New Climate Change Warning 1023
sebFlyte writes "A new grid computing climate research project, climateprediction.net, has come up with its first major results, and they're really not good news for the planet according to the BBC. The simulations suggest that over the next hundred years we could see average rises of average temperatures of up to 11K, more than twice what was previously thought."
Someday... (Score:4, Insightful)
...not good news for the planet... (Score:5, Insightful)
HOWTO: give science a bad name. (Score:5, Insightful)
However I think the results are pretty conclusive in their own right and right-minded politicians ought to be doing something on that basis alone (they're finally beginning to, as well
So, by varying the parameters in a simulation, they've found a range of temperature increases which we should engender reactions from "concerned" (2 degrees) through "terrified" (11 degrees). Hey, I admitted my bias in the first paragraph! The press reports the "terrified" figure and it's big news. Until someone points out that it's a Normal distribution, and the massively-more-likely figure is in the "worried" temperature range of (guessing here) 5-6 degrees.
The problem is not that the scientists are lying (they're not), and not that the press are lying either (they're not). The problem is a lack of understanding of the end-result in announcing a catastrophe and then saying "No, we'll be ok". There's a fable about this, and it involves a boy crying "wolf" too many times...
I'm not sure who's to blame. Should the scientists state more forcefully what their expectation is rather than the extremes of their results? Would they ever get published in that case ? Should journalists be held accountable for doing the equivalent of shouting "Fire" in a theatre ? Well, a journalist's job is not to report the news, it's to sell papers, and catastrophes sell better. Perhaps there's a need for a neutral ground, some sort of arbiter that can interpret the results in a way the public can understand (since no-one seems to take science these days), but *that*'s open to *easy* abuse as well.
Perhaps science was better off in its ivory tower after all. That's a depressing thought. Perhaps the best solution would be to comprehensively educate people about science (better, about statistics) and beat the snake-oil salesmen at their own game.
Simon.
11K? (Score:2, Insightful)
It rained yesterday (Score:2, Insightful)
The news was unable to predict either of these to any accuracy only 24 hours prior to the weather event.
You want to believe that they can predict the weather 100 years from now?
Specifics about the model used??? (Score:3, Insightful)
it shows there's no such thing as a safe level of carbon dioxide.
Uh. Ok.
BS, FP (Score:3, Insightful)
Again, why do I have to keep posting the same thing: where are the scientists?
SHOW me a graph of solar infrared output versus Earth temperatures, over a period of at least 50 years.
THEN we'll see how much B.S. this global warming crap is.
Mankind doesn't have the ability to alter the planet in this way. We're off by dozens of orders of magnitude.
Get real, folks. It's all about the sun.
Lalalalalala I can't hear you lalalalalala (Score:4, Insightful)
Do conservatives just not think there are consequences, or does it just appear that way? "Pollute the environment? Don't worry about it. Dump motor oil on your lawn, screw it. Make a liberal cry. Hahaha. Torture innocents? Eh. Has to be done. Drive up the national debt? C'est l'vie. Declare war for no good reason? They love us for it, the liberal media lies if they say any different."
I thought America was founded by *scientists*, non? The prevailing scientific opinion is that global warming is real and dangerous. Where'd these religious zealots come from, and when do we start shooting?
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
It's All Rubbish (Score:1, Insightful)
Don't worry people, sit tight, the sky isn't gonna fall down on us.
Re:You have to prioritize (Score:4, Insightful)
Terrorism in the USA: A few billion dollars, a few thousand lives, maybe once every 10 years.
Warming: Sea defences, mass migration from low-land, and everything else: Hundreds of billions of dollars, millions? of lives, over the next 100 years.
Re:Uh, what? (Score:3, Insightful)
The simulations suggest that over the next hundred years we could see average rises of average temperatures of up to 11K
I can only conclude that the average annual rise in the average global temperature* will be up to 11 degrees Kelvin for the next 100 years. In other words, the average temperature will be up to 1100 degrees warmer in 2105 than it is now.
I'm no global warming expert or pundit, but that's certainly my interpretation of the story blurb that made the front page. Good work on the clarity, Slashdot submitters and editors!
* - Saying "temperatures" in the plural is misleading, as global warming is about global average temperature, and using the plural indicates local measurements are what is relevant, which is not the case.
Re:HOWTO: give science a bad name. (Score:2, Insightful)
Personally, I live in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the winter the average temp here is probably around 30 degrees F. My family lives in Las Vegas, NV a mere 400 miles away. The average temp there is probably more like 50 degrees, I was there last week wearing shorts and flip flops, it was warm (60 F) for January.
Now, in the summer it gets up to 120F in Vegas, yet more than a million people somehow manage to live there. That is easily 11C warmer than Salt Lake in the summer, people live all over this planet in all sorts of temperatures. Storms might get worse, but that's not going to make the planet "uninhabitable", the Tsunami killed more people by far than all of the huricanes Florida had last year, so unless you're saying global warming causes earthquakes, I'd say we fear that alot more than having to wear short sleeves instead of sweaters.
Even if "The day after tomorrow" happens, (oh whoops it only destroyed the US.. weird... I'm glad that the climate knows who is creating all the greenhouse gasses, and will selectively destroy only them, maybe I can move to Europe and I'll be ok...) That movie was so bizarre, if things really happened the way that movie talked about we'd have to redefine absolute zero (the temp is dropping 40 degrees per second!!!).
anyway, my point is the media sucks at "educating" people be it the news, movies, whatever, they are idiots and can't "convince" any thinking person of their "science". The complete misuse of statistics in this whole argument also renders it useless.
And when there is no significant immediate threat (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It rained yesterday (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You have to prioritize (Score:3, Insightful)
Terrorism is overhyped. Planes are STILL the safest way to travel, yet we have this screening program hiring McDonalds rejects.
Re:It rained yesterday (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, actually, I think you're a little confused on the issue of weather vs. climate. First, predicting weather is different from predicting overall trends in the climate system. So no, obviously, they're not going to know exactly what's going to happen on a particular day a week from now to say nothing of a century from now. However, it is reasonable to predict an increase in the planet's temperature over the next several decades based on amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and so forth.
Using your logic as stated, we'd have to be skeptical that New York City is going to be about 50 degrees F warmer in six months than it was today.
Climate prediction model is worthless (Score:2, Insightful)
Until a model can take past data and accurately come up with conditions we have today, it's worthless other than as an interesting exercise in "what if?". More on this here. [jerrypournelle.com]
Now climate prediction is complex and difficult, and I understand that you have to start somewhere, and that government-funded climatologists need something to do. But sensationalist media's penchant for crying "THE SKY IS FALLING!" and reporting these simulations as gospels of truth is not to be taken seriously.
Re:HOWTO: give science a bad name. (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that we humans have a lot invested in how the climate is right now. A drastic change of 11 degrees over a relatively short period of time would be a global catastrophe that could cause an economic depression that's make the great depression look like an "economic downturn".
Re:It rained yesterday (Score:3, Insightful)
And yet, we make tall claims. Your water boiling analogy is too simplistic - a better one would be you boiling water using minimal firewood in the middle of a forest on a mountain with wild life and equatorial weather. Can you still predict with certainty what would happen to the water?
Chaotic systems are hard to predict - and there is no shame in admitting that. Rather than do that, most climatologists make claims without bothering to sufficiently back up their data or their analytic methods.
There is a rise in global greenhouse gas levels. There is a rise in Earth's temperature. But there is no absolutely conclusive evidence linking the two.
I'm quite open, show me the evidence and I will believe. Look at what Crutzen, Rowland and Molina did - they proved conclusively the link between Ozone depletion & CFCs and they won a Nobel.
What climatologists are doing today is not science, they're still guesstimating. Educated guesses, perhaps. But guesses neverthless.
We've hardly been here a fraction of time the age of this rock and we hardly even know anything about the planet's weather conditions or its past. And yet, we'd like to delude ourselves that we are somehow responsible for an upcoming global catastrophe. Bah.
Re:You have to prioritize (Score:3, Insightful)
And what threat did Iraq pose?? No WMD. They Saddam was contained.
Let's face it. This was a blood for votes war started by Bush.
It's costing us billions of dollars and over 1000 American lives. And I don't give a shit if we did capture Saddam. His capture wasn't worth a single American life!
I only hope that history will paint Bush as the evil little mental midget that he really is.
Re:HOWTO: give science a bad name. (Score:3, Insightful)
But saying average temperatures rise 11 degrees does not mean "oh it's 30 degrees now it'll be 41 degrees in a hundred years". Lets move away from the fact that I live where it gets to 40 degrees, and I most definitely don't want to live in a place where it's 50 degrees. But other things happen that are just unpredictable. Global weather is so complex we can't predict what will happen, but the following things are likely: For you, the sea levels will raise to at least destroy Salt Lake at least because of the ice caps melting. It is quite likely also the atmosphere will become unbreathable to humans. There will be more storms that are more violent. Entire groups of species will become extinct, especially plantlife and especially in the northern hemisphere since they are not very well equiped for major input of energy and will quite simply burn up (having life's major food source being eliminated isn't neccessarily a good plan), and anyway if the plants are eliminated then basically the planet turns into pure deserts, which makes daytime temperatures rise even more (at a sacrifice to nighttime temperatures), so it may well be in the 60 degree areas. There will also be more frequent and more violent volcanic eruptions because of the extra heat being fed into the crust. But anyway, we have more to worry about than "wearing short sleeves".
BS or not (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:HOW I KNOW GLOBAL WARMING IS A LIE (Score:4, Insightful)
Possibly just another one of those problems that we can deal with, but maybe not. At any rate, it debunks your argument that global warming is almost definitely a good thing.
Mod Parent Up (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You have to prioritize (Score:5, Insightful)
OK. So when the EU can take care of, say, problems a days drive from Berlin, like Kosovo or Bosnia, the United States should leave Europe, of course when the entire Red Army and Warsaw Pact was sitting on the other side of the Fulda Gap, it was alright to be nosy.
What about Korea? Ready for the DPRK to burn Seoul? Or Japan? Ready for the PRC to get back at Japan for WW2? Or Taiwan? Ready for the PRC to get back at them for having the gaul to resist the PRC?
Or how about things no one hears about, like the Green Berets demining all over the world? Or American SAR saving lives in the deep ocean? Or how about the 82nd Airborne keeping the DMZ in the Sinai since 1977?
Or what about the US military being there to assist in the Indian Ocean after the Tsuamni? Australia is the only other one in the region with any sealift or airlift and it's a fraction of what the US has.
As soon as the rest of the World shows the slightest ability to not burn itself down the moment we pull back to the US, we'll be happy to, until you all man up, you are stuck with us.
First test of this distributed model (Score:2, Insightful)
Until you have a model that correctly predicts the present to a high degree of accuracy, shut up about the future..
Re:You have to prioritize (Score:3, Insightful)
You know the prayer "God grand me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference"? You -really- need to trade in some of that courage for the other two attributes. You can't change the middle east, and if you'd stay the hell out of it, you wouldn't need to.
Oh, Fuck You Too, and have a nice day. Ya hoser.
Real Questions: (Score:2, Insightful)
1) Is it serious, i.e. causes big problems?
2) Is it caused by humans?
3) Is the cost of stopping negative effects lower than the cost of the negative effects?
4) Is there an alternative?
What is known now:
1) Who knows... worst case forecasts trumped up to guarantee continued funding for one's research projects are over-excited at best and morally bankrupt at worst.
2) Who knows... could be natural cycles or the sun.
3) Probably not...Kyoto would cost America $200-300B/yr for decades, and save little compared with money spent on research into alternative fuels or space energy mining.
4) Growth & Wealth
The real protection against nature is the wealth that arises from free societies. The third world would not only pollute less if they entered the first world, but they would also be much better prepared to handle any possible problems.
Compare the earthquakes in Iran last year to those in California. Or the system to prevent casualties from tsunamis in Japan to the non-existent system in nations recently affected.
The body count from the recent tsunamis is close to 300,000. Who are environmentalists kidding themselves to say potential global warming is a greater threat than other natural disasters, malaria, and poverty in general?
Re:Scare mongering (Score:2, Insightful)
I also find it funny that you criticize the results of a very well-known study without actually seeing the results, then you proceed to ask for definitive results. Maybe you could actually visit the climateprediction.net website for more information before criticizing their research? For example, go here for a detailed description of their model: http://www.climateprediction.net/science/index.ph
Re:You have to prioritize (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, sorry about that. We'll pull our aircraft carrier and troops out of Malaisa and those other countries hit by the Tsunami. Damn Americans. Providing fresh water, mobile airfields, command structure, delivering food, medicine and other supplies.
To primarily Moslem areas. Americans, keep your military in your own damn country. No one likes a nosy neighbor.
Re:You have to prioritize (Score:5, Insightful)
Your de-mining bit though; rather ironic considering that when last I heard, the U.S. still hadn't signed the international treaty banning anti-personnel mines.
Re:You have to prioritize (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, they did have WMD. Sarin gas for starters. What else went over the border to Syria and Iran, we'll probably never know. Absence of proof is not proof of absence. Even the report that the media trotted out a few months ago highlighting the "NO WMDs" claim made it very clear that Saddam was going to keep his eyes on the WMD prize.
And this is completely setting aside the question of the oppression of Iraqis.
Let's face it. This was a blood for votes war started by Bush.
Wait, first it was a blood for oil war. But then everyone pointed out we weren't making out on Iraqi oil. (Just the UN made out on that, right?)
Now it's a
It's costing us billions of dollars and over 1000 American lives. And I don't give a shit if we did capture Saddam. His capture wasn't worth a single American life!
Is he worth hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives? Because that's how many his men have killed since he was in power. And they didn't just die from bombings, we're talking rape and torture. And no, not the kind of torture where people have sex in front of you and make you undress, but the kind where things are shoved up your ass that don't belong in your ass, where you are slowly killed, you know, real torture.
And that's not even counting the Iraqis that were just made to suffer under his rule.
I only hope that history will paint Bush as the evil little mental midget that he really is.
Sad to tell you this, but if Iraq gets a taste of democracy and it catches on in the middle east, Bush is going to be the Reagan of the 21st century.
Re:And when there is no significant immediate thre (Score:2, Insightful)
Does it indicate that Iraq posed a significant, credible threat?
A threat so real that one thousand four hundred and eighteen (to date) American lives should be spent stopping (somehow) that threat?
Re:Lalalalalala I can't hear you lalalalalala (Score:3, Insightful)
So, when the shooting starts, you'll have a bunch of people who think guns are evil and probably have never touched a gun, versus people who have been using guns for most of their adult lives.
What's your scientific prediction of the outcome?
Re:You have to prioritize (Score:1, Insightful)
Funny you should ask that. Was it an implicit parallel between Pearl Harbour and 9/11? The US Government is known to leave its own people die when that serves its interest.
Re:You have to prioritize (Score:2, Insightful)
Iraqi lives? okay, so why are the US allies with Uzbeckystan (sp?) a country where political rivals of the president are boiled alive? you know, real torture.
Oppresion of Iraqi people? so why didn't the US, or the rest of the world for that matter complain louder when he gassed them? Instead Donny Rumsfeld and Co. probably just gave him more money to buy weapons from the French and Russians. The WMD argument doesn't hold water. The saving the Iraqi people argument doesn't hold water, what other excuse for an illegal invasion of a soverign nation are you going to give us next?
Re:You have to prioritize (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, that's one possible outcome for Iraq. Another possible outcome is that out of all the chaos Iraq manages to form itself into an Islamic state - what Zawahiri and bin Laden have been trying (and repeatedly failing) to do for the last 15 years or so. Who knows, Zawahiri and bin Laden believe that, sould that actually happen it will cause the muslim masses to rise up, overthrow their leaders and create a slew of Islamic states throughout the middle east. That was, is, and will be their goal. For the most part the state "jihad against America" is a way to try and rally support - a lesson they learned when their attempted efforts in, for instance, Algeria failed to attract the support of the masses (oddly the general population was rather repelled, rather than attracted by, their violence).
So, we have 2 competing theories:
(1) Install a democracy in the Iraq and watch democracy then sweep the middle east.
(2) Rally support by encouraging people to rise up against the Americans that interfere in middle east politics and institute an Islamic state in Iraq. The Islamic Jihad movement can then sweep the middle east.
To be honest, no matter what happens in Iraq, I don't really expect anything to "sweep the middle east". In the meantime though the two theories seem to be fairly well in balance. Iraq is in chaos, there's ill will by the common people toward the US, and Islamic clerics (like al Sadr) are polling very well leading up the elections. In the meantime Iraq is actually having free and open elections so democracy will arrive. It looks to me if things could go either way - which means I'm not so sure this whole "introduce democracy and watch it spread through the middle east" idea was quite all it was cracked up to be.
Jedidiah.
Re:You have to prioritize (Score:1, Insightful)
Iraq had Sarin gas 10 years before the war started. Sarin has a shelf life of 2-3 years before it decomposes.
As to Saddam wanting WMDs, since the sanctions were originally imposed, every indication has been that he would start a WMD program as soon as the sanctions were lifted. As long as the sanctions were in place, there was no problem.
Is he worth hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives?
That's a question for the Iraqi's to answer, not for other countries. If the Iraqi people started a revolution and asked us to help them, it would be reasonable for us to help overthrow Saddam. The Iraqi people obviously didn't think Saddam was bad enough to warrant being overthrown. They certainly do seem to think that our occupation needs to be resisted, and they're giving us a much better fight than Saddam's army did, which makes it reasonable to believe the Iraqis were capable of overthrowing Saddam if they chose to.
Re:You have to prioritize (Score:5, Insightful)
Afghanistan was fine. Noticed how the world was with you and cheering you on when you went there ? But let us cut the crap. You didn't really go there to "extend freedom and democrocy". You went there to catch terrorists who had attacked you and to topple a regime which harboured these terrorists, and world agreed that you had the right. Freedom and democracy ? Well that was incidental. You *are* supposed to clean up after the mess you cause. If you create a power vaccum you would definitely be expected to protect the innocent civilians there from anarchial looting and rioting, by helping set up a democratic government.
As for Iraq ... for the umpteenth time, how was it a problem for you ? There are hundreds of tyrannical regime. Last I checked one of them actually became an ally despite having WMDs and caught profilerating the nuke technology *and* being a dictatorial regime, which had actually toppled the previous democratic government via a military coup.
You seem to be the only one buying into your fairytales about "extending freedom and democracy", when in reality you just support dictators usually.
Please don't call it Climate Change (Score:2, Insightful)
Peak Oil vs Global Warmining (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:First test of this distributed model (Score:1, Insightful)
It is trivially easy to create a model that accurately predicts the conditions today. All you have to do is tweak the parameters of whatever model you're using to fit the current data. The problem arises when you a) try to correctly train your model, and b) try to use a model that actually agrees with some of the stuff we know about the environment.
The fact that the environment is chaotic should only underscore how hard it is to predict what will happen. It always amazes me to see how many clueless idiots think they know more about what will happen to the environment than people who actually study this stuff in a serious manner.
Re:And when there is no significant immediate thre (Score:2, Insightful)
Jeeze, what does BUSH have to do with it? You can't quote a negative statistic without mentioning Bush in the same thought? How about this: 3.2 MILLION AMERICANS WERE KILLED BY CIGARETTES ON CLINTON'S WATCH!!! Makes no sense, right?
It's because millions of workers would be out of their damned jobs (assuming they weren't in jail) and ready to vote the jerks "in the government" out of office, if not start outright rebellion.
Dude, get real. Every smoker out there made a concious decision to light up for the first time. My father died at 46 due to a massive heart attack, massively influenced by his two or three pack a day habit. His father died at 40 for the same reason. But I know whose fault it was --- both of them knew it wasn't healthy. Nobody forced them to light up.
Re:Real Questions: (Score:2, Insightful)
1) The effects are serious. At the very least, most of the worlds population centers will be flooded and uninhabitable. And that's the good news.
2) Absolutely no doubt that greenhouse gases contribute, and absolutely no dobut that human activity is responsbile for most of those additional greenhouse gases. The only question is how much it matters.
3) The cost of preventing it is negligable. Banning monster trucks masquerading as passenger cars would be a good first step and would cost very little. Replacing CRT's with LCD's will help and will cost the economy almost nothing. It might even help. Wind power could help. Nuclear might help. There are alot of things that could be done that might even help the economy as much or more than they hurt. They will hurt big oil and Detroit in the short term, which is of course why there well funded propaganda campaign to ridicule solid science.
4) Growth and welath don't work so well when your assets are, literally, under water.
Seriously get yourself into a science class ASAP. You are fantastically ignorant or trolling.
Re:You have to prioritize (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to agree with you there - it was pretty impressive how Bin Laden was captured so quickly. Uh.. oh.. wait...
Re:Probably as silly as... (Score:3, Insightful)
But they have NO evidence that this warming is caused by human activity. Climate, like much in nature goes in cycles, some of very long periodicity compared to the short human life time. There were times in recorded history when it was much warmer and also times when it was much colder, all long before mankind started using fossil fuels. So right now we may be in a warming cycle, the duration and extent of which NONE of the smart-@ss scientists can predict any more than the lottery numbers.
Re:Someday... (Score:4, Insightful)
Because it's patently false [sciam.com]:
Re:HOWTO: give science a bad name. (Score:3, Insightful)
you seem to forget there's a difference between ice water and sea water (hint: salt). that's what scientists are worried about - disruption to currents when the two mix.
Re:Since when did computer models become gospel? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, I seem to recall reading about Henri Poincare finding a "homoclinic tangle" while trying to solve the problem of the stability of the Solar System (to win a prize put up by the King of Sweden). It amounted to a strange attractor, and a chaotic system. That probably wasn't "the first" being only around 1890, but it was one of the earlier points. Why what did you have in mind?
The crux of Chaos Theory is that some systems will NEVER be predictable because there are so many variables that it is impossible to know all the starting conditions.
Not really. Chaos Theory generally has more to say about what you can predict/say about such systems, and the fact that your predictions will have to be formed differently than those of nice classical linear systems.
Or were you talking about "Popular Chaos Theory" where people who don't know what they're talking about make vague generalisations about what they think "Chaos Theory" probably means, largely based on a few half assed descriptions from MIchael Crichton books and Hollywood films?
If a computer model can't even predict weather more than a few days out, how is it that it can predict weather a hundred years from now?
Really? I can make quite a few fairly accurate predictions about the weather over the coming year: It will be (in the northen hemisphere) warmer over June July and August, but will cold come the end of the year. On average Florida will be warmer than Maine this year. Seattle will see a lot of days with rain this year.
You see, despite it being a chaotic system, it's still possible to discuss some of the more qualitive aspects with some accuracy. I can't predict exactly what the weather will be like on July 23rd, but I can make a fairly accurate guess that it will be warmer than the weather tomorrow (unless you're in the southern hemisphere). They can't tell you exactly what the weather will be like 100 years from now, but they can make qualitive broad statements about it.
Chaos Theory has to be the single most misunderstood and misrepresented theory next to Quantum Physics. Could you please refrain from further spreading this bizarre contaminated view of what is, actually, an interesting field of mathematics.
Jedidiah.
Please, no more climate change articles. (Score:3, Insightful)
it seems like there'd be less bullshit being posted if the topic were creationsm or some bollocks like that.
Re:You have to prioritize (Score:2, Insightful)
But then please please stop recognizing dictators as allies and friends when it suits you. Stop taking sides in wars that do not really concern you and are not about democracy. And at least clean up and actually *leave* when you are done setting up your democracy. Especially when the people you went to save, want you to leave.
I am all for idealism. But don't expect me to cheer for hypocrisy.
Re:You have to prioritize (Score:2, Insightful)
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13445
Re:You have to prioritize (Score:2, Insightful)
Look up the US annual military budget, and then say that.
Furthermore, the US is far and away the biggest culprit for causing global warming, and IMO it is fitting that the US should suffer the consequences along with everybody else.
First-Worlders pollute less? (Score:3, Insightful)
"The real protection against nature is the wealth that arises from free societies"
Protection against nature? the problem isn't "nature", it's the distinctly unnatural effects of dumping billions of tons of extra carbon into the atmosphere.
The deepest irony is that right now in the US we've got a sweet deal, climate-wise, in the status quo, with our temperate climate and fertile breadbaskets. From purest self-interest, we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot if we continue to perturb the system. On a geological time frame most of the time the earth has either been incredibly hot with no ice caps, or frozen in ice ages; our current temperate, interglacial state is the exception, not the rule, and while it won't last forever, we still have a huge vested interest in keeping it that way as long as possible. It's true that we really don't know how the system works, but dumping tons of carbon into the air is equivalent to blindly conducting a major climatological experiment. While it's theoretically possible that we could introduce enough "dimming" from particulate pollution to counterbalance greenhouse effects, the presence of many positive-feedback systems (melting ice sheets releasing stored CO2, forests switching from carbon sinks to carbon sources, etc) make that rather unlikely. It's like saying that the best way to good health is to drink lots of beer, lots of coffee, smoke lots of opium and lots of crystal meth because they'll all cancel each other out, instead of not doing any of them and maybe get out of the house every now and then.
This happened before with CFCs--the scientific community pointed out the harmful effects of CFCs on the ozone layer, the world acted to reduce CFCs, and it appears like we might have acted in time--the ozone holes seem to be shrinking.
Maybe we'll act in time for climate change. Or perhaps invading Iran would be a better use of our time.
Re:You have to prioritize (Score:2, Insightful)
Ok, I'm done taking the metaphor too far now.
Re:100 years 100 years 100 years .... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's like when you tell a friend "You're drunk. If you drive home you'll kill somebody," when you know that he only has a 1 in 10 chance of actually killing somebody on that night, you still might be able to stop him and drive him home yourself, preventing a potential accident.
Plan for the worst. Hope for the best.
Having a let it ride attitude is a good way to meet with the day you really needed that gun, and didn't have one.
Re:Probably as silly as... (Score:3, Insightful)
But they have NO evidence that this warming is caused by human activity.
There is quite a lot of evidence, or at least indicators. A simple one:
As a child, did you ever make a small ecosystem [k12.ut.us]? Basically a plant sealed in a bottle. If you did not, I can tell you that increasing carbon dioxide increases temperature. And as a comparison, burning fossile fuels releases a lot of stored carbon dioxide. Now, the earth is not a closed system like the bottle, but we can suspect that the same principles apply. Get it? Or was I too smart-@ss for you?
Climate, like much in nature goes in cycles, some of very long periodicity compared to the short human life time.
As I, and many others, have mentioned before on Slashdot, scientists do not dispute that climate changes over time. What they worry about is a much more rapid change than has been seen before. And before you say we don't have measurements from the past, we do. We can check trees, sediments, ice layers in the Arctic and Antarctic to see temperatures and levels of carbon dioxide.
Think of it as a pendulum slowly going back and forth. It was already going in the direction of slightly warmer, and no, it has not reached the temperature levels it has in the past. However, when we compare the speed of change, it looks like someone whacked this pendulum hard and sent it rocketing in one direction. And this at the same time that humans started releasing a lot of greenhouse gasses. How far will the pendulum go? Where will it stop? Is there something we can do about it? That is the questions being discussed.
And before the old lie of volcanoes releasing more greenhouse gasses pop up - read this [nwsource.com]. Volcanoes release more pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, but NOT as much carbon dioxide. Not even close to what humans release.
Re:First test of this distributed model (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, that won't help.
The conditions for 50 years ago are nothing like the conditions that the Chicken Littles are claiming we'll see in another 50 years. A model which accurately predicts 2005 from 1955 could fail utterly to predict 2055 from 2005.
The problem is called ``out of sample prediction''. The model can be expected to be accurate for the range of data used to calibrate it. When you try to predict the future by plugging in data which is outside the range of the data you used to calibrate your model, there is no reason to think that the model will still work.
I'd say that out-of-sample prediction is right up there with ``consensus'' as a sign of bad science.
Re:Since when did computer models become gospel? (Score:3, Insightful)
Bad presumption, I'm afraid. I've explained that a bit in an earlier reply, see here [slashdot.org].
What it boils down to is the model is only assured to be good for the range of data that you fitted it to. Plug in data that is outside that range (which you must do, if you believe that the future will be significantly different than the present!) and the model is suddenly unreliable.
Of course, I've assumed that the model isn't suffering from spurious correlation or over-fitting. In those cases, it could be wrong for the range of data you fitted it to!
Re:Crichton novel- State of Fear (Score:1, Insightful)
He may be an MD, but he has to have one of the poorest grasps of science and technology of any writer I have seen. I really do wonder how he managed to pass his exams in Med School, because he seems to have none of the basic groundwork in critical thinking that is normally taught to undergraduates.
I just don't understand how anyone takes him seriously when his entire idea of chaos theory was a mathematician who went around spouting statements that any child over 10 could utter...
He's a fucking puppet for the Republicans and deserves to burn in hell with Coulter, Rand, Rove, Rice, Bush and all the other evil bastards...
Rising Sun (Score:1, Insightful)
The cute kitten cartoons are just a cover. Beware.
Re:You have to prioritize (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Models Suggest... (Score:2, Insightful)
First they ran the parameter sets on known data (the 1800s); the ones that ran wild then don't model reality. The remaining ones are possible candidates, and are run using 1900s data. Then those are statistically analyzed (you can see the overlaid graphs of all the param sets on the climateprediction.net web site).
Re:It's because.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The grand (or is that grand, grand) parent was concerned that the Bush administration didn't realize that the EPA was saying that the temperatures were rising AND were predicting further rises.
The problem here is a misunderstanding of what the point of disagreement is (and it's really not a right-left issue at all: I'm a liberal democrat myself, but agree with the White House on this). The difference is based, not on the question, "is it getting warmer?" That was a real and significant question in the 80s when there were doubts about the measurements being used. However, at this point we are fairly certain that temperatures have been rising for the last 100 years and have been rising more sharply for the last 50.
The question is: is this a natural warming trend, as observed 500-1000 years ago, is this human-induced or is it a combination of the two.
The most likely answer is that it's a combination, so the disagreement boils down to where you place the division of responsibility. If man is responsible for 0.00001% of the current warming trend then there's no point in worrying about it any more than we worry about tracking hurricanes. Do the math, warn the people, carry on.
If we're responsible for 50% of the current warming trend, then we should seriously re-think out interaction with the environment... and soon!
My personal belief is that, in the current climate of mud-slinging and political pressure, there is no reasonable way to determine the real answer, and so I am left with one overriding fact: for every form of influence man can exert on our world, nature routinely exerts far, far more influence. All of our factories, planes and cars pale in comparison to volcanoes, forest fires and various bilogical processes. The Sun's influence is still poorly understood. For example, what is the exact relationship between increases in solar output and evaporation? Since water vapor is the most potent greenhouse gas, knowing if evaporation is a linear, logarithmic or step function with respect to solar radiation is KEY to understanding global warming, and yet the process of evaporation is so complex that we have yet to understand it even enough to describe simple weather phenomenon, much less climactic change.
So, do we change the way we live? We should, but we didn't need a global warming debate to tell us that. We desperately need to police the most obviously damaging influences that man has on the environment. Chemical dumping kills millions every year, around the world. Why is that less of a problem than the THEORY that global warming might have a human influence?! We're over-fishing our oceans. Why is that less of a danger to human quality of life? We've been preventing forest fires the wrong way for 100 years, leading to fires that burn orders of magnitude hotter and more dangerously.
The problem I have with environmentalism is that it is mostly focused on a FEELING that humans are doing the wrong thing, and research is used as a sort of background music to the movement rather than the driving force. I want to be an environmentalist, but as long as environmentalism is defined by owl-squeezers and doom predictors I guess I'll have to just be a concerned inhabitant of planet Earth.
Yeah, Right! It's minus F**King -25 outside. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Peak Oil vs Global Warmining (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:CO2 IS a greenhouse gas (Score:3, Insightful)
I honestly do not understand how anyone can doubt that humans cause climate change.
(1) Because people (including many here on /. apparently) don't think for themselves and easily believe the (politically and economically based) propaganda claiming otherwise.
(2) People simply don't like being told that their current lifestyles are unsustainable and that they'll have to make changes if we are to survive (i.e. they just don't like hearing that there is something "wrong" with the way they are living, so they'd rather just bury their head in the sand). I mean, nobody likes hearing that there is something wrong with something they rather like, and have grown accustomed to, doing.
(3) The problem "feels" too big to solve, essentially insurmountable, so many people feel helpless so they'd rather just deny there is a problem (again, head-in-the-sand syndrome), it feels more comforting that way, and ...
... (4) many people prefer to believe a comforting falsehood than a discomforting truth.
(5) Peer pressure (which is for adults as much as it is for teens). Certain opinions, even though they're wrong, are "cool" to have, purely by virtue of most of your peer group having them. If everyone else at school or at work acts like it's cool to blew out blatantly false statements like "volcanoes generate more greenhouse gasses than mankind's activities" or to reject pro-sustainability advocates as "tree-hugging hippies", then it becomes "cool" to do that, so if you want to be cool and not be uncool you say the same things.
(6) Group-think/sheeple etc. Most people don't behave based on rational thought and analysis of problems, rather they simply imitate what other people do. So if other people laugh and say "damn bunny-hugging liberals screaming chick little", then they imitate that behaviour, regardless of how immensely stupid it might be to ignore a massive climate change problem, because that seems like more "fun" behaviour.
(7) Combining (2) and (5), nobody likes a "party pooper", i.e. nobody likes the guy that points out the problem with what you're doing. So many otherwise rational, intelligent people don't pipe up and criticise stupid behaviour .. they just watch quietly, not wanting to be the "party pooper".
(8) Another reason people prefer to ignore the problem is that humans are generally evolved for short-term thinking. Only a tiny percentage of the population can think further into the future, so for more people it all just seems way too far in the future to really be something to worry about.
Of course, all these things are so dumb and trivial compared to the problem we're facing.
Re:It's because.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Silly article (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Uh, what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's because.... (Score:4, Insightful)
THIS... this right here, is what I was talking about above. No one with a shred of scientific credentials that I've read anywhere has suggested that man has the unbridled power to reverse or even halt global warming. It's unthinkable that we would have that kind of power. All that has been suggested is that the existing warming trend, that current models take as a given could be returned to the track that our current understanding of solar and geothermal forces predict. In plain english: the best we could do is go back to slower warming, not prevent what appears to be a natural period of global warming that began in the late 1800s.
But that's not a valid statement for an environmentalist to make. It *feels* better to say that we could "stop [...] or decrease" global warming, and so science be damned!
Like I said, in this climate, we are almost certain to be unable to extract real meaning from the data at our disposal. Instead, I suggest that we focus on the threats to the environment that are real, provable, and KILLING MILLIONS OF PEOPLE EVERY YEAR. Do that, and you are a real environmentalist. Do that as an environmentalist organization, and I will back you financially.
Re:It's because.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's because.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why? If the sea level rises due to 'natural' temperature variations you'll still drown.
Re:It's because.... (Score:3, Insightful)
A lesser man would have interpreted that as evidence that the "conventional wisdom" that the Bush administration covers this stuff up might be in error. I salute your unshakeable faith.
Re:You have to prioritize (Score:3, Insightful)
That is what happens in a war. However, we did not intentionally kill civilians, unlike Saddam. And our goal is to free everyone there, unlike Saddam's goals.
Do you know how many millions died fighting the good fight in WW2? How many innocent civilians? Does this mean we shouldn't have fought that war? There's more to war than just black and white.
now the civilian death rate is worse than it was under Saddam.
Ummm, nope, sorry, it's not. That report you cited examined precisely 14.6 months of deaths in Iraq under Saddam. Or are you saying the people he killed 15+ months before the war don't count?
You mean like the Iraqi teenager who was seen in Abu Ghraib, lying on the floor with his anus bleeding while US troops discussed sodomizing him with metal objects? I guess that story didn't get reported on FOX News, huh?
Not only wasn't it reported on FOX News, nor did I read anything about it from any other credible sources, such as CNN, MSNBC, my local newspaper, etc. I am talking about credible evidence, not hearsay from prisoners. Can you point me to some references other than blogs?
I am not trying to excuse the stupidity of Abu Ghraib, however I find it laughable how much was made of that "torture" by the same crowd that would like to forget the torture rooms of Saddam.