US Scientists Scramble To Protect Research On Climate Change (cnn.com) 534
Long-time Slashdot reader ClickOnThis quotes CNN:
Some scientists and academics are embarking on a frenzied mission to archive reams of scientific data on climate change, energized by a concern that a Trump administration could seek to wipe government websites of hard-earned research... The chief concern: publicly available climate change data and research found on government websites would be wiped clean or made otherwise inaccessible to the public. Some worry the information could only be retrieved with a taxing Freedom of Information Act request.
One associate professor at the University of Texas tells CNN, "There is a very short window for when the new administration will come in and that's why there's a lot of anxiety. There's a lot of information to save."
One associate professor at the University of Texas tells CNN, "There is a very short window for when the new administration will come in and that's why there's a lot of anxiety. There's a lot of information to save."
Wiping servers? (Score:3, Funny)
Re: Wiping servers? (Score:2, Funny)
It's going to be so hilarious when Trump loses the primary!
It's going to be so hilarious when Trump loses the election!
It's going to be so hilarious when Trump loses the rebelling electoral college!
It's going to be so hilarious when Trump is impeached!
It's going to be so hilarious when Trump loses the election!
It's going to be so hilarious when Trump fails to build the Mars base!
It's going to be so hilarious when Trump fails to obtain the secrets of immortality!
Nerr-gak 'zi8ggit zeitgoid Trump s22wellik h-g
Build an ark (Score:2)
I think they need two build an ark before the great flood comes..
Re:Wiping servers? (Score:4, Insightful)
And he really doesn't like it when the evidence contradicts him. Especially not when it reflects on the (in)advisability of his policies.
He might not personally order a wipe, but with a view to running the country as a business, he has appointed some "climate sceptics" who could very well appoint like-minded trustees to actively realign publicly funded research efforts with national priorities, restructure research departments with a view to national needs, and focus monetary and computing resources in accordance with those needs and priorities.
Translation: he has appointed a few idiots who in turn might appoint a posse of yahoos who see it as their mission in life to vanish anything or anyone the boss doesn't like and hide the evidence. As in: fire anyone who openly says global warming is a fact, have their funding cut, their computing resources confiscated, and their data wiped. That's what "running the country like a business" means, you know.
Given that perspective ... why not extend and enhance current backup policies to guarantee continuity of valuable research data with an eye towards potential refocusing of research priorities and allocation of means.
Tanslation: why not save an offshore copy of your work while you still can?
Ordinary precaution I'd say.
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Re:BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually China looks a lot more effective than the US at combating climate change long term. In the US it all depends on whether big oil has bought the government of the day. China makes all the solar pv cells for the world and has an actual plan.
Re:BS (Score:5, Informative)
China? What a great example. It's a country that has curbed the rise in CO2 emissions far more than the USA over the past 2 years. And I mean who do they think they are with being number 20 in the list of countries in emissions per capita. The USA is far better at ... well fuck we are number 7... Actually per capita we emit 3 times as much as China and 9 times as much as India.
Yeah those bloody developing nations ruining the world. Damn them right?
Idiot.
Re:BS (Score:5, Informative)
+1. The US is responsible for almost 30% of all the historical emissions :
https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
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China is putting a lot of effort into reducing its emissions. As is the EU. You seem woefully confused about this, to the point you are arguing against your own best interests. How terribly sad.
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In the US:
Is CO2 "pollution" to you? If so, CO2 has nothing to do with health, so "not any better". If not, US has massively reduced air pollution since I was young - to the point that the only places that even have a problem are a handful of cities where for some reason there's very poor circulation between the air above the city and the atmosphere in general. So "almost no difference, but maybe a little".
I China or India: it's a big deal. But it's no worse than the US when we were going through the in
Re:BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Poe's law in full effect now, but given your posting history I'm guessing you're not joking.
I'm curious how you believe that more CO2 in the atmosphere will increase UV emissions? If the atmosphere heats up we'll get more water vapor and thus increase the UV albedo of the atmosphere, yes?
Drowning? Are water levels increasing faster than people can walk part of your religion? Falling debris? I'm sure you'll explain how climate change causes earthquakes - I know I've seen that claim in the media a couple of times now.
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Water vapor amplifies warming
https://www.google.ca/amp/phys... [google.ca]
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I guess you don't think those floods and extreme weather have anything to do with climate change. The science disagrees with you.
Seems like this is easily solved by archive.org (Score:5, Interesting)
All they need to do is make a deal with archive.org to take the materials off their hands in a deal which doesn't involve a robots.txt file, as a special collection. This is precisely what the internet archive is for...
Re:Seems like this is easily solved by archive.org (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, it's a fine time to put our money where our mouths are, as donations are being matched (presumably out of the same concern [archive.org]):
Dear Internet Archive Patrons:
You’ve come to the Internet Archive in search of knowledge, to find Web pages you would have lost. Now we need your help in return. Will you help sustain this non-profit library built on trust? We have a huge mission: to give everyone access to all knowledge, forever. For free. The Internet Archive has only 150 staff but runs the #250 website in the world. Your privacy is very important to us, so we don’t collect your personal information. We don’t accept ads. But we still need to pay for servers, staff and rent. That’s where you can help us. Right now a generous supporter will match your donation 1-for-1. So you can double your impact! If you find our site useful, please give what you can today. Thank you.
Guess I'm chipping in again...
http://archive.org/ [archive.org]
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Now's a great time to point out that the Internet Archive themselves are so afraid of what Trump is going to do, that they're currently collecting funds for setting up a mirror outside the US.
May you live in interesting times, indeed.
You sow the wind ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Motivations aside, remember when the climate skeptics said, "Make the raw data public so we can analyze it!" and actual government agencies, supposedly working for the public were like, "nooooooooooo. You wouldn't understand it the right way, so we can't do that! We only show it to certain people that we've pre-vetted to ensure that they think like us. We'll release these summarized graphs that prove our point!"
Yeah, ignore the fact that the whole of science actually works when people share their ideas an
I actually don't remember that (Score:5, Informative)
See, this is one of those things I always thought was funny. You've got a bunch of folks with PHds, usually with a heavy emphasis on math and statistics, but the implication I get again and again from folks is that they're somehow trying to cheat us all for the mountains of grant money.
These folks are in ridiculously high demand in the private sector. They command salaries 2-3x the public sector at the drop of a hat (and if they go to Wallstreet 5-10x). I'm not saying there won't be the occasional bad apple or just plain wrong person, but really, if they were out for personal gain they have much, much better alternatives and they're smart enough to know what they are.
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there's tons of raw data out there
Exactly - people in generl have little idea just how much we are talking about. All scientific activity produces mountains of data - it isn't just the LHC at CERN (which produces 100s of GB per second) - even a small study of sea-birds, with the use of small strap-on cameras and similar, can produce TBs in a relatively short span of time. For climate data, it has to be enormous amounts of data too: several daily observations from perhaps millions of weather stations, plus satelite data, radar observations,
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I've heard a similar story, but not of source code. The account I've heard passed down was of an inexperienced employee who, while teletyped in to a remote mainframe, mistyped a single character when executing a program: Rather than outputting to magnetic tape, he set it to output to an automated card punch machine. The truck, and the bill, arrived some days later.
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These folks are in ridiculously high demand in the private sector.
Those who can, do. Those who can't scrabble for tenure.
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So attacking 'random blogs and op eds' for what they are, and not arguing their proposed facts (I trust them by default no more than I do the AGW academics), is that the scientific equivalent of the lawyers' dictum: "if you can't argue the facts, attack the source"? Because it smells like it.
1) I never said the grant money gravy train is their motivation. I don't believe there is that much money in it either. Yet...the left has been peddling a constant stream of foretold disasters 'just around the corner
Re:You sow the wind ... (Score:4, Informative)
NASA's raw data on global temperature and the GISTEMP code they use to analyze it are all openly available online. NOAA's climate data is openly available and there are good R packages to make it easy to download. NCDC's climate data archives for the US and for the whole world are freely available online. NASA's satellite climate data is all available on line. Paleoclimate data from ice cores is all on line. NOAA measurements of atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases is all on line. All the code for NCAR's community climate model and NASA's GISS Model E are available on line. Other integrated assessment models, such as GCAM are open-source.
I have been teaching climate change for years, and I have found it very easy to write scripts in R and Python to automatically download the raw climate data from various public government repositories (NASA, NOAA, NCDC, ORNL, etc.), and process it to produce up-to-date figures for my lectures. It's really easy to do.
So what data do you think the government is not making openly available to the public?
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The problem is (as has happened in Canada) - it becomes a lot harder later to prove thing the government doesn't want proved, if the government can legitimately say 'there is no data to prove that' - when it's been thrown out.
The problem isn't access to the raw data only - it's getting rid of that raw data.
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I've got lots to say about Climate Change. However, I'm past wasting my time saying it to people who kept claiming there was "no scientific evidence" smoking causes cancer and their willing dupes. There is literally no point in wasting my time on them.
Fake News (Score:2, Insightful)
The chief concern: publicly available climate change data and research found on government websites would be wiped clean or made otherwise inaccessible to the public.
There is no reason to believe this will happen. It's FUD, fake news, whatever you prefer to call it.
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You mean like how it didn't happen in Australia or Canada?
When the incoming administrations starts issuing demands for the equivalent of a Jew List for climate and environmental scientists, are planning to gut earth science funding, appointing heads who have vendettas against all things climate and environment, etc. you have to be pretty fucking stupid not to see what the end goal is.
We've seen this shit before. We know exactly where it's going. That's why scientists are taking steps to make sure the data i
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It's certainly not news. News is when something happens and you tell people, not when some excitable, self-involved people imagine something might happen and tell a story about what it might be like.
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If those scientists were doing real science, they'd be proud to have their names associated with their actions. Instead, they're ashamed and trying desperately to hide. That should tell you something.
Instead, they're going with "You don't need to know what we've been doing for the last several years, because, um, censorship? Something? Only Nazis would want scientific accountability!"
I've been to a UN Climate Conference. No science, just politics and a vacation on government money. When the weather turned u
Re:Fake News (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, it happened. The questionnaire is public record. After the outcry, the Trump transition team claimed it was "not authorized", which basically means they got caught and then pretended it didn't happen.
Claims of "fake news!!" are going to be harder for the Trump administration to make now that everything, including the tweets of Drumplethinskins himself are going to be public record by law.
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Then why did the Trump transition team go all over the news in order to disavow the questionnaire and pretend that it was "unauthorized"?
Funny that of all the things that the Department of Energy spends money on, the one thing they want to know about is who spent money going to climate conferences. This from a guy who's charging the Secret Service millions just because his wi
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You're saying Trump didn't ask for a list...
Please quote me where I said that.
U.S. Scientists work at the U. of Toronto? (Score:2)
Summary title: "US Scientists Scramble To Protect Research On Climate Change"
From TFA:
at schools like the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Toronto, academics are attempting to download and save as much data as possible. The Canadian school on Saturday is set to host a "guerilla archiving event" in collaboration with the Internet Archive's End of Term 2016 project, which will archive the federal online pages and data that are in danger of disappearing during the Trump administration, including climate change, water, air and toxics programs.
Dear Scientists. (Score:4, Insightful)
Release ALL OF IT as a torrent and encourage people around the globe to download it.
Honestly all this shit needs to be in the hands of regular people and not sequestered away for only the chosen to look at.
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Unfortunately, there is the Dunning-Kruger effect to contend with. Picture a hundred amateurs on youtube trying to draw graphs in Excel and reaching all sorts of crazy conclusions.
Send it all to Wikileaks (Score:2)
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Wikileaks would be the worst place to send it, given their recent actions.
Torrents? (Score:2)
Does anyone know if torrents are being set up for replication?
You know it's too bad (Score:3)
what is this mysterious data? (Score:2)
The data for reproducing climate model predictions and published research already should be fully released, and as a practical matter, archived. Here is a set of links:
http://www.realclimate.org/ind... [realclimate.org]
So what is this other data that they are trying to rescue from Trump?
If there is data missing, then that should be published. The climate research community might also want to update their computational tools from the dusty Fortran decks to something more modern. Everybody should be able to reproduce climate m
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Everybody should be able to reproduce climate models on a modern desktop computer with a GPU and check for themselves.
Do you know how much computational power it takes to run climate models? Anyone with a desktop and GPU is not going to be able to replicate many of these models' results. You need supercomputers on the scale of the Top 500 to do that sort of thing, you idiot.
Re:There is a legitimate dispute (Score:4, Insightful)
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Hollywood movie stars are great propaganda for the whipping up support among the unwashed, unthinking masses; that's why political leaders and Scientologists have always sought public association with them.
"legitimate" dispute vs consequence of being wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
And there's where climate 'activist' are just idiots. They think an emotional appeal somehow countermands the need for people who question a controversial scientific subject with a snide comment on social media. Contrary to those 'the debate is settled' ass holes there is no such thing as a settled scientific debate that can never be questioned. That's not science. That's called a religion.
Yeah, it's not like evolution, gravity, or the shape of the planet is settled. There's no point in making decisions about life and determining public policy on those three items because just because there's "only" a consensus, because who knows, the science may change on the (e.g.) shape of our planet. NASA should stop following the Hollywood actors saying the earth is spherical and keep studying things to make sure the supposed reality doesn't change. /s
Seriously: there are two possibilities
a) humans are
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Nothing to say? Really?
The scientific consensus is pretty clear on what we need to do, and the consequences of not doing it.
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Okay, I present for my case the most recent IPCC report. It's peer reviewed, data published, methodology widely reviewed.
What do you have?
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Ah, okay, so you accept the science, you just don't give a shit. As long as we are clear about that I don't think I need to comment any further.
Re:"legitimate" dispute vs consequence of being wr (Score:5, Insightful)
no, you don't think.
that's the problem.
you aren't objective.
youre just stupid.
3/4 of the worlds population lives in areas where they will be displaced by rising seas.
that's 5 billion people.
where are they supposed to go?
who takes them in?
how do you avoid conflicts as a result of mass migration of such numbers of people?
so no.
you don't think.
and if you did, you wouldn't then have the gall to state that its the climate activists who are willing to sacrifice millions.
Re:"legitimate" dispute vs consequence of being wr (Score:5, Informative)
Five seconds with Google shows you lied. In his latest paper states that we are close to the point of no return, i.e. the moment when we can't undo the damage. That's a long way from the end of civilisation.
He recommends a 6% emissions reduction per year. Doesn't specifically say we need to stop all coal use immediately, only 6% across the board.
Anyone else you want me to debunk?
Re:"legitimate" dispute vs consequence of being wr (Score:5, Interesting)
That's what the deniers say. They keep on wheeling out economists to deny the arguments of actual scientists.
It has been more than a century since the El-Nino/La-Nina cycle was identified by climate scientists. When Scott went on an expedition to Antarctica just over a century ago he took some climate scientists with him.
You have been conned by very expensive PR so it's not your fault, but it is somewhat pathetic.
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That's not science. That's called a religion.
Galileo vs. the Pope
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Also intensely personal since the Pontiff and Galileo were rivals as students.
It's worth considering the vote of the Cardinals as well, many were on Galileo's side, just not a majority of them.
Make authority look stupid (Simplicio in Galileo's text being an obvious and insulting parody of the Pontiff) and they see it as a threat to their power and lock you up - that is the lesson to be taken from that situation. Books by Copernicus had been circulating among the clergy for decades before the d
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Re:There is a legitimate dispute (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, if you insist on burying your head in the political sands, then I suppose that would be your interpretation of what's going on. "Deniers" (nice little marketing associating with the Holocaust) have produced and are still producing peer-reviewed scientific work; it's not their fault if you choose to disregard their work.
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"Deniers" ... are still producing peer-reviewed scientific work; it's not their fault if you choose to disregard their work.
For example?
Re: There is a legitimate dispute (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you saying some greater purpose is being served by not releasing all data and methodology on climate change?
I'm saying that the greater purpose of bringing up this different topic was to draw attention away from this claim:
Someone asked [slashdot.org] for an example of this peer-reviewed scientific work and all we got was an off-topic rant about seeing the raw temperature data. That was not the example that was requested which would prove the original assertion. I believe that the only reason why this irrelevant and sudden change of subject was posted here was because the alternative would be to admit that deniers aren't producing anything remotely like science. The original statement was a lie, and this business of climate model source code is just your attempt to distract us from the original question.
It is the usual denier tactic of rapidly switching to the next bullet point on their favorite denier website the moment anyone picks a hole in their crazy theories, or indeed actually answers their question. I have no doubt that if I posted a link to the raw data that you think is so important that you would quickly jump to the next prepackaged denier post.
May I suggest for the next leap in the discussion that we haven't see the old "they have fogotten about about the sun" line for a while. It's a shame that you can't point to 1998 anymore to "prove" that the climate is actually getting colder; that was always a good one. Don't you think that being a denier would be so much easier if it just would stop getting hotter?
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Provide the list of works that falsify AGW. And no, tweets, blog posts and WSJ editorials are not falsifications. Since you seem to believe AGW has been demolished, it should be trivial to find a dozen published articles falsifying the link between CO2 emissions and warming, or falsifying the data that demonstrates the warming.
Re:There is a legitimate dispute (Score:5, Interesting)
The true measure of scientific fact is how well it survives the opposition trying to disprove it. Given that the opposition to climate change has given up on producing data disproving that the Earth is getting warmer on aggregate and instead resorted to attacking it politically, I would say it's doing pretty well as scientific theories go.
Nah, it's an intractable problem because there is only one earth. Better to burn all the research to the ground and call it a day. Strangely enough trump petitioned scottland for variances to account for rising sea levels on his golf course there. But he wouldn't say one thing and believe/do another would he?
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"If the predictions of an increase in sea level rise as a result of global warming prove correct, however, it is likely that there will be a corresponding increase in coastal erosion rates not just in Doughmore Bay but around much of the coastline of Ireland."
Further, he
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If you want to see the oppositions disproval, then you Need to fund their research equally, just like the researchers received the massive funding for their work who actually started off with assumption that greenhouse-gas-caused climate change exists and is caused by humans.
The ones who assume work doesn't prove the foundation of their research is true though,
they just further developed the theory, which doesn't receive adequate funding for critical truth analysis.
Re: There is a legitimate dispute (Score:5, Informative)
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ExxonMobil already did some comprehensive, high quality research on climate change in the 1970s. They discovered AGW but decided to bury their research and go about a campaign to discredit anyone who made similar findings. Or perhaps you haven't been following the news lately?
Given how their innocuous research has been blown way out of proportion to claim that they're doing a "Big Nicotine" denial act, they were right to keep it secret. It takes a particular mendacity to claim that merely doing climate research is an admission of guilt in some imaginary propaganda war.
Re:There is a legitimate dispute (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to see the oppositions disproval, then you Need to fund their research equally, just like the researchers received the massive funding for their work who actually started off with assumption that greenhouse-gas-caused climate change exists and is caused by humans.
The ones who assume work doesn't prove the foundation of their research is true though, they just further developed the theory, which doesn't receive adequate funding for critical truth analysis.
LOL. For any scientist, disproving an established theory is a dream come true. This is the stuff to make careers. And it's not as if people haven't tried. Former climate sceptic Richard Muller [wikipedia.org] got funded by the Koch brothers, and, with his team, did a completely independent reconstruction of the temperature record of the last. Of course, he came up with essentially the same results NASA, NOAA, and the HadCRUT team had previously found, and, as a good scientist, changed his position in response to the data.
Of course, we don't fund science by desired result, but by the importance of the questions asked and the plausibility that progress towards an answer can be made. Assuming equal quality of grant applications, if 97% of working scientist hold one broad position, you would expect 97% of funding to go to this group. And, from what I have seen of so-called "sceptic" science, "equal quality" would be a long stretch...
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Sadly, you are very wrong. One of the biggest problems ot the scientific fields of today is precisely that debunking existing theories achieves literally nothing for the people doing the debunking.
Scientist careers today live and die by citations - how often their published work is cited by others. The problem is that published works that debunk an existing theory get cited several orders of magnitute LESS than the work they are trying to debunk. Worse yet, among people who actually read the "works of disproval", the majority only slightly change their opinion of the work being criticized.
So no, in the current environment it is highly improfitable and illogical for a scientist to engage in anything but original work (or work that at least looks original).
"Debunking" is a very soft term. But if you look e.g. at "Unidentified curved bacilli on gastric epithelium in active chronic gastritis" (by Warren and Marshall), which identified a bacterial cause for most peptic ulcers, and followup-paper "Prospective double-blind trial of duodenal ulcer relapse after eradication of Campylobacter pylori", "debunking" the prevailing theory that fatty diets and stress are the primary causes of ulcers, they received over 4000 and over 1000 citations, respectively. That is mo
Re:There is a legitimate dispute (Score:5, Informative)
But disproving an establish theory is real science, and real science has no place in this debate! All we need is Al Gore.
97%? You must mean 97% of a cherry picked group of 74 people, quite a few of whom lack actual backgrounds in climate or meteorological science.
Well, there are several sources for the ca. 97%, but they seem to have been too conservative (in the non-political sense of the term). The latest analysis among actually publishing scientists [sagepub.com] (by James Powell [wikipedia.org]) finds "above 99.99%", or what he calls "virtual unanimity". The fact that several studies with different methodologies all find support in the high 95+% is a nice example of consilience [wikipedia.org], and that usually is takes as very strong evidence for a fact.
Of course an alternative explanation is that all the scientists, all the editors, and all the scientific organisations are conspiring to keep THE TRUTH from us, with only a small number of heroic conservative think tanks and fossil fuel companies desperately trying to defend it. You take your pick...
Re:There is a legitimate dispute (Score:5, Informative)
The latest analysis among actually publishing scientists [sagepub.com] (by James Powell [wikipedia.org]) finds "above 99.99%", or what he calls "virtual unanimity".
In other words, a crap study. There aren't that many climate researchers in the world to maintain a 10,000 to 1 ratio over the publishing skeptics by probably two orders of magnitude.
Powell counted 69406 to 4, and apparently the referees and editors at the Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society agreed. The full paper [sagepub.com] including the methodology is online, as are the data sets [dropbox.com].
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The "publishing skeptics" you refer don't publish AGW-skeptical papers. This is something you should note very carefully. The actual small number of out and out skeptical researchers in climatology don't write their vast AGW-debunking critiques in journals, they write them in places like the Wall Street Journal. Their published works tends to be pretty mundane stuff.
This reminds me so much of how people would trumpet Michael Behe as the great destroyer of evolutionary theory, because he is a Intelligent Des
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If you are concerned about global warming (as I am) and think that human-created carbon dioxide may contribute (as I do)
Again, you fell for propaganda.
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If you want to see the oppositions disproval, then you Need to fund their research equally, just like the researchers received the massive funding for their work who actually started off with assumption that greenhouse-gas-caused climate change exists and is caused by humans.
That sounds fair until you rephrase it as giving equal funding to those who accept over 100 years of accumulated scientific research and those who think that it is all wrong. You would have to make a pretty compelling case of why you think that way if you wanted to be taken seriously when making a proposal for a new study.
The problem is that science doesn't work like an internet troll. Just because you make an assumption doesn't mean that you have to stick with it in the conclusions of your paper. In fact,
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That's certainly moving the goalposts. Now it's "warmer on aggregate". Before it was droughts, floods, hurricanes, no arctic ice, no snow in England or New York, mass extinctions, 100 meter sea level rise, mass starvation worldwide, point of no return, end of the world.
Next time stick with "somewhat warmer on aggregate" and keep things scientific -- rather than dividing people into tribes to fight each other so leaders can gain power and wealth.
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Scientific theories need to be proven as true before anyone can try to disprove them.
I suggest you take a look at the Steps of the Scientific Method: http://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/project_scientific_method.shtml
Which step is the anthropogenic global warming theory (AGW) on?
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"The opposition" isn't getting any funding to produce opposing research.
The political attacks are about policy, not science. Personally, I don't care whether the average gl
Re:There is a legitimate dispute (Score:5, Insightful)
Then list these legitimate criticisms. And no, someone's blog or a WSJ article is not legitimate criticism.
Re: There is a legitimate dispute (Score:4, Insightful)
Are those scientific sources? Why would you even mention them? Are you a fucking idiot?
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Cute. When was there a scientific consensus that the world was flat? Oh, that's right. There never was. The scientific method as we currently understand it originated with people like Galileo, Bacon, and Newton in the late 16th and early 17th century. And there has been overwhelming expert consensus that the Earth is spherical since around 350 BC. Plato, Archimedes, and Eratosthenes all developed ways to measure the diameter of the earth. But hey, don't let the facts get in the way of your argument that the
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Leave aside the eminent people you mentioned. What do you think Joe Sixpack thought? It stands to reason that if the Earth was round all the sea would fall off...
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Don't confuse the religious bigotry and superstition of the 15th century with the scientific method of today, please.
Although unfortunately religious bigotry and superstition does seem to be making a comeback in conservative circles of, how ironic, the country that was the scientific motor of the 20th century.
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Arabs didn't exist 2000 years ago. They weren't invented until the 7th century.
Scientific Denial vs. Financial Impact (Score:2)
Widespread "Consensus" is not the measure of scientific fact; if it were, we'd all still believe that the Earth is flat, etc.
True but widespread consensus amongst scientists working on the problem has historically been shown to be the absolute best indication of scientific fact. When the ancient greek philosophers first suggested that the world was a sphere and then managed to measure its radius the population listened, learnt and based on the scientific consensus changed their mind. So the exact reverse is true: had there been an ancient greek Donaldus Trumpus opposing the idea that the world was a sphere we might still believe
Re:There is a legitimate dispute (Score:5, Interesting)
Widespread "Consensus" is not the measure of scientific fact; if it were, we'd all still believe that the Earth is flat, etc.
Let's put this idiotic meme to bed once and for all.
(1) There has never been a scientific consensus that the Earth was flat.
The consensus among natural philosophers since the time of Aristotle (4th century BC) has been that the Earth is spherical. In the third century BC Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth as 252,000 stadia, which works out to 39,838 km. The modern figure for the circumference of the Earth is 40,030 km. Since Eratosthenes was dealing in round numbers, he had an accurate figure that is merely less precise than the modern figure. The Portuguese had a more accurate figure for the size of the Earth, which is why they rejected Columbus's expedition which was based on an estimate that was 1/3 too small.
In medieval universities astronomy was one of the "liberal arts", and the standard texts considered the Earth spherical. The "flat earth" notion was only widely held by the ignorant.
(2) Scientific consensus is not about eternal truth, it is about who currently bears the burden of proof.
Science is unique in that it admits, even depends upon crackpot ideas, but it imposes a high burden of proof on them. On the other hand it imposes a low burden of proof on ideas that have a long history of standing up to scrutiny.
This is discrimination, but it's not unfair discrimination. It's a system that allows those crackpot ideas a shot at becoming a new scientific consensus, without burdening everyone else with endless recapitulation of the evidence for things that currently enjoy the support of overwhelming evidence.
When evidence supports a change in the scientific consensus, it changes very rapidly. Take the Heliocentric theory. Copernicus's model had a number of shortcomings, but after the work of Tycho Brahe and Kepler it rapidly gained support among professional astronomers. The main opposition to heliocentrism was political -- not actually religious. The Pope was a Renaissance humanist [wikipedia.org] and an admirer of Galileo; but he had a problem with the Spanish cardinals and couldn't afford to appear "soft on heresy". It's a familiar problem [wikipedia.org] to us today.
3) The existence of scientific dissent does not somehow make an idea more credible.
Dissent, even crackpottery, is not only inevitable, it is an important feature of science that even crackpots are allowed to participate. It doesn't matter what you believe, it matters what you can prove. So if your critieria of evidence is scientific unanimity, you won't get it on just about any topic. Not even conservation of momentum [sciencealert.com]. Everything is open to debate. Even "real" debate.
This means that if you take the "some scientists disagree" route you can go scientist shopping for whatever position you want. Science would have no value whatsoever if we used it that way. You can of course cite dissident scientists if you want of course, but their dissent in itself isn't proof of anything. You have to drill down to why they believe what they believe and why you believe that is correct. People who rely on the scientific consensus within a field need only rely upon the fact that it *is* the scientific consensus.
This reflects the same asymmetrical burden of proof that happens within science. One side is making an extraordinary (in scientific terms) claim and needs equally compelling evidence. The other is making a non-controversial claim.
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Not only are there legitimate criticisms about the interpretations of measurements, but even of the measurements themselves. Prior to the 1920s, most stations around the world providing temperature measurements weren't staffed with trained personnel recording the data. In many cases, the measurements weren't taken at any regular intervals, but rather when someone had free time in between performing other work to do so. In fact, it was often a janitor or other completely untrained staff member recording temp
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Billions of dollars of research being flushed down the drain, research that could save billions of lives in a few decades when the effects of global warming become more severe.
If the research is that important, then publish it and get libraries and other 3rd parties archiving it after the data is collected ---
this is also a good thing as it means observation datasets can no longer be tampered with in the future to support new models.
I doubt that Trump's team is going to say "delete the research data"
Re: There is a legitimate dispute (Score:2)
Except you know archiving the data costs money too.
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If the research is that important, then publish it and get libraries and other 3rd parties archiving it after the data is collected ---
this is also a good thing as it means observation datasets can no longer be tampered with in the future to support new models.
This tampering thing is a myth. Datasets do need to be normalized and massaged before you draw any useful conclusions from them, but you can get the raw data if you're interested -- for example the station data in the instrumental record [nasa.gov]. The myth persists because people want to believe it and don't even make rudimentary efforts to see if it is true.
I've been reading a lot of this bullshit, and it's clear the people spreading them have never bothered to look for the data or go to the papers which publish
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Threatening the messenger is now how science is done:
[ https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com] ]
Re:There is a legitimate dispute (Score:5, Insightful)
You must be like the guy telling the Jews in the mid-1930s "Don't worry, they just want to register you. It'll be just fine..."
Trump has made it clear he doesn't accept the science. He's surrounded himself by people who either don't accept the science, or have strong commercial reasons to try to suppress it. He has a Congress stacked with people who either think God wants coal to be burned or who take their orders from fossil fuel companies.
But you know what, it doesn't fucking matter, because the laws of nature don't give a fuck about Donald Trump, and CO2 has the properties it has, and all the delicate little Republican snowflakes in the world won't make a bit of difference. You cannot stop the laws of physics with a fucking vote.
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I do think there is a legitimate problem with our climate and that us humans are more than capable of influencing it for good or for worse even if it was an entirely natural cycle, if nothing else we should be able to ensure our survival.
The problem I see is indeed the politicized parts of it. We are donating large swaths of money in the form of carbon credits to the very nations that should be improving their situation, but instead we export our "dirty air" and allow them to make it worse even though Chine
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I do think there is a legitimate problem with our climate and that us humans are more than capable of influencing it for good or for worse even if it was an entirely natural cycle, if nothing else we should be able to ensure our survival.
The problem I see is indeed the politicized parts of it. We are donating large swaths of money in the form of carbon credits to the very nations that should be improving their situation, but instead we export our "dirty air" and allow them to make it worse even though Chinese smog particles are now affecting coastal cities in the US. In the end it's just a taxation to offset debts and improve their economy and when it comes time for "them" to pay up they'll just back out of whatever agreement they signed, just like Trump wants to do.
The United States with 318 million citizens produces something like 16% of global greenhouse gas emissions with an upward trend that is set to become even sharper now that Trump is president, persecuting climate scientists and promoting fossil fuels process that looks set to continue for the next eight years since there is little reason to believe that Trump won't be re-elected. The EU 28 with 508 million citizens manages to produce 10% of Greenhouse gas emissions with a downward trend. Pundits in the US l
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And when your department gets sacked, and the data storage defunded, what good does that USB drive (neglecting the fact that it may be petabytes) do in your garage?
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It does.
The backups are however not free, and stored in government property.
If the funding for those goes away, then at some point, it gets deleted.
Re:Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit Will Be Happy (Score:5, Insightful)
He was given plenty of data, he just didn't like what it was saying so kept trying to get some more to his liking.
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Re:Ha! (Score:5, Informative)
Really? [washingtonpost.com]
In a section titled “Patterns of Immigration,” a speech bubble pointing to a U.S. map read: “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
"This is erasure,” Dean-Burren said in an interview with The Washington Post. “This is revisionist history — retelling the story however the winners would like it told.”
In calling slaves “workers” and their move to the United States “immigration,” she noted in viral Facebook posts Wednesday and Thursday, the textbook suggests not only that her African American ancestors arrived on the continent willingly, but also that they were compensated for their labor.
If you lived in Texas, which I do, you'd be aware of the right wing Evangelical Christian batshit crazy supremacist white trash bitches like former governor Rick Perry.
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Check out some uranium mining sites sometime
As opposed to a rare earth mine? Aren't they the same thing?
Wind and solar requires mining. They actually require more mining than nuclear power for the same energy output. Wind requires over 500 tons of steel and concrete for every MW of installed capacity, about ten times that of nuclear, coal, and gas.
Morgan Stanley did a study and concluded that to replace coal with wind worldwide would require 10 billion tons of steel and concrete annually. Current world wide production is 1.5 billion tons.
People h
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To quote the first sentence in the above link:
The brain-dead leftist media isn't really in the news business anymore.
Clearly, this site is a paragon of objective reporting...