Global Warming 'Confirmed' By Independent Study 967
chrb writes "The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project — an independent study of Earth's historical temperature record partly funded by climate skeptics, including the Koch brothers — has released preliminary results that show the same warming trend as previous research. Project leader and physics professor Richard Muller, of the University of California, has stated that he was 'surprised' at the close agreement, and it 'confirms that these studies were done carefully.' The study also found that warming in the temperature record was not caused by poor quality weather monitoring stations — thus rejecting a frequent claim of skeptics. Climate skeptic Stephen McIntyre has previously said 'anything that [Muller] does will be well done.'"
Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because that's the real issue that most skeptics have been questioning of late. Anyone who isn't an idiot knows that the earth's climate is ALWAYS changing (and always has been). The real issue that people are talking about when they say "global warming" is the question of how much influence human activities have had on the normal warming/cooling cycles, if this is a negative influence, and, if so, what can humans do within reason to mitigate any negative influences. And *those* questions are a helluva lot harder to answer than "Has there been a general warming trend over the last 100 years?".
I'm not sure pure science is up to answering those questions. And it doesn't help that the issue has become hopelessly politicized--to the point where I've grown very skeptical of BOTH sides and their respective penchants for self-serving hyperbole and increasingly shrill fear-mongering.
Of course, there is also the question of DEGREE of warming, an issue where it's getting harder and harder to distinguish between mainstream science and Chicken Little fear-mongering. IIRC, initial models were showing a 1-2 degree increase over the next 100 years, something that clearly needs to be addressed but not something that's GOING TO KILL US ALL TOMORROW!!!!!. Somewhere along the way this kept getting more and more ramped-up to the point now where I hear advocates claiming that the entire east coast of the U.S. is going to be underwater by 2050. I can no longer tell where the truth begins and the humbug ends.
Of course, I'm going to be criticized here for even daring to question the accepted narrative.
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:4, Insightful)
To answer your questions, the warming we see is consistent with anthropogenic climate change models, it is going at a rate which requires remedial action within a century, and I have yet to see anyone outside of the lunatic internet fringe claim that climate change is going to kill us all off, Roland Emmerich style.
Re: (Score:3)
I think the real threat of climate change is typically ignored for more "dramatic" scenarios. People like Al Gore seem to focus way too much on issues like sea levels rising a couple feet.
Whereas, the real threat of AGW is more mundane: starvation and the wars that food shortages will invariably cause. In Western democracies, it's been so long since we've had food shortages that nobody can really relate to the risk of it. If you are relatively wealthy (by world standards not US) and live in say a flyover st
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:4, Insightful)
Your hypothesis is that the world's best climate science researchers all spontaneously had strokes and started doing really bad research for no reason, that all pointed in the same direction? Or you prefer the conspiracy theory scenario?
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:5, Insightful)
So your idea of the best climate scientists is... people who aren't climate scientists? Who's your doctor, the postman?
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:4, Insightful)
Beside the point? (Score:3)
As long as people will agree that the earth is warming up - will a long discussion about whether man caused it really serve any useful purpose?
Here's how I see it:
Picture yourself as a passenger of the Quantas A380 plane whose engine exploded mid-flight. The moment the engine exploded, what would you look at first:
a) trying to figure out what CAN be done?
b) trying to figure out whether it was caused by humans or not (terrorists or material faults vs. meteor or lightning strikes)?
Think that you will have to
Re: (Score:3)
False analogy, because considering the source is actually important to determining a solution in the case of AGW.
The question of whether humans are responsible is important, because it is used as an excuse to eliminate some very important remediation methods. Namely, stop burning fossil fuels.
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:4, Insightful)
If I find flaws in a proof, does that make me a math skeptic? A tolerable statement would have been:
Stephen is not convinced that steam from the morning sunrise should be included in the assessment of smokingness. He's be less of a skeptic if more of the vapour was actually smoke.
Michael Mann defended weaknesses in his statistical methods on the basis that this paper survived peer review, despite the peer review failing to include a statistician with expertise on the statistical methods employed. How does that work in any other walk of life? What gives science the passing lane to miracle quorum?
Working in another field, Stephen McIntyre does have expertise on the application of statistical methods to inflated conclusions and he elucidated flaws in the approach to the tree ring analysis which notable statisticians have commended as very astute.
Mann responded by playing a game of "you can't have my data", so it was a long time before notable statisticians had anything to pronounce upon.
Mann is representative of the climate believers who feel it's more important to be right than to get to the right answer on the best possible foundation. In part this is a defense against well funded detractors who wish to distract the climate debate to go around in endless circles of mock debate. I understand the frustration.
The problem with Mann's approach to McIntyre is that McIntyre had actually filed a valid bug report. All Mann needed to do was fix the bug, publish a supplement to his paper with less convincing hockey sticks, then go back to the grindstone to find data or an analysis of the data the proved what we all suspect on a foundation of watertight analysis. What any scientist working in dull obscurity would accept as everyday life.
Mann behaved like a project manager who had a progress graph on his wall showing 80% complete after a developer comes to him and says "we've made a huge mistake in estimating the scope of one of the subsystems, so the remaining work is twice what we thought". A good manager updates his chart to show 60% complete, then works his ass off to follow through on the 40% that remains. A bad manager says, "but we had a board meeting and everyone signed off on 80%" Then the developer gets painted as a progress denier.
I am absolutely thrilled to see this analysis being repeated by a group of people I suspect would rather fall over dead than mutter some of the vague defenses employed by Michael Mann. I think Mann is a fairly decent guy who did a good piece of work on a very difficult subject, made a few extremely subtle mistakes, then reacted very badly when those mistakes were identified, primarily by saying things about science that no-one trained to speak about science would be caught dead uttering.
The thing about peer review is that it catches more problems than it misses most of the time. It's not rock solid in any particular instance. In the fullness of time, the process converges to good science. But the whole point of the climate debate is to incite a radical economic response far in advance of the fullness of time that makes science a faultless enterprise.
There's another group that wishes to claim that the radical economic response isn't actually that radical. People trained to study this are called economists, not scientists. I know, that's a horrifying reality. I've yet to meet a scientist with a fourth year credit in global intervention, yet there are no shortage of these guys telling the world what it needs to be doing.
Some of them are speaking with wisdom and common sense. Are they trained to take these positions? Absolutely not.
Who reads your x-rays,
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words you're cherry picking your experts. You're committing a classic example of the No True Scotsman fallacy.
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:5, Informative)
You and people like you are the ones with agendas. If you can blow off global warming, then you can keep right on living large and wastefully, diverting our resources to peacock like displays of virility and vanity, and the propping up of obsolete businesses and ideas so that you don't have to change. Because then you might actually have to think, heaven forbid! After all, you have to show the neighbors that you're rich and important, don't you? And you sure don't want anyone changing the rules on how best to do that.
So you go down the classic route of "offense is the best defense", and make ridiculous claims that scientists are stupid and wrong, or have joined in a vast conspiracy to extract grant money from governments. You cry about the "sacrifice", but you won't go live next to a coal power plant on the downwind side, will you? But it's okay with you if poor people get shoved into such locations, and have to deal with the resulting health problems themselves. And you ignore that we have that thing known as progress. You surely don't want to give up the LCD monitor, and go back to CRTs? How about leaded gas? Do you understand what that stuff did to us all, and how simple it was to ditch? Just need hardened steel valve seats, that's all. Just a few more pennies per engine, and we saved many dollars on health and pollution problems. If we ever get some good batteries, or fuel cells, I promise you that almost no one will ever want to use a combustion engine vehicle again, global warming or no. A combustion engine is awful compared to an electric motor. They will be relegated to museums, much like the old railroad steamers. But we won't ever get there, unless we research it.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:4, Insightful)
A more reasonable interpretation is that scientists have gathered evidence, analysed it, made models, drawn conclusions and published their findings. Findings all point at the same direction - that climate is changing and it is manmade in nature. And for reasons unknown some people cannot accept that fact and prefer to concoct some vast conspiracy to rationalise the scientists saying what they're saying.
AGW deniers are in the same camp as creationists, 9/11 truthers, Holocaust deniers, moon hoaxers. Even when faced with overwhelming evidence they still refuse to believe it preferring to grasp for pseudoscience, quote mining and other nonsense to pretend evidence doesn't matter.
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:4, Insightful)
Different scientists are funded by different institutions. You're telling me that all of these institutions, people, grant funders, etc. are slanted the same way?
Re: (Score:3)
And in another 30 years or so you will have finally caught up with "mainstream" science of today and what the rest of us have already known! Hooray!
I'm still waiting on my own independent team to verify Newton's "just a theory" on this thing called "gravity" myself...
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, all but this one, who's results went against the bias of the funding institution. This is why I, an arch-climate skeptic, am more likely to believe this study.
Did you also believe the government studies that occurred under the previous administration whose results went against their bosses' wishes so strongly that the bosses decided to edit the report themselves to better suit what they wished?
BTW, the "bias" of most climate scientists, and scientists in general, is to find something different than their colleagues. That's how you make yourself stand out and gain recognition in the scientific and academic community. However that only works if the science they d
Re: (Score:3)
If so, why don't you point us to the manipulation in the climate model source code that's been posted on the web ?
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:5, Insightful)
> Can we at least agree that scientists are human
> and thus vulnerable to the same pressures that motive
> other human beings?
Nope. Different humans are motivated by different things. Some of us live for sports, some of us live for money, some of us live for love, some of us live to build, some of us live to discover, some of us live to please, some of us live for power.
Research scientists in general did not choose their profession for its salary or its power. Most scientists would not falsify research for money. Virtue and integrity aside, they know if nobody can reproduce their results they're unlikely to have a long career.
Which side of the bread is buttered? (Score:5, Informative)
The Berkeley study got $150,000 from the Koch brothers precisely because those who started it came largely from outside climate science, having established their considerable credentials in other sciences, and announced at the outset their skepticism about the standards of climate scientists. They expected they well might find - and the Koch brothers clearly hoped they would find - that the interpretations of the temperature records accepted by over 97% of current climate scientists were exaggerated and sloppy.
The Berkeley study leaders are now openly surprised that their conclusions - using more advanced statistical methods than have been employed previously - are within 2% of the mainstream climate science analyses. I'll bet good money they get no further funding from the Koch brothers going forward. The Kochs have many billions, and have been generous in funding the economics department at Florida State University, with strings attached to assure that department will support economic theories the Kochs agree with ("Austrian school" economics). Universities keenly court large donors. Had the Berkeley climate study likewise come to conclusions agreeing with the brothers' prejudices, that cash-strapped university could have anticipated generous funding to support a climatology institute going forward.
So which side of the bread is buttered? Were the genius scientists too stupid to see they just dropped the bread butter-side down? Why have they followed the science even when it drives away their funding?
Re: (Score:3)
Note that you are in no way a scientist, but rather simply a schmuck who thinks he is better than others because he blindly follows what others tell him WITHOUT QUESTION. If the "scientific" community were ruled by people like you, the universe would still be rotating around the Earth, disease would still be caused by miasma and/or demonic possession, and there would be no such thing as subatomic particles, only "aether".
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:4, Insightful)
So, to be clear, you are saying that climate scientists somehow think they will make more money working for tree huggers than working for oil companies? Please respond to this and say "Yes, I think there is more money to be made pushing AGW than denying it."
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:4, Insightful)
Awesome. That's the first time I've had anyone bite on that bait.
Okay, now this is an important follow up: please say that yes, "tree huggers" have MORE of a 'direct line' to the general treasury of the USA than the big oil companies. That was implied in my first question, but you didn't really address it.
If you are willing to say that, out loud, then wow I'll have no retort. We will simply disagree on who has more power and influence and money -- big oil or big tree.
just a quick question for you (Score:3)
Re:just a quick question for you (Score:5, Informative)
Are you asking me to do your research for you? Okay, I'll do it, but only this once:
"Bloomberg New Energy Finance identified US$43–$46 billion last year allotted by governments for renewable energy. Meanwhile, oil, coal and gas received $557 billion [renewableenergyworld.com]"
So, renewables got about one-twelfth the money that hydrocarbons got. Is that what you were asking? So, the hydrocarbon industries have something like twelve times the sway on government spending than renewable-energy industries? And thus government conspiracies would be twelve times as likely to fund anti-AGW science as pro-AGW science? Is that the kind of argument you are trying to make?
Not me. I'm just trying to point out that it is absurd, preposterous, and demonstrably wrong to suggest that somehow the tree huggers have taken over government, resulting in a gigantic multinational conspiracy to push the false myth of AGW onto an unsuspecting public in order to advance an anti-human ideological agenda. That argument is retarded, and people who make it are kooks.
Re: (Score:3)
Also, note that despite my anti-AGW stance, I am much more
Re: (Score:3)
No, that is not the important comparison, because your argument would rely on the assumption that government money is tainted by a pro-AGW agenda. That, right there, is wrong, and we can tell its wrong because tree huggers don't have nearly so much political power or influence on the government as oil companies. And even if they did, which remember they don't, it STILL wouldn't show anything because you would furthermore have to impugn the entire worldwide community of climate scientists, saying they are al
Re: (Score:3)
But this is a false dilemma. These scientists are by and large funded directly or indirectly by governments that would be far better off if cheap energy could be produced. At any rate, what you're saying isn't that they're research is colored, but rather that they are committing fraud to get grant money. You are making the most profoundly damaging accusation against a rather large number of researchers.
And to what? To defend a very small number of researchers (excluding all the engineers, journalists an
Re: (Score:3)
We both pulled a figure out of our asses.. but my pull is actually approximately correct.
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:5, Funny)
As I sit in my electrically lit office, using my table top computation device, drinking water delivered from the ground after being treated with sanitizing chemicals to make it safe to drink, sitting in a chair composed of materials derived from multi-step chemical synthesis and processing, reading your electronically delivered tripe sent from hundreds of miles or more away, I can see how the misconception that science works could be so common. Thanks for informing me.
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:5, Funny)
Is it perhaps because they feel that the remedial actions required to address the findings could potentially negatively impact their lifestyles?
A rise in sea levels will affect their 'lifestyles' a couple of orders of magnitude more. It might even shut down Slashdot, the Cheeto factory and the WOW servers...think of that!
(And I'm not even joking...)
Re: (Score:3)
The hilarious thing are the newer predictions by skeptics, some of which immediately underestimate the change, like within 5 years. Start a prediction in 2000, have it wrong by 2010.
Whereas the mainstream people, except for this 'Kellogg' dude, are mostly on track.
Although the graph is slightly misleading. Some of the predictions were made more recently, and projected backwards in time. For example, IPCC FAR was made in 1990, and thus doesn't really get 'credit' for any predictions before that, although i
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
There needs to be an option to mod a post -1 "Doesn't understand how science works".
And just in case you are still confused, I'm talking about ALL science. The way modeling is handled in climate science is exactly the same way it's handled in all other sciences. Feel free to claim that the modern scientific method doesn't work. But you'll sound even more like an idiot than you already do.
Re: (Score:3)
That's why they design models which match the physics and not models that match the data.
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:5, Informative)
Of course there are "anthropogenic climate change models" - I suspect that you don't know what is meant by a climate change model. So a little Climate Science 101:
The models take data other than the measured temperature data, such as forestation, solar activity, human population, etc., and the OUTPUT of the model is predicted temeratures. They then compare those predictions to the observed temperatures to validate the model.
The models that include human activity as an input ("anthropogenic models") predict the actual observed temperatures much better than models that ignore human activity. Thus, human activity is strongly believed (98% of climate scientists) to be a cause of global climate change.
And even if you ignore the science, and believe that humans aren't CAUSING global climate change, we still want to stop the change that is taking place (i.e. we don't want to flood coastal cities, etc.). There's no doubt that it is going on, and that human behavior can affect what is going on. So even if the global warming were caused entirely by sun spots, we would still want to reduce our carbon emissions in order to cool the planet off.
Or are you saying that because you think that we're not causing it, we should do nothing? That doesn't seem like a good long term plan. Do you have kids, or friends?
Re: (Score:3)
Take your head out of your ass
u mad bra?
try learning the slightest bit about how science actually works
Funny, considering I have a doctorate, a masters and a bachelor's in science fields. Yeah I admit that I'm not a meteorologist or "climate scientist", but hey physics and biology should teach one how the scientific method works and w
Re: (Score:3)
If they were contrived models, you'd have a point. They're not - they're very physical.
Re: (Score:3)
Erm, have you checked google, or are you just repeating talking points?
Because the IPCC [www.ipcc.ch] has pretty much all of their data [ipcc-data.org] available. Here [ipcc-data.org] is the data used in AR4. Whereas the math appears to be over at the paper itself [www.ipcc.ch].
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear gods!
If it wasn't caused by man, then our actions would just end up making a better world for nothing!
How horrible!
A world with cleaner air, water, and land, sustainable clean energy sources, and solutions that preserve the environment for future generations?
Such a world would be horrible! I want nothing to do with such a hell!
Re: (Score:2)
You know, people point to the second world war as a time when the Western world threw all its intellectual might into solving a single problem, and reaped enormous economic, social, and scientific benefits for decades after the war was over. Maybe this is our moment.
Re: (Score:3)
And when everyone else is on hybrids, it'll be even cooler.
We just found the reason why the world will never change.
Re: (Score:3)
Absolutely we should move toward renewable, cleaner energy sources, and more recycling -I'm all for it- the big question is, at what rate can we do this without bringing about another type of catastrophe? The global economy is already in dire straits, it can't take much more, and carbon taxes and new regulations and such push it to the breaking point that much harder. So sure, we might wind up with a cleaner environment, but with a collapsed economy, bringing about a different kind of future nigh
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup - since they can't 'deny' that it is happening at all anymore (thus absolving deniers of any need to do anything), now they assert that it's (some sort of a) a natural phenomena (deniers disagree as to which), that has to be wholly independent of our actions (thus absolving deniers of any need to do anything).
See a pattern here?
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:4, Insightful)
And once they can no longer deny it is caused by man, they will assert that it's not a bad thing at all (thus absolving deniers of any need to do anything). Global warming just means more rain in the tropics and temperate weather in Canada and Russia. How could that be bad?
Re: (Score:3)
Because most of the tundras are perma frost ... if they thaw hughe amounts of Methan (CH4) get released and the global warming process becomes self accelerating.
Self accelerating to what point? It has happened numerous times in the past and we haven't become Venus-like. What turned it around? What can we do that will actually make any difference? Sorry but I'm not willing to change until I have proof that you actually know what outcomes will be besides throwing money at it.
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:5, Informative)
That reminds me of the Yes, Prime Minister foreign office 4 stage strategy [imdb.com]. You've just outlined stages 1 and 2. I guess that once they can no longer deny it's anthropogenic, they'll move to saying that there's nothing we can do (stage 3), again absolving them of the need to do anything. Then they won't need stage 4 until after some coastal cities are already underwater and millions of climate refugees/victims are making their lives a misery.
It'd be funny if it weren't so tragic.
Re: (Score:3)
It's called Global Warming because the -average- temperature goes up. Because of ignorant people like you that are unable to understand what global average means, they decided to use the term Climate Change instead.
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:4, Informative)
For the 10 billionth time, "global warming" and "climate change" are two different, but related, phenomena. "Global warming" is the observation that the global average temperature (note the words "global" and "average") is rising. "Climate change" is the observation that the climate is changing (which includes localized record snowfalls and cold snaps) as a result of global warming. One leads to the other. If you're talking about average temperatures, then "global warming" is the correct term. If you're talking about severe weather phenomena, then "climate change" is the likely subject.
The fact that the media (and the "skeptics") don't understand this says nothing about climate science, and lots about the media (and the "skeptics").
Re: (Score:3)
So, when exactly did this change occur? Obviously it had to be before the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [www.ipcc.ch] back in 1988. Certainly long before Science magazine published Barrett and Gast's article titled Climate Change [sciencemag.org] back in 1971, I assume. Probably even before the publication of Gilbert Plass's study The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change [wiley.com] back in 1956.
Please, enlighten us. When did this "name change" occur to avoid all of this ridicule?
Re: (Score:3)
The models predict global climate destabilization, so while the overall temperature goes up, the destabilized weather patterns lead to more extreme storms and snows as well as droughts and record high temperatures. Some people simplied this complex interaction into "global warming", which is in a simple sense what is going on, but in reality the models were ALWAYS more complex than that simple phrase.
If anything, the changes in the models have been that the changes are coming faster and are more extreme tha
Re: (Score:3)
The solar output variance [skepticalscience.com] is going in the opposite direction of the warming trend. The world should be getting slightly cooler because the sun is in a period of minimum activity. It's not.
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:5, Insightful)
> Anyone who isn't an idiot knows that the earth's climate is ALWAYS changing (and always has been).
Also, earthquakes & tornadoes are totally not humanity's fault, so we shouldn't plan around them either.
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:4, Insightful)
> Anyone who isn't an idiot knows that the earth's climate is ALWAYS changing (and always has been).
Also, earthquakes & tornadoes are totally not humanity's fault, so we shouldn't plan around them either.
That's exactly what we should do about climate change - plan around it. But that's not what's advocated by the AGW alarmists. Instead they are claiming that climate change can actually be stopped or reversed, if only we put some experts in charge of how everyone is allowed to use carbon. Nobody is going around claiming that some resource-controlling global bureaucracy can stop tornadoes and earthquakes.
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Economist estimates 2% of global GDP to meaningfully cut emissions. (By comparison, the recent round of bank rescues cost about 5%)
Nobody know what the cost of adjusting is, because we don't know what scale of the change will be. If the changes are less than 2 degrees, that's likely to be tolerable. ON the other hand, some of the worst case predictions are very, very bad for human civilisation.
This uncertainty is being used to encourage inaction when the opposite is true: any sensible approach to risk management would suggests taking reasonable action to avoid it.
Re: (Score:2)
By measuring temperatures in dumb-ass places, the BBC link in the article sums it up nicely with a picture of a weather station next to an airplane, and you could argue that jet exhaust and black tarmacs are natural, but you can't argue that jet exhaust and black tarmacs are representative for the earth surface in average.
A graph, is always a very shitty representation of reality.
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:5, Informative)
It was probably caused by man.
By measuring temperatures in dumb-ass places, the BBC link in the article sums it up nicely with a picture of a weather station next to an airplane, and you could argue that jet exhaust and black tarmacs are natural, but you can't argue that jet exhaust and black tarmacs are representative for the earth surface in average.
Actually, the heat island effect was one of the things that this study was meant to address. The climate skeptic's contentions on this are basically threefold:
- Urban heat islands exist and they are warmer than they otherwise would be if urbanization had not happened (I don't think anyone disputes this).
- Urban heat islands exaggerate warming trends.
- Unlike TV weathermen, climate scientists are too stupid to realize that urban heat island effects could affect their data and too stupid to correct the data for it (even though it is quite likely that clever TV weathermen probably read about this effect in the climate science literature in the first place).
What this group has found on the matter, to their great surprise, is that not only doesn't the urban heat island effect not exaggerate warming trends, it actually dampens them a little bit. In other words, if you are not accounting for the urban heat island effect it makes the hockey stick less steep, rather than more steep.
Which is no great surprise to me because others have already looked at this due to the stink Anthony Watts was raising and found the same thing (though I would guess Watts probably doesn't talk about that too much).
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:4, Interesting)
[Did it "confirm" it was caused by man?] Because that's the real issue that most skeptics have been questioning of late.
If the question of whether or not the warming is anthropogenic, then why the Climategate stink? The researchers involved in those studies (as referenced here) had no skin in the anthropogeny game, they were merely reporting on collected warming/cooling data. If self-proclaimed "skeptics" were not contentious about warming and instead only worried about the cause, there would not have been a scandal at all...
But there was.
Re: (Score:3)
NASA and CRU use different methods. The problem is that the station data around the poles isn't as dense as they would like. NASA solves this by interpolating stations a bit further away (and they show that this is a valid method). The CRU team chooses to only report averages on the earth excluding the polar regions.
Since the Arctic has shown exceptional warming, the NASA averages are a bit higher.
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:4, Informative)
It didn't "confirm" it was caused by man, as it didn't set out to and doesn't claim to.
Nevertheless the collected data seem to indicate a steady increase in temperature. This has coincided with increased emissions of CO2 (while many other factors remained constant, or more precisely didn't vary enough to allow anyone to claim correlation). This of course does not mean that it's _caused_ by the increased emissions of CO2.
But if my belly starts aching I look at what I ate that others didn't. And if I ate something that others didn't (say a dodgy kebab) and I feel bad and they don't then of course I can't claim I feel bad because of the kebab. But I'm sure not going to have the same kebab next time. I don't wait for a double blind study done on a statistically significant sample to confirm to within some statistical error that the kebab is indeed bad.
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:5, Insightful)
Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? Because that's the real issue that most skeptics have been questioning of late.
Of late? Yes. That puts us on step 3.
The Republican 8 Phase Denial Plan
1) There's no such thing as global warming.
2) There's global warming, but the scientists are exaggerating. It's not significant.
3) There's significant global warming, but man doesn't cause it.
4) Man causes significant global warming, but it's not economically possible to tackle it.
5) We need to tackle global warming, so make the poor pay for it.
6) Global warming is bad for business. Why did the Democrats not tackle it earlier?
7) ????
8) Profit.
Re:Did it "confirm" it was caused by man? (Score:5, Insightful)
You missed some steps:
3) There's significant global warming, but man doesn't cause it.
3.1) Man causes it, but it isn't a problem.
3.2) It's a problem, but it's not a problem for man, it's only a problem for other animals and plants.
3.3) It's a problem for man, but man is incapable of solving it.
4) Man causes significant global warming, but it's not economically possible to tackle it.
Trust me, dude, the goalpost can be moved one inch at a time.
Re: (Score:3)
It's actually rather simple to understand the real problem.
The earth's temperature changes on a large number of different cycles. The longest being hundreds of thousands of years long and the shortest is a few hours. It's easy to look for patterns in short cycles. We've got a hundred years or so of actual measured data, so it's not too hard to predict what the weather will be like tomorrow or the next day. When you have 100+ years of actual data, it's easy to spot changes in patterns that are days or maybe
Re: (Score:3)
Hell, the entire east coast is underwater every high tide.
Re: (Score:3)
Can you cite some of the nutballs that are suggesting the entire east coast of the US is going to be underwater by 2050? No competent scientist makes this claim.
Harold Wanlass, Jonathan Gregory, Philippe Huybrechts, Sarah Raper, all Ph.D.'s in climate science (except Wanlass, who is a Ph.D. in geology). I think they qualify as "competent scientists" and all of them have made this claim.
Even in principle (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no amount or type of evidence, even in principle, which would answer climate change sceptics. They will disavow the fundimental principles of science if that is what is necessary to protect their beliefs.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no amount or type of evidence, even in principle, which would answer climate change sceptics. They will disavow the fundimental principles of science if that is what is necessary to protect their beliefs.
Couldn't the same be said for climate change zealots?
Re: (Score:3)
The zealots are well supported by many peer-reviewed scientific articles, so no, it's not the same.
I still equate their passion and zeal to that of religious folks. Even if AGW were conclusively disproven, many of those folks wouldn't believe it. This is my issue with the whole "debate", it is politicized science, which makes information coming from both "sides" suspect. On the other hand, this study appears to be promising.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I Remember Reading About This in 2004 (Score:2)
Does Muller stand by this statement on Principle Component Analysis from 2004 [technologyreview.com]?
In PCA and similar techniques, each of the (in this case, typically 70) different data sets have their averages subtracted (so they have a mean of zero), and then are multiplied by a number to make their average variation around that mean to be equal to one; in technical jargon, we say that each data set is normalized to zero mean and unit variance. In standard PCA, each data set is normalized over its complete data period; for key climate data sets that Mann used to create his hockey stick graph, this was the interval 1400-1980. But the computer program Mann used did not do that. Instead, it forced each data set to have zero mean for the time period 1902-1980, and to match the historical records for this interval. This is the time when the historical temperature is well known, so this procedure does guarantee the most accurate temperature scale. But it completely screws up PCA. PCA is mostly concerned with the data sets that have high variance, and the Mann normalization procedure tends to give very high variance to any data set with a hockey stick shape. (Such data sets have zero mean only over the 1902-1980 period, not over the longer 1400-1980 period.)
Re: (Score:3)
Why did it take them seven years [slashdot.org] (almost exactly to this date) to come to this conclusion?
They were doing first-rate science on an enormous data set? Pulling off a major research project in less time than it takes to train two PhD students is pretty quick by any science's standards, regardless.
Climate change caused by...us? (Score:2)
No one disagrees that the earth's climate has warmed and cooled repeatedly over the last 100,000 years and beyond. Many disagree, however, about the extent of man's involvement in climate change. This sort of study is as if police were to report 'Yes a crime has occurred' when what people really want to know is 'who dunnit?'
Re:Climate change caused by...us? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not true. A depressingly large part of the climate change denial community still insists it isn't happening at all, and hasn't moved onto "yes, but...".
Re:Climate change caused by...us? (Score:4, Insightful)
True. A lot of climate deniers talk like this:
- It is not warming
- Even if it's warming, it's natural fluctuation
- Even if it's not natural fluctation, it's not due to CO2
- Even if it's due to CO2, human didn't cause it.
- Even if humans caused it, it's not bad.
- Even if it's bad, I don't want to act.
yes, so peak WAS in 1998 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:yes, so peak WAS in 1998 (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think you looked at the graph.
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/56197000/gif/_56197115_climate_change_624gr.gif [bbcimg.co.uk]
Re: (Score:3)
The graph from the BBC article was drawn by the Berkeley team, not a local ass clown:
http://berkeleyearth.org/analysis.php [berkeleyearth.org]
A real important thing to note... (Score:3, Interesting)
A real important thing to note was that this was paid for privately- with a large chunk of that capital coming from Climate-change-deniers who wanted to prove that climate change wasn't happening.
Climate-change-deniers often say that government paid studies are fake because governments are encouraging the scientists to come back with fake positives to promote various policies... ... they can't say that anymore.
The debate of man's involvement will still go on- but STOP DENYING THE PROBLEM! Let's put that to bed now.
Re:A real important thing to note... (Score:5, Insightful)
Won't matter. Remember, Nixon had an independent commission study the issues surrounding marijuana (LaGuardia). They came back and recommended decriminalization. We're still fighting the war on drug users today. Right wingers are immune to science.
Re: (Score:3)
Clinton and Obama are best described as centrist, and on the world stage they're well right of center. We haven't had a serious leftist contender for president since Eugene Debs.
Re: (Score:3)
The problem is climate change. The problem is that economies need to adapt. The haves and havenots of water will change.
Water is a necessity- so if you're somewhere that is going to get less- you need to build pipes NOW- rather than when the area is in drought.
If you're used to growing barley- but now you're getting less rain and too much heat- your local farmers are going to go broke unless they adapt- buy the equipment needed to harvest maize (before they run out of money trying to grow barley and they
Finally. (Score:3, Interesting)
"But for Richard Muller, this free circulation also marks a return to how science should be done."
I've long been sceptical of 'man made global warming' because of the science involved. It didn't help that people would say, "Only university-trained scientists can understand the data", either. (Obviously an idiotic claim. Anyone with a brain can learn, and Universities are not a requirement for learning.)
But this is the moment I've been waiting for. Someone finally did the science openly and put all their cards on the table. They aren't hiding anything, including their funding sources. They even used new data that wasn't tainted and made sure to watch for the things sceptics have been critical of.
So, as a long-time AGW sceptic, I'm saying: Thank you for finally proving it.
Now if we can only find ways to counter or offset it that don't hurt the environment even more than we already are, we'll be in good shape.
Re:Finally. (Score:5, Informative)
Except for:
1) None of the scientists ever said "only university-trained scientists can understand the data".
2) All of the science was done openly with all the cards on the table. Published papers are, well, published.
3) You could always discover the funding sources for the vast majority of all scientists, because most of them are required to disclose it.
4) Vanishingly little data was used that could be considered "tainted".
The only real difference between this research project and previous ones which came to the same conclusions was the personalities involved.
It seems like there are three major questions. (Score:5, Insightful)
Question #1: Is the Earth appreciably warmer lately? Answer: Yes. There seems to have been some skepticism over this question but this appears to be where the nutjobs on the 'denier' side fell (we'll get to the nutjobs on the other side in a minute). To some extent we 'already knew this,' but the point of this study appears to have been that we need to start from this point -- that if we can't even agree whether the Earth is warmer, we certainly aren't going to agree on why or what to do about it.
Question #2: Is it our fault, i.e. is it anthropogenic global warming (AGW)? Answer: This study doesn't have anything to say about that, but as others have pointed out, it is 'consistent with AGW models.' This seems to be the most difficult question because there are so many variables. The earth is warmer, sure; but it's been warmer before without our having done anything to it and the crucial piece of information that would easily answer this question -- what would temperatures be if we hadn't been mucking about doing things for the last 200 years -- would require a control planet. I've been trying to educate myself about global warming for a while but it's been very difficult filtering through the noise and vitriol. It doesn't seem possible to me that can conclusively answer this question, and to some people, that's a reason to forget the whole thing -- but the realization that we can't prove it doesn't excuse us from having to make a decision. It just means that we have to make a decision with imperfect information.
(Question #2A would be 'if the Earth has been warmer before, is it necessarily a bad thing that it's warm again -- is that just a natural cycle? This is an interesting question but let's set it aside for the moment. Even if we assume that there is a natural cycle, let's still also assume that what we're concerned with here is the extent to which humans are changing that natural cycle, not whether 1 degree celsius is going to cause an apocalypse.)
Question #3: To what extent should we handicap our own consumption of natural resources or industrial production to alleviate AGW? If we aren't entirely certain about our answer to #2, it's difficult, but by no means impossible to make a quantitative analysis of the 'value' of reducing carbon emissions by, say, one ton a year. But this question is so political that it'd be tough to have a reasonable conversation about it even if it didn't depend on equally, but differently perplexing questions like #2, because it allows for a scenario where an elected leader has to make a judgment call that is going to favor the environment over his or her constituents' jobs. We don't like to think about it in those terms -- we prefer to just imagine that everyone will buy a Prius or bicycle to work -- but it's important to realize how far-reaching these decisions are. It's also quite naive to imagine that industrial interests only exist on one side of this equation. The green industry has just as many crooks in it as the oil industry does, as any industry does, because it is composed of homo sapiens. Throwing money at solar and wind is well and good, but it's a luxury that a rich country ('rich' being relative these days) like the United States can afford; it's a joke to imagine that India or Indonesia or China are going to handicap their economies when they've only just lately (to varying degrees) got round to having economies in the first place. That's not to say that they won't invest in wind and solar (China certainly has) but this is merely diversifying their own energy portfolio -- reducing their dependency on oil -- which is related to but not the same as pursuing green energy for its own sake.
Speaking as an American business owner for a moment, it's tough for me to accept that the solution here is to make it even more expensive to conduct business via something like cap-and-trade, though not because it will affect my own business (it won't, much). This is clearly a problem that requires huge expenditures of capital to solve, and a
Re: (Score:3)
Cap and trade is a terrible idea. The right approach is much simpler.
1) Carbon tax. Use the revenue from this to lower other taxes. E.g. we'll add oil/coal/natural gas taxes, but we'll reduce business taxes to alleviate at least some of the economic drag caused by the carbon tax.
2) Carbon tariffs on imports. If something comes from a country that isn't making similar efforts to curb carbon usage, then we put that into the tariff on the good. An ideal tariff would be some value equal to the extra carbon emit
No peer review, not "science" yet (Score:4, Funny)
It is inappropriate to draw any conclusions from this research because it has not yet been peer reviewed. Watts of wattsupwiththat.com fame was shown a draft, and found some problems with the study, specifically with the selection of weather siting data. No doubt there will be other issues that need to be corrected, that's the whole point of having peer reviews. Everybody wants to skip to the end, but we need to let the process work.
You'd think that the /. crowd would be a little more sophisticated about this kind of thing than the average MSM reader, but apparently not in this case, given the comments I've read thus far.
Still no proof of ANTHROPOGENIC global warming (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Still no proof of ANTHROPOGENIC global warming (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude, don't worry, after this there are still lots and lots of places for you to move the goalpost to. You have plenty of options left to preserve your denial until you are dead. You will never have to face the truth.
Even after the anthropogenic part is undeniable even to folks like you (having been proven in the 1990s), you can move the goalpost to "but it's insignificant", and then to "okay, but it's too expensive to fix", to "okay, but it's too hard to fix", to "okay, but humanity will never cooperate to fix it", to "oh, well I just don't want to fix it". I bet there are even more steps in between you can fall back on.
So don't be too concerned. Your denial is as safe as any other denial. Toward the end of your life, you can just devolve into a delusion of universal conspiracy, where even your tending nurse is getting paid off.
Re: (Score:3)
Mmm hmmm. None of that is relevant. Here's the whole GW argument, boiled down:
1. CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
2. CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere.
3. PREDICTION the earth must warm up.
This is the GW hypothesis. I rarely hear anyone deny any of that. Here's the AGW argument, boiled down:
1. CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
2. The accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere is due to human activity.
3. CONCLUSION the earth's recorded spike in warming is due to human activity.
I do hear people say that 2 is wrong because, uh, be
Points that need to be addressed (Score:4, Insightful)
The study does not "confirm" global warming, and certainly not man-made global warming. It confirms that the analysis from various temperature stations over the last 100 years has been fairly accurate. This indicates a light global average increase in temperature over this period. This tells us nothing about whether the planet is truly warming, or if we are in some sort of long term earth cycle. It also tells us nothing about man-made warming, if it exists. Finally their analysis still can't fully account for the so-called "fudge factor" which has to be applied when you consider the positive effect of concrete cities on temperature readings. All they can prove is that previous samplings of the data were adequate, and that our somewhat inherently faulty data shows a positive temperature trend over the last 100ish years. They also reconfirmed the El Nino impact.
Finally, I think it's important to note that if this study had come to the opposite conclusion, it would have been derided as quack science and laughed off of Slashdot. Furthermore, the fact that the Koch brothers funded an apparently legitimate scientific study is unlikely to challenge the conception of most on this forum that they are a bunch of purely evil monsters, but it should.
Re: (Score:3)
Finally, I think it's important to note that if this study had come to the opposite conclusion, it would have been derided as quack science and laughed off of Slashdot. Furthermore, the fact that the Koch brothers funded an apparently legitimate scientific study is unlikely to challenge the conception of most on this forum that they are a bunch of purely evil monsters, but it should.
Well yeah.
If you interview a 100 mathematicians, 99 say x=3, and the 100th says x=2, than one of three things has happened. Either the 100th was right, the 99 were right, or neither were right.
Now it's not impossible that the 100th is right, but siding with the 100th on a regular basis is a very good way to be wrong.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Finally, I think it's important to note that if this study had come to the opposite conclusion, it would have been derided as quack science and laughed off of Slashdot.
Because for it to come to the opposite conclusion, it would probably have had to have been quack science. And before you accuse me of not wanting to challenge my "religion" of AGW, a couple of months ago when a report came out that claimed that warming was basically not happening, the first thing I thought was "wow, that's fantastic news. I hope they're right and not just partisan quacks." In case you missed that one, I'll leave it to you to guess if they were right or not.
Furthermore, the fact that the Koch brothers funded an apparently legitimate scientific study is unlikely to challenge the conception of most on this forum that they are a bunch of purely evil monsters, but it should.
Good on them. Now let's see if
Re: (Score:3)
"This indicates a light global average increase in temperature over this period."
I think you have a strange definition of "light". According to paleoclimate studies, a change of a degree or two Celsius is enough to drastically alter the climate of the entire globe.
"Finally their analysis still can't fully account for the so-called "fudge factor" which has to be applied when you consider the positive effect of concrete cities on temperature readings."
Bunk, and there have been several papers on this. Having t
Re:Weather stations (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually that's one of the key issues addressed by the study. Climate scientists have been accounting for that effect pretty much forever, but the authors of the new study were dubious about the way it was handled, so they did their own treatment. They found it was insignificant.
Re:Why so hard. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is it so hard to accept that human actions can have consequences ?
Because God wouldn't allow that to happen.
No, seriously, that is essentially what many of these nuts believe.
http://www.cornwallalliance.org/articles/read/an-evangelical-declaration-on-global-warming/ [cornwallalliance.org]