How Climate Scientists Parallel Early Atomic Scientists 440
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by
Soulskill
from the politicians-see-them-as-tools-to-be-used dept.
from the politicians-see-them-as-tools-to-be-used dept.
Lasrick writes "Kennette Benedict writes in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists about the existential threat of climate change, and how the scientists who study and write about it are similar to the early atomic scientists who created, and then worried about, the threat that nuclear weapons posed to humanity: 'Just as the Manhattan Project participants could foresee the coming arms race, climate scientists today understand the consequences of deploying the technologies that defined the industrial age. They also know that action now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will mitigate the worst consequences of climate change, just as the Manhattan Project scientists knew that early action to forestall a deadly arms race could prevent nuclear catastrophe.'"
Honesty? (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems to me they're trying to have it both ways.
(Note: This is just an observation, nothing more. If you try to argue with me about issues I haven't raised here today, I'm going to ignore you.)
Re:Honesty? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Honesty? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the weather always changes and that way you'll never be proven wrong.
Re: Honesty? (Score:5, Informative)
No, it's because people don't understand the difference between the weather and the climate. The weather is what happens day to day, the climate is the long term trend over a wide area.
The climate is warming up over the entire earth. The problem is that it is on a human scale people see cold periods or one are getting a lot of rain and assume their personal experience is the global trend. This is unfortunately a very common problem and you see people on Slashdot extrapolating anecdotes about people they know into everyone everywhere all the time.
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The climate is warming up over the entire earth.
No, it's not. We have not seen any warming for 15 years. Even the IPCC admits to this now that the evidence is overwhelming.
that's totally wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
We still have some of the lowest CO2 concentrations in earth's history right now, and our climate has been changing rapidly (in fact, oscillating wildly) for the past 7 million years or so. To stop these oscillations, CO2 concentrations would have to go up substantially.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology [wikipedia.org]
Re:Honesty? (Score:4, Insightful)
I am amazed at how people love to attribute the worst possible motives to scientists (lying for what? to get a 20K-100K grant?) but refuse to see the motives of those who fund climate CHANGE deniers, which would be oil companies, investment fund managers with big stakes in petroleum, etc. with billions at stake.
For the dim witted I can only assume it is because in the back of their minds they think they can never be a PhD scientist, which feeds resentment, but they think they could possibly be a hedge fund manager or oil boss.
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Climate scientists have more in common with priests than the sort of people who try to disprove their own hypothesis with experiments. If you had based your whole career on a particular hypothesis how anxious would you be to disprove it? Climate scientists are anything but unbiased observers. Any climate scientist who maintained the sort of dispassionate skepticism which is the hallmark of a real scientist would never be able to graduate in their chosen major. They would not be able to pass even a single cl
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The big fame in science comes from disproof. The most referenced papers of mine are ones where I disproved theoretical claims. Every scientist wants to be the one who disproves something big.
Watson and Crick disproved that DNA was a double helix. James Maxwell disproved that electricity and magnetism could be described by a single set of equations. Issac Newton disproved that physical phenomena could be reproducibly described by equations rather than by attributing them simply as acts of God. Einstein disproved that electromagnetism and gravity could described by a single set of equations. That's why all those guys are unknown.
You are either an idiot or someone who knows nothing about scien
Re: Honesty? (Score:4, Insightful)
Reference please.
Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_effect
The article says that his formula wes reasonable, but he could not predict industrial growth, so could not predict trends.
I agree that CO2 levels are linked to temperature,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Co2-temperature-plot.svg
But ... Misrepresenting facts doesn't help.
Note to all mods (for the second time) : do NOT moderate opinions without FACT. Most highly moderated comments in here have nothing to back their claims. It makes a mockery of Slashdot.
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Re:Honesty? (Score:4, Informative)
I can fully back up BM on this.
When I was a grad student the most valuable training happened in lab meetings, journal clubs and at the Burly Earl Pub around the corner. Everyone was allowed to express their ideas and then prodded to back them up. Even a lowly grad student like me. At one of my first big journal club meetings a big-shot professor was presenting a paper on T-helper cell subgroups. Everyone in the room was very impressed by the implications and off and running on discussions about what the results mean. But I pointed out that the data looked funky to me. Nobody bought it. So I dug in further and pointed out that their controls were off by more than double the measured results that they were comparing. It seemed that their assay was very unpredictable. Within 10 minutes the entire group swung my way and we ripped the article apart. One of the other groups took on the task of replicating the results - just like science is supposed to work.
My first chance to meet a real big-shot was at the Burly Earl. Our department had drinks with Linus Pauling, just a couple of years before he died - still brilliant and curious. He was sharing a back-of-the-napkin idea with the group and I started arguing with him. Wrap your head around that - a 20 year old grad student arguing with a 2-time Nobel Laureate. I got a couple of incredulous looks from some of the others, but Dr. Pauling was very engaged and seemed to enjoy the discussion. He ended up jumping to my side and arguing with some of the other professors. It was just an amazing afternoon. And you know what he never said? "Shut up you idiot, I have 2 Nobel Prizes and you haven't even passed your qualifying exam." (Which, as argument from authority goes is a pretty effective rejoinder, you've gotta admit.)
Imagine either of those scenarios happening in the halls of power.... You think an intern at the State Department gets to call out Hillary Clinton? Imagine Dick Cheney taking a couple of hours to argue big policy decisions with Donald Rumsfeld's assistant's intern. Right.. that might have happened!
Not only is "testability" built into the mechanisms of science, it is also part-and-parcel of the culture of science. (That doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of opinionated pricks running around who think they can declare something so by the weight of their credentials - they do. It's just that you don't have to listen to them if you can back it up.)
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http://www.innovationtoronto.com/2013/06/global-warming-caused-by-cfcs-not-carbon-dioxide-study-says/ [innovationtoronto.com]
This is one that made me giggle. I am not a climate scientist so I don't have much of an opinion but I enjoy watching and learning from the debate.
Maybe both? They warned if a coming ice age (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe alot of people twist and exaggerate the evidence for their own reasons when $ billions are on the line. A $100k grant ? Just in the Obama years alone, he's handed hundreds of millions of your money to fake greenies. By fake , I mean ones that took the money and ran, never living up to any of their promises.
Re:Maybe both? They warned if a coming ice age (Score:5, Informative)
In the sixties and seventies, the climate hucksters were selling us on a man-made ice age.
Bullshit. The media sensationalized a couple of crackpots claiming a new ice age was coming. Check the peer-reviewed scientific literature during that time period. Just about every paper discussing the subject was in regards to warming. http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=11 [skepticalscience.com]
In the eighties, they told us California would be underwater by 2000. It's still there.
Bullshit. No credible peer-reviewed research ever stated anything REMOTELY close to that possibility either during the 80's or anytime before or after. I'm pretty sure this is a crock that you just made up as there is no physically possible way for California to go "underwater" short of a massive asteroid impact. Even if all of Greenland and Antarctica melted, most of California would still be above sea level
Maybe alot of people twist and exaggerate the evidence for their own reasons when $ billions are on the line. A $100k grant ? Just in the Obama years alone, he's handed hundreds of millions of your money to fake greenies. By fake , I mean ones that took the money and ran, never living up to any of their promises.
Oh, you're one of the conspiracy nutters. Ok, you want to play the money game? The National Science Foundation (NSF) has a yearly budget at the moment of $5 billion, and that covers all the sciences. Exxon has a QUARTERLY profit of $9.5 billion. So in a given year just Exxon by itself is making nearly 8 TIMES the entire budget for the NSF. And that is just one fossil fuel company.
The fossil fuel industry profits dwarfs climate research budgets by orders of magnitude. If climate scientists wanted money, they would drop this "conspiracy" in a heartbeat and go work for Exxon and the like saying how everything is just peachy.
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Re: Maybe both? They warned if a coming ice age (Score:4, Interesting)
Not so. Read the Newsweek article, Time, etc. the contemporaneous press shows the coming ice age was quite the thing on the 70s.
The media isn't a good guide to what scientists actually think.
Meanwhile, back in reality, cooling never was the dominant opinion in scientific publications [skepticalscience.com].
Also note that until we figured global warming out, global cooling was a reasonable prediction, since we appear to be in an interglacial [wikipedia.org] that can be expected to go back toward cold at some point.
In fact, the last I read on the topic (several years ago) said we're experiencing forcing toward warmth due to greenhouse gasses and forcing toward coolth due to the interglacial cycle, and it happens that the forcing toward warmth is stronger, so we're warming up rather than cooling down.
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"I am amazed at how people love to attribute the worst possible motives to scientists (lying for what? to get a 20K-100K grant?) but refuse to see the motives of those who fund climate CHANGE deniers, which would be oil companies, investment fund managers with big stakes in petroleum, etc. with billions at stake."
Except that is not what I did, as you would know if you bothered to read more carefully and cease attributing motives to ME that equally do not exist.
I simply stated that it was the media following the scientists, not the other way around. I did not attribute any motives to anybody.
Re:Honesty? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's cheap energy that's at stake. Basically, if anthropogenic climate change is true, then the options are:
None of these are good options, so people prefer fantasy to reality. Specifically, they pretend either that climate change is a lie or that windmills can keep the lights on. It isn't, and they can't, but it's not fun admitting that your children will be worse off than you are.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No warming for 17 years
See 17 years in a 40 year context [guim.co.uk] and in the 130 year temperature record [wikipedia.org].
Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the railroad engineer who for some reason chairs the IPCC
The same Dr. Pachauri who was the director of the energy and resource institute of India, chancellor and fellow at several the universities in several countries, chairman of the agriculture foundation, chairman of climate board at Colombia University, senior advisor at Yale, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, advisor to several oil companies, manufacturers and banks?
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Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Because most of them would not have a job without "Climate Change". And by most I mean somewhere in the neighborhood of 90%. What was the job market for "Climate Scientist" 35 years ago? Did such a title even exist?
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Yes.
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(And where do you think comes the weather report from, if not from climate scientists collecting weather data, calculating moving averages, creating models of the atmosphere and predicting the future?)
So climate huckster = oil baron (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
"What, exactly, do you think they're getting out of it?"
First, I want to note that I am not asserting that they get anything out of it other than to further their own interest, "their own interest" being public support of their theories.
And I suggest (although I am not making the claim that they are... just asking) that one reason MIGHT BE that it keeps people interested in the subject even after their predictions have gone so demonstrably awry. After all; it's hard to harp on "Global Warming" when there has been little if any overall warming for a long time.
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Except ... well, we have politicians in the mix. That was/is as true with the atomic weapons issue as it is with climate change.
One thing we have today that's different is political correctness. That wasn't such a big thing during the peak of the arms race and the cold war.
I can see little possible good coming from the politicization of science. Nor can, frankly, I see much good in making science "politically correct."
Science should just be science, objective and dispassionate. The conclusions are wha
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If they were honest, why are they calling it "Climate Change" now, rather than Global Warming?
Huh? I thought this story was well known.
The Bush Administration enacted a deliberate policy to change the name in all public discussions. Mr Frank Luntz was responsible for the new one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz#Global_warming [wikipedia.org]
Re:Honesty? (Score:5, Informative)
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed in 1988, so where do you get the idea that what it's called has changed?
The indisputable increase in global average temperature [woodfortrees.org] due to human CO2 emissions is called global warming. The response of the global climate system to that increase is called climate change. The climate changes vary by locale. That distinction has been there for quite some time.
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Uhm... lots of them do still call it global warming.
Hard to draw a good conclusion from flawed premises...
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If they were honest, why are they calling it "Climate Change" now, rather than Global Warming? Seems to me they're trying to have it both ways.(Note: This is just an observation, nothing more. If you try to argue with me about issues I haven't raised here today, I'm going to ignore you.)
Climate change more accurately describes the effects. Global warming, to the lay person, implied that everything would warm up. So when a record breaking cold snap occurred, invariably we would here "See? It ain't warmin' up!".
Warmer average global temperatures means one thing; there's more energy in the system. More energy in the system means that the system will destabilize until it reaches a new norm. That is, the climate will change.
Now how that change actually effects different regions depends on a num
Re:Honesty? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Climate Change" is more common now thanks to conservative think tanks who made a concerted effort to use that term in the early 2000s because it was considered "less scary" than global warming. Scientists went along with it because "Climate Change" is technically more accurate anyway and they are not particularly good at playing politics.
You've got to envy the Republicans in their ability to twist language to suit their needs.
Re: (Score:2)
"The term "Climate Change" has been around since at least the 1950's"
That has absolutely nothing to do with my comment. The phrase "climate change" has almost certainly been around a lot longer than that. So what?
"Climate Change" is more common now thanks to conservative think tanks who made a concerted effort to use that term in the early 2000s because it was considered "less scary" than global warming. Scientists went along with it because "Climate Change" is technically more accurate anyway and they are not particularly good at playing politics.
I doubt that very much. Your argument sounds nice but logically it makes no sense. The "conservatives" would have wanted to make it sound MORE scary, not less.
Since largely speaking it was the liberals, not the conservatives, who were pushing the "global warming" agenda, it would only make sense that THEY were behind the change to make it "less scary" to the publ
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Accepting for the sake of argument the common caricature of 'conservative' and 'liberal', I'm afraid the situation is quite the reverse. The
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"Climate change" is just a workaday term that's been around for some time to describe, well, exactly what it sounds like it describes. And GP is quite right that it's been in use for some time. A simple search of the NY Times archives and I found articles from the 1930's discussing the relationship between climate change and forest evolution.
It is certainly true that the term "climate change" has seen increasing use of late. As the OED says, "The Oxford English Corpus data from the year 2009 contains twice
Re:Honesty? (Score:5, Informative)
Then you're remembering it wrong.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz#Global_warming [wikipedia.org]
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"That's not how I remember it. Climate change was put forward by the greenies because the results were not agreeing with the predictions. Once you can attribute temperatures going up, going down or staying the same to the same cause, you're golden"
Glad YOU got it, at least. Some a**holes marked me "troll" for daring to ask a completely sensible question.
Re: (Score:3)
Propose it multiple times, after it has been repeatedly corrected, and people will suspect that you know your premise is wrong and therefore that you are trolling, and will mark you as troll.
Simple as that.
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I still don't know how measurements of climate change can be done in fractions of a degree with the base measurements are done with margins of error sometimes as much as 5-10 degrees. Accumulations of rounding errors alone would seem to indicate that reports should have much larger margins of error on computed values. That is but one of many problems with current observations in climatology.
It's called the Central Limit Theorem [wikipedia.org]. Suppose you have some independent random variable with mean mu and variance sigma squared; CLT says that if you take n observations (X_1, ..., X_n) from the random variable then the sample mean (X_1 + ... + X_n)/n tends to be normally distributed with mean mu and variance sigma^2/n. It is a very well established and formally proven [wikipedia.org] theorem of basic statistics.
Now, how does this apply to large error bars on individual temperature observations and fractions of a degree o
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Tense About Nuclear Weapons (Score:2)
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We stopped talking about it in the present tense when the global mutually assured destruction regime faded in prominence as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nowadays our big existential threat is terrorism, and in that context the kind of humanity-killing nuclear catastrophe we used to talk about isn't so likely. Of course, we could still have a stupid accidental nuclear catastrophe, or a Indo-pakistan nuclear catastrophe, and we shouldn't imagine that there is no longer any existential thr
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our big existential threat is terrorism
terrorism is not an existential threat.
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Oops. You're too late:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/07/20/1611211/around-2000-fukushima-workers-at-risk-of-thyroid-cancer [slashdot.org]
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What bullshit. Computer models are just a tool, not the foundation of climate research.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ6Z04VJDco [youtube.com]
Re:Tense About Nuclear Weapons (Score:4, Insightful)
The AGW hypothesis may or may not reflect actual reality. That's the problem with an unfalsifiable hypothesis.
The AGW hypothesis is not unfalsifiable. People with no understanding of science often make that claim. A couple decades of significant cooling (0.05C per decade or so compared to the warming trend of 0.18C/decade warming since 1970. ) while CO2 levels continued to climb would probably be enough to do that.
The problem for people who like to lie about science is that the science of AGW is very basic and well understood. To pretend it's not going to happen you have to imagine something that could stop it. And so far nobody has been able to invent something that can stop it short of a catastrophic breakdown in global atmospheric and oceanic circulation. Be my guest. Find something that can prevent CO2 from increasing temperatures and prove it. In 1906, Arhennius calculated the climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 when including water vapor feedback was 2.1C. Current estimates are between 2C and 4.5C. Go ahead, find a way to make the climate sensitivity negative and show that it works.
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We need you to worry about something else now. Fear of a nuclear holocaust was sufficient to control populations and political agendas for a while. But now its time to move on and believe in the new bogeyman.
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Science? (Score:2, Insightful)
It is not science if your hypothesis is not falsifiable.
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Fortunately, the global climate change is falsifiable, and we are in the process of demonstrating that it is correct. Yay science. :]
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Global climate change hypothesis. Sigh. Maybe someday Slashdot will add the ability to edit our posts...
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And that we can do something to change it, and that we should do something to change it.
The effects of the predicted changes and the effects of the measures necessary to contain or mitigate them need to be evaluated against each other. I haven't heard any real concrete steps for containment other than "shut down pretty much all economic activity, right now, just in case."
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When I drop a ball, and show that it follows the path predicted by gravitation, what more must I do to "show" that gravity caused the ball to fall.
When the atmospheric CO2 content increases and the global average temperature goes up about the amount Arrhenius said it would back in 1906 due to basic physical principles, and then I show that is in fact human emissions that caused the CO2 increase, what more must I do to "show" that global warming cause the temperature increase.
ITYM provable (Score:2)
Since falsifying in this case is effectively proving a negative - ie demonstrate its NOT going to happen.
Obviously the person who modded you up is as clueless as you are.
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If there are any scientists in the room, perhaps you can address this misconception for sylvandb.
It appears he learned how science works from reading the pop skeptics and the Discovery Institute.
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(B) Plenty of science is "not falsifiable".
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It is not science if your hypothesis is not falsifiable.
Bullshit. Popper's philosophy is not that which defines science.
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For all of you with the exceeding strong faith in your global climate change religion, whom have felt the need to attack the facts, please post your definition of the scientific method so that rational people will know how to converse with you.
For those who think a "provable" hypothesis is somehow different from a "falsifiable" hypothesis, I encourage you to keep studying the language. English is demonstrably difficult even for native speakers.
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It is not science if your hypothesis is not falsifiable.
I'm guessing that in your reality geologists, biologists, and astronomers aren't scientists, since they work with theories about things that can't be reproduced in their laboratories.
The Doomsday Device has worked so far. (Score:4, Insightful)
Manhattan Project scientists may have foretold the arms race, but could they have foreseen that the advent of nuclear weapons would produce the longest period of peace between industrialized nations in the past several centuries? Considering the countless lives lost in the wars of the 19th and 20th centuries, how many lives have been saved under the haunting specter of nuclear annihilation?
In this context the analogy to climate science is less clear.
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What makes you think it was nuclear weapons that "produced" this era of world peace? One could just as well say it was the invention of television or the integrated circuit.
Why is it that any Slashdot story with the words "climate change" brings out the sillies?
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The Korean War was more than half a century ago. The assertion was that there has been "peace" since Hiroshima because of nukes.
You can suggest this is so, but there really is no proof. Especially since not all developed nations have nukes. Plus, there might be some argument to the last 50 years really being so peaceful, considering how many of the nuclear powers have victimized the non-nuclear powers.
If you happen to be living in a nuclear power, and it makes you feel better to have nukes, good for you.
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I don't know, but I have a fair inkling that one must provide some good justification for numbers significantly higher than the victims of the various proxy wars during the Cold War era.
To say nothing of all those that died as victims of the nasty dictatorships that both sides were propping up to wage those dirty wars for them.
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but could they have foreseen that the advent of nuclear weapons would produce the longest period of peace between industrialized nations in the past several centuries?
Logical fallacy: Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Selective Memory (Score:4, Interesting)
The arms race happened. It wasn't deadly. There was no nuclear catastrophe.
Carbon's increasing. We're still here. The polar ice caps are still here.
Good comparison.
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Carbon's increasing. We're still here. The polar ice caps are still here.
But getting smaller. The one to the north looks like it is going to be winter-only before too long.
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The polar ice caps are still here.
And I suspect that when the north one does disappear in a summer not so far in the future, that will be an inflection point in denialism. The lack of a north point is hard to deny. Even to oneself.
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The polar ice caps are still here.
And I suspect that when the north one does disappear in a summer not so far in the future, that will be an inflection point in denialism. The lack of a north point is hard to deny. Even to oneself.
If evidence had any influence, there wouldn't be any denialism now.
Re:Selective Memory (Score:4, Insightful)
As you said, good comparison (even though the submitter and the article don't even realize that the comparison they are making should cause one to draw the opposite conclusion to the one they want you to draw).
Alarmists don't change (Score:4, Interesting)
The biggest similarity between the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and climate alarmists is that they both have predicted the end of the world like a dozen times by now.
Nonsense (Score:2, Insightful)
When I was growing up, i.e.
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Earth didn't always have life on it either. Sounds like a great plan!
Change happens - and it's bad (Score:2)
In fact, it is true that regional climate change has been happening here and there all through human history.
Unfortunately, it has tended to bring down entire civilizations.
So if there's a change in climate that we're causing, may we should stop.
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The Earth's climate has always been changing and will be changing while the planet is alive. It is uncertain whether humans have measurable influence on those changes at all;
Scientists say that the hypothesis that humans have a measurable influence on the climate is proven with P > 0.95.
What is uncertain about it?
the fact that people with clear financial interests claim so does not make it certainty.
So we only believe scientists who work for free? Better rip out all the wires in your house then. Better set your car aflame, since it is entirely a product of scientists who were remunerated for their work. But don't use petrol or any substance cracked from crude oil. Wood only.
And I hope you don't get sick, since modern medicine is entirely a product of scie
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The Earth's climate has always been changing and will be changing while the planet is alive.
Correct.
It is uncertain whether humans have measurable influence on those changes at all
Incorrect. CO2 emissions are very measurable, as are the resulting temperature changes.
Even if we suppose there is a measurable influence it is still uncertain whether the human influence is setting the current trends
No, it's beyond reasonable doubt.
there have been warm ages in the past, too. For instance, the Medieval Warm Period.
The fact that there have been natural variations in the past and present does nothing to take away the fact that there are current changes in climate as a result of CO2 emissions.
When I was growing up, i.e. the 70ies and the 80ies, the climate scare was The Big Bad Global Cooling.
No it wasn't. That's a myth. It is known that ice ages are cyclic and in thousands of years one will likely turn up. This is not a "climate scare". AGW is happening over the lifespans of individual people,
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The Earth's climate has always been changing and will be changing while the planet is alive.
And you won't find a single climate scientist who would disagree with you. However, that in no way should imply that climate change NOW is a good thing. In fact, sudden climate changes often were a BAD thing to the existing life forms of the time.
It is uncertain whether humans have measurable influence on those changes at all;
No, it's pretty certain at this point. Fourier himself proposed greenhouse theory back in the 1820's, so it's been around for quite some time. Since then, mountains of research and data have been collected on the subject.
the fact that people with clear financial interests claim so does not make it certainty.
Oh stop with this tired bullshit, ok? Exxon
let me unpack this for you (Score:4, Insightful)
early atomic scientists:
- developed sound physical theories that any theoretical theorist could verify from first principles and a few key experiments
- proved that their theories worked in a series of repeatable experiments
- implemented their technologies as practical devices
- worried that the technology they themselves developed might be used for bad
climate scientists:
- make extrapolations involving tons of assumptions and unknowns
- their experiments and data collections cannot be reproduced
- haven't created any new technologies
- try to stop people from using other people's technologies
Re: Couldn't have said it better! (Score:2)
My mind was stuck in a 'Is she a total idiot to not see the difference?", followed by, "How arrogant to even make the comparison!", indignation loop.
Re:let me unpack this for you (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the difference between a relatively simple and straightforward problem and a very difficult one.
Once the basic experiments were done for nuclear fission, all you needed to do was give it to the engineer. The problem with climate change is that the experiments would be global and require a long time to give meaningful results.
However, the mechanisms are perfectly clear. Greenhouse gases make it warmer. People are increasing greenhouse gases at an alarming rate. Both of those statements are supported by experiment and data. Now, it just becomes a math problem.
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You clearly don't understand the first thing about climate change. Positive feedback loops and economic models are an essential part of climate change predictions, and they are mostly guesswork. Furthermore, the potential consequences are also mostly guesswork.
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Stenvar, you turn up in every discussion here about climate change and bring the same right-wing dismissal to every single conversation. Whether it's George Zimmerman, or climate change, or your desire to see an entirely privatized school system, the phrase, "You know nothing of what you speak" or "You are babbling incoherently" seems to appear in almost all of your exchanges.
And yet, from a perusal of your very short history commenting on th
Re:let me unpack this for you (Score:4, Informative)
Now, it just becomes a math problem.
The Earth is a complicated, dynamic system with many factors. It's not a "math problem". The models failed in their predictions for recent warming, which has remained flat. There's also the question of "forcings" vs "feedbacks".
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Murdoch owns Nature now?
http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-forecast-for-2018-is-cloudy-with-record-heat-1.13344 [nature.com] :
In August 2007, Doug Smith took the biggest gamble of his career. After more than ten years of work with fellow modellers at the Met Office's Hadley Centre in Exeter, UK, Smith published a detailed prediction of how the climate would change over the better part of a decade1. His team forecasted that global warming would stall briefly and then pick up speed, sending the planet into record-breaking territory within a few years.
The Hadley prediction has not fared particularly well. Six years on, global temperatures have yet to shoot up as it projected.
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Another difference is that physicists are not required to have certain political beliefs. To be a climate scientist, to even consider becoming one, you pretty much have to be a true believer already. No one who didn't believe in AGW would seek a degree in order to study it. An atheist or agnostic does not become a priest for similar reasons. At least religious people do not try to claim that the fact that 99.9% of priests believe in a god is somehow evidence for its existence.
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Monkton?
Monckton did create a jigsaw that he thought would be unsolvable, and bet his house on it by offering a million pound prize. It was solved in less than a year and the buffoon lost his house.
The bulletin.org as a source (Score:2)
Right or wrong, it's hard to take this article seriously when thebulletin.org doesn't exactly look like an objective and balanced source of information on climate change.
Re:Rothchild bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Why stop at four billion years? Compared to the temperature some ~13.8 billion years ago, it's positively chilly right now!
I find it fascinating how science is often refered here on slashdot, but when it comes to climate scientists, all of a sudden the vast majority of scientists are stupid, lying, elitists scaremongers.
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I find it fascinating how science is often refered here on slashdot, but when it comes to climate scientists, all of a sudden the vast majority of scientists are stupid, lying, elitists scaremongers.
Reminds me of evolution deniers. Those people are apparently ignoring the fact that there is ovehelming scientific consensus on human-caused global warning. From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
National and international science academies and scientific societies have assessed current scientific opinion on climate change. These assessments are generally consistent with the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), summarized below:
- Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as evidenced by increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, the widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.[5]
- Most of the global warming since the mid-20th century is very likely due to human activities.[6]
- "Benefits and costs of climate change for [human] society will vary widely by location and scale.[7] Some of the effects in temperate and polar regions will be positive and others elsewhere will be negative.[7] Overall, net effects are more likely to be strongly negative with larger or more rapid warming."[7]
- "[...] the range of published evidence indicates that the net damage costs of climate change are likely to be significant and to increase over time"[8]
- "The resilience of many ecosystems is likely to be exceeded this century by an unprecedented combination of climate change, associated disturbances (e.g. flooding, drought, wildfire, insects, ocean acidification) and other global change drivers (e.g. land-use change, pollution, fragmentation of natural systems, over-exploitation of resources)"[9]
No scientific body of national or international standing maintains a formal opinion dissenting from any of these main points; the last was the American Association of Petroleum Geologists,[10] which in 2007[11] updated its 1999 statement rejecting the likelihood of human influence on recent climate with its current non-committal position.[12] Some other organizations, primarily those focusing on geology, also hold non-committal positions.
I don't know why so many techies are ignoring scientific opinion on climate change. My guess is they have political reasons:
- most techies i know are individualists advocating right wing political ideologies (libertarians, minimal or no government etc.). Global warming is inconvinient to their views because it can be solved only with stro
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Signed the Truth? You are a laugh riot. How much do you think it would cost Exxon and the Koch brothers if oil and coal production gets cut? A hell of a lot more than any bankers stand to gain from it.
Follow the money, but use your brain rather than your politics.
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"In case you ever doubted what rich liberals think about you, note the above:"
Nice try , except I'm not rich or a liberal. But I do prefer to believe scientific consensus over the opinions of brainless rednecks who's highest intellectual achievement is changing the carb on their 10mpg V8s.
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You do realize that even if "The climate is changing" is true, the perpetual - sometimes implied, sometimes expressed - follow-up "...and therefore we must have more socialism and more power to the government" is not a scientific conclusion, right? The natural sciences does not have a political agenda.
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You do realize that even if "The climate is changing" is true, the perpetual - sometimes implied, sometimes expressed - follow-up "...and therefore we must have more socialism and more power to the government" is not a scientific conclusion, right?
You do realise it's YOU that's arguing politics rather than science, don't you.
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Actually, climate is just a much harder problem than fission. I'm pretty sure you could use to same argument to say the "today's crop" of climate scientists are much better because they're working on a much harder problem.
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What claims are deceitful? Provide some references, please, instead of the usual derpy right-wing smears.
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Atomic scientists didn't create anything either. They discovered.
You might be confusing science with engineering.
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If you believe that about Republicans (or Democrats if you're from the other side), you will be creating your own incorrect conclusions.
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Climate change is not an existential threat.
Probably not, but there might be a possibility of a runaway system if it gets far enough from it's current equilibrium.
But certainly, it is an existential threat to our way of life. The US DoD and spy agencies have both identified climate change as the greatest threat to the USA in this century.