NASA's Greenhouse Gas Observatory Captures 'First Light' 143
mdsolar (1045926) writes with news that NASA's second attempt to launch a satellite to map carbon dioxide levels across the globe succeeded, and its instruments are operating properly. From the article: NASA's first spacecraft dedicated to studying Earth's atmospheric climate changing carbon dioxide levels and its carbon cycle has reached its final observing orbit and taken its first science measurements as the leader of the world's first constellation of Earth science satellites known as the International 'A-Train. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) is a research satellite tasked with collecting the first global measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) — the leading human-produced greenhouse gas and the principal human-produced driver of climate change. The 'first light' measurements were conducted on Aug. 6 as the observatory flew over central Papua New Guinea and confirmed the health of the science instrument.
let me help cuz I apparently am a slashdot editor (Score:2)
It's like saying "the satellite booted up for the first time." Good news, but I'm going to keep my pants on.
97% say 'Why?' (Score:1)
All this money wasted on actual measurements could have gone to generating computer models with baked in hockey sticks.
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It's like saying "the satellite booted up for the first time." Good news, but I'm going to keep my pants on.
Thank you.
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First light is significantly more than bootup. After launch, typically at least a few days to weeks are spent doing initial power-on and checkout of various subsystems before collecting science or mission data. The initial health checks (monitoring component temperatures, voltages, currents, communications, powering on subsystems in order, etc) are much more analogous to booting up.
Once initial checks are complete, then the instrument is commanded to collect real data. That is first light. For any satel
commissioning & Phase E (Score:4, Informative)
The launch of the spacecraft is effectively the start of 'Phase E' (operations) for the instruments ... but there's a lot of things that still have to happen:
They refer to this whole period as "commissioning". They're not always run in order (eg, for the missions to the outer planets, which might take *years* to get to, they try to check on the health of the instruments before they get to the planet). For some instruments, it might take years to validate the data.
There's also typically a press conference with the "first release" of the data, after the first calibration is done, but that's more to do with scientists on the ground than the spacecraft itself.
disclaimer : I work for a NASA center, but I don't deal with spacecraft directly; I just manage the data after it's downlinked & processed.
How is CO2 leading cause of warming? (Score:1)
CO2 levels have continued to rise rapidly over the last decade, even as actual warming has kind of flatlined,
If CO2 were a leading cause of warming, why would the temperatures not be spiking along with CO2 levels?
It's great that we are tracking CO2, but the human race seems overall far too concerned with one aspect of warming that seems not to be playing out as a dangerous factor.
Re:How is CO2 leading cause of warming? (Score:5, Informative)
You seem to be assuming it's linear and immediate, as opposed to being a complex system with built in lag and other factors -- which would boil down to "if I release X amount of CO2, tomorrow the temperature will go up by Y".
It doesn't work that way, and is much more complex.
Much like if you turn up your thermostat, your house isn't instantly warmer, because, thermodynamics.
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. Yes, it's so complex that you don't understand it. And neither do climate scientists as evidenced by their modelling effort failures. Despite not understanding it, both you and they are 100% confident the hypothesis is correct, however.
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And based on your completely ignorant and idiotic posts, I assume you have nothing at all to refute any of this, other than your firmly held idiocy and conviction that they must be wrong?
Why don't you go visit the creation museum or something, you might find other people who care about what you say.
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Gravity is exceedingly complex, yet there are certain things which are evident from even a rudimentary theory of gravity -- namely, things tend to fall. CO2, likewise, has a complicated relationship to the climate -- but it is a known greenhouse gas, which has certain implications.
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You seem to be confusing science and politics. You'd do well to ignore the politics and look at the science.
Who is studying the positive effects of a warmer climate?
That sounds rather unscientific. Surely one should study the effects of a warmer climate, not bias onesself to positive and negative.
But anyway why are your fishing for these red herrings? The effects on people has nothing to do with climate science. Climate scientists don't stufy the positive or negative effects, because they're too busy figuri
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ou must understand every aspect of the system if you want to make predictions of a real=world system by modelling it.
No you're flat out wrong. We certainly do not understand all aspects of physics. There is no way of unifying quantum mechnics and gravity yet. Yet both complex CPUs and GPS works just fine without understanding "every aspect".
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Because of this I can only conclude you haven't really thought the point through and your arm-waving about Quantum Gravity a somewhat distracting irrelevance.
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Just so I understand,
No you don't understand. Your posts are full of red herrings, moving the goalposts and straw men. You then adopt a smug attitude when I did not answer to your satisfaction a question that you never raised.
In the previous post you claimed it was impossible to simulate anything without understand every single aspect of it.
That is demonstrably false and I demonstrated it. I though you were merely ignorant and figured I'd correct you. It turns out you're not ignorant, you're an idiot with
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Let me put it another way as you seem to be having trouble understanding the point: What do I learn if I model a system with my current understanding of its properties and that model fails to reproduce actual observed behaviour in the real world?
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I referred to "the system", not every single law, field, particle, force and property of every single object in the entire Universe. So I ask you again, in what respect am I wrong?
And the difference is...? Nothing.
No, you simply go the no TRUE scotsman and define the system as "everything required to model global warming but not so big it means I don't have to answer award questions about GPS and relativity".
What do I learn if I model a system with my current understanding of its properties and that model f
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And before you say it they are wildly divergent. They might look close at first but that's because (and many people don't realise this), they're tuned against past data. Yes, they're trained to match past data. That cannot in any way whatsoev
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I see you haven't actually answered my point but instead
I did answer your point. You're a liar anf a fraud and keep pretending that you did not make the point you did in fact make.
I then went on to counter the point you kept pretending you first made and you claim I didn't say anything. So, not only are you a liar and a fraud, you are also stupid and cannot read. Quite a winning combination there, bucko.
That cannot in any way whatsoever take a current state and hind-cast it with any accuracy
[citation neede
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I did, for the third time answer the point. You're too stupid to be able to read it. Makes sense you're a denialist seing as you cannot read or think independently.
Re:How is CO2 leading cause of warming? (Score:5, Interesting)
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What do you mean by "magic mechanism"? Nothing is happening that is outside of thermodynamics. It is well known that over 90% of the heat of global warming is going into the oceans.
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Mostly the atmosphere does not warm the oceans (although under some conditions there can be heat transfer to the oceans from the atmosphere). But the atmosphere can affect the rate at which the oceans lose heat which affects how much heat they retain.
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Then there's nothing to worry about from CO2 if the oceans are absorbing the heat - even with all that melting and expansion we are getting at worst around a foot of rise in the next few hundred years. That's easily dealt with by coastal communities, especially over such a long period of time. Whole towns (and nations!) rise and fall over that kind of timescale...
The situation is even better if you believe the IPCC:
"The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report described studies that estimated sea level rise for the
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That EPA article is scaremongering published before the IPCC (you know, the INTERNATIONAL panel on climate instead of just the U.S.) revised estimates significantly downwards...
If there's no need to panic then why care about CO2 emissions? We should instead be focused on REAL pollution.
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Then there's nothing to worry about from CO2 if the oceans are absorbing the heat
The oceans are absorbing the CO2, causing ocean acidification. Nothing to worry about, right?
Whoosh (Score:2)
You might want to read the science on that skippy, the claim is that the oceans are ABSORBING HEAT.
This is exactly why the global warming debate is so absurd, the people who claim they are on the science are not using science, but fear and calling that science.
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I didn't say the oceans aren't absorbing heat, they are. But they are also absorbing CO2. Here's some good introductory material:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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No, 2mm/year means 16 inches in 200 years.
Or is an inch 50mm where you come from?
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I miscalculated but I thought that was too low, thanks for the correction.
Still not a figure that is hard to deal with, and nothing like the 20-40 feet in a few decades some people are throwing about.
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actual warming has kind of flatlined,
I keep hearing this, but I really don't see it [noaa.gov].
It's like the repeated statement that "there has been no warming [since the record-setting global average in 1998]". Nobody ever claimed that global temperature would rise monotonically year-on-year; fortunately, we are allowed to look at the trend line across years and draw the quite obvious conclusion that yes, temperatures have been rising in the last two decades as well.
(You'd think the 1998 argument would lose steam after the 2005 and 2010 global temperatu
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yes, temperatures have been rising in the last two decades as well.
Of course they have but the point is that CO2 emissions have been constantly high over that period, which should have accelerated the trend line upward way more than it has.
In order to reach some of the gloomier temperature increases predicted to occur by 2100, you now have to have a massive increase in temperature gains that year by year is increasingly unlikely. At this point it's pretty obvious CO2 alone is not much of a danger.
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Of course they have but the point is that CO2 emissions have been constantly high over that period, which should have accelerated the trend line upward way more than it has.
The NOAA source I linked can tell us that the 1990-2014 trend has been a rise of 0.14 C per decade, and that 2013 was already 0.78 C above the 1880 pre-industrial level. A simple linear extrapolation gives us a temperature of (2100-2014)*0.014 + 0.62 - (-0.16) = 2.0 C in the year 2100, coincidentally the same 2 C used as the critical limit beyond which global warming will have alarming consequences.
Some may contend that the 2000-2014 trend has been a rise of only 0.04 C per decade, to which I'll note that t
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coincidentally the same 2 C used as the critical limit beyond which global warming will have alarming consequences.
Why, when that is still far less warm than it has been in the past?
The danger of CO2 was always advertised as runaway warming, with a feedback loop of warming that could not be ended - not a slow linear ramp up of just 2C over 100 years.
That amount of increase still does not show any reason to worry about CO2 emissions. If there were something to worry about it would be because of an exponenti
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The danger of CO2 was always advertised as runaway warming, with a feedback loop of warming that could not be ended - not a slow linear ramp up of just 2C over 100 years.
That may be what some people say is the issue, but as far as I understand it, the mainstream science concern is not run away warming that renders the planet unliveable. That's actually considered fairly unlikely in the near-term scenarios. The actual major areas for concern are rising seas, ecosystem disruption, droughts, wildfires, floods, augmented storms and storm damage, heat-related illness and disease, and economic losses.
From what I've read about it, of particular note is that at around +4 degrees
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This person probably lives downwind of the great lakes, which froze last winter because the polar vortex moved off the poles (which were above freezing at times) and landed on Minnesota. We had a great winter in Vermont. OTOH, they are experiencing unseasonable high temperatures in California this summer, and Europe has had some really hot summers recently. Unfortunately people confuse their local climate with the global climate.
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If CO2 were a leading cause of warming, why would the temperatures not be spiking along with CO2 levels?
If you notice closely, they attempted to pose a slightly different question...
carbon dioxide (CO2) — the leading human-produced greenhouse gas and the principal human-produced driver of climate change.
If you ask the question like this, it's true. However, leading causes of warming is the sun and the other main gas driving global climate change is methane, neither of which is technically human produced.
If you want to get technical, if factor in our desires for growing plants, industrialization, keeping warm and eating beef, then both CO2 and methane are somewhat similar in that regard. There's about 200x the CO2 than methane i
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It's easy to forget humans are likely responsible for only 25Gtons of the CO2 released, where the natural carbon cycle is about 750Gtons (+- a extra volcano eruptions which are about 40Gtons)... Human contribution is non-negligible, for sure, but natural variations are of the same scale.
Lately human caused emissions of CO2 are closer to 35 GT/year and volcanic eruptions are around 0.3 GT/year. When you say natural CO2 emissions are 750 GT/year that's kind of misleading if you don't also mention the ~770 GT/year that are naturally absorbed. That's why for thousands of years before human industrialization the CO2 level was around 280 ppm while the yearly seasonal variation was about 10 ppm.
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Yes, it's like a bath where the taps are on and providing X litres/s while Y litres/s are going down the plughole. X only needs to be a little bit bigger than Y for the water level to rise.
Of course, which is why I also said this...
...but even if somehow we could collectively reduce our carbon footprint to zero (likely impossible), it's likely that some warming is already inevitably started and the only long term solution would be to adapt our planet to sink the additional carbon output we will be producing...
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Warming hasn't flatlined. Atmospheric warming hasn't even flatlined. But sea warming has been consistent and substantial. Google clathrates if you're curious why you should care about that.
Confusing Weather and Climate (Score:2)
You might be misunderstanding the difference between short-term forecasts and longterm projections. I know I failed to understand the scientific nuance until recently.
You see, "global average temperatures are going to rise X by 2100" is a projection. It's based on pretty basic thermodynamics (ie. this much carbon increases the greenhouse effect by such-and-such). This science, because it's so basic, is pretty solid.
At the same time "global average temperatures are going to rise by Y by 2025" is a forecast.
OCO2 is one of the most important sats that .... (Score:2)
Right now, most of the world's CO2 emissions numbers are based on what gov claim that their nation consumed in coal, oil, and nat gas. Yet, it does not take into account issues such as inefficiencies, etc. Most of the numbers dealing with 3rd world and even some of the western nations are really wrong.
With this, it will show the TRUE flow of CO2 outward, as well as into, of nations.
Sadly, it will also become controversially once the far left realizes that America is NOT the
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Thank you for the intelligent comment. I worked on the original instrument design at Hamilton Sundstrand over 10 years ago, and it was heartbreaking to learn of the original launch failure. A lot of us suspected but had no evidence that the failure was someone's desired outcome... now that OCO-2 is on station and collecting data we finally feel a sense of accomplishment.
And we'll not only learn who's contributing CO2 to the atmosphere, (and when, and where) but also what's consuming it, so we can not only
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And yeah, when OCS's shroud failed to release, I was miffed, but far more miffed when they got the next contract for OCO2. Thank god that it was turned over to ULA. Oddly, not sure if you have noticed, but 100% of OCS's failures were earth sats. That has always struck me as interesting.
But, I suspect that when the initial batch of numbers come from OCO2, that it is going to drive a lot of po
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At that point, does the world finally point to China and say enough is enough, or will the far left still insist on giving them a MASSIVE out?
That 'out' is the best thing that we can do. If you look carefully, China is moving as fast as it can towards fast breeder reactors, hydro, etc. They're cheaper in the long-run than carbon-based energy sources and much better for their air (and ours) but the capital expense is really high. Look, nobody in Beijing is happy about breathing diesel soup for breakfast.
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China claimed that they were going to spend 100's of billions on doing Solar and Wind for China, BUT, for the amount that
Re: OCO2 is one of the most important sats that .. (Score:2)
Instead, we should put an increasing tax on all goods based on where the parts come from. In addition, the normalization should be co2 / $GDP. With this approach nations like India which actually has a low emission / $GDP will have a lower to none existent tax, while nations / states such as China, or wyo
Re:fast forward 5 years.... (Score:5, Informative)
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Cite your facts and your science, because otherwise we conclude you're doing nothing more than making an ad hominem attack on science.
Oh, wait, you don't have any facts, right?
Sorry, but if you want to be given any credibility, you need to show some science which refutes it.
Otherwise, it's the same as if I said "Pino Grigio will reject any science which does
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Re:fast forward 5 years.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, and really, really huge (many orders of magnitude bigger) amounts of profit would be lost by oil companies' shareholders if we decided to believe the absolutely overwhelming evidence that carbon dioxide causes global warming. Being a global warming scientist is a lot less lucrative than using those same skills to do just about anything else, so it's really hard to believe that job security is the motivational basis for roughly 99% of scientists who study climate change saying that we have a problem. Chances are that they just want to try to prevent their children seeing the last days of civilization and then dying painfully.
The double irony is that a lot of climate change deniers are the same people who stockpile weapons in case of the collapse of civilization. It's almost as if you bloody well want to spend your last days futilely defending the dwindling supplies in your bunker.
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roughly 99% of scientists who study climate change saying that we have a problem
if you are going to make a claim about something, get the claim right at least. 99% of scientists not NOT believe that there is a problem, no where is that stat ever said except for in blogs and bad reporting.
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He said "scientist who study climate change". You can't find even 5% of that group that says there is no problem
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The scientists were about evenly divided on whether they thought the effects of global climate change over the next 50 to 100 years were likely to be near catastrophic (41 percent) or moderately dangerous (44 percent). About 13 percent saw relatively little danger.
While this is a group of knowledgeable outsiders, it's a group of knowledgeable outsiders with somewhat less conflict of interest than those who study "climate change".
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Your cited article was from 2008. It would be interesting to see how the results reported by that poll have changed in the ensuing 6 years. The poll was conducted among geologists and meteorologists, most of whom were not directly studying climate so it doesn't really negate my point. And finally 41 percent plus 44 percent means that 85 percent of them thought there will be problems from global warming. I don't know about you but for me in most cases if 85% of scientists agree to some extent about somet
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Maybe so although I'd call it refinement rather than backtracking. But you're still left with 85% of the scientists in the survey who consider it moderately dangerous to catastrophic.
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In the poll that came up with 85% only 41% of the scientists polled had ever published anything on climate so it makes sense that they wouldn't get the same results as polling only climate scientists.
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I suppose you think that NASA can bend objective reality to their will as well. In science, particularly a physical science like climate you can maybe get away with fudging things for a little while but sooner or later (usually sooner) objective reality will destroy your fudging.
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so you're pushing the old "rich scientists" myth?
You know its BS right?
As in false, made up, not true?
In fact, it's actually a projection, because the REAL money to be made in global warming is in DENYING it.
Well you should.
Come back to reality.
It's not just more rational, it's nicer over here too.
And we have cookies.
To sum up: climate research doesn't pay well, the amount of money dedicated to it has been shrinking, and if the researchers were successful in convincing the public that climate change was a serious threat, the response would be to give money to someone else. If you come across someone arguing that scientists are in it for the money, then you can probably assume they are willing to make arguments without getting their facts straight.
http://arstechnica.com/science... [arstechnica.com]
http://www.scientificamerican.... [scientificamerican.com]
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dear god, you keep saying the exact opposite of reality. each and every time this topic comes up.
the models do in fact predict both previously observations, and as each new set of observations come in, they have continued to fall within the predictions.
the graphs go back far further than that, and no, 1970 was not some local minimum.
one would almost think that you're not simply a troll, but a professional troll.
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you keep saying the exact opposite of reality
I'm not the one confusing unsubstantiated computer models with reality.
and no, 1970 was not some local minimum
I looked [wordpress.com] before I posted.
Re:fast forward 5 years.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Repeating a lie does not make it true.
Everything on Skeptical Science is referenced, if you have some complaint tell us what your problem is.
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you didnt debunk anything.
you just linked to another faulty denier site that has itself been proven wrong, and an article that trots out the same "warm period and "little ice age" misconceptions.
Roy Spencer is not a valid source.
Tree ring reliability: ( http://www.skepticalscience.co... [skepticalscience.com] ):
The divergence problem is a physical phenomenon - tree growth has slowed or declined in the last few decades, mostly in high northern latitudes. The divergence problem is unprecedented, unique to the last few decades, indicating its cause may be anthropogenic. The cause is likely to be a combination of local and global factors such as warming-induced drought and global dimming. Tree-ring proxy reconstructions are reliable before 1960, tracking closely with the instrumental record and other independent proxies.
Medieval Warm Period: ( http://www.skepticalscience.co... [skepticalscience.com] ) AND ( http://www.skepticalscience.co... [skepticalscience.com] ):
The Medieval Warm Period predominantly affected the North Atlantic and Europe, not the whole world. While the Medieval Warm Period saw unusually warm temperatures in some regions, globally the planet was cooler than current conditions.
The Little Ice Age: ( http://www.skepticalscience.co... [skepticalscience.com] ) AND ( http://www.skepticalscience.co... [skepticalscience.com] ):
The sceptical argument that current warming is a continuation of the same warming that ended the LIA is unlikely. There is a lack of evidence for a suitable forcing (e.g. the sun) and numerous correlations with known natural forcings that can account for the LIA itself, and the subsequent climate recovery. Taken in isolation, the LIA might cast doubt on the theory of climate change. Considered alongside the empirical evidence, model predictions and a century of scientific research into the climate, recovery from the LIA is not a plausible theory to explain the observed evidence and rate of global climate change.
As for Roy Spencer h
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I see. So debunking the most popular myths and misconceptions of the science, using actual science, from actual scientists...is propoganda?
Fraid not. You can't just cover your hears and "lalalalalalalalala" the science away.
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n the basis of that data, I wouldn't bet much on what the temperature will do next. Only a fool would go all in on a prediction of warming, cooling, or stability.
So the warming could in fact be much worse than what the models predict? Talk about your doom and gloom.
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just like the fact that they cant explain why there has been no warming for the past 17 years??
Still pushing that same old bullshit canard?
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just like the fact that they cant explain why there has been no warming for the past 17 years??
Still pushing that same old bullshit canard?
Keep modding me troll, deniers. Keep on suppressing discussion. Whatever; you're helping destroy the world.
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they've infested slashdot.
they talk about the evils and conspiracys of science, proclaim trusting experts isnt valid, that non-experts have equally valid opinions...and when you point out the problems, or how they ignore reality and history, and how the gilded age wasnt a utopia, or talk about actual science and actual observations...they mod you as troll and flamebait.
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Sure, facts can explain that:
a) considering only the endpoints of an interval does not describe the middle of an interval
b) using an outlier as one of the endpoints of an interval makes the end-to-end comparison look more extreme than the trend would suggest.
Combining this two con consistent with either not knowing how to represent statistical data, or knowing that your audience doesn't know how to present statistical data.
So yes, that is an excellent example of the "how to lie with statistics".That is to s
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Although it is quite a clever piece of polemic, it is at heart just a dumb strawman argument and infers a point of view which is not, nor ever was articulated by any CAGW skeptic that I am aware of.
Well you just made one of the arguments that the graph dispells: "The pause is real and merits an explanation", so presumably you know at least one such person. Case in point one of the many points the graph addresses it easy to choose many different periods and say "there is no trend for this period" and confuse that with "there is no trend". In fact, you can pretty much cover the entire temperature record with cherry-picked periods that show no statistically significant warming despite the obvious histo
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The pause is a real physical phenomena which the climatology community is now trying to explain, this is now broadly accepted and is not a fringe skeptic position as you seem to insist on trying to frame it. Even in IPCC AR5 Report deals with it. WG1 Chapter 9 for example: "Box 9.2: Climate Models and the Hiatus in Global Mean Surface Warming of the past 15 years". Download it and read it for yourself. This section in the report posits a number of broad explanations, statistical artefact is not one of t
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Let me elaborate further on why the SKS graph is a strawman, I assumed my initial comment would be obvious and sufficient. Anyway it is because most cogent skeptics do not dispute that the world was warmed in the 20th century, that warming post 1970 was quite pronounced and that co2 does have a warming effect; these observations are not controversial. The SKS graph implies that skeptics wilfully ignore the observed warming. It is a stupid lie vigorously repudiated, and by virtue of this that SKS continue to publish it makes them wilful liars, wilfully misrepresenting the point of view of their detractors.
Methinks thou dost protest too much.
Seriously, there are, in fact, many "skeptics", cogent or otherwise who dispute that the world has warmed and that CO2 does have a warming effect. For example, Jane Q. Public is a good example of self-professed skeptic on Slashdot who apparently does not believe that CO2 has a warming effect. She has several times posted "proof" that the greenhouse effect can not exist. And she is not alone, I've replied to dozens of posts from many different posters on Slashdot who cl
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Yes, plenty of whacky ideas out there and including some skeptics that think co2 cannot warm the planet, i.e. Sky dragon's. We are united in our belief that such views are almost certainly incorrect.
I guess it is easier to focus on the the fringe argument and try and represent all skeptics as being one and the same than confront lukewarmer arguments, which are becoming increasingly uncomfortable in light of actual observational data.
CAGW predicted rapid and accelerating warming. But the data fails to bear
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CAGW predicted rapid and accelerating warming. But the data fails to bear it out, so post-hoc rationalisations are put forth and the capacity of the hypothesis to yield falsifiability tests is shrinking : which urges the question is the development of this hypothesis robust?
Speaking of fallacies, the use of CAGW [rationalwiki.org] is generally associated with a strawman, goalpost moving or loaded language fallacies, depending on context. It's use is rarely associated with honest debate because there is no actual definition for CAGW.
CO2 emission records are actually what predicts accelerating warming, if C02 is a greenhouse gas and we increase the rate at which we're releasing CO2 into the air, we increase the speed at which the planet warms. And rapid is at best a relative term when applied to
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Speaking of fallacies, the use of CAGW [rationalwiki.org] is generally associated with a strawman, goalpost moving or loaded language fallacies, depending on context.
Nice try, but no. CAGW = Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming and it describes the point of view of alarmism on climate quite well. When public narrative out there uses terms like 'greatest moral challenge of our time', and slogans like 'no jobs on a dead planet', the inference is quite clear : the proponents of such points of view are clearly advocating that a global catastrophe is looming. There is an appalling barefaced hypocrisy in an article that takes um-bridge with the term CAGW, which I asse
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Nice try, but no. CAGW = Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming and it describes the point of view of alarmism on climate quite well.
There is no formal definition of what CAGW is, you could even stick to one definition for a single sentence, you used two very different examples of what it supposedly means. All in all, it's useful rhetorical trickery used to make sure you never have to deal honestly with people you disagree with. You always just one goalpost shift away from continuing the argument.
When public narrative out there uses terms like 'greatest moral challenge of our time',
Dealing with AGW may, in fact, be the "greatest moral challenge of our time" but that has nothing to do with your argument. It's a moral qu
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that's not a fact.
that's a myth.
it is a myth, or more accurately a LIE, that there has been "no warming" for the past 17 years.
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In 1896 Svante Arrhenius said "if the quantity of carbonic acid [CO2] increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression." Expressed as a formula (and working with Slashdot's font limitations) that is:
(delta)Temperature=(alpha)Ln(C/C(subzero))
Where (alpha) is a constant between 5 and 7 and C is the concentration of CO2 and C(subzero) is the original concentration. That relation still holds and can be verified in the laborat
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More likely scenario ... if it starts getting results confirming AGW, some congresscritter will vote to cut its funding on behalf of his 'constituents' (the oil companies).
There is a group interested in not seeing the truth here, and it isn't the climate scientists.
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yeah, climate science is where the money is.
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If that's your best argument, it sounds like you've come to the debate unarmed. Congress is notoriously hostile to climate science.
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You can throw all of the incentives you want at scientists but in the end they still have to reflect the objective reality they are studying. In the end the value of what they produce will be judged against that and only that.
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You're forgetting that "truth" has a half-life and that group-think dominates the process from bottom to top.
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It's not a matter of TRUTH. It's a matter of objective reality. If scientists are deliberately skewing their results it shouldn't be that hard to show they are wrong, yet it hasn't happened.
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It fascinating to me that you think that scientists would think they could get away with ignoring objective reality and still maintain their credibility.