Today Heartland's conspiracy to falsify science is threatening to destroy civilisation as we know it.
How? Even if you grant fully the research supporting AGW (Heartland's primary target), there's no civilization-threatening problem out there.
Heartland is making an argument against proposed policy responses to global warming by attacking the science. Their attack is to support and amplify the voices of critics who are shouting out assertions that scientists are liars, con men, hoaxers, crooks, and frauds.
If the "I-don't-believe-in the-greenhouse-effect" crowd were merely saying "climate scientists are well intentioned, but are misinterpreting key data that shows we should hesitate before drawing conclusions," that would be a different thing. But the attack is using phrases like "criminals" and "corrupt" and "conspiracy to defaud the public" and "should be put in jail."
Since our society is based on science, yes, I'd say that a campaign to instill the attitude that science is fraudulent and scientists are liars and should be put in jail is an attack on civilization as we know it.
One thing I'd like to know is this: for the last few decades there's been a concerted campaign to make conservatives distrustful of science....
So here's what I want to know:
1. Why? Why target conservatives specifically with anti-science propaganda? Why aren't liberals being targeted too? (Arguments like "Conservatives are more gullible" will be ignored for obvious reasons.)
This is an interesting thing that I've noticed. It's a very significant change from the world I grew up in, where liberals were classically distrustful of science, and conservatives very much pro-science. Through the Reagan era, being pro-science was associated with conservatism, but somehow after the end of the Reagan era, the conservative movement made a sharp turn away from science.
My hypothesis is that it comes from the conservative politicians discovering in the 90s that they can tap into the power of religious fundamentalists. The fundamentalists came with an anti-science agenda and distrust of science, preferring belief-based reasoning in the form of their advocacy of creationism, and have spent decades fine-tuning their anti-science arguments that they have been using in the war against evolution. The mainline conservatives seem to have picked up their specific arguments, without even explicitly recognizing the overall tenor of them as being anti-science.
Well, they are funded by the fossil fuel industry (not just oil; that includes coal), or by billionaires whose money comes from in the oil industry. (For this campaign, anyway; they also work on other issues.) Whether this makes them "shills" is a value judgement.
What we learn the billboard, however, is simply this: the Heartland Institute is a policy advocacy organization, not a science institute. They are no longer even pretending to have any interest in actual science. Their only interest in science is to attack it in order to make policy points.
They have stated this before-- Joseph Bast, the president of Heartland, stated that the Heartland Institute's focus is "commitment to a free market policy agenda," and that the main motivation for the Heartland Institute being involved in this debate is to "prevent the U.S. government from adopting policies that favor renewable energy," which he claims would cause an "economic disaster for the country."
But, despite clear statements that their agenda is related to policy, not science, people have been taking their attacks on science seriously.
The text of the article and the information in the articles it links to seem to state different things.
The article linked states:
"...the FBI returned to May First's offices, this time with a subpoena, requesting information about the server. We [the EFF] helped them respond to the subpoena and May First turned over what minimal information it had; namely that the server was running the anonymous remailer program Mixmaster"
"An Internet hosting service through which at least three University of Pittsburgh bomb threats passed said Monday that one of its servers was "hijacked" and it is cooperating with the FBI.... May First/People Link believes someone illegally hacked into ECN's system, which requires members to log in, and emailed the bomb threats, said Alfredo Lopez, co-director of May First/People Link. "The problem is, somehow this joker got in, and we don't believe they had an authentic login. We think they did some kind of shenanigan to get in there," Mr. Lopez said....
These seem to be completely different things! The article states that they were running an anonymous remailer which, assuming it's done right, doesn't leave any trail. But the link in that text states that they believed that "someone illegally hacked into their system" and "they did some kind of shenanigan to get it"-- which could plausibly have left fingerprints, since real-world hackers aren't always the genius criminal masterminds that the movies like to portray.
Which is it? Were they "illegally hacked" using "shenanigans", or were they running a remailer open to anonymous login? Or, did they actually run an anonymous remailer, but told the FBI that they were hacked?
Gosh, so if you had a database of the health of every single person in America, and also a database of where they lived for the last fifty years, you could make a really good retrospective correlation study!
(Of course, if you did, then the/. discussion would be all about the massive invasion of medical privacy laws. But you don't have the database anyway.)
That is, if cosmic radiation were in fact the main location-dependent factor that caused cancer.
But since cosmic radiation dose is something on the order of 0.5 millisievert per year, it's probably not significant enough to see the signal over the noise, assuming that there are other sources of cancer.
Ionizing radiation causes cancer. More ionizing radiation causes more cancer.
Of course. The question is, how much more cancer is caused by a given dose of radiation?
Unfortunately, this is a question that the paper in question does not answer, because it completely neglects to mention actual numbers. (The pretty colored graphs have units of "excess relative risk." How do you convert that to deaths? You can't. What are the units-- per year? Per lifetime? they don't say. Relative to what? They don't say.) I'd like to see a number, like "excess cancers per year per sievert of exposure," but they don't give one. They compare different studies, but never discuss whether the differences are statistically significant.
There is no "safe dose", though there is a certain unavoidable dose.
That is a question. That is what is known as the "linear no threshold" model-- but although these authors assert the validity of that model, you can't tell it from the data they show. Figure 1 shows too much scatter below 0.3 Sv to give much information about thresholds, and Figure 2 sure looks like it would be well fit by a threshold model.
In short, I'd like to have seen an article with real information.
If you're an alien with the intelligence and skill to achieve interstellar travel, would you stop and visit a world as hostile as ours, or simply avoid it and classify said planet as "The Ghetto"?
Heck yes; I'd have visited it about a hundred million years ago, to see the dinosaurs!
Who wouldn't want to sightsee to a world with dinosaurs?
You have already stated that you have a strong opinion about policy, and, referring to people who disagree with your opinions, you stated:
I really don't care whether people distrust these people for the right reasons or for the wrong reasons.
Since you just told us that truth is of no importance to you in when it comes to discrediting people who don't believe what you do about political issues, why should I credit what you say about people who don't believe what you do?
As long as you attack the proposals by showing why they are ineffective and/or dangerous or for that matter other reasons why they are inadvisible, and not by saying "I disagree with the policy, therefore the science is wrong," I'm fine with that.
You got it backwards. If you want action to happen on global warming, you need to make a strong economic case for it and you need to demonstrate that there is a feasible path to global action. If you can't connect the science to my economic interests, the science is nothing more than a curiosity.
I'm fine with that. Curiosity is a good thing as far as I'm concerned. People can make their own decisions about their economic interests.
However, people are attacking the science because they want to make a political points. I am not find with that.
As far as I'm concerned, the proposals for government intervention on climate change are ineffective and dangerous, and I'm glad they don't have a chance of getting implemented.
As long as you attack the proposals by showing why they are ineffective and/or dangerous or for that matter other reasons why they are inadvisible, and not by saying "I disagree with the policy, therefore the science is wrong," I'm fine with that.
I really don't care whether people distrust these people for the right reasons or for the wrong reasons.
This is where we disagree. I do care about the science, and I most particularly do care about people calling scientists criminals because they find that to be an easy way to make a political point.
>> The lesson here is, read the actual science, not the advocates or deniers or bloggers or politicians or special interest groups or popularizers.
In other words, Gore is a dishonest idiot. When you're willing to honestly criticize those politically aligned with your own position, only then should we take you seriously. Until that time, you're just a self-serving hack. Read Feynman.
I have little interest in Al Gore. He's a guy who was a failed presidential candidate twelve years ago and made a movie a year or two later. He's definitely not a scientist.
So, yes, when I say "read the actual science, not the advocates or deniers or bloggers or politicians or special interest groups or popularizers," Gore would definitely be on my list of "advocates or deniers or bloggers or politicians or special interest groups or popularizers," and not scientists.
I think the point Geoffrey Landis is making is that the IPCC is an unreliable organization, since it cites unreliable sources.
Yes, a single sentence out of a thousand page report cited one incorrect source... which was immediately acknowledged and an errata published as soon as it was pointed out.
Nevertheless: the overall lesson to look at the science, not the advocates, bloggers,or tertiary sources, is good advice.
All of the oxygen in the atmosphere comes from reduction of carbon dioxide to oxygen and reduced carbon, so (other than a very small amount currently in biomass) if you burned all of the reduced carbon underground-- what we call "fossil fuels"-- you'd return the Earth to a carbon dioxide and nitrogen atmosphere. That shouldn't be controversial. Yes, if we burn all the fossil fuels, it will have very bad consequences.
I'm sorry I don't have time to critique that website line by line. Given that he manipulated the baseline on figure 3 to move the Hansen prediction upward by 0.4 degrees (and then draws the conclusion "look, Hansen was wrong! His prediction is a whole 0.4 degrees too high!), I don't trust anything else he says unless I track back to the original sources, and I don't have time to do that.
On the subject of feedback factors, there's a decent overview in the IPCC Working Group I Report, "The Physical Science Basis," available here: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml#.T5lYtO25340 That should, at a minimum, help convince you that feedback factors aren't numbers just made up out of thin air, but do have real science behind them.
the people who think that carbon-credit trading is not a good idea don't address it, but instead argue that the greenhouse effect doesn't exist
No, that's just the strawman climate alarmists put up.
I find 11.6 million search hits on the terms “fraud” and "global warming". Looking at the summary of just the first page of hits, I see, among other things, these phrases: "Global Warming Fraud: Somebody Needs to Go to Jail," and "I on the other hand will be giving the criminals that are pushing the Global Warming fraud the finger".
Yeah, that's what these "strawmen" people are saying-- scientists are criminals who "need to go to jail." If you in fact agree with the scientific consensus that the greenhouse effect exists, human-generated gassed contribute to it, and scientists in general are not frauds; but merely disagree with the proposed solutions-- we have no disagreement.
By denying that a possible problem even exists, the discussion of solutions ends up being completely one-sided.
You are again putting up a strawman. The fact that a problem possibly exists doesn't mean that it is rational to do anything about it.
In that case, we are in agreement.
I have no problem with people discussing solutions, and in that category I consider the proposal "let's not do anything" as a rational suggestion worth considering in the discussion. It is those millions of people who have been convinced that it is all a fraud concocted by scientists who are criminals or completely ignorant that I would like to convince otherwise.
I have no interest in, nor patience with, "apocalyptic scenarios that say that feedbacks will amplify everything and we all will die,"
Glad to hear it.
although I'm not actually quite sure who these people are.
Try a Google search for "global warming runaway" or "global warming tipping point". I did the former and found: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_climate_change From that page: "James E. Hansen has suggested that the Earth could experience a runaway greenhouse effect and adopt a climate like that of Venus if fossil-fuel use continues until reserves are exhausted.[27]" So there's one name for you, James E. Hansen.
If all the fossil fuel reserves are exhausted?!!!
Good god! You are aware, are you not, that all of the oxygen in our air comes originally from photosynthesis, and that "all of the fossil fuel is exhausted" occurs when every molecule of oxygen has been turned to carbon dioxide? Yes, I would say that if we actually were stupid enough to do that, probably we would return the Earth to its original Venus- like conditions. This is not a realistic condition, however; I would certainly hope that we would stop burning fossil carbon somewhere around when people start dying from lack of oxygen.
I meant: I don't know of who's predicting imminent disaster in the near term. Yes, I agree, if we return all the fossil carbon to the atmosphere, that would be bad. But I don't think you need climate models to say that.
My problem as a layman is that I don't understand how cherrypicking would help the last two-thirds of his article.
The last two thirds? As I said, I really don't have time to comment on a blog post line by line; you're not paying me enough for that. Do I understand your comment to mean that you're saying that although the beginning of the article is twaddle, the last two thirds isn't not?
....The key quote from the article:
Notice that the skeptics agree with the government climate scientists about the direct effect of CO2;
Some of the skeptics agree on that. Some think that the greenhouse effect itself does not exist. Some think it exists but is saturated. This is part of the problem, there really isn't a consistent alternate model from the skeptics.
they just disagree just about the feedbacks. The climate debate is all about the feedbacks; everything else is merely a sideshow.
I'm wondering if you agree, and I'm wondering what feedbacks if any were postulated by Manabe and Wetherald.
The Manabe and Wetherald model was a constant humidity model, with no cloud effects. It predicted about 2.2 degrees C per doubling IIRC, which is still within the band of the consensus today. That's well above the 1 that he calls "no feedback": what he means by "no feedback" requires that humidity decreases as temperature rises.
My question is: what is this model he proposed with negative feedback loops that cancel out the well understood positive feedback? Who made this purported model, where has it been published, and what are its predictions? How does it compare with the data? (that's a rhetorical question, by the way; the purported model doesn't exist. Lindzen tried to come up with one about ten years or so back, but even Linzen now agrees that that model he proposed didn't fit the data.)
The article is wrong about cloud effects, by the way; clouds do not necessarily cause negative feedback-- clouds reflect infrared, which increases temperature, as well as reflecting visible, which decreases temperature. In the simplest case of clouds with the same reflectivity in visible and infrared, the first-order effect is zero (proof is left as an exercise to the student. Hint: use the Stefan-Bolzman equation).
Light emission is the converse of light absorption, so any solar cell that absorbs light must, by the same mechanism, emit light, unless other loss mechanisms prevent it. Obviously light emission is a loss mechanism-- light emitted is clearly not turned into electricity. However, all other loss mechanisms can be eliminated by sufficiently clever design, but light emission is a loss required by the laws of thermodynamics. Thus, a solar cell is optimized when there is no other loss mechanism other than light emission, which is to say, when the light emission is maximized.
(In fact, it is optimized when the light emission back toward the source is maximized; all emission that isn't back toward the source could in principle be retroreflected and reabsorbed. This would be known as "light trapping".)
The calculation done in 1967 by Manabe and Wetherald
Does that calculation say that the ice caps will melt, the waters will rise, and we will all starve to death? Or does it predict a mild temperature rise like we have already observed?
I don't deny that the world has warmed. But I question the apocalyptic scenarios that say that feedbacks will amplify everything and we all will die.
I have no interest in, nor patience with, "apocalyptic scenarios that say that feedbacks will amplify everything and we all will die," although I'm not actually quite sure who these people are. The climate scientists I pay attention say that the anthropogenic warming effect is, so far, about half a degree. Perhaps Lovelock was saying "feedbacks will amplify everything and we will all die," but the actual climate scientists-- the ones nobody pays attention to-- are a little less spectacular.
Yes, in fact I do have issues with the arguments presented in the blog you cite. It is badly cherrypicked, I'm afraid. I don't have anything like the time required to show how, over and over again, Evans made choices of what data to present and how to present the data that just "happen" to make the predictions look bad, but I will start with just a single question for you. In figure 3, the graph showing how bad Hansen's predictions are, he happens to start the graph with the "prediction" matching the data at the left edge of the graph, at 1988. Now, the Hansen paper he is quoting predictions from was published in 1988, so that paper couldn't possibly have known the temperature in 1988. In fact, eyeballing the graph, it looks like 1988 was a cyclic high point. The paper was published 1988, so it must have been written in 1987, which means that Hansen actually must have baselined his predictions on temperature data from no later than 1986 (1987 data wouldn't have been available yet, of course.). OK, Evans does give his source for the data he graphed, and, yes, it turns out that 1988 was indeed anomalously high. The average temperature for 1986 was 0.41 degrees cooler than the temperature in January, 1988. So, here's my question: if you slide the predictions 0.41 degrees lower (and two years earlier) than they are shown in the graph drawn by Evans-- that is, start the predictions at the point where the temperature actually was when Hansen made the prediction-- how does the data fit the prediction?
Soylendra failed because it was (or became) a shell company to funnel government money into corrupt pockets - and they were quite good at that. It's a perfect example of a "green" sham, didn't mean it as much else.
It must be nice to have a worldview where you can so confidently ascribe problems to corrupt people and the evil government, but in fact, there's no need for such conspiracy theories, nor evidence to support them. Solyndra started up at a time when solar panels were selling at about $2.50 per peak watt; right now solar panels can be purchased (in bulk-- not at the consumer level) at 90 cents per peak watt. That's really sufficient information to explain why they failed.
I'm not actually a great fan of their technology-- it was a lot of complication to solve a relatively minor part of the problem-- but there's no reason to say that they are, or were, a "shell company"-- they were, in fact, producing the product they said they would produce. There just turned out to be no way that it could compete in the market.
Not all startups that have a clever idea work, and the technological landscape is just littered with clever inventions that simply were outcompeted by something less clever, but cheaper. Sorry, but that's just the way it is.
Can you please explain in detail how a colorless, odorless gas can trap heat from radiating from the planet and act as a blanket? In fact, I've never seen an explanation of the actual mechanism of global warming more specific than "green house gases act as an insulator". I can believe that if they were colored in some way, but they aren't, they're clear.
Sure. Carbon dioxide is transparent in the visible spectrum, but has absorption bands in the infrared. Thus, some of the thermal infrared emitted by the Earth is absorbed by the CO2 in the atmosphere rather than being radiated to space. This energy is then re-radiated (still in the infrared) isotropically. Some of that re-radiated energy escapes to space, some of it is re-absorbed by the atmosphere, and some of it is reradiate downward, to the ground.
The portion reradiated to the ground is the part we need to think about. Essentially, the ground radiated energy upward, but due to trace-gas infrared absorption in the atmosphere, a fraction of that returned back to the ground, effectively reducing the amount of energy radiated. That's what's meant by "acts like an insulator"-- it reduces the heat transfer outward (to space).
Clear enough? If not, you might see what you get if you look for "greenhouse effect" in wikipedia.
...Solar is different. There's plenty of solar power. But current solar-electric panel are still bullshit (I drive past the Soylendra buildings every day)...
I do have to point out that Solyndra was not a large part of the photovoltaic industry, and even if their expansion plans had succeeded, they still wouldn't have been a major player in the photovoltaic industry. The failure of one small manufacturer, out of many, has little to do with the viability of the photovoltaic power.
I will also point out that one (not the only, but one) of the reasons they failed was because competition in the industry had driven the price of panels down so far that their production system couldn't compete. In other words, they failed because photovoltaic panels are much less expensive than anybody had expected they would be. That's not any kind of evidence that "solar-electic panel are bullshit"; exactly to the contrary.
The mainstream climate scientists are not and have not been mispredicting the rate of climate change
Pardon my ignorance, exactly what *is* the mainstream prediction?
The currently published consensus (IPCC AR-4) is that climate change will be 2 to 4.5 C temperature rise per doubling of CO2, with a current best estimate of about 3 C (another source, Rahmstorf 2008, says 2.6 to 4.1 C, with most modeled results clustering around 3 C.)
If you want to turn that into a temperature prediction, multiply that by the log base 2 of your prefered prediction of carbon dioxide in the year you want to predict for (divided by the carbon dioxide in the year you take as baseline). The climate science part, however, is not the prediction of carbon dioxide emission (that's sociology and/or politics and/or economics), it's the response of the climate.
(Yes, it's a little annoying that the climate community settled in on log base 2. Temperature is logarithmic in greenhouse-gas concentration-- that's the Arrhenius relation-- and the earlier modellers decided to model the effect of doubling carbon dioxide, hence the log_2.)
> You're still hanging on to that? Because that's really one of the very few significant errors that have ever been demonstrated. And for what it's worth, you know who found the error? Those damn crackpot scientists on the IPCC panel.
The data I cited, specifically the _real_ finding, was only published in February. So please forgive me if I only cited one recent example in my quick post, and if I consider the scientific data more interesting than the IPCC panel admission of error.
You're missing the point.
The incorrect paragraph about the rate of glaciers melting was not in the IPCC working group one report, "The Scientific Basic of Climate Change;" it was in the working group 2 report on the effects of climate change. And, what exactly was the error? The error was not sourcing the report from the scientific literature, but taking data from a tertiary source.
The lesson here is, read the actual science, not the advocates or deniers or bloggers or politicians or special interest groups or popularizers.
What pisses me off are the people who think that wealth redistribution in the form of carbon-credit trading will do anything to solve the problem,
Ah, but that's a very different question from the question of whether carbon dioxide emissions are affecting the climate... and it is a question that gets almost no discussion at all, because the people who think that carbon-credit trading is not a good idea don't address it, but instead argue that the greenhouse effect doesn't exist, or it exists but is saturated, or it exists but volcanoes emit more carbon dioxide than humans so it doesn't matter what we do, or the weather data is wrong, or the scientists who study the problem are all frauds, or the cosmic rays are changing the climate more then humans do, or solar activity has gone up recently, or solar activity has gone down recently, or some hithertofore unknown feedback mechanism cancels out the changes created by humans, or... every six months there's a new purported explanation for why human-generated carbon dioxide doesn't affect the climate. (Yes, I've heard all those arguments, and many more that make even less sense.)
By denying that a possible problem even exists, the discussion of solutions ends up being completely one-sided. No one critiques carbon-credit trading, because the people who would do so are spending their efforts denying that the science.
if there really is a problem.
See? You can't even complete a single sentence before you start suggesting the greenhouse effect isn't real.
Slashdot Mirror
Today Heartland's conspiracy to falsify science is threatening to destroy civilisation as we know it.
How? Even if you grant fully the research supporting AGW (Heartland's primary target), there's no civilization-threatening problem out there.
Heartland is making an argument against proposed policy responses to global warming by attacking the science. Their attack is to support and amplify the voices of critics who are shouting out assertions that scientists are liars, con men, hoaxers, crooks, and frauds.
If the "I-don't-believe-in the-greenhouse-effect" crowd were merely saying "climate scientists are well intentioned, but are misinterpreting key data that shows we should hesitate before drawing conclusions," that would be a different thing. But the attack is using phrases like "criminals" and "corrupt" and "conspiracy to defaud the public" and "should be put in jail."
Since our society is based on science, yes, I'd say that a campaign to instill the attitude that science is fraudulent and scientists are liars and should be put in jail is an attack on civilization as we know it.
One thing I'd like to know is this: for the last few decades there's been a concerted campaign to make conservatives distrustful of science....
So here's what I want to know:
1. Why? Why target conservatives specifically with anti-science propaganda? Why aren't liberals being targeted too? (Arguments like "Conservatives are more gullible" will be ignored for obvious reasons.)
This is an interesting thing that I've noticed. It's a very significant change from the world I grew up in, where liberals were classically distrustful of science, and conservatives very much pro-science. Through the Reagan era, being pro-science was associated with conservatism, but somehow after the end of the Reagan era, the conservative movement made a sharp turn away from science.
My hypothesis is that it comes from the conservative politicians discovering in the 90s that they can tap into the power of religious fundamentalists. The fundamentalists came with an anti-science agenda and distrust of science, preferring belief-based reasoning in the form of their advocacy of creationism, and have spent decades fine-tuning their anti-science arguments that they have been using in the war against evolution. The mainline conservatives seem to have picked up their specific arguments, without even explicitly recognizing the overall tenor of them as being anti-science.
Shills for the oil industry.
Well, they are funded by the fossil fuel industry (not just oil; that includes coal), or by billionaires whose money comes from in the oil industry. (For this campaign, anyway; they also work on other issues.) Whether this makes them "shills" is a value judgement.
What we learn the billboard, however, is simply this: the Heartland Institute is a policy advocacy organization, not a science institute. They are no longer even pretending to have any interest in actual science. Their only interest in science is to attack it in order to make policy points.
They have stated this before-- Joseph Bast, the president of Heartland, stated that the Heartland Institute's focus is "commitment to a free market policy agenda," and that the main motivation for the Heartland Institute being involved in this debate is to "prevent the U.S. government from adopting policies that favor renewable energy," which he claims would cause an "economic disaster for the country."
But, despite clear statements that their agenda is related to policy, not science, people have been taking their attacks on science seriously.
Some links:
http://rockblogs.psu.edu/climate/2012/01/ethical-analysis-of-the-climate-change-disinformation-campaign-introduction-to-a-series.html
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201107070016
You need that information to get relative cancer rates by area?
Yes.
The text of the article and the information in the articles it links to seem to state different things.
The article linked states:
But the link in that goes to this site http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/neighborhoods-city/internet-service-to-help-in-probe-of-pitt-threats-631734/
which states:
These seem to be completely different things! The article states that they were running an anonymous remailer which, assuming it's done right, doesn't leave any trail. But the link in that text states that they believed that "someone illegally hacked into their system" and "they did some kind of shenanigan to get it"-- which could plausibly have left fingerprints, since real-world hackers aren't always the genius criminal masterminds that the movies like to portray.
Which is it? Were they "illegally hacked" using "shenanigans", or were they running a remailer open to anonymous login? Or, did they actually run an anonymous remailer, but told the FBI that they were hacked?
They have the whole population as a sample
Gosh, so if you had a database of the health of every single person in America, and also a database of where they lived for the last fifty years, you could make a really good retrospective correlation study!
(Of course, if you did, then the /. discussion would be all about the massive invasion of medical privacy laws. But you don't have the database anyway.)
Well, it would correlate with latitude as well.
That is, if cosmic radiation were in fact the main location-dependent factor that caused cancer.
But since cosmic radiation dose is something on the order of 0.5 millisievert per year, it's probably not significant enough to see the signal over the noise, assuming that there are other sources of cancer.
Ionizing radiation causes cancer. More ionizing radiation causes more cancer.
Of course. The question is, how much more cancer is caused by a given dose of radiation?
Unfortunately, this is a question that the paper in question does not answer, because it completely neglects to mention actual numbers. (The pretty colored graphs have units of "excess relative risk." How do you convert that to deaths? You can't. What are the units-- per year? Per lifetime? they don't say. Relative to what? They don't say.) I'd like to see a number, like "excess cancers per year per sievert of exposure," but they don't give one. They compare different studies, but never discuss whether the differences are statistically significant.
There is no "safe dose", though there is a certain unavoidable dose.
That is a question. That is what is known as the "linear no threshold" model-- but although these authors assert the validity of that model, you can't tell it from the data they show. Figure 1 shows too much scatter below 0.3 Sv to give much information about thresholds, and Figure 2 sure looks like it would be well fit by a threshold model.
In short, I'd like to have seen an article with real information.
If you're an alien with the intelligence and skill to achieve interstellar travel, would you stop and visit a world as hostile as ours, or simply avoid it and classify said planet as "The Ghetto"?
Heck yes; I'd have visited it about a hundred million years ago, to see the dinosaurs!
Who wouldn't want to sightsee to a world with dinosaurs?
You have already stated that you have a strong opinion about policy, and, referring to people who disagree with your opinions, you stated:
I really don't care whether people distrust these people for the right reasons or for the wrong reasons.
Since you just told us that truth is of no importance to you in when it comes to discrediting people who don't believe what you do about political issues, why should I credit what you say about people who don't believe what you do?
You got it backwards. If you want action to happen on global warming, you need to make a strong economic case for it and you need to demonstrate that there is a feasible path to global action. If you can't connect the science to my economic interests, the science is nothing more than a curiosity.
I'm fine with that. Curiosity is a good thing as far as I'm concerned. People can make their own decisions about their economic interests.
However, people are attacking the science because they want to make a political points. I am not find with that.
As far as I'm concerned, the proposals for government intervention on climate change are ineffective and dangerous, and I'm glad they don't have a chance of getting implemented.
As long as you attack the proposals by showing why they are ineffective and/or dangerous or for that matter other reasons why they are inadvisible, and not by saying "I disagree with the policy, therefore the science is wrong," I'm fine with that.
I really don't care whether people distrust these people for the right reasons or for the wrong reasons.
This is where we disagree. I do care about the science, and I most particularly do care about people calling scientists criminals because they find that to be an easy way to make a political point.
>> The lesson here is, read the actual science, not the advocates or deniers or bloggers or politicians or special interest groups or popularizers.
In other words, Gore is a dishonest idiot. When you're willing to honestly criticize those politically aligned with your own position, only then should we take you seriously. Until that time, you're just a self-serving hack. Read Feynman.
I have little interest in Al Gore. He's a guy who was a failed presidential candidate twelve years ago and made a movie a year or two later. He's definitely not a scientist.
So, yes, when I say "read the actual science, not the advocates or deniers or bloggers or politicians or special interest groups or popularizers," Gore would definitely be on my list of "advocates or deniers or bloggers or politicians or special interest groups or popularizers," and not scientists.
I think the point Geoffrey Landis is making is that the IPCC is an unreliable organization, since it cites unreliable sources.
Yes, a single sentence out of a thousand page report cited one incorrect source... which was immediately acknowledged and an errata published as soon as it was pointed out.
Nevertheless: the overall lesson to look at the science, not the advocates, bloggers,or tertiary sources, is good advice.
All of the oxygen in the atmosphere comes from reduction of carbon dioxide to oxygen and reduced carbon, so (other than a very small amount currently in biomass) if you burned all of the reduced carbon underground-- what we call "fossil fuels"-- you'd return the Earth to a carbon dioxide and nitrogen atmosphere. That shouldn't be controversial. Yes, if we burn all the fossil fuels, it will have very bad consequences.
I'm sorry I don't have time to critique that website line by line. Given that he manipulated the baseline on figure 3 to move the Hansen prediction upward by 0.4 degrees (and then draws the conclusion "look, Hansen was wrong! His prediction is a whole 0.4 degrees too high!), I don't trust anything else he says unless I track back to the original sources, and I don't have time to do that.
On the subject of feedback factors, there's a decent overview in the IPCC Working Group I Report, "The Physical Science Basis," available here:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml#.T5lYtO25340
That should, at a minimum, help convince you that feedback factors aren't numbers just made up out of thin air, but do have real science behind them.
No, that's just the strawman climate alarmists put up.
I find 11.6 million search hits on the terms “fraud” and "global warming". Looking at the summary of just the first page of hits, I see, among other things, these phrases: "Global Warming Fraud: Somebody Needs to Go to Jail," and "I on the other hand will be giving the criminals that are pushing the Global Warming fraud the finger".
Yeah, that's what these "strawmen" people are saying-- scientists are criminals who "need to go to jail." If you in fact agree with the scientific consensus that the greenhouse effect exists, human-generated gassed contribute to it, and scientists in general are not frauds; but merely disagree with the proposed solutions-- we have no disagreement.
You are again putting up a strawman. The fact that a problem possibly exists doesn't mean that it is rational to do anything about it.
In that case, we are in agreement.
I have no problem with people discussing solutions, and in that category I consider the proposal "let's not do anything" as a rational suggestion worth considering in the discussion. It is those millions of people who have been convinced that it is all a fraud concocted by scientists who are criminals or completely ignorant that I would like to convince otherwise.
I have no interest in, nor patience with, "apocalyptic scenarios that say that feedbacks will amplify everything and we all will die,"
Glad to hear it.
although I'm not actually quite sure who these people are.
Try a Google search for "global warming runaway" or "global warming tipping point". I did the former and found: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_climate_change
From that page: "James E. Hansen has suggested that the Earth could experience a runaway greenhouse effect and adopt a climate like that of Venus if fossil-fuel use continues until reserves are exhausted.[27]"
So there's one name for you, James E. Hansen.
If all the fossil fuel reserves are exhausted?!!!
Good god! You are aware, are you not, that all of the oxygen in our air comes originally from photosynthesis, and that "all of the fossil fuel is exhausted" occurs when every molecule of oxygen has been turned to carbon dioxide? Yes, I would say that if we actually were stupid enough to do that, probably we would return the Earth to its original Venus- like conditions. This is not a realistic condition, however; I would certainly hope that we would stop burning fossil carbon somewhere around when people start dying from lack of oxygen.
I meant: I don't know of who's predicting imminent disaster in the near term. Yes, I agree, if we return all the fossil carbon to the atmosphere, that would be bad. But I don't think you need climate models to say that.
My problem as a layman is that I don't understand how cherrypicking would help the last two-thirds of his article.
The last two thirds? As I said, I really don't have time to comment on a blog post line by line; you're not paying me enough for that. Do I understand your comment to mean that you're saying that although the beginning of the article is twaddle, the last two thirds isn't not?
....The key quote from the article:
Some of the skeptics agree on that. Some think that the greenhouse effect itself does not exist. Some think it exists but is saturated. This is part of the problem, there really isn't a consistent alternate model from the skeptics.
I'm wondering if you agree, and I'm wondering what feedbacks if any were postulated by Manabe and Wetherald.
The Manabe and Wetherald model was a constant humidity model, with no cloud effects. It predicted about 2.2 degrees C per doubling IIRC, which is still within the band of the consensus today. That's well above the 1 that he calls "no feedback": what he means by "no feedback" requires that humidity decreases as temperature rises.
My question is: what is this model he proposed with negative feedback loops that cancel out the well understood positive feedback? Who made this purported model, where has it been published, and what are its predictions? How does it compare with the data? (that's a rhetorical question, by the way; the purported model doesn't exist. Lindzen tried to come up with one about ten years or so back, but even Linzen now agrees that that model he proposed didn't fit the data.)
The article is wrong about cloud effects, by the way; clouds do not necessarily cause negative feedback-- clouds reflect infrared, which increases temperature, as well as reflecting visible, which decreases temperature. In the simplest case of clouds with the same reflectivity in visible and infrared, the first-order effect is zero (proof is left as an exercise to the student. Hint: use the Stefan-Bolzman equation).
Light emission is the converse of light absorption, so any solar cell that absorbs light must, by the same mechanism, emit light, unless other loss mechanisms prevent it. Obviously light emission is a loss mechanism-- light emitted is clearly not turned into electricity. However, all other loss mechanisms can be eliminated by sufficiently clever design, but light emission is a loss required by the laws of thermodynamics. Thus, a solar cell is optimized when there is no other loss mechanism other than light emission, which is to say, when the light emission is maximized.
(In fact, it is optimized when the light emission back toward the source is maximized; all emission that isn't back toward the source could in principle be retroreflected and reabsorbed. This would be known as "light trapping".)
The calculation done in 1967 by Manabe and Wetherald
Does that calculation say that the ice caps will melt, the waters will rise, and we will all starve to death? Or does it predict a mild temperature rise like we have already observed?
I don't deny that the world has warmed. But I question the apocalyptic scenarios that say that feedbacks will amplify everything and we all will die.
I have no interest in, nor patience with, "apocalyptic scenarios that say that feedbacks will amplify everything and we all will die," although I'm not actually quite sure who these people are. The climate scientists I pay attention say that the anthropogenic warming effect is, so far, about half a degree. Perhaps Lovelock was saying "feedbacks will amplify everything and we will all die," but the actual climate scientists-- the ones nobody pays attention to-- are a little less spectacular.
Yes, in fact I do have issues with the arguments presented in the blog you cite. It is badly cherrypicked, I'm afraid. I don't have anything like the time required to show how, over and over again, Evans made choices of what data to present and how to present the data that just "happen" to make the predictions look bad, but I will start with just a single question for you. In figure 3, the graph showing how bad Hansen's predictions are, he happens to start the graph with the "prediction" matching the data at the left edge of the graph, at 1988. Now, the Hansen paper he is quoting predictions from was published in 1988, so that paper couldn't possibly have known the temperature in 1988. In fact, eyeballing the graph, it looks like 1988 was a cyclic high point. The paper was published 1988, so it must have been written in 1987, which means that Hansen actually must have baselined his predictions on temperature data from no later than 1986 (1987 data wouldn't have been available yet, of course.). OK, Evans does give his source for the data he graphed, and, yes, it turns out that 1988 was indeed anomalously high. The average temperature for 1986 was 0.41 degrees cooler than the temperature in January, 1988.
So, here's my question: if you slide the predictions 0.41 degrees lower (and two years earlier) than they are shown in the graph drawn by Evans-- that is, start the predictions at the point where the temperature actually was when Hansen made the prediction-- how does the data fit the prediction?
Soylendra failed because it was (or became) a shell company to funnel government money into corrupt pockets - and they were quite good at that. It's a perfect example of a "green" sham, didn't mean it as much else.
It must be nice to have a worldview where you can so confidently ascribe problems to corrupt people and the evil government, but in fact, there's no need for such conspiracy theories, nor evidence to support them. Solyndra started up at a time when solar panels were selling at about $2.50 per peak watt; right now solar panels can be purchased (in bulk-- not at the consumer level) at 90 cents per peak watt. That's really sufficient information to explain why they failed.
I'm not actually a great fan of their technology-- it was a lot of complication to solve a relatively minor part of the problem-- but there's no reason to say that they are, or were, a "shell company"-- they were, in fact, producing the product they said they would produce. There just turned out to be no way that it could compete in the market.
Not all startups that have a clever idea work, and the technological landscape is just littered with clever inventions that simply were outcompeted by something less clever, but cheaper. Sorry, but that's just the way it is.
It's simple is it?
Can you please explain in detail how a colorless, odorless gas can trap heat from radiating from the planet and act as a blanket? In fact, I've never seen an explanation of the actual mechanism of global warming more specific than "green house gases act as an insulator". I can believe that if they were colored in some way, but they aren't, they're clear.
Sure. Carbon dioxide is transparent in the visible spectrum, but has absorption bands in the infrared. Thus, some of the thermal infrared emitted by the Earth is absorbed by the CO2 in the atmosphere rather than being radiated to space. This energy is then re-radiated (still in the infrared) isotropically. Some of that re-radiated energy escapes to space, some of it is re-absorbed by the atmosphere, and some of it is reradiate downward, to the ground.
The portion reradiated to the ground is the part we need to think about. Essentially, the ground radiated energy upward, but due to trace-gas infrared absorption in the atmosphere, a fraction of that returned back to the ground, effectively reducing the amount of energy radiated. That's what's meant by "acts like an insulator"-- it reduces the heat transfer outward (to space).
Clear enough? If not, you might see what you get if you look for "greenhouse effect" in wikipedia.
...Solar is different. There's plenty of solar power. But current solar-electric panel are still bullshit (I drive past the Soylendra buildings every day)...
I do have to point out that Solyndra was not a large part of the photovoltaic industry, and even if their expansion plans had succeeded, they still wouldn't have been a major player in the photovoltaic industry. The failure of one small manufacturer, out of many, has little to do with the viability of the photovoltaic power.
I will also point out that one (not the only, but one) of the reasons they failed was because competition in the industry had driven the price of panels down so far that their production system couldn't compete. In other words, they failed because photovoltaic panels are much less expensive than anybody had expected they would be. That's not any kind of evidence that "solar-electic panel are bullshit"; exactly to the contrary.
The mainstream climate scientists are not and have not been mispredicting the rate of climate change
Pardon my ignorance, exactly what *is* the mainstream prediction?
The currently published consensus (IPCC AR-4) is that climate change will be 2 to 4.5 C temperature rise per doubling of CO2, with a current best estimate of about 3 C (another source, Rahmstorf 2008, says 2.6 to 4.1 C, with most modeled results clustering around 3 C.)
If you want to turn that into a temperature prediction, multiply that by the log base 2 of your prefered prediction of carbon dioxide in the year you want to predict for (divided by the carbon dioxide in the year you take as baseline). The climate science part, however, is not the prediction of carbon dioxide emission (that's sociology and/or politics and/or economics), it's the response of the climate.
(Yes, it's a little annoying that the climate community settled in on log base 2. Temperature is logarithmic in greenhouse-gas concentration-- that's the Arrhenius relation-- and the earlier modellers decided to model the effect of doubling carbon dioxide, hence the log_2.)
> You're still hanging on to that? Because that's really one of the very few significant errors that have ever been demonstrated. And for what it's worth, you know who found the error? Those damn crackpot scientists on the IPCC panel.
The data I cited, specifically the _real_ finding, was only published in February. So please forgive me if I only cited one recent example in my quick post, and if I consider the scientific data more interesting than the IPCC panel admission of error.
You're missing the point.
The incorrect paragraph about the rate of glaciers melting was not in the IPCC working group one report, "The Scientific Basic of Climate Change;" it was in the working group 2 report on the effects of climate change. And, what exactly was the error? The error was not sourcing the report from the scientific literature, but taking data from a tertiary source.
The lesson here is, read the actual science , not the advocates or deniers or bloggers or politicians or special interest groups or popularizers.
What pisses me off are the people who think that wealth redistribution in the form of carbon-credit trading will do anything to solve the problem,
Ah, but that's a very different question from the question of whether carbon dioxide emissions are affecting the climate... and it is a question that gets almost no discussion at all, because the people who think that carbon-credit trading is not a good idea don't address it, but instead argue that the greenhouse effect doesn't exist, or it exists but is saturated, or it exists but volcanoes emit more carbon dioxide than humans so it doesn't matter what we do, or the weather data is wrong, or the scientists who study the problem are all frauds, or the cosmic rays are changing the climate more then humans do, or solar activity has gone up recently, or solar activity has gone down recently, or some hithertofore unknown feedback mechanism cancels out the changes created by humans, or... every six months there's a new purported explanation for why human-generated carbon dioxide doesn't affect the climate. (Yes, I've heard all those arguments, and many more that make even less sense.)
By denying that a possible problem even exists, the discussion of solutions ends up being completely one-sided. No one critiques carbon-credit trading, because the people who would do so are spending their efforts denying that the science.
if there really is a problem.
See? You can't even complete a single sentence before you start suggesting the greenhouse effect isn't real.