saying the science is wrong regardless of the facts; in fact, they aren't even interested in the facts.
Deniers aren't skeptics-- they are, in fact, the exact opposite of skeptics. They are completely credulous: they repeat any argument saying that the science is wrong, no matter how silly, with no trace of skepticism or analysis.
In a real sense, deniers are the enemies of skeptics, since by continuously attacking the science regardless of whether the attacks have even a trace of merit, they end up discrediting any analysis that might have actual merit by burying it under garbage.
Yes, the various article on this topic shift back and forth from mm per year to cm per decade, sometimes even in the same paragraph. And the popular articles add inches per decade and feet per century.
It's not hard to convert back and forth, but it is disconcerting.
The error range is not a factor of 1.4, it is no lower than 1.4 cm/decade.
Specifically, the text in the AGU release was: "As a result, the authors place a lower bound on 20th century sea level rise of about 1.4 millimeters per year during the 20th century, and the most likely "true" global rate was closer to 1.7 millimeters per year.
NASA is once again figuring out how to doctor data to make you panic.
A university study has analyzed data to result in a very minor change (about a 6% correction) in average rate of sea level rise and the media has figured out how to make you panic. By the way, if you look at the "funded by" part of the abstract, the study was funded by NOAA.
NOAA has other thoughts.
Nice link, but I'm not sure why you say that this is "other thoughts"-- that's a link to the raw data. The University of Manoa/Old Dominion University/Caltech study takes these readings as input data to calculate the average.
What a shame that NASA, an organization once devoted to science, has fallen so far to become essentially the national enquirer of climate. sea level rise is the new Bat Boy...
What a shame that even very minor reanalysis papers get politicized. This wasn't even primarily a NASA study: the first author is funded by the University of Hawaii Sea Level Center, which is a NOAA program.
The headline is quite misleading. What the story actually says is that the previous estimate was 1.6 cm per decade, and the new number is 1.7 cm per decade--with an error range that it might be as low as 1.4.
Really this isn't "We've been wrong!"-- it's more "we have a slightly better estimate now."
The abstract of the article is here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
...Sweden is destroyed. Germany is destroyed. I guess UK and France also are. Yay!
Haven't been to Sweden-- Norway is as close as I've gotten--but I'm told it's in good shape. For the ones I've been to, Germany doesn't seem to be "destroyed", nor UK nor France-- they're in fine shape. (So far. We'll see what Brexit does).
Muslims.
Despite "Muslims" being present in Sweden, Germany, UK, and France, they all have 1/4 the murder rate of the U.S., so you're a lot safer in any of them than you are here.
People in Sweden, Germany, UK, and France are all afraid of the U.S., because we have so many "gun-totin Texans". Everybody's afraid of something.
How would you know? Seriously, this is not trolling. How many countries has Russia invaded for profit or global politics
Thirteen that I can think of offhand:
Afghanistan
Albania
Czechoslovakia
Estonia
(East) Germany
Hungary
Latvia
Lithuania
Moldavia
Poland
Romania
Ukraine
Yugoslavia
Probably more that I'm not thinking of.
That's a cute speculation.
What I posted, however, is observational data.
Demographics shows that affluent people, on the whole, have fewer children than poor people. Period. Independent of "advanced" societies, or "cultural programming."
Some people think it is going to be gradual but there are people who think it could be sudden for a few reasons.
I am reminded of the quote from Ernest Hemingway: "How did we go bankrupt? Two ways. Slowly, and then all of a sudden."
People need to realize that the effects of global warming are at this point unstoppable. No conservation effort and certainly no carbon dioxide removal program could possibly show an effect for decades. At which point the damage will already be done.
You have just written a false dichotomy; dividing "damage" into a binary: either there's damage or there's no damage, with no significance to degree of damage. That's not the real world. There can be more and less effect; less damage or worse damage.
Some effects of global warming are unstoppable.
At which point the damage will already be done. .
Some damage will already be done.
Money would be much better spent preparing for sea level rise etc than trying to prevent it.
False dichotomy: you can do both. Or, more particularly, different people and different organizations can do either, or both.
But the real problem here is that this simply isn't news. Even the quotation in the article is from 2015.
And the curve of carbon dioxide has been known for decades-- it is zero surprise.
I haven't seen any evidence of a "panic attack" by politicians where they "open the flood gates to immigration from the poorest excuses for countries."
So far, exactly the opposite has been true: recently there has been panic attacks by politicians where they close all the borders to immigration from the poorest countries.
I'm not sure what you think you're talking about, but, yes, many recent years have been the warmest on record.
If you want graphs, they're available many places. Try, for example, looking here:
http://berkeleyearth.org/summa...
Make stuff from what ?
I gave a link. Read it.
This argument just needs to die. It's not going to happen unless we're talking about some sci-fi book/movie. China does this, but they are a communist country too, so their people gave up their choice in any matter what so ever just simply by being born in the country.
To the contrary. You do not need to "give up choice" to limit population. Demographic studies have demonstrated that there are three things that have been shown to reduce population growth.
1. Prosperity. Demographics shows that affluent people, on the whole, have fewer children than poor people. You want to reduce population growth in poor countries? Address the poverty.
2. Education. Demographics shows that educating people reduces the birth rate. Most effectively, educating girls (who in many countries with high population growth have no access to education at all)-- but in general: population growth rate decreases with education.
3. Access to birth control techniques. This actually surprised the demographers, who hadn't predicted it, but the data is pretty firm. Independent of the first two factors, simply give people access to means of control over their own reproduction... and they, in general, have fewer children.
So, that's it: how to save the world: bring people out of poverty, give them education, and give them access to birth control.
You don't need the totalitarian bullshit.
and stop telling us that while every cold year did not refute anything, the hot ones are, in fact, confirming.
No single year that's colder than average in one particular place is significant, nor one that's hotter than average in one particular place. The important feature about global warming (or, if you prefer, global climate change) is the global part.
A year that's warmer than average averaged across the whole Earth is indicative... but not conclusive.
A whole sequence of years that are all unusually warm, averaged across the whole Earth, however: that is significant.
And to keep the plants powered. Mars is at 1.5AU, which gives less than half the sunlight intensity of earth - your crop would grow very slowly and very small.
Plants grow fine in places that are cloudy. Mars will get on the order of ~250 to 300 w/m2 averaged over a day. Here's a map of the incident solar radiation ("insolation") on Earth:
geosun.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/GHI-Solar-map-World.png
Mars insolation levels correspond to the light green color. It's no worse the Europe in terms of sunlight, and plants grow in Europe
Reality check: what you consider to be "no infrastructure" is an entire planet worth of infrastructure.