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Comments: 1011 +- Science: Where the Global Warming Data Is on Sunday November 29, @09:04PM
Posted
by
kdawson
on Sunday November 29, @09:04PM
from the premiere-cru dept.
from the premiere-cru dept.
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science
Several readers noted the latest fallout from the Climate Research Unit's Climategate: the admission by the University of East Anglia that the raw data behind important climate research was discarded in the 1980s, "a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue" according to the Times (UK) article. The Telegraph quotes Phil Jones, beleagured head of the CRU: "Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for NASA and the National Climate Data Centre in the United States, among others. Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them." Some of the data behind these other results can likely be found in a new resource that jamie located up at the Real Climate site: a compilation of links to a wide variety of raw data about climate. From the former link: "In the aftermath of the CRU email hack, many people have come to believe that scientists are unfairly restricting access to the raw data relating to the global rise in temperature. ... We have set up a page of data links to sources of temperature and other climate data, codes to process it, model outputs, model codes, reconstructions, paleo-records, the codes involved in reconstructions etc."
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after seeing all this (Score:5, Funny)
Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Insightful)
If I were to be "worked up" it would be because it is not rational to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. And when I'm told, "oh, well, even if the conclusion of AGW is wrong it still means we need to do such and such" then I become immediately suspicious. I don't like handwaving. The data should stand, or fall, on it's own merits.
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Re:Why are people not getting worked up enough (Score:5, Insightful)
So, you're saying, "Cut off funding for anyone who questions the official position that this is an urgent global crisis that demands massive government intervention"?
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Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Insightful)
if global warming is false
Look at pictures of Mount Kilimanjaro [wikipedia.org] today, 20, 30 and 50 years ago. Where have the glaciers gone? Travel to any of the glaciers fields in Europe, North America or Asia. Where have the glaciers gone [wikipedia.org]? Global cooling sure as fuck hasn't caused them to recede drastically.
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Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Insightful)
Kilimanjaro has been retreating since the 1800s [nationalgeographic.com].
C02 in the atmosphere has only been shooting up since the 1950s. Pre-industrial C02 levels were about 2.8 parts per 10 000. As opposed to 4 or so now [noaa.gov].
If these things pre-date C02's big increase this indicates a large role for natural climate variations.
This is what many skeptic say.
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Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Informative)
Kilimanjaro has been retreating since the 1800s [nationalgeographic.com].
Yeah, once the industrial age had got started in earnest.
And in the past 50 years the industrial age has really grown, and so have the consequences.
Parent
Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Insightful)
Where have the glaciers gone?
My city of residence was covered by massive glaciers not too long ago by geologic standards. My house is built on a big pile of glacial till. I'm happy my area is warmer now than it was.
It's not a simple matter of true/false, either/or, all or nothing. People to reduce the problem to those terms are making it impossible to have rational discussion.
Yes, climate temperatures fluctuate with or without our influence. Yes, human influence is large enough and pervasive enough to alter those fluctuations. Yes, some areas of the world will benefit from further warming. Yes, some areas of the world are already at the limit of habitation/productivity because of warm temperatures and further warming may ruin them. Yes, it's always better to pollute less and have less man-made impact on the environment if we have a choice about it. Yes, we will someday run out of useful oil reserves. Yes, significantly changing our behavior may cost trillions of dollars and hurt many people. Yes, making those changes may leave us better off politically and financially in the long term.
These things are all true. Some of these facts are in tension with other facts. No simple solutions exist. We need a complex, nuanced solution. Unfortunately in these days of conservative vs. liberal sound-bite-bashing, it's impossible to discuss any complex solutions. The only choices we seem to have are "environmentalists are total frauds, burn all the oil you want" and "the world is about to end unless we impose a fascist state to dictate every detail of our lifestyles".
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Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Insightful)
It wasn't. There's both natural variation and anthropogenic change. If only there were some framework we could use to examine the system and the data, differentiate natural variation from anthropogenic change, and predict the future impact of anthropogenic change on humans.
On an unrelated note, why is quantification, proper logic, and science so hard for Slashdot users to understand?
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Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Insightful)
However we should get correct data. If Global Warming is not an issue, then why are we focusing so much on Carbon. Carbon Trading, Carbon Free Energy, your Carbon Footprint... The only think I have been hearing that is Bad about Carbon Dioxide is it is contributing to Global Warming, and perhaps raising acidity in the oceans.... But the issue is if you are going to make policy to protect the environment you need real facts to make the right choices. Environmental policy is about making the right tradeoffs it isn't about prohibitions it is about measuring what will benefit society the most without the most harm to the environment, and hopefully get to a point where we are doing good enough to allow the earth catchup to what we cause.
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Re:Geopolitical Consequences of Global Warming (Score:5, Insightful)
What then?
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Re:Geopolitical Consequences of Global Warming (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Geopolitical Consequences of Global Warming (Score:5, Insightful)
Every industrialized nation is to blame here.
Yeah and the dirt farmers that burn thousands of acres of forest are completely blameless. People are to blame here. Interestingly enough, there is a solution to the people problem...
The solution, of course, is to set up a global despotic government, just as proposed in the Copenhagen protocol. History has shown that tyrannical leaders can kill 10-15% of their populations, and often suffer no repercussions at all. With the NWO proposed by the Copenhagen treaty the new tyrants could do away with a billion or more people, and solve this problem.
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Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Insightful)
Your first paragraph seems to indicate that there are those who would actually choose smog over clean air. Many who are concerned with CRU and the validity of certain global warming conclusions such as myself don't doubt that it is happening, or that we can and should be better environmental stewards. I'm just not convinced that the data supports their conclusions. Even if the CRU data is completely valid, it does not necessarily guarantee that their conclusions are correct.
Your second paragraph is a list of environmental problems that are unrelated to smog. algae blooms (which subsequently render the water virtually lifeless so you repeated yourself) are not caused by air pollution. Freshwater algae blooms are usually caused by Phosphorus run off from the soil because it is the nutrient that is limiting algae growth. Saltwater blooms are usually caused by Nitrogen run off because it is the first limiting nutrient in that aquatic environment. Nitrogen can come from the atmosphere, but not in the concentrations necessary to trigger an algae bloom.
Your third paragraph is a second attempt to set up your straw-man. Namely that anyone actually wants to pollute the environment. It also trots out the timeless "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!" meme, Bravo! Every anthropogenic global warming skeptic I've met doesn't doubt the sense of taking care of the environment, only the conclusion that the world wouldn't be warming without us. I'm all for tougher enviromental standards, but there is a point at which I believe we are cutting off our nose to spite our face.
You can feel free to disagree, but I'd prefer it if you'd leave your straw-men and Parental Hysteria at home.
Parent
Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, there are. There are people who would choose money over clean air any day of the week. All of China has done it for starters. The fact that you find it hard to imagine doesn't make his argument a straw-man.
Personally, I don't really care that much since I have no children to pass the planet on to. So I'm all for saying fuck the planet and exploit the resources (including plants, wildlife, etc.) until there's nothing left of it. The human race isn't immune from natural selection and there's no reason to think that it won't select itself out of existence. Regardless, the planet will always be here (for a few billion years anyway) so our disappearance isn't particularly significant.
I'm fortunate that there are just enough skeptics to prevent any serious environmental change from occurring in my lifetime, thus sparing me what is likely to be a hefty tax or fee increase of some form.
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Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed there are, whenever smog is free and clean air costs money.
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Re:Why are people getting so worked up (Score:5, Insightful)
But there are many people whose motive is Profit and who don't give a shit if a side effect of their economic activity is to mess up the environment.
(of course they are not confined to the USA, or even 'the west'.)
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Just another day (Score:5, Insightful)
The Parent Isn't a Troll (Score:5, Insightful)
The parent posting isn't a troll. He is saying it like it is. This "incident" involves four scientists. Just four. And I'm trying to figure out the scientific arguments being put forward by the contrarians. Are they saying that data has been suppressed that shows the world hasn't being warming significantly since the 1970's?!! Really? Thirty five years ago, I used to skate on local lakes...they used to freeze regularly. Those lakes haven't frozen solid for since 1977. Glacial retreat has accelerated since the 1970's...this is undeniable. And this isn't part of the retreat since the last ice age. To assert that the recent glacial melting is somehow part of a linear decline that began 10000 years ago is an absurd claim that can easily be refuted by looking at measures of sea level over the past 10000 years.
The assertions of the contrarians about these emails are irrelevant to the scientific discussion about climate change. They do not address in any real or logical way the arguments of climate change scientists. They are thus, a clear example of the use of the "Red Herring Falacy".
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Re:Just another day (Score:5, Insightful)
The deliberate coverup in response to an FOI request pretty much blows the climatologists out of the water. Kaboom! Game over. The British press is all over the issue while the American press ignores it, hoping it will go away. It won't.
Money rules BOTH sides of the climate debate. You simply don't get funding unless your outcome favors the people who provide the money. If Microsoft funds an "independent study" and the outcome favors Microsoft products (as it always does), we understand, laugh, and life goes on. Why is this climatology such a mystery? If Rob Enderle, Laura DiDio, and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute opened a climatology division, Slashdot would be challenging them in about 10 minutes. What's taking so long with the climatologists?
The clues are everywhere. Notice how the "cap and trade" money grab is absolutely essential to solving the problem, while consuming less meat or zero population growth are given hardly any consideration at all. Without the money grab and subsidies for the third world, the sense urgency goes right down the toilet. Things we could be doing at zero cost get zero attention. This doesn't prove climatology is a scam, but it sure looks that way.
Meanwhile, we had better hope global warming a scam. During the years since Kyoto, China has become the number 1 generator of CO2. And they have far more growth potential than the US does. So do Brazil, Russia, and India for that matter. I have actually visited Shanghai and have seen the pollution first hand. Complex measurements were not required; coughing in the smog was more than enough for me. If anyone claims China is serious about controlling pollution, it's total BS.
The reality is that Brazil, Russia, India, and China (the BRIC nations) offer to do essentially nothing, while they hide behind the number 2 generator of CO2 - the US. I have news for you folks - the US government is broke. Obama views "cap and trade" as a palatable source of tax revenue that will throw off so much cash, he can distribute it all over the world. Problem is, cap and trade is NOT palatable. The production of CO2 will simply migrate to the countries with the least enforcement or the heaviest subsidies. Obama's Democrats will be "wiped off the map" in large sections of the US if they expect Americans to subsidize [even more] offshoring of jobs. There is a very real possibility that a mismanaged implementation of cap and trade would be both ineffective and indistinguishable from economic suicide. In such a scenario, the Democrats would become a regional party with no real power outside of California and Massachusetts.
Fortunately, we have been saved by Russian hackers. No deal in Copenhagen, no cap and trade. No support in Congress; it's dead with a capital "D". Obama is already looking for excuses to cancel the trip! Perhaps they can mail him his Nobel Peace Prize. The countries that were determined to do nothing will be joined by all the others, so that we can all continue to do nothing on an equitable basis. This may not be the best outcome, but it is infinitely better than a naive Obama getting hoodwinked into picking up the costs of everyone else's pollution controls.
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Re:Just another day (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of the problem has been researchers who won't let others see their data, except under NDA. You can't effectively attack that which you can't see, so frustrations go astray and lead to attacks on the researchers and their backers.
Those of us who are still skeptical but willing to listen have been asking for the raw data to be released for a very long time, and getting a lot of groups sending back the response, "You can trust us. You don't need to see the data." I can (unhappily) live with that for privately-funded research, but if it's happening at a public university or with public funds, the data should be made available on the basis that public money paid for it, so the public should be able to see it. If it's happening, there are things we can do. If it's not happening, some of the tech coming about as a result of the fear of it happening are still good ideas, like converting coal plants to run on natural gas or moving to alternative hydrocarbon fuel resources.
Openness is all that the honest among us ever asked.
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Re:Just another day (Score:5, Insightful)
"Raw data" - what does this exactly mean? Atmospheric scientists studying climate have multiple sources of data in multiple data formats. We don't save every bit when we collect our research, and stuff does get tossed out for various reasons. Heck, I have model-generated data from 10 years ago that it sitting on tape somewhere, but when it goes, it's gone. The model code is probably also on that tape. It is very possible that I could not recreate the work I did even 10-15 years ago. I now use new models, better data, etc.
At some level, we as scientists trust one another to not fudge things and the peer review process should take care of most of that. Should raw data be requested via legal means, I would presume that this data would be presented if it were available. Since reproducibility is a cornerstone of the scientific process, if one research comes up with some bizarre result (think cold fusion) and it can't be reproduced, it's tossed out. In this case we have just one of hundreds of sources which is called into question. This does not change anything scientifically, and probably won't change much politically in the long run.
Another thing to consider: Scientists often keep their data hidden from the rest of the world until they get the big publications out since it would be career suicide to let someone else scoop you on your own hard work and data acquisition. I don't think there is a standard grace period for when you suddenly make the data available. It probably depends on the project and the granting agency rules. The truth is, the rawest of the raw data is often discarded, and there is no ulterior motive involved. On the other hand, you are foolish if you toss any data form recent research as you may need to go back to it at some point in time and redo calculations. This happened to me once and had I not had the data available from a tape backup, I could not have gone back and done a calculation that was being requested of me from reviewers, and my paper would not have been published.
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Re:Just another day (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh I don't know, were you in a coma for the last couple of years ? I just find it really funny that the new stratergy now is to call into question the honesty and ethics of the researchers or basically personal attacks instead of challenging the freaking DATA. Denier still know what data is defined as right ?
The problem is that the DATA is now in question. I don't know where you've been for the past week or so, but it appears that many of the scientists who have been writing reports for policy makers in the UN and various world governments have been manipulating data, cherry picking data, and then destroying data. After that, they have been denying data to those who ask for it who might discredit their "findings". Why would challenging them be considered a personal attack? It's their professional credibility that is in question.
So, I guess the question should be, why are you not challenging credibility of those that changed, destroyed and withheld data?
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Science as Open Source (Score:5, Insightful)
Science was the first instance of open source. If someone else can't freely check your data and replicate your experiments you've got nothing. The raw data and source code for the climate models should have been available from day one. The fact that they weren't and that large quantities of data were "lost" throws the conclusions into serious question.
Re:Science as Open Source (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not quite right. It's important that your results are reproducible. That requires a full description of how the data was gathered and how it was analysed. That way, someone can go and do their own experiments, collect their own data and conduct their own analysis. Giving out the raw data isn't a bad thing, but it's not necessary and actually doesn't happen that often.
You could make a case that it's in fact bad for people to all work off the same data set or code, as any mistakes (or even deliberate fraud) will then be common to all analyses.
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Re:Science as Open Source (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I feel that when you are an activist, not just a scientist, and pressuring for major policy changes based on your research, you should be held to a higher standard.
If you're going to stand up, proclaim the end of the world, and tell everybody that they need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to avert it... you have a moral obligation to publish your data.
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Re:Science as Open Source (Score:5, Insightful)
"You could make a case that it's in fact bad for people to all work off the same data set or code, as any mistakes (or even deliberate fraud) will then be common to all analyses."
And that deliberate fraud issue, sadly, appears to be the case. How many good models were scrapped because the cooked data made them give obviously bogus results? How much good new data was discarded because it didn't match with the "approved" data. A huge amount of work is scrapped, or is about to be.
My dissertation was on non-linear modeling. If I had cooked the data like this bunch I'd have been in the dumpster with my data. Although I did not have to show every bit of input data, it was required to be traceable all the way from the raw input through any smoothing, transforming, and normalizing to get to the input of the model. Anything less and there would be no Ph.D. after my name.
So it's been less than a week, but why are these guys still employed?
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My A*& will be sore (Score:5, Interesting)
Ponds and Fleishman said they successfully created cold fusion and they are now bus boys at Chili's. What I'm saying is that if the scientific community subjected the CRU to even the most basic scrutiny they would either be forced to prove their conclusions or sent packing.
Imagine for a moment someone spent thirty years recording data in any field then compiled a report based on their interpretation of the data only to delete all of the raw data. What reasonable person on this planet would say, "No problem, I trust you." Bull$#%@.
This isn't Republican or Democrat, American or European, this is the very basis of what Slashdot is founded on, that is don't give me bull$%#@ show me the data and your source, and most of all don't patronize me!
This world is going in the crapper unless we call everyone's BS.
"When the scientific principal is replaced by conventional wisdom or worse peer pressure, what prevents us from returning to the dark ages?"
William David Howell Sr.
First Hand Knowledge? (Score:5, Interesting)
Outside of the science, all I know is that the climate zone in my local area has changed. Plants which you could not grow before, you can grow now. I hear from Innuit that there are plants and animals in the North which they have not seen before. I know that tornadoes dot the German Rhine where no tornadoes were seen before, I know hurricanes on the Eastern seaboard are behaving differently, I know that Crete was so dry when I saw it that I couldn't imagine olive trees growing there without irrigation, I know that our highways are a half kilometer wide and countless kilometers long, with thousands upon thousands of idling cars sitting on them, ten times a week for as long as I've been alive, and I know that sea captains don't want to traverse the Indian ocean because the almanacs are no longer reasonable guides to chart how long a given voyage from one port to the next might take.
Everything else is told to me by strangers. Maybe the arctic is intact, maybe the rainforests never actually existed. Maybe Mt. Kilamajaro doesn't exist, maybe it's all a mind control plot. All plausible answers I suppose from people telling me that climate change is a myth.
Has anyone here seen a rainforest? Have you seen the clearcutting? Maybe none of this is real. Right now, the temperature where I am is 6 Celcius. Is my thermometer tampered with by some global warming co-conspirators? If I wrote it down, would somebody question it 100 years from now? Maybe the celcius scale has been tampered with.
Where's the beef? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the _results_ from the lab in question match up with other independent results, what possible grounds to laymen have to presume the data was deliberately changed? Unless they assume that all independent labs falsified their data in concert, which would be a hell of a conspiracy.
What really bothers me about the complaints around the emails is that none of them (as I understand it) come close to proving that findings were deliberately falsified to point to one conclusion over another. All of the emails were either innocuous or, at worst, ambiguous.
And what have some skeptics done with ambiguous data? They have manipulated it to fit their pre-existing theories. Which is very close to the sort of bad behavior they are charging the lab with now.
By definition, this is no longer Science. (Score:5, Insightful)
We have this quote from TFA:
By deleting the raw data, no one can ever reproduce or review the process by which raw data became tested theory.
This is not the act of a scientist; in fact, this would make you fail in the Elementary School Science Fair of your choice. The sad truth seems to be that, while Science concerns itself with discovering truth, these scientists have concerned themselves only with discovering funding and prestige.
Climate change theory must now reside with such things as Cold Fusion and Duke Nukem Forever.
Climate skeptics caught manipulating temp data (Score:5, Informative)
There's been another breaking climate scandal. Some big name climate skeptics have been busted big time manipulating temperature data and lying about it.
They've manipulated the data to make it look like it was cooling when it was really warming, and the Drudge Report and blogger Anthony Watts have been caught up in the lies, and have tried to blame it on some New Zealand climate researchers:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/11/new_zealand_climate_science_co.php?utm_source=sbhomepage&utm_medium=link&utm_content=channellink [scienceblogs.com]
http://hot-topic.co.nz/nz-sceptics-lie-about-temp-records-try-to-smear-top-scientist/ [hot-topic.co.nz]
"As long as its green, I'm not quite sure about this moralistic issue."
- Quote about writing "scientific studies" for the tobacco industry by Frederick Seitz, the author of that cover letter for that petition of 30000 questionable signatures against the science of climate change.
Still no nefarious behavior from where I sit (Score:5, Informative)
Let's review... The hacked emails look bad, but they were obtained illegally and were never meant for public consumption - these emails were never "peer reviewed" so to speak. As far as I'm concerned, they are irrelevant, as tempting as it is to see some giant conspiracy in them.
Concerning the data that was tossed out: This was probably due to something as humdrum as cleaning out a room to make space for new equipment or office space or something similar. I remember in the 90s when I was working at a R1 university our group needed more space for new hardware, and we got money to convert a storage room to a cold room where we could stick our hardware. There were rows and rows of old 9-track tape (probably the same kind of tape that was tossed out from the climate research group in question). Nobody claimed them, nobody wanted them, so we threw them out (not before unravelling one and playing with it first though). Had someone actually wanted to retrieve data off of those 9-track tapes, they probably would have been unsuccessful anyway since magnetic tape degrades with time and tar files don't have any error correction built in.
So even if these tapes from the 80s were still around they would likely be useless. Unless some sort of data migration plan had been in place, they were probably destined to decay.
Concerning the paper records, they would likely be just fine assuming they didn't get eaten away from the acid assuming it wasn't acid-free paper. But those were tossed too.
So, to review: Some asshole gets into the private email system of a university, does who-knows-what to it (we don't know for sure whether the emails were filtered, cherrypicked, manipulated, etc.) and releases it to the world. The text of the email appears to contain some language which could be interpreted as a bit dodgy, but honestly if you think science is all fun and games and doesn't involve egos, power struggles, rivalries, and colossal asshattery, well, surprise, it does. Now we have the data loss issue, which is easily explained and is likely due to cleaning up stored crap to make room for office space (I am guessing but that is not an unreasonable scenario).
Meanwhile, hundreds of other independent studies from dozens of different sources of instrumentation and other proxies shows over and over and over again that climate is warming and it's anthropogenic in nature due to greenhouse gas emissions. Is anyone arguing that humans are NOT responsible for 280 ppm going to, what is it now, 385 ppm of CO2 over the past 150 years? Is anyone arguing that CO2 is NOT a greenhouse gas and that all else being equal, a shift in the earth's radiative equilibrium temperature upward would NOT be expected with this increase?
As an atmospheric scientist it's crazy for me to think that anyone would even need to mess with climate data as it doesn't need to be massaged to show the obvious. The fact that there is interdecadal variability (things have flattened out a bit over the past few years) is really nothing too shocking and fits well within the range of predictions.
So wake me up in 20 years an let me know how this whole "conspiracy" worked out. If we're back to temperatures from the 1960s well, I'll eat my hat or whatever serves as headwear in the 2030s.
Look at the larger picture (Score:5, Informative)
During 2001 the IPCC made a number of predictions as to what would happen as a result of the climate change. At the time their results were widely mocked and ignored by the "climate change deniers" circles.
It now turns out that the actual effects measured today are _worse_ than what was predicted. For example, the rise of the ocean level is 80% greater.
I think people should concentrate on the larger picture -- the predicted effects are happening. The whole CRU emails issue is peanuts and only diverts the attention from the real issue, even if we assume that everything that is being claimed there is true.
Re:Oh, hey, (Score:5, Informative)
---
Global Warming [feeddistiller.com] Feed @ Feed Distiller [feeddistiller.com]
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Re:Oh, hey, (Score:5, Informative)
I think they're exaggerating the lost of one particular set of data, from one set of researchers, in
one university, compared with thousands of different climate research around the world. So this
case of data mismanagement at one university, isn't going to make much difference to the case
for global warming being caused by humanities energy usage.
Problem is, some of the other sources aren't looking so good, either. [telegraph.co.uk]
Parent
Re:Oh, hey, (Score:5, Informative)
Except for the fact that this university is the co-ordinating site for many other centers and many of them got their facts and calculations from CRU. So CRU is about to drag a bunch of other universities down with it.
Parent
Re:Oh, hey, (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they're exaggerating the lost of one particular set of data, from one set of researchers, in one university, compared with thousands of different climate research around the world. So this case of data mismanagement at one university, isn't going to make much difference to the case for global warming being caused by humanities energy usage.
How many "lostes" will it take, then?
The real issue that the "climategate" leaks expose is that many of the "scientists" involved are more concerned with promoting their ideology than with finding the facts. It doesn't matter which side of the policy debate you happen to be on - justifying the means because of your support of the ends should never be okay.
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Re:Oh, hey, (Score:5, Informative)
I like how you use the word "deniers" to intentionally reference "Holocaust deniers," as if wanting scientific proof of something is so horrible. I also like how you pretend AGW supporters don't spread propaganda, especially now that we know the AGW movement has been censoring opposing papers. Your post oozes bias.
Meanwhile, the global temperature record has shown no rise in temperature since 1998.
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Re:Oh, hey, (Score:5, Informative)
You are entitled to your opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.
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Re:Deniers? (Score:5, Informative)
"Deal with it like an adult, or deal with it like a leftist." HAHAHA I loved that. Priceless. People who want big government to provide everything they need and take care of anything that might make them feel bad and thus, make a parental figure of government, are more juvenile and immature than people who understand why this is a bad idea and are satisfied with the parents they have already outgrown. Whodathunkit?
In all seriousness, whether global warming is real or not, and whether it's caused by human beings or not is immaterial. Regardless of any of that, it will be used to justify the taxation of carbon. Fake global warming will justify this as readily as real global warming so there's no reason for the controversy of the issue to divide people on this one thing. A tax on carbon is a tax on life, seeing how we are carbon-based life forms. This will represent a new era of governmental power and control heretofore unknown to us and found only in the wet dreams of statists and other would-be tyrants.
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Re:Deniers? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Deniers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because he's simplifying to the point of being wrong. So are you.
It's called climate change because "global warming" has been so soiled by deliberate misunderstanding that it's problematic to use. "Skeptics" have managed to insert a wedge of "creative" misinterpretation into our popular conscious: they'll note a cooling trend in a specific locale, or a specific time period, and gleefully use that cherry-picked factoid to shoot down the whole theory. It'll get some consideration, too, because the idea that the whole planet can go up in temperature on overage, but Podunk can get two snowy winters, is hard for may laypeople to understand. Skeptics know this, and prey on it.
And a carbon tax isn't "a tax on the basic building blocks of life", it's a tax on emissions of previously-unlocked carbon. This is why things like biofuels aren't being subject to a carbon tax, nor are the production of goods that use non-carbon sources of energy, yet produce something that contains carbon (like, oh, food). It's also why you get credits for locking carbon back up. Of course, people like you and the grandparent devise well, lets not mince words, outright lies about how this stuff works in hopes that people will accept because your lies smell vaguely like truth.
I'm reminded of any number of meetings I've been in where some dickhead vice-president who knows nothing about technology will, for political or budgetary reasons, give his or her creative, oversimplified misundertanding that sounds reasonable enough to other dickheaded VPs and managers, yet is outright wrong. What you're saying it like that.
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Re:Damned if they do Damned if they don't (Score:5, Insightful)
> Seriously, you will get some scientists that are fine with using proprietary data and some who are not.
I don't know what the rules are on your world, but on mine it isn't science if the work can't be peer reviewed, published and duplicated. If you basing results on datasets that can't be released none of that is possible. Seriously, how would you peer review a paper based on data you can't look at? How did 'respected' journals publish papers that they couldn't ask another serious scientist to do a proper review of? Why is work that, even if it COULD in theory be duplicated, in fact never will (and wasn't) be given any weight in the high councils of the world's leaders?
Should a scientist use a closed dataset to help his company decide which research line to pursue? Yes. Decide where to drill for oil? Yes. Publish in the peer reviewed journals? No. Make recommendations to world leaders with trillion dollar consequences? No.
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Re:Damned if they do Damned if they don't (Score:5, Informative)
Review and duplication does not require publishing all raw data. It requires publishing the methods used to obtain the raw data, so someone else can do the same thing and come to the same conclusion. For a proprietary dataset, this could mean, "go sign your own NDA and see the proprietary data", or it could mean, "go gather data the same way they did" (e.g. in the case of ice cores or other repeatable climate data samples.
Science has never required full access to the publishing scientist's lab notes, lab equipment, or diaries. That's the domain of historians, patent attorneys, regulators, and corporate spies.
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Re:Damned if they do Damned if they don't (Score:5, Insightful)
> Review and duplication does not require publishing all raw data.
No. If you were asked to peer review a paper, would YOU sign off on it without seeing the data that went into it or (usually) the program code that processed the data? Really?
Most of this global warming stuff isn't much more than the data. They take raw data and either process it and make projections or use it to feed a computer model that makes projections. The only part published is the end result which is taken on faith since there isn't much more to work with. The raw data isn't submitted as part of the publication/peer review process and apparently the actual computer code driving the models is equally private. So exactly has been being reviewed all these years? And forget duplicating the 'work.' You would basically be finding your own datasets (often with no way to even know if you are using the same data) and doing everything from scratch. Science has really fallen this far?
Here is a hint. If he says "Trust me" he ain't no scientist he is a salesman/politician.
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Re:Damned if they do Damned if they don't (Score:5, Insightful)
OK buddy. Link to the actual emails that support your statements or I call complete bullshit.
To review, you state (grammatical errors aside):
- "data was being manipulated"
- "material subject to FOIA was being systematically and deliberately purged"
- "the system was being manipulated to keep out opposing views and get editors removed"
The raw-data (i.e. stolen emails) that you're basing this on are presumably available on some right-wing/skeptic web site. So why don't you cite some specific instances? Specific phrases and paragraphs from specific emails.
Go ahead, make my day.
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Re:Climate change was NO issue in the 80s (Score:5, Insightful)
Which was more or less addressed because we stopped pumping ozone-destroying chemicals into the atmosphere. Anti-AGCC people always being up "well, the ozone layer didn't turn out to be a problem" line, forgetting that the reason it's not a problem is that we legislated CFCs and such out of existence. Acid rain similar: it's less of an issue because we did something to fix it. AGCC is, unfortunately, much harder to quick-fix
The reason this stuff gets whipped up isn't the "Bilderberger manipulators" but a media that's addicted to thirty-second soundbites. Respectable scientists aren't the ones running feature pieces about how the Maldives will disappear or we could be looking at another prarie dustbowl: that's the media's need to parley anything and everything into a alarmist pablum* deal because reprinting the IPCC studies directly does not sell advertising space for used car dealers and mattress stores. At best, we get grade-six science textbook diagrams and selective quoting, and even that's pushing what the media thinks people can digest before the sports scores.
And this, of course, leads to simplistic retorts like "It's the sun!" or "Climate is cyclical!" because the sum of the data isn't commonly presented. Do you think that all the hundreds of people who hold Ph.D's on this stuff wouldn't notice the big, hot ball in the sky, or haven't done core extractions? Do you really think that they've overlooked things that obvious and just handed right-wing soapboxers such an easy mark? Really?
* Yes, this includes, notably, Al Gore. On one hand, he's done a good job getting the memo out. On the other, he's a lightning rod because people a) they hate anything Rush Limbaugh tells them to and b) he's simplified the science to the point where people who don't know better can poke holes in it and think they're right.
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Re:Correlation does NOT mean causation (Score:5, Insightful)
No one disagrees that the earth's climate varies a great deal over any long period of time you care to look at. The question is, if the world is warming at the moment (and over a scale of tens of years, it is), then is this due to man-made causes, and is it happening far faster then it could due purely to natural causes? Furthermore, if the temperature is pushed up, will the effects become decidedly non-linear, in that the processes that regulate climate will themselves change and some (quite different ) equilibrium become the norm? The modeling and experimentation suggests that pumping CO2 into the atmosphere will have a warming effect, though how CO2 interacts with the various climate regulatory and feedback processes is extremely complicated and there's a great deal of work to do. The further question of altering the equilibrium state of the climate (which could be utterly disastrous for civilization, and a great many current species of life on this planet) is even trickier to answer, but there's plenty of good evidence to suggest this could happen (including in the geological record, so we know it is possible).
I am not a climate scientist, but I do know that in my own field it takes about 10 to 15 years to get really useful at anything. Therefore I am loath to make some quick contrary claim to someone who has spent many years thinking about something. Nearly everyone I have encountered who dismisses AGW is either pretty ignorant about doing science (that's fine, I am sure they are good at other things - it's unrealistic to believe scientific literacy could be universal), or are just plainly unable to contemplate or accept the changes required in the organisation of human affairs (even though these changes would also happen in the absence of global warming), or are just full of anti-environmental politics for various delusional reasons of their won.
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