'Half' of 2012's Extreme Weather Impacted By Climate Change 417
sciencehabit writes "2012 was a year of extreme weather: Superstorm Sandy, drought and heat waves in the United States; record rainfall in the United Kingdom; unusually heavy rains in Kenya, Somalia, Japan, and Australia; drought in Spain; floods in China. One of the first questions asked in the wake of such extreme weather is: 'Could this due to climate change?' In a report (huge PDF) published online today, NOAA scientists tackled this question head-on. The overall message of the report: It varies. 'About half of the events reveal compelling evidence that human-caused change was a [contributing] factor,' said NOAA National Climatic Data Center Director Thomas Karl. In addition, climate scientist Peter Stott of the U.K. Met Office noted that these studies show that in many cases, human influence on climate has increased the risks associated with extreme events."
Only for Atheists. (Score:5, Funny)
Godfearing Christians are smitten by God and not by Climate Change.
cause and effect (Score:3, Insightful)
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The studies detailed how much climate change may have impacted specific events.
There are plenty of *other* studies that examine human impact on climate change.
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No, its not indisputable, or proven beyond reasonable doubt. Its just been documented and argued about by people who specialize in the field for 30-40 years, and they keep saying the same thing. We're the problem.
Shoving your head in the sand might keep you from seeing the tsunami coming, but it wont keep you from drowning. You'll be on the first ones to go. To date, i've never seen any kind of scientific evidence that is any kind of strong indication that we're not causing significant change to weather
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As a matter of interest, at what stage did you accept that smoking was carcinogenic, as an indisputable fact, proven beyond all reasonable doubt?
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For an example, this recent study published in PNAS [nationalgeographic.com] suggests that Hurricane Sandy type storms would become less likely as a result of global warming.
Anyone who only shows you the negative of something is trying to manipulate you. That's a heuristic.
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Anyone who only shows you the negative of something is trying to manipulate you. That's a heuristic.
And the fact that you're only pointing out the negative side of this report would mean...? :-)
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And the fact that you're only pointing out the negative side of this report would mean...? :-)
That I'm a genius. Anytime things get too confusing, that's the conclusion I draw. Works wonders for my self-esteem.
Superstorm Sandy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Superstorm Sandy? (Score:5, Informative)
Categories only measure wind speed. What made it a "superstorm" was an improbable set of coincidences, such as being at high tide when the moon was in perigee, and another storm intersecting Sandy. What made it a superstorm was the amount of damage it caused, not its wind.
And it isn't just New Yorkers, it's the entire news media that always calls it a superstorm.
Re:Superstorm Sandy? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can agree with your other points but "the amount of damage it caused" is really more a function of unwise building techniques. The fact that a hurricane was going to hit New York and cause damage and at least 10' of flooding was certain- it was just a question of when.
It's sort of like the Tsunami in Japan. There were stones saying "Tsunami water gets this high". And they were ignored.
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I agree. Although I wouldn't classify it as "unwise building techniques". The damage done directly by wind was probably a very very small fraction of what wind damage does in Florida and NC. A lot of buildings are brick, steel, and concrete. I was in one of them...it was like nothing was happening. There were a couple things at were vastly different than most storms:
1. The significant damage, and it wasn't even close, was flooding. The storm surge coinciding with a super high tide basically dump the o
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yep, and we know the high tide and full moon is caused by global warming
Re:Superstorm Sandy? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wow, what a hostile response to a good point. You weren't one of those people yelling about rebuilding New Orleans after Katrina (stupid location, stupid city!), were you? If you're going to live in a 30-year, 100-year, or 500-year flood plain, eventually you're going to get hit by a flood! If you live in a coastal region that has been hit by many hurricanes in the past, eventually you're going to get hit by a hurricane! That's that.
The trade-off is of course how much money do you spend on precautions.
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Sandy was pretty weak compared to The New England Hurricane of 1938 [wikipedia.org] (also Called "The Long Island Express") that made landfall on Long Island as a category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale. Wind gusts of 125 mph (200 km/h) and storm surge of 18 feet (5 m) washed across part of the island. In New York 60 deaths and hundreds of injuries were attributed to the storm. In addition, 2,600 boats and 8,900 houses are destroyed.
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I find the tree ring cores fascinating, and am sympathetic to the inherent difficulties that paleoclimatologists have to deal with (natural variation being the least of them).
The one thing I've never seen answered about tree ring growth though is how do you separate the temperature signal from:
1) amount of CO2 in atmosphere
2) amount of rainfall
3) amount of sunshine
4) changing nutrient levels in the soil (the soil must change for trees that lives hundreds of years, right?)
I agree with you that it's totally o
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Yep. That's called "dendroclimatic modelling." It is, indeed, one of the best means we have to trying to understand the climate of the past in temperate latitudes (at arctic latitudes, ice cores are a good tool).
At least this article is somewhat accurate by using words like "influence" and "contributing factor"...yes, please, tell us what the other contributing factors and influences are.
Depends on time scale. Over short time scales, volcanic eruptions injecting aerosols into the atmosphere are a big factor. (Aerosols injected by humans have an effect too, of course.) Over longer time scales, Milankovitch cycles.
Deliberate stupidity [Re:Superstorm Sandy?] (Score:2)
You are mixing up different things.
Our planet has gone through intense weather and drastic climate change long before we were here and will do so long after were gone..
Right. Human-induced climate change is not instead of other factors that change the climate; it is in addition to other factors that change the climate.
The most significant effect humans have is blaming it on shit (carbon, pagans, magnets, aliens, too much violence, not enough violence, foreskin, etc.).
This is not merely silly, but deliberately stupid. Or, more accurately, straw man. Nobody is "blaming pagans, magnets, aliens, too much violence, not enough violence, foreskin."
I have no patience with deliberate stupidity.
and then hocking horseshit to morons to fix it (carbon credits,
Now, you are really mixing different things. Understanding the causes of climate variation, and real
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Last time I checked, nineteen different global climate models are being run by groups on four continents. They pretty much all agree on the overall effect of carbon dioxide on climate, although the details vary somewhat. Which should be pretty non-controversial, since the basic physics is well understood. There are no climate models being run by any groups on any continent that don't show the effect.
I'm curious with these models, do they work with backtesting? How accurate have they been with predicting the last 10 years? The last 20 years?
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You mean your religion. Climate change denialism isn't based on science, it's based on faith. And yeah, you try bringing faith into a discussion of science, you're going to be mocked.
And deservedly so.
The earth is big (Score:5, Insightful)
The question should not be is warming/climate change aided by manmade endeavors. It should be, now that we realize we have the power to alter the climate, what do we want to do? Let it go as is? Change it for the better? Try to change it back?
Now I will go get my popcorn.. I need to have snacks for the ensuing battle.
It's old, too. . . (Score:2, Troll)
I rather giggle at "Man-Made Global Warming". Primarily, because the planet has been in an Ice Age for the past 2-3 million years: we are merely between continental glacial advances.
The HISTORIC climate for most of the US was hot and swampy for the past several hundred million years. Since genus homo has only been around for the last 2 million years or so, you can't even blame us for human-induced global COOLING. . .
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I rather giggle at "Man-Made Global Warming". Primarily, because the planet has been in an Ice Age for the past 2-3 million years: we are merely between continental glacial advances.
The HISTORIC climate for most of the US was hot and swampy for the past several hundred million years. Since genus homo has only been around for the last 2 million years or so, you can't even blame us for human-induced global COOLING. . .
I rather boggle at you giggling at observed effects of human activity on our climate, while at the same time taking as fact that our planet has been in an Ice Age for the past 2-3 million years, despite not having observed this yourself.
The other boggling thing is to see that you don't seem to understand the difference between natural global climate changes and temporally localized man-made climate change, and that both can happen *at the same time* and influence each other. When you want warm water from a
Re:It's old, too. . . (Score:4, Interesting)
I am TEMPTED to reply with the short version of this argument, that goes as follows:
SCIENCE, bitches!
However, I'd tell you how I'm confident of my information. We call it "Geology", and it's what I studied and did 20+ years ago, before I evolved into an IT Geek. Specifically, Quaternary [wikipedia.org] Geology, which, amongst other things, chronicles the glaciations of the past 2.6 million years. Which is proven by land structures, glacial remains like drumlins and moraines, and radio-isotopic dating of various types used to date those structures.
I also note the longer-term average climate based on the extensive fossil and geological record, as evidenced by not just radio-dating, but standard principles like "unless overturned (which can be detected easily by examination of the rocks), lower strata are older than younger strata. Paleomagnetic data yields approximate latitude, so we KNOW most of what is now the US and Europe were swampy jungles, which require a significantly warmer and wetter climate than they currently enjoy. And before you mention Continental Drift, paleomagnetic data was crucial in supporting that theory, as well.
So again, I say to your boggling: SCIENCE, bitches!!!
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I see a difference from 10 years ago....I mean, I don't see any difference from 10 years ago. I also travel a lot all around the world. The one thing that usually strikes me as I look out the window is how much air is out there and how most of the time we are flying over vast areas of no-mans-land with no pollution....one exception. India. Fly all over India in regional jets and you usually don't get higher than the brown haze of smok
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Statistically, about 1 degree C per century. But that was from previous pollution levels. We've increased since then.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record_(NASA).svg [wikimedia.org]
Call it 2 more degrees C by 2100 as a first approximation.
That's enough to change the ice caps, ocean levels, comfortable regions, etc. That alone will cost humanity trillions to mitigate/move/deal with those changes.
Compelling evidence (Score:3)
Re:Compelling evidence (Score:4)
Repeat after me: (Score:2)
"Better models are needed before exceptional events can be reliably linked to global warming." Nature [nature.com]
The trick (Score:4, Funny)
The trick is knowing WHICH half
Climate Correlation is not Causation (Score:2)
Show me the detailed worldwide climate model including the future cycles of the Sun before I will consider believing 1 year worth of change is due to any particular cause.
Come on now. Rational, scientific work doesn't confuse Correlation with Causation!
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What bad climate change that happens 100 or 1000 years being caused by humans is the argument of human caused climate change.
It could easily be that variations in the Suns output both in the past and in the future totally dominates climate change (excluding multi-kilometer asteroids and mega-volcanoes). The Maunder minimum is evidence within documented human history.
I understand scientists wanting to do theories and remain employed so they write "what is hot."
However, as pointed out recently in the news, t
In other words (Score:2)
And this year's extreme lack of extreme weatther?? (Score:2)
Extremely small number of hurricanes? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is that considered extreme weather? If so, which half is it in?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/30/a-head-scratcher-no-atlantic-hurricane-by-august-in-first-time-in-11-years/#more-92771 [wattsupwiththat.com]
Idiots. (Score:2)
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Affected. Not effected. If you had left out "all", then it would have been correct either way.
A true observation, however trite.
Here's what I want to know. How much weather is affected by humans? Screw the climate.
Did changes in the character or volume of emissions in China or India in 2011 set up the conditions for the summer of 2012? Or the US or Europe or Russia, for that matter. Did human activity directly drive the weather?
I'm guessing not. Ocean currents seem to be the biggest driver of changes
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Wild speculation... (Score:2)
That report is as accurate as an old tymey Alminac that says that the last 4 years it did not rain today, so it wont rain today.
I want to see the raw data and all the peer reviews of the same study. Too many of you people JUMP on the OMG sky is falling / OMG Sky is not falling bandwagons too fast.
US scientists want to see the real meat and what a LOT of others scientists think.
What what if it is...then what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's just say it's all true.
Then what? In order to have ANY appreciable effect GLOBAL GDP would have to be rolled back.
that simply aint going to happen.
Half? (Score:2)
But which half?
Half of my coin flips are influenced by some mysterious force causing them to come up heads. Or is it tails?
The rate of change is the key (Score:2)
Yes, the planet has gone through many, many periods of extreme warming and cooling over the millenniums however there is no previous warming trend spanning 110 years like we have since the 1900's. Data suggests the start of the industrialized age has contributed heavily heavily to the climate change issue. We've never seen warming before over 20 year periods like we see since 1900 [1] and the only best guess at this point is industrialization and anthropogenic activity impact the climate negatively.
So, d
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there is no previous warming trend spanning 110 years like we have since the 1900's.
We've never seen warming before over 20 year periods like we see since 1900 [1]
These are pretty amazing claims to make considering that accurate, global instrumental records cover less than the last 100 years!
It's my understanding that most "paleo" records can indicate greater climate shifts, but with nothing like 20 year granularity.
I viewed the BBC page you linked to. It's a perfect example of why I find myself sickeningly torn when it comes to AGW. I'm a big, big believer in protecting lands, reducing pollution, and generally more sustainable living. Like a good 21st century Americ
All weasel words.... (Score:3, Interesting)
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The reality of climate over the long term... (Score:2)
Climate scientist Peter Stott of the U.K. Met Office should have commented that these studies show that in many cases, excess human presence in areas where they have no business permanently living, has increased the risks associated with extreme events that randomly occur. Humans need to learn that life on Earth has not always been pleasant and the building of and living in flimsy structures in Earthquake fault zones, flood zones, and areas where tsunamis, hurricanes and tornadoes frequent will lead to unp
Header confusion (Score:2)
Re:Correlation is not causation, FFS. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Correlation is not causation, FFS. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Correlation is not causation, FFS. (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember an article in which it discussed that Climate Change denying is an American problem.
Climate change by itself is not under dispute. The question is: what causes climate change. And then there are three sides:
- It must be us, the human population, burning all those fossil fuels causing CO2 levels to rise;
- It can't be us, we are to insignificant. Climate change is caused by increased solar activity and oceans releasing vast amounts of CO2;
- It is a combination of both: we can slow it down but it is inevitable;
To be honest, I'm not a scientist and I don't give a rats ass who is correct. What I do care about is that we start taking the necessary measures to ensure that my daughter and her future children still have a place to live once I'm long gone..
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The cause of climate change is also not really under dispute either. We only care about catastrophic anthropocentric climate change. And even within that category, we should only really care about things we can realistically and economically do. For example, Australia apparently has a huge carbon tax that will have an impact on the climate so small, it cannot even be measured.
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Personally, I wonder why, if another 1C increase would start a feedback causing temperatures to rise another 20C, why we don't see this happen on parts of the planet that are already 1C hotter than average. It's an average, so there are places that are far above and far below that average. Why aren't we seeing cases of mini-global-warming where, for example, some part of Arizona, due to high humidity (which has many times the greenhouse effect of CO2), enters this deadly feedback mode causing the temperature to rise to 150 only to be saved by nightfall?
I think you fundamentally misunderstand what global warming/anthropogenic climate change means. Very few scientists think it means runaway warming or even 20C rises (unless we continue BAU for another century). The changes are subtle (especially over short time periods) but profound. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the loss of land based ice from warming and the sea level rise that results. From year to year or even over a decade the rise in sea level is not alarming. But it will take sever
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It seems to me that geoengineering methods like iron fertilization are worth, you know, investigating. Instead we seem to be prohibiting any reasonable experiments, with regulations being passed preventing it in the UN.
I understand skepticism that humans can fix their environmental mistakes, so I'm not saying "start dumping tons of iron into the sea and hope for the best," but it
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I completely agree with you. I think there's an entire new strand of luddites emerging today. This is party with good cause--we've learned a lot about chemicals, pollution, and health, that we simply didn't know 50 years ago. We SHOULD be cautious going forward.
But there's such a strand of "anything that has plastic is bad" and "anything that isn't all 'natural' is bad" that are followed by a belief that humans cannot possibly affect POSITIVE climate change, that I'm somewhat baffled.
Humans have in the last
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I remember an article in which it discussed that Climate Change denying is an American problem.
Climate change by itself is not under dispute. The question is: what causes climate change. And then there are three sides:
That's why the summary of the article doesn't say 'climate change', but 'human-caused change'.
Much like in the church, apparently repetition makes it true.
We're skeptical because the world is full of self-grandizing bull-shitters who prey on the nieve. Climate Scientists, who tend to NOT be paid through sales of produced materials but through 'squeeky wheel' government budgeting, are far from immune of that skepticism. Just sayin.
Re:Correlation is not causation, FFS. (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, some of those who started politicizing AGW early on didn't help. Nor did the over simplification of calling it global warming (even though that is what it is).
People should not have picked results, out of context, that were convenient at the time. For example, when the ice caps start melting, it was pointed out that it was due to global warming. But when someone finds evidence that more ice is being formed somewhere else it looks suspect, even when it's part of a climate model. It looks suspect to not point that part out in the first place. Same thing with temperatures rising consistently in an area. As soon as they drop for a year, or two, before continuing to climb again, it's easy to confuse the discussion. Some of the loudest proponents of AWG, have done the most damage to the cause. After trying to simplify the situation for the greater population and then having the over simplification shown to be questionable a couple of times; laymen have a heard time knowing what to think.
To make matters worse, people start calling each other names and ridiculing each other. When you start labeling non-believers: deniers, Luddites, planet-killers, etc. what do you think is going to happen. Hell, how would most people react?
When I was younger, my father used to paraphrase Socrates by saying, "The older I get, the dumber I get". I finally understand how he felt. We have people on two different sides of this issue. Neither of them want to destroy the planet. But instead of taking a deep breath and discussing it like rational people, it's devolved into name calling. But that seems to be the way of things in the US anymore. I'm pretty sure that both parties in congress want what's best for the country. But instead of compromising, they both are throwing tantrums because they can't have their way 100%. It's truly sad.
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The essential truth is that 98% of people who speak out on this issue are merely parroting back talking points and/or just being fanboys for the side that aligns with their politics.
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You're crazy; 97% of people parrot back talking points. You're clearly just a shill.
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With the footnote that just about every scientist studying the problem is only on one side.
Let Me Get This Straight... (Score:2)
...Now, Weather = Climate??
Re:Correlation is not causation, FFS. (Score:5, Informative)
Look, nobody is stupid enough to believe that climate is static. It never has been in the past, and it certainly won't be so going forward. The big questions are what are the driving forces, what are the positives and negatives of climate change as it is currently occurring, what ought to be done, and what can be done. None of these questions are nearly settled.
As an aside, it's always interesting to me when the stereotypical political orthodoxy gets flipped. Republican doves and Democrat hawks on Syria? Likewise, liberals lampoon conservatives as being stuck in the past and afraid of change. Yet for many liberals, climate change is a great fear, a purely negative outcome, and has no conceivable positive results. ~shrug~
What's most interesting about your post is that you apparently find it wise to chastise your father for his foolish beliefs--and gosh darn it, the man just won't listen to facts! At the same time, it's pretty obvious you're throwing around statistics that you can't have read anything about.
I'm assuming the 97% statistic you are referring to is from Cook et al., Quantifying the Consensus on AGW. Cook et al. took two approaches to find the consensus number. The author team first searched databases for papers that had terms such as "global warming" and "global climate change" (I'm not a statistician, but I would think these terms would introduce some pretty intense selection bias right off the bat). Finding 12,465 match papers in the ISI Web of Science database, they tossed 520 (4%) and analyzed the results:
34.8% of these papers endorsed AGW
64.6% took no position on AGW
0.4% rejected AGW
0.2% were uncertain on AGW
Amongst ONLY those papers (34.8% of the total) that took a position on AGW, 97.1% "endorsed the scientific consensus."
The second approach was to mail out a survey to certain selected paper authors. The response rate of the survey was 14%. Again, I'm not a statistician, so I have no idea how good a result this is. Of these 1200 (14%) responses:
62.7% endorsed AGW
35.5% took no position on AGW
1.8% rejected AGW
This is all in the paper, so if I'm misinterpreted anything, or misrepresented anything, let me know.
I think perhaps the surprising thing is that given the search parameters (such as terms that are now highly politically tinged like "global warming") and given AGW is absolutely the easiest way to get funding today as an kind of academic who remotely deals with environmental issues, is that there were as many "no stand on AGW" responses as there were.
It's like asking the Pentagon and the CIA to write papers on the threat to the US from Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea. Regardless of whether there really are threats (or the magnitudes), you can bet when their jobs are on the line, they'll find something!
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it's pretty obvious you're throwing around statistics that you can't have read anything about.
then you go and throw out statistics that you clearly haven't read into. Although, you're right, most papers take no position, but the ones that endorse it versus the ones that don't is a ratio of 30:1, which should write a clear enough message.
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You can accuse me of providing a (in your view, at least!) flawed interpretation, but I copied the detailed numbers right from the paper and put them in post and provided my take on their meaning, so you can't accuse me of not reading them (or "reading into")!
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Re:Correlation is not causation, FFS. (Score:4, Insightful)
Look, nobody is stupid enough to believe that climate is static. It never has been in the past, and it certainly won't be so going forward. The big questions are what are the driving forces, what are the positives and negatives of climate change as it is currently occurring, what ought to be done, and what can be done. None of these questions are nearly settled.
You make it sound like we don't have a clue, which is incorrect. Research on anthropogenic warming goes back about 120 years or so. Greenhouse theory goes back almost 200 years. These concepts are not new.
As an aside, it's always interesting to me when the stereotypical political orthodoxy gets flipped. Republican doves and Democrat hawks on Syria? Likewise, liberals lampoon conservatives as being stuck in the past and afraid of change. Yet for many liberals, climate change is a great fear, a purely negative outcome, and has no conceivable positive results. ~shrug~
Political ideology doesn't factor into it. The science does. And the result of tat science paints a grim picture of the future if we don't get our at together. No credible scientist is predicting the end of human civilization as a result, but the change and the speed that it happens is going to present some serious obstacles. Even the DoD has released several reports on the subject, including projections of future "hot spots" where rising sea levels, droughts, depleted watersheds, etc. may cause unrest.
It takes time and resources to respond to change. Our current civilization is built upon a certain expected climate. A shift in that climate is going to cause problems EVEN IF the overall outcome would be beneficial (current projections show it won't be, especially the worst case scenarios).
What's most interesting about your post is that you apparently find it wise to chastise your father for his foolish beliefs--and gosh darn it, the man just won't listen to facts! At the same time, it's pretty obvious you're throwing around statistics that you can't have read anything about.
I'm assuming the 97% statistic you are referring to is from Cook et al., Quantifying the Consensus on AGW. Cook et al. took two approaches to find the consensus number. The author team first searched databases for papers that had terms such as "global warming" and "global climate change" (I'm not a statistician, but I would think these terms would introduce some pretty intense selection bias right off the bat).
Selection bias? That's what they were looking for. They wanted papers explicitly researching aspects of climate change. However, there are a lot of climate research papers that don't deal with climate change. So what would you recommend as a filter? Global cooling?
Finding 12,465 match papers in the ISI Web of Science database, they tossed 520 (4%) and analyzed the results:
34.8% of these papers endorsed AGW
64.6% took no position on AGW
0.4% rejected AGW
0.2% were uncertain on AGW
Why did you bold the papers that took no position? Do you think all climate research is about global warming? Global warming is one, just one, subject of study in climatology. And since they were trying to determine what scientists thought on the subject of global warming, there's no point in including those papers which had nothing to do with global warming research.
Amongst ONLY those papers (34.8% of the total) that took a position on AGW, 97.1% "endorsed the scientific consensus."
I'm not sure what point you are trying to convey here. Of the papers that were related to global warming research, there was a 97.1% agreement. Given the number of research papers and scientists that represents, that's pretty good agreement.
The second approach was to mail out a survey to certain selected paper authors. The response rate of the survey was 14%. Again, I'm not a statistician, so I have n
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This is the case no matter what happens, whether through "green" tech or continuing pollution. That's not a climate policy problem.
Re:Correlation is not causation, FFS. (Score:4, Insightful)
Scientific consensus by itself doesn't actually mean a whole lot. After all, scientific consensus once said the universe was static in size. Even Einstein agreed...
And of course, the exact details of that "consensus" are a bit murky (http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/05/30/global-warming-alarmists-caught-doctoring-97-percent-consensus-claims/). The consensus is strong when the question is "are humans *affecting* the climate?" and that consensus starts to shrink one the question moves to "are humans the *primary* cause of the climate's change?" or "is this a disaster?"...
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Science!
Re:Correlation is not causation, FFS. (Score:5, Insightful)
Argument from consensus alone is also a fallacy. I'm skeptical of the motivations and accuracy of promoters AND deniers in politically contaminated 'science.' For example, your link points to a government funded organization. That's as biased as a study funded by exxon. Even if they're right, they're not promoting this for the right reason (telling the truth).. They're promoting it to push a political agenda (justification of center left politics, which means more funding for them).
Something as large as climate change is going to require more strict adherence to the truth (whatever it is) than political cheerleading usually allows. I guarantee that it is more complicated than "man influences/does not influence."
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I nominate "politically contaminated science" as the phrase of the week.
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Even if they're right, they're not promoting this for the right reason (telling the truth).. They're promoting it to push a political agenda (justification of center left politics, which means more funding for them).
1. What if there were large funds and grants to be had [theguardian.com] by saying that global warming is a myth? Wouldn't that mean that you're presumably money-grubbing scientists have an easier time just switching sides than they would trying to change the politics of the situation in the hopes that in a decade or two they could get more money?
2. Even if the politics of the situation changed, why would that result in more money for them? Presumably, the same number of people who are monitoring the increase in global avera
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I'm arguing against mixing politics with science. It's not enough to support the truth. It must be supported for being so, not just because it happens to be convenient or emotionally satisfying for someone's political beliefs. Otherwise, you get mixed support at best. Something with global implications will require more than that to deal with, if it is even possible.
Today, the problem is that a lot of scientists buy into leftist thinking because the universities are full of it, and because its political
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You're using fallacies to criticize my argument. Yes.. scientists fall for political bandwagoneering too. They're are humans after all. They should know better, but a lot of times, they don't have a choice: tow the line or get no funding. Political correctness demands that the science 'agree' with the official position of the political party in question. This dynamic varies from country to country, depending on its politics, and also includes inter/intra university level politics as well. You cannot te
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The neocons are not the only rhetoric filled hogwashers in the arena.
Re:Correlation is not causation, FFS. (Score:5, Interesting)
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All this time I thought maybe people who have studied the climate for years and years might be on to something, but you have convinced me that I was wrong with your deep understanding of the topic and highly credible, well thought out refutation of their claims, random dude on the internet!
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Large groups of scientists have believed very wrong and goofy things for long periods of time.
I'm not saying that's the case this time. Just saying that using the argument form that 9 out of 10 doctors agree "Brand X Cigarettes are good for your health" isn't the best argument.
I suspect the climate is going to cool down (as it did after 1945) and then it will go on to new highs. That cool down is going to be seized on when it's really just natural variability around the generally rising temperature.
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Just saying that using the argument form that 9 out of 10 doctors agree "Brand X Cigarettes are good for your health" isn't the best argument.
It is, however, the appropriate response to the argument coming from a lot of deniers (I wouldn't sully the label skeptic with them) that this is a very controversial topic among scientists. It isn't. The numbers are why. As soon as people stop claiming that there's a controversy, we will be able to stop bringing out this largely irrelevant data point.
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Is there any evidence that doctors actually did believe that?
Because if they didn't your argument falls at the first hurdle.
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Not that its this extreem, but if you have one area at -150F and another area at 150F, if you live between these two extreems you might call the average temp 0F. Problems arise when the wind changes direction and you go from freezing to death to frying to death. Either way you're dead.
Climate Change is a steady increase in average temp, yes some areas will get cooler, and others warmer, but the overall effect is more heat. More heat is a problem. They changed the term because people are too idiotic to u
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No. Facts are facts.
Otherwise, go visit:
http://creationmuseum.org/ [creationmuseum.org]
Re:Enough is enough. (Score:4, Insightful)
What you're advocating for amounts to stories saying "Opinions Differ on the Shape of the Earth" with one link to, say, the Geological Society of America and the other link to the Flat Earth Society. Sometimes, when there are two sides to an issue, one side is definitively wrong, and reporting it any way other than that is just plain stupid.
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Can we agree in future not to post news items having to do with climate "science" unless we are at the same time including links to debunkers of said news?
It's obvious to everyone that the wheels have come off this particular scam. Obvious to everyone, that is, except to those whose livelihood depends on them continuing to find new ways of makinjg hockey sticks.
Are you saying that it's not obvious to Canadians here? Probably not obvious to Alaskans either, or the Danish -- the three groups that can look outside and see the immediate effects of the climate "science" "scam".
Personally though, I'm more concerned with the dead zones in the pacific ocean (caused by human pollution); these are likely affecting climate (and ecology) way more than our GHG emissions.
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The very set of studies this article is about exists to examine the impact (presence and magnitude) of global climate change on specific events.
That the line you quote doesn't say it's immeasurably small (hell 'small' isn't even in the article), it says that the models need to be improved, and you probably shouldn't say a new expansive set of studies is irrelevant because one *editorial* in Nature published a year ago says the models need to be improved.
Then again, denial seems to revolve around completely
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Human-caused changes often cause extreme events...
That's because we're such Extreme creatures. F'rinstance:
Extreme weather is what we crave.
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My Xtremes begin with an X, you lightweight...
No ice age [Re:When I was a Kid] (Score:4, Informative)
All I can say about global warming is that when I was a kidd these same people where saying we where headed to and Ice Age.
No, they weren't. Nobody was ever seriously predicting we were heading into an ice age. That "next ice age" played well in the media-- it made Time and Newsweek--but it was never a scientific consensus. Check out "The myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus [ametsoc.org]" in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, or the discussion and links here: http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2008/09/18/now-out-in-bams-the-myth-of-th/ [scienceblogs.com]
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I just think it's irrelevant in the current climate change debate. I don't know what logical fallacy it is, but one scientist being wrong about scenario A doesn't dictate that another scientist is wrong about scenario B.
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The question now is: will we be wiped out by global warming before the next ice age hits?
What's this mechanism for "wiping out" humanity by slightly getting warmer? Are we going to forget to take off our jackets and turn on the AC?
Data does not show cooling. (Score:4, Informative)
Here is that NASA data you're referring to:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/ [nasa.gov]
or here, comparing various data sets:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/image/0/h/compare_datasets_new.jpg [metoffice.gov.uk]
I would not seriously characterize this as "the earth has been cooling for the past decade." Most notably, the increase in temperature observed from the 1960s has not reversed.
Here, from the BEST project, is the comparison of theory and data:
http://static.berkeleyearth.org/img/annual-with-forcing-small.png [berkeleyearth.org]
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BURN!
Heh, I mean that in two ways.
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I think my friend's Yugo could do 130 kph.
At least with the air conditioning off.