Why Groundwater Use May Not Explain Half of Sea-Level Rise 244
New submitter Sir Realist writes "A recent Slashdot scoop pointed us at a scientific study that claimed 42% of global sea-level rises could be due to groundwater use. It was a good story. But as is often the way with science, there are folks who interpret the data differently. Scott Johnson at Ars Technica has a good writeup which includes two recent studies that came to remarkably different conclusions from mostly the same data, and an explanation of the assumptions the authors were making that led to those differences. Essentially, there is some reason to think that the groundwater estimates used in the first study were too high. However, that's still under debate, so it's worth reading the whole argument. Scientific review in action!"
Scientific review (Score:3, Insightful)
Got it...
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Interesting Theory (Score:4, Insightful)
Glad to see REAL scientists questioning AGW tenets.
Ferret
Re:Scientific review (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe it is simply that all peered reviewed papers get reviewed. And it is simply that climate change is a fact and it is happening ~ like we believe it is so all reviews of those papers turn up no problems.
Re:Scientific review (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Scientific review (Score:4, Insightful)
So, we can review groundwater/sea-level scientific studies, but 'Climate Change' is a done deal.
It's a scientific fact that global warming is real. There is no debate, and no controversy, there. We've got too many satellites confirming it, along with thousands of ground stations and the upward trend is undeniable.
It's still up for discussion why it's happening or what it will eventually mean for us. Ethical scientists generally take the side of "Until we can predict with some confidence what will happen, we should do what we can to limit the impact," similar to the ideal behind the Hippocratic oath. Our present models, understanding, and theories point to rising sea levels, melting ice caps, and heating to the point where much of the ariable land along the equator will no longer be able to sustain industrial farming.
We're already seeing some of the effects of this rapid heating (in geological terms); In Japan, native moss is no longer used at several Zen shrines because it's become too warm for them to survive. Coral reefs are undergoing a mass-extinction event, and we are seeing weather patterns which roughly correspond to modelling predictions for a warmer Earth. If these trends continue, life will become increasingly inhospitable to humans. While long-term predictions aren't reliable, it is almost certain the Earth of 200 years from now will have a radically different climate than the Earth of today; We are directly responsible for this planet entering a new geological age with as much speed and force as the Cretaceousâ"Paleogene extinction event.
The debate really doesn't center on whether or not these things happen; The choice faced by our generation is not whether or not life after climate change is possible, but what kind of life it will be.
They can't even "count" groundwater (Score:1, Insightful)
Just finished the article. These scientists can't even reach a conclusion of how much groundwater was pulled from reservoirs *even when directly measuring it*. Some say 0% loss. Others 40% loss.
And yet these same people claim they can predict the temperature 100 years from now. :-| Riiiight. If they can't get *current* numbers right, even when pulling out their rules and measuring, how can we trust anything they say about the future water level, temperatures, et cetera? The Greeks called this "hubris".
Re:Scientific review (Score:5, Insightful)
Any individual study can be reviewed at any time. This rarely has any significant impact on the consensus formed by the weight of all other existing related studies. If there are two interpretations of a study based on two different sets of assumptions, the question can be resolved by testing the assumptions. The fact that a single study is ambiguous does nothing to cast doubt on the remaining vast preponderance of scientific studies which unambiguously indicate that climate change is both real and man made.
'Climate Change' is a done deal
The scientific community has overwhelmingly agreed that Climate Change is occuring, and that there is a greater than 90% chance it is man-made. [wikipedia.org]
That this is the consensus is a cold, hard, unambiguous fact. If you want to believe that climate change is not real, or not man-made, the only remaining avenue of rationalisation is that the scientific community a wrong or lying for some reason. This puts climate change deniers on the same ground as creationists.
Re:Scientific review (Score:1, Insightful)
It's still up for discussion why it's happening
Personally, I feel it's a bit disingenuous to say that without adding something along the lines of "but the most widely accepted and scientifically supported explanation is man made CO2 emissions". The plain fact of the matter is that there isn't much discussion amongst scientists as to the cause and that there's virtually no debate amongst climate scientists. Solar variation isn't enough to explain the changes we've seen and CO2 from other sources is a tiny fraction of human output (despite what many people would tell you online). Having a group of laymen trotting out the same tired arguments again and again while the experts explain why they are wrong isn't a debate, if it were then evolution would be up for debate as well!
Re:Scientific review (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>It's a scientific fact that global warming is real. There is no debate, and no controversy
How come it's getting colder over the last decade with record levels of snowfall and cooler-than-normal summers? (I had heard by 2010 we wouldn't even know what snow is in Great Britain.)
Re:Scientific review (Score:2, Insightful)
It's still up for discussion why it's happening or what it will eventually mean for us. Ethical scientists generally take the side of "Until we can predict with some confidence what will happen, we should do what we can to limit the impact," similar to the ideal behind the Hippocratic oath.
My concern here is that without being able to predict the outcome with confidence it is not possible to determine what action will "limit the impact". What we need to do is to verify the models by predicting a future change and see if it happens as predicted. If so the model used is "good enough" and we can see if limiting carbon emission makes things better or worse.
We also have to get ridf of the myth that climate is something stable. The earth is on a journey from creation to end. No year will ever be the same as the last one. The distance to the moon changes, the distance to the Sun changes, the solar output changes. The cyclic model is just a model that works well enough. What we need to find is not a state that is "natural". What we need to determine is what kind of climate we want and do whatever it takes to get that climate, even if the this includes increasing gas emissions. Until we are willing to do this we are playing with the planet for the sake of politics rather than doing what is scientifically sound. (Also, it might be a better idea to experiment with Mars rather than to try to fix the production system while we still depends on it.)
Re:Scientific review (Score:2, Insightful)
One is one paper, the other is scientific consensus. Please troll elsewhere.
Re:Scientific review (Score:2, Insightful)
At one time it was the scientific consensus that light was a wave, and that it traveled through a medium called "ether" that filled the gap between the sun and the earth. 99% of scientists believed this.
They were wrong.
Consensus doesn't really mean much..... read "Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn. Learn about paradigm shift; how an entire generation of scientists can believe with absolute certainty a false fact.
Re:Scientific review (Score:4, Insightful)
Define "radical" please.
The rate of change is important. Toss me a baseball and I'll catch it, whip it at my head and I probably won't.
We generally don't know the rate of change that previous global climate changes had, but the rates that we're seeing today would be equivilent to the ice age ending in a matter of decades or at most a couple centuries. 1.5 degrees so far might not sound like much but when look at the global scale that is a big change.
Re:Scientific review (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Scientific review (Score:4, Insightful)
These points have been refuted so many times that it honestly isn't worth listing them again.
I sure as hell hope that no scientist has to work under these ludicrous standards you demand of the climatology field. They've demonstrated on several occasions that they have nothing to hide, and denialists just keep piling on them with more cherry-picked quotes. It's sickening to watch.
Re:Scientific review (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a scientific fact that global warming is real.
As the Earth being the center of the Universe was, once, another scientific fact.
Every single scientific fact is prone to scrutiny and refutal. Every single one.
We can assume that some scientific facts are insanely unlikely to be refuted (Gravity Law, for the sake of my balls and despair of my girlfriend's boobies, are one of them). But never, ever, assume any "scientific fact" above any controversy or debate.
Dogmas have no place here.