Scientists Explain Why Chairman of House Committee On Science Is Wrong 476
Lasrick writes "Michael Oppenheimer and Kevin Trenberth take apart Rep. Lamar Smith's (R-Tex.) Washington Post op/ed on climate science saying: 'Contrary to Smith's assertions, there is conclusive evidence that climate change worsened the damage caused by Superstorm Sandy. Sea levels in New York City harbors have risen by more than a foot since the beginning of the 20th century. Had the storm surge not been riding on higher seas, there would have been less flooding and less damage. Warmer air also allows storms such as Sandy to hold more moisture and dump more rainfall, exacerbating flooding.'"
Fantastic... (Score:5, Insightful)
Man, I certainly can't think of any better candidates for the chairmanship of the House Comittee on Science, Space, and Technology than a lawyer without any technical or scientific background, a big fan of SOPA, expanding the DMCA's restrictive elements, and PCIP. Just as icing on the cake, the guy is a Christian Scientist, so he probably has a worse-than-average relationship with medical science.
Honestly, how do we end up with these jokers?
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Re:Fantastic... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fantastic... (Score:4, Insightful)
Usually the choice offered is the one who is bad and the who isn't as bad as. Yes, I'm aware of the write in option, but most times the bad one really needs to be voted out in favor of anyone who isn't as bad as.
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You vote for them.
Please don't insinuate that I'm a Texan voter, I have feelings too you know...
Not very surprising (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Not very surprising (Score:4, Informative)
I have no idea who that is.
Neither do most of - anymore. At one time Dennis Miller [wikipedia.org] was a very liberal comic who turned very conservative after 9/11. He started off on Saturday Night Live and ended up on Fox News. What a waste.
Re:Not very surprising (Score:5, Funny)
There is broad consensus in the scientific community that there is no connection between severe weather like droughts or hurricanes and gay marriage.
So we now call speculation "conclusive evidence"? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll quote Feynman on this one, because I couldn't say it any better:
"I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the laymen when you're talking as a scientist. . . . I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, [an integrity] that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen."
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Unfortunately, nothing of what you said stops people from rating my comment -1 troll ... as expected.
Re:So we now call speculation "conclusive evidence (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, I don't even have a problem with saying that CO2 is the primary driver of increased temperatures - but I do have a problem with
a) anything that goes beyond CO2 (that is 1.3K for a doubling) that is pure speculation, consists of poorly researched feedback mechanisms, with the poor state of research in cloud formation being among the worst offenders and most important negative feedbacks that are currently being ignored due to the poor state of knowledge and
b) I do have a problem with the constant one-sided discussion of the effects of increased temperatures. They are always held in the tone of horoscopes and greek oracles to avoid any clear statements that could be easily contradicted. "Extreme weather events" being the worst offender. That's says nothing and is obviously taylored to feed a constant media frenzy. This is combined with a complete lack of reporting on past "extreme weather events". Thus even decidetly average events like hurricanes Katrina or Sandy (in their historical and geographical context!) become "unprecedented monster storms", which is just laughable for anyone who bothered to look into the history of hurricanes on the US south and east coast.
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Also, I don't even have a problem with saying that CO2 is the primary driver of increased temperatures - but I do have a problem with
I would hope not - that it's a greenhouse gas has been well established for about 100 years.
a) anything that goes beyond CO2 (that is 1.3K for a doubling) that is pure speculation,
On what basis is it purely speculation?
consists of poorly researched feedback mechanisms, with the poor state of research in cloud formation being among the worst offenders and most important negative feedbacks that are currently being ignored due to the poor state of knowledge and
What feedbacks, and ignored by whom?
b) I do have a problem with the constant one-sided discussion of the effects of increased temperatures. They are always held in the tone of horoscopes and greek oracles to avoid any clear statements that could be easily contradicted. "Extreme weather events" being the worst offender. That's says nothing and is obviously taylored to feed a constant media frenzy. This is combined with a complete lack of reporting on past "extreme weather events". Thus even decidetly average events like hurricanes Katrina or Sandy (in their historical and geographical context!) become "unprecedented monster storms", which is just laughable for anyone who bothered to look into the history of hurricanes on the US south and east coast.
"precedented monster storms" don't sell papers/eyeballs. Keep in mind who characterizes them in this fashion. Protip: it's not the scientists. Sometimes, one needs to pick up a better news media. Personally, I just go to the weather service web page. As to past weather events, keep in mind that forecasting then used to be axioms such as "red s
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This article is about one scientist and it is definitely fair to demand this from him, as he obviously did the very opposite.
As for the rest of climatologists, who are a large bunch of individuals, of course it is fair to demand the same from them. There are those among them who see this as natural and do inform people about both the contents and the limits of their knowledge.
Unfortunately, those are few and far between in the public debate and especially in the media, who dislike true scientists exactly fo
Lamar Smith (R-Tex) (Score:5, Funny)
Am I the only person who initially read this as "Lamar Smith (T-Rex)" ?
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Science or Not (Score:2, Insightful)
Both sides can make their claims. But unless someone can do a proper experiment with a control planet, and make that experiment repeatable while you're at it, its all speculation. Not proper science.
And Smith forgot to make an important point about the Keystone Pipeline. Stopping it doesn't mean that carbon stays in the ground. It means the Chinese will burn it. And they will do so with less rigorous emissions standards. But then I can't prove that either. Its all speculation.
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Saying "well he's going to pollute so I might as well too" is a horrible philosophy. We can do our part to move to better energy sources, and pressure China to follow, but China is not even going to consider it if the US is using the very same fuel.
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Should we create it around a control star, or set it in an identical orbit, perhaps on the other side of the sun? Venus + Mars + a number of larger asteroids (maybe a lot of them) can come up with the right mass, we just need to assemble them and get them in the right orbit. It may be hard getting the atmosphere right, it would likely inherit Venus's atmosphere, and not be sufficiently close to ours.
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Both sides can make their claims. But unless someone can do a proper experiment with a control planet, and make that experiment repeatable while you're at it, its all speculation. Not proper science.
That is a ridiculous view of science. You have just declared history to be non-science.
And Smith forgot to make an important point about the Keystone Pipeline. Stopping it doesn't mean that carbon stays in the ground. It means the Chinese will burn it. And they will do so with less rigorous emissions standards. But then I can't prove that either. Its all speculation.
Indeed, you cannot prove that. It is difficult to transport bitumen to anywhere useful in reasonable quantities without the Keystone Pipeline. Without the Keystone Pipeline, there is a limit on how much you can economically extract. It is possible that the bitumen will get extracted eventually, but without the pipeline this extraction will at least be delayed.
Re:Science or Not (Score:5, Informative)
Both sides can make their claims. But unless someone can do a proper experiment with a control planet, and make that experiment repeatable while you're at it, its all speculation. Not proper science.
You can't be that dense. By your reasoning, just about every aspect of science is "speculation".
Almost all non-trivial physics models are simulations. This includes everything from CFD's to weather and climate models. These simulations are built upon physical equations the describe the phenomena. These models are run against KNOWN CONDITIONS to see if the are accurately modelling the phenomena.
In the case of climate models, the models are initialized with pre-industrial conditions (with various small tweaks to the initial conditions to create what is known as an ensemble). Then the models are run forward to present day to see how well they modeled the KNOWN conditions that happened over that time period. And, not surprisingly, the climate models do a pretty good job. Keep in mind, these models are not STATISTICAL models. These are PHYSICAL models, i.e. modelling the actual physical dynamics of the earth's climate.
And even then, the models are just tools. The research used to the develop the models are based upon real world observations (historical as well as current). And this research has been ongoing since Fourier first proposed greenhouse gas theory back in 1824.
Speculation is someone saying "The moon is made of cheese!". Science is someone showing objectively that it isn't. Idiocy is looking at the science and disregarding it as nonsense since it goes against your belief that the moon is made of cheese.
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By your definition astronomy, paleontology, and any part of geology which hypothesizes the formation of rocks and major landforms are not proper science. There are sciences which are not experimental sciences but still make testable predictions. The predictions are along the line of, "if you make the following observation, you will observe this..", or, "if you build this type of instrument and look in this place, you will observe this phenomenon...". The theory of the big bang cosmology made a testable p
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All of these disciplines validate theories based upon multiple, independent observations. You can't just take one hurricane and say, "QED. AGW exists." And you can't throw out all the climate data that doesn't support your hypothesis by saying, "Well, that's just weather, not climate."
Re:Science or Not (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't being thrown out, it's being thrown IN. Into a vast sea of data that overwhelmingly favours one side even though you can try to cherry-pick data that points in the other direction (a la http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Escalator_2012_500.gif [skepticalscience.com]).
Nobody is taking one hurricane and saying QED, AGW exists. We're examining the effects of GW (A or no A) on a hurricane. And it's basing it on factors like sea level which are less chaotic than say wind patterns.
This is how you do science. More controls are good. But science is done in reality. We didn't need to create a control Sun and then make its entire mass utterly vanish instantaneously in order to learn orbital mechanics, and we do our verifications using a model of how gravity works and much smaller scale experiments like the Cavendish experiment (generally -- some astrophysicists have since dome some grand measurements as well).
And when birds start flying and magnets levitate, nobody gets excited when we make excuses for why they aren't falling to the Earth. When rockets start moving away in a vacuum, you don't point to it as proof of non-conservation of momentum and dismiss it when we point out you aren't considering the full system of rocket and ejecta. "That's just part of the rocket, not the whole rocket-ejecta system". And when people point out that Earth's gravity does play a substantial role in bird flight, citing the top speed of an eagle dive, nobody claims that they are extrapolating the entire existence of gravity from a single bird dive.
the scientists are right, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, you aren't giving it.
True, but incomplete. Sea levels have been rising steadily since long before industrialization:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.png [wikipedia.org]
Therefore, although warming can cause sea level rise and sea levels have risen, there is no conclusive evidence that anthropogenic emissions have contributed significantly to sea level rise.
True, but that could mean anything from totally insignificant to significant increase in damage; nobody knows how much increase there is. Since the sea level rise isn't attributable to human emissions, however, that point is academic.
The actual problem is that people build in flood plains and too close to the ocean, because Congress bails them out with taxpayer money. That problem is much easier to take care of than carbon emissions.
True, but nobody knows whether that is a significant effect (likely not) either or how much of it is due to human emissions.
So, the scientists actually haven't said much factually wrong, but their statements are misleading and full of weasel words, and their policy recommendations are unfounded and ineffective.
Lamar Smith is right: "wait and see" is the right approach for the US. To that I'd add: eliminate federal flood insurance and disaster aid. If millionaires want to live on the beach, they should self-insure and not have the tax payer assume their risks.
The devil did it (Score:2)
poppycops (Score:3)
This is ridiculous. No one would take a one-time one foot rise in global sea level seriously if it wasn't being construed as a canary in a coal mine with respect to a larger threat. They would just accept the city being built with insufficient surge margin as one of a thousand things done differently one hundred years ago.
Nor would people rush to conclude that a one-time one foot rise in sea level was a high price to pay with what humanity has achieved in the last one hundred years.
Building too close to unpredictable water is an ageless human tradition.
I think it's poppycock to tie an amorphous process such as global warming to any specific counterfactual. There are many environmental carcinogens where we know it doubles the base rate, but we can't point to any one specific person and say "you died because of this".
It's unscientific in attitutude to dupe the public into thinking that science operates in these terms. One does not need a concrete case of cause and effect in order for a process to have real effects. Even if the sea level had declined by a foot, some storm somewhere would have been worse. I've never had much appetite for scientists drawn into PR.
Re:poppycops (Score:5, Informative)
Nor would people rush to conclude that a one-time one foot rise in sea level was a high price to pay with what humanity has achieved in the last one hundred years.
What makes you think sea level won't continue to rise, that it's a one-time thing? The last time CO2 levels were as high as they are now sea level was over 60 feet higher than it is now.
Re:email leak (Score:5, Informative)
Six official investigations have cleared scientists of accusations of wrongdoing.
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/global_warming_contrarians/debunking-misinformation-stolen-emails-climategate.html
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So you obviously have made up your mind on the argument without looking at any evidence. You willfully accept propaganda and when someone offers you actual evidence you claim it is propaganda. You really should work for Fox News.
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people who stand to profit from climate change
If you think that anyone would profit from even the average predicted scenario, you must be living comfortably on another planet. Droughts, floods, food shortages, heat waves, extreme weather patterns, economies destroyed? Where's "profit" in that, for any economy?
Re: email leak (Score:2)
I agree in the belief people aren't pushing false information for profit but you'd have to be foolish to not see that the climate and weather related damage has a market.
Contractors and firms bid for infrastructure before and after as well as clean up. This trickles to increase sales on most equipment they use. It wouldn't be hard to think of more instances.
Re: email leak (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a classic tragedy of the commons situation. If everyone pollutes everyone looses. If only you pollute and no one else does.... you win. If you dont pollute and everyone else does... you really loose. If no one pollutes everyone kind wins.
I have no idea why tards on the right who get all huffy about free market economics would not recognize this economics 101 situation. Given a free market situation we will always turn to the WORST possible outcome. Since it is always better for the individual to pollute the Nash equilibrium is achieved when everyone chooses to pollute.
Now how to deal with this flaw in the free market solution is more up to debate. But in general this is the EXACT situation where governmental regulation is needed and will produce the most net surplus. The free marketer solution is that every single potential polluter gets together and negotiates who gets to pollute..... I like to call this solution a "government". But repubs get all pissy about that name for some reason. They think every individual entity should negotiate... They seem to forget there are a thing called transaction costs which make this completely crazy in the real world.
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How do you track down the air polluters? Sue everyone who drives by? Film the smoking cars and sue them? Things like NOx are invisible. Same with when there are 10 industries up wind, they enforce their property rights to stop you from entering and measuring pollution on their property so how to figure out who is actually polluting your air? And when it turns out that all 10 are to some degree, how do you enforce your property rights? Sue them?
Same with water, the creak you get drinking water from goes thro
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Canadian farmers stand to do pretty well, for a start.
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Which is precisely the problem. We have a legitimate issue with pollution and climate change, but then we have assholes like Al Gore profiting off the whole mess and turning it into a political issue. Al Gore should have realized that he would turn the debate into a left verses right issue and kept his stupid mouth shut... if he really wanted to make a difference he should have secretly funded some non-profit to get some politically neutral members of the scientific community to spread the word.
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Which is precisely the problem. We have a legitimate issue with pollution and climate change, but then we have assholes like Al Gore profiting off the whole mess and turning it into a political issue. Al Gore should have realized that he would turn the debate into a left verses right issue and kept his stupid mouth shut... if he really wanted to make a difference he should have secretly funded some non-profit to get some politically neutral members of the scientific community to spread the word.
You are correct. The fact that George W. Bush's home was "greener" than Al Gore's shows that this is not a left/right issue. It also shows that Al Gore does not truly believe global warming.
The best way to pull the left/right tension out of the issue would be to stop calling people names and using hyperbole. Capitalist pigs are not out to destroy the world or enslave the masses just as commie-tree-huggers are not out to destroy business (most of them anyway). For example, those who believe that GW is a
Re:email leak (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're more worried about the money than the science you're doing it wrong. Do you really think that the vast majority of climate scientists from around the world are falsifying science for the sake of money when they're smart enough to know that their falsification will eventually be discovered utterly destroying their scientific reputations? I don't doubt there are a few scientists around who are that venal but not enough in the long run to overcome the vast majority who are honestly seeking to understand our physical world better. To think they're all in on falsifying climate science is to postulate conspiracy on an impossible level.
The science is nearly 200 years old now starting with Fourier who discovered the greenhouse effect in 1824 and it's just been building since then. In the past 20-30 years it's been subject to intense scrutiny yet no one has come up with that magic bullet that explains the current climate change better than the current explanations. If somebody does I'll pay attention.
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falsifying science for the sake of money when they're smart enough to know that their falsification will eventually be discovered utterly destroying their scientific reputations?
It can and does happen, though usually they expect to get away with it.
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OK, now you are in a position where the burden of proof is on you.
It's legitimate to look at somebody's evidence and say, "it doesn't convince me." It's sometimes *also* legitimate to say "I've seen enough evidence to convince myself beyond a reasonable doubt, so I won't bother thinking about your evidence; otherwise you'd have to take the time to examine the workings of every proposed perpetual motion machine.
What you can't do is say, "I'll dismiss your evidence because there's a possibility you have a c
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" Vegan bakeries?"
It can't be economica; to ship baked goods across 26 lightyears, and it wouldn't be very fresh by the time it got here.
Re:email leak (Score:4, Funny)
I am not a scientist
Thank you, you could have saved the rest of your comment.
Re: email leak (Score:3)
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It's pretty obvious many/most of the people here on either side of this argument haven't bothered to educate themselves on the subject - so responding with insults is all they can do.
Re:email leak (Score:4, Insightful)
It depends on how you ask. Here are two examples:
Q: All you arrogant scientists want us to believe this AGCC nonsense; yeah, well prove it to me!!
A: Go F*** yourself.
Translation: You're a troll. I'm busy doing my work. I don't have time for trolls.
Q; Wow, thousands of scientists have spent decades studying this, and they appear to agree for the most part. Gee, I'd really like to know more about this, can you help me understand?
A: Well, it's really complicated, and I only know part of the science behind it. I can explain what I'm doing, but if you want an overview, perhaps you should start with the IPCC report, and maybe track down the references on the Wikipedia article. After that, I'd be happy to answer questions to the best of my ability. Again, though, I'm a specialist, so I won't be able to answer all your questions
Translation: I understand the sincerity of your question, but this is like asking a biologist to teach you all of biology while you stand on one foot. Really, you need to dive in and get past larval stage before you're in a position to ask meaningful questions.
Note: this is hypothetical, I'm not a climate scientist, nor do I play one on TV.
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Could you be more specific? TFA looks fine to me, especially how it starts:
The two of us have spent, in total, more than seven decades studying Earth's climate, and we have joined hundreds of top climate scientists to summarize the state of knowledge for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the World Climate Research Program and other science-based bodies. We believe that our views are representative of the 97 percent of climate scientists who agree that global warming is caused by humans. Legions of studies support the view that, left unabated, this warming will produce dangerous effects. (This commentary, like so much of our work, was a collaborative process, with input from leading climate scientists Julia Cole, Robert W. Corell, Jennifer Francis, Michael E. Mann, Jonathan Overpeck, Alan Robock, Richard C.J. Somerville and Ben Santer.)
Please tell me: where, exactly, are you hallucinating this lack of care and honesty?
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This is not science class. The people asking the questions are not looking for real answers. The average person is simply not even qualified to ask questions.
Do you ask questions about how nuclear reactors are working to power your home? No. The experts know. If you ask a question of them. If they are nice they could give you some dumbed down version. But you will never really understand without spending YEARS of your life.
There comes a point where you simply have to trust the experts. We are well beyon
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[holding back the expletives I feel] That is the most demeaning and supercilious thing you could possibly say. There are no unqualified questions. There are no stupid questions; only condescending and stupid answers. You better the hell believe questioning F=MA deserves a meaningful answer, and that one is dead simple to illustrate. When the fucking car hits the tree at speed, M times A of the occupant becomes very large, and the resultant F t
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The F=MA part is a nuanced point which you failed to grasp. There are fantastic and interesting reasons to question F=MA. However the average person will never be able to even come close to understanding any of a real response. Short in at least having a masters in a related field. Any answer will simply go over the questioners heads.
Ill put myself in this po
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Imagine Oppenheimer and Trenberth were surgeons. Then the dialog would go something like this:
OT: You need a costly and risky operation, but we can handle it, trust us.
Patient: What's wrong with me? I don't really feel sick.
OT: You have some kind of tumor, but it's too complicated for you to understand. Just trust us. That cold you had last month, and the headache, and feeling queasy after the
Re:email leak (Score:4, Interesting)
OT: We, and 97% of all the doctors out there agree that you have a sickness. It's so complicated we would never be able to help another person if we explained it completely to every person who's never had any medical training who wants to have it all explained, therefor we say "you have a problem, lets see if we can come up with something to help it out."
Patient: No, i know i've never had any medical training, and i'm scared of doing anything cause Billy-Bo-Bob and his wife/daughter Mary-Beth-Bob said it wun't nothing, so you're wrong because they all got them a 10th grade edukation. I don't want to actually have to take initiative and go learn to read so i can have a chance to understand it.
OT: If we don't try to come up with a solution, you may die.
Patient: You don't know nothing.
Patient: - - - dies - - -
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But you didn't ask any questions. Your post said
How insightful. What kind of a response do you expect if you haven't even looked into the CRU hacking case?
Now, the two important things we did learn from the CRU emails are that 1) denialists bombard the scientists with information reques
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They wouldn't have to be bombarded if they simply made all of the data public to begin with for anybody to look at. If this is something really truly important that we must all make life altering decisions, then why is it such a closely guarded secret? Empirical science depends on peer review. How the hell are you supposed to peer review top secret data?
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Re:email leak (Score:5, Insightful)
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As a scientist (unrelated to climate in any way), when I come across a manuscript for review that is completely devoid of use of the scientific method, then I get angry. They wasted the editor's time, and my time, with "work" that was not well-motivated, well-interpreted, etc. I then go out of my way to be as brutal as possible.
You see, I review manuscripts to make sure that they are up to basic standards, not whether they are "right." I would much r
Nothing burger (Score:2)
Then you can read one of numerous official reports on the leaks.
Even with the kindest interpretation of "skeptic" arguments surround
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If you need the cliff notes version, then this [youtube.com] and this [youtube.com] give pretty damning information on the "scandal" surrounding the leaks.
What we have there.
1 proponent of AWG is angry and frustrated because data he works with doesnt support his theory.
2 another proponent of AWG discards some data, but only portion that was inconvenient for his theory. Doesnt try to explain why the data is "wrong". Still bases his theory of warming using same data for the cold periods, but ignoring it for the hot ones.
Sure, nothing to see here.
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I did READ the emails (Score:5, Interesting)
AGW then you are either one of the authors, or you are a fanatic who accepts any act,
You sir, are an ideologue. There is a third option. The person you are denouncing may actually have some scientific literacy. See this entertaining video [youtube.com] on skeptics and climategate.
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Do you even know what I'm talking about?
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What is the p-value for "no warming since 1998", for a linear regression line? What is the p-value for the time series starting 1997 and 1999?
Do you even know what I'm talking about?
Apparently the irony was unintentional. Well, don't confuse your lack of a sense of irony, and possibly humor, with my being stupid. If you want to look it up or do some calculations yourself, and post the results, knock yourself out. Just be sure to note the source of the data and your methodology in case anyone wants to replicate your work (this being science and all), as well as the usual measures of significance, etc.
If you want to quibble about the facts, perhaps you can inquire of Professor Judith
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If I told you the answers to these questions, you'd probably just copy and past some other nonsense. So if you want to convince me there was no warming since 1998, pull the numbers up, do the linear regression, and report the p-value.
The reason I ask, is that the trivial lie in th
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Maybe.
Curry: less warming than predicted. Models seem wrong [news.com.au]
What happened to global warming? [bbc.co.uk]
Re:Ok, I have a question. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the "threatening" now-faster-rate of sea level rise [wikipedia.org] is on the order of a 3.3 mm/year, then how is it that the sea levels in NY harbors have "risen more than a foot since the beginning of the 20th century (which would be 1900AD.)
1000mm / cm ...we're talking 30 centimeters.
2.54 centimeters / inch
12 inches / foot
Wikipedia (linked above) says the *current rate*, which is *faster* than previous, is 3.3 mm / year. 113 years (since 1900) is 372.9 mm if we count 3.3 mm / year for EVERY year since then. That's a total of 3.72 cm (isn't metric easy?) or between one and two inches.
And actually, Wikipedia reports sea level rise this way: "Between 1870 and 2004, global average sea levels rose 195 mm", which is less than an inch.
So, a foot, how? [grumble]
There are only 10mm in 1 cm. So that would be 37.2cm, or 14.68 inches, since 1900. I think you'll find thats more than a foot.
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Re:Ok, I have a question. (Score:5, Informative)
Are you saying the oceans, which are all connected, are as much as a constant 4" different in level, say, between NYC and, oh, Denmark or Japan?
Yes. See, for example, this Straight Dope [straightdope.com] which mentions that there is a 8" difference between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans at Panama.
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Prevailing winds push water and create a difference in sea level across oceans. When those winds change, so does the ocean level. Centripetal force has an affect, causing higher levels towards the equator. Temperature and salinity also affects water levels. Then as others mention, the land itself changes height with N. America generally still springing back from the weight of the glaciers.
Disagree with your charactersiation (Score:3, Insightful)
The "leaks" worst offense was that in some cases scientists' felt pressure to modify the way they presented their facts to the public.
I disagree with that. The worst offense was that some of the scientists privately expressed frustration at denialists trolls who play political games, and waste their time. I don't think the emails show that the scientists were modifying how they presented anything to the public. But they do show occasional defensiveness and frustration from scientists.
The smear campaign works by being completely unreasonable, and then demanding to be taken seriously. Whenever people get frustrated, you just claim that t
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But I disagree with the last part. The scientists should not be wasting their time explaining this ad nauseum to a bunch of idiots. It has come to the point where organizations should be put into place simply to manipulate the last renaming trolls.
In the world of reality these people are no longer informed voters. They are simply objects standing in the way to reason. Whatever tool needs to be used to get them out of the way should be used.
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If you really want to play the 'OMG Poor People!' card, it'd probably be worth considering the impact of even relatively modest shifts in climate or precipitation on the billion or two economically marginal subsistence dirt farmers and 'squalid urbanites who spend 50% or more of their household income on staple foods'...
The value of some highbrow beachfront property is highly visible; but total chickenshit compared to perturbations in the low-rent side of the agricultural sector.
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"If you really want to play the 'OMG Poor People!' card, it'd probably be worth considering the impact of even relatively modest shifts in climate or precipitation on the billion or two economically marginal subsistence dirt farmers and 'squalid urbanites who spend 50% or more of their household income on staple foods'..."
But considering that even the IPCC is pulling back pretty drastically on its claims of climate change driving higher-energy storms, I think maybe GP has a point.
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This is nonsense. How dare you post false accusations without bothering to provide a source! A real source like CNN/NYT or even any credible science magazine, not Fox or some fossil fuel lobbyist's blog.
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I notice that the other poster, who was provably wrong (see the link I posted... the correct one that is), got modded up while I -- although I was right -- was modded down.
What does that tell you? I've had this happen left and right when it came to this particular subject matter. But no matter how much I get modded down, I'm still not wrong. Sure, I've made some mistakes. But so have everybody else.
Re:data sample question (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:data sample question (Score:5, Informative)
The alarmist models have largely failed to model both the past and ongoing present situation, and are therefore useless in predicting the future.
This is a big steaming pile of bullshit [skepticalscience.com].
Re:data sample question (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes, and the same data tells us that if we continue that way, we will invariably head for a civilization destroying glaciation event, likely within a few thousand years.
And the same data tells us that this is far below the carbon or temperatures that Earth experienced during most of the time that mammals and primates evolved and that th
Re:data sample question (Score:5, Informative)
the short answer is that sometimes CO2 trails temperature increase, sometimes it doesn't.
Usually when CO2 trails climate, it's because of orbital forcing, but interestingly, sometimes that temperature increase will increase ocean acidification and amply carbon feedbacks.
Hey, the carbon/feedback cycle is complex, no doubt about it. But carbon is a forcing -- no doubt about it, and right now GHG are responsible for the lion's share of the present and future temperature increase.
Here's deeper discussion of this issue: http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature-intermediate.htm [skepticalscience.com]
Here's a video that responds to the CO2 trails climate meme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ3PzYU1N7A [youtube.com]
Re:data sample question (Score:4, Informative)
It's both. More CO2 drives warming. More warming causes CO2 to bubble out of the ocean, permafrost to thaw and organic matter to rot and release CO2, etc. And thinks to the practice of carbon dating, we can say reasonably well that a large part of the current CO2 increase is from long-buried carbon sources--aka fossil fuels.
Yes, it's the rate that's troubling. Because in the past it took thousands of years to see the sort of warming the gradually resulted in tropical conditions in Canada's latitude. But with the rapid rate we're seeing now, the honest fear is that even if we were to simply stop fossil fuel CO2 emissions completely, we'd still continue to see the unprecedented rapid temperature rise because of the previously mentioned warming->CO2 release.
Except that your point is sort of superfluous. Even if what you state is true--which I'm not certain of--, the fact is that we know pretty confidently that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and higher CO2 concentrations means a greater temperature. We also know, pretty confidently, that greater temperatures have the above mentioned forcing cycle. That there have been possible exceptions to this cycle isn't comforting unless we have a good reason to believe the mentioned cycle won't repeat itself. That is, even if someone could come up with a good explanation for past higher temp/lower CO2 periods, it doesn't resolve the current higher temp/higher CO2 period. A better place to look would be lower or flat temper/high CO2 periods and consider why or how we could take that track. To that end, I haven't remotely heard anything to suggest we could be or are on that track.
The closest I've heard about anything along those lines is considerations on combating global warming with things like mitigating global warming with dust clouds (either in the atmosphere or in space). The general problem with that is a matter of scale--that human CO2 emissions are so great, countering them with dust would be of similar scale great, and that introduces a lot of unknowns like (a) how much dust to use, (b) how to remove dust if we go too far, (c) all the atmospheric (if done in the atmosphere) risks of increased dust, (d) the cost/risks of doing the same in space (a dust cloud could slow asteroids and increase the risk of them hitting Earth), etc. In essence, anything of the scale that could fix the problem are probably also of the scale of the problem itself. So, we have the real risk of solving one problem just to produce another one. Hence, it'd seem a lot wiser to head off CO2 release as much as we can and only really consider alternatives as a last resort.
But, seriously, we're so far from even seriously trying to deal with CO2 release. :(
Re:data sample question (Score:4, Informative)
If I may impose, could you explain how it is known that CO2 drives warming, and not vice versa?
We know that CO2 drives warming because physics. It fucking works. Now, warming may also drive CO2 to an extent, and the extensive warming we're causing may have a runaway effect, but that's not a happy story, that's a sad one.
Walls. Really? (Score:4, Informative)
Minus an atmosphere, and assuming .3 albedo (based on satellite measurements), the Earth would be about -18 degrees C (255 K) [wikipedia.org]. The average surface temperature of the Earth is currently around 14.5 degrees C. The atmosphere traps enough heat energy to take the entire globe from deep freeze to balmy. Geothermal and tidal heating account for pretty negligible amounts [wikipedia.org] of heating.
So, two points: one, the amount of energy involved is rather large, and a small percentage change is going to have a huge effect. Secondly, heating the atmosphere changes its content. The atmosphere is more or less saturated with water vapor, and any increase in temperatures increases the amount of water that it can contain. We can't do anything about how much water is on the planet, for reasons that should be obvious. On the other hand, we're really great at making CO2. A naive calculation would indicate that you can increase temperatures almost arbitrarily by adding CO2, in fact.
Oh hey look there's a textbook [aip.org] that has this same objection explained in detail. Apparently your objection was addressed in the 1950s. Whoops.
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However, that still raises the question of how one explains the verdant Greenland of the Norse settlement of about 1000 years ago; the medieval warm period.
The same reason that Iceland was a frozen wasteland 1000 years ago. Public relations. They wanted people to move to Greenland and they didn't want people to move to Iceland as things were actually much like they are now.
Climate does seem to respond to other forces including the Sun being mildly variable. Currently we're pretty good at measuring the output of the Sun and even in the past an active Sun affects things like isotope levels of various elements that we can dig up and measure.
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If the "solar activity->global warming" hypothesis is true, then why does the temperature keep being at the level it rose to due to exceptional solar activity when that activity has disappeared?
Re:data sample question (Score:4, Insightful)
They threw out one set of data that was showing anomalous results. Since that paper was published there are many new tree ring datasets that don't show an anomaly past the 1960's. If you read the paper they fully explain the anomalous data and what they did about it.
Re:data sample question (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not an expert on the matter; but my understanding is that there are all sorts of tools for drawing inferences about historical climate. The resolution tends to get coarser, and the precision isn't as good as having a network of contemporary monitoring stations; but it isn't a total shot in the dark.
Ice cores [wikipedia.org], if you can find suitably deep drill sites and observe good handling practices, can be very helpful. I don't think we have any that go back more than ~800,000 years; but that's certainly something.
For older stuff, plant and animal fossils can help you map out what climate zone a given area was subject to when the fossils were laid down. The geologic record should also provide some information on how active volcanic activity has been as a greenhouse gas source at various points in time.
For relatively recent; but pre-contemporary-monitoring, you can draw inferences from records of crop yields/successes/failures(a matter that has been of considerable interest, often complete with tax records from the relevant authority, for most of human civilization) and, once fossil fuel use kicks up, economic historians can provide decent estimates of burn volumes for much of modern human history.
Re:data sample question (Score:4, Informative)
It seems that the past 5 decades or so of accurate satellite and temp data is way to small of a sample.
Actually, we have a few centuries of fairly accurate data on temperatures. Granted, not in high-resolution grids, but in many places, there are temperature records going back to the 18th century.
It would be like looking at my speedometer while on the freeway on ramp and extrapolating that 45 minutes down the road I will be going 25,000 MPH not accounting for the fact that I will stop accelerating and maybe even break in that time It would be like looking at my speedometer while on the freeway on ramp and extrapolating that 45 minutes down the road I will be going 25,000 MPH not accounting for the fact that I will stop accelerating and maybe even break in that time
You do realize that the XKCD comic on extrapolation was a joke and not an illustration of how scientists work, don't you?
How can we know with precision about Earths climate 300 years ago, much less 3,000 or 3,000,000 years ago
Perhaps not with the precision that we have for contemporary data, but there is a large number of proxy indicators. Visit your library and borrow a textbook on paleoclimatology. It's fascinating stuff.
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Which isn't to say we shouldn't do anything about CO2 in the atmosphere, but we definitely SHOULD try to improve our scientific historical knowledge.
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On one level, you are correct, we do not know how the CO2 level in the various ice core being sampled correlates to what the average temperature on of the planet was at that time. On the otherhand, we do know that the more CO2 and other greenhouse gases, the warmer the average temperature will be until it becomes a runaway system like Venus. We also know the approximate age of those ice core samples and we know from the fossil record elsewhere on the planet what the flora was and we can come pretty close to
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On the otherhand, we do know that the more CO2 and other greenhouse gases, the warmer the average temperature will be until it becomes a runaway system like Venus.
FYI the chances of that happening are so remote the IPCC didn't even consider it a serious scenario. Each new ton of CO2 added to the atmosphere warms the atmosphere less than the previous ton, because of how the warming works.
If it is just a cyclical phenomenom as many opponents say, well, I am sure they have the data over the last 100,000 years to back that statement up. Otherwise, that is more wishful thinking than scientific methodology.
That is exactly my point, there is a lot of wishful thinking going on without data to back things up.
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I didn't insinuate that scientific knowledge on the subject is incomplete, I said it explicitly. You however, are insinuating that scientific knowledge on the matter is complete. If you intended to insinuate that, I'd love to hear your reasoning.
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Geology. It is all recorded in the rocks. Earth Story (1998) is probably the best and most complete explanation of general geography you will get in documentary form.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Or we could, you know, develop cleaner technologies so that we improve the quality of life without having to set fire to hydrocarbons in order to obtain our energy. Just saying...
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Of course, that's not necessarily a bad idea, but the point of them was there was so much to do, no one member could be an expert in everything, so you specialize and focus on certain aspects.