With these sorts of articles now I'm never quite sure what to believe.
Now before you jump in to mock me, it's just that I don't have time to keep really up-to-date with climate change anymore. Are we really getting warmer? Are we cooling? What's causing it?
For each article I read that tells me one thing, a few days later another comes out and tells me the previous one was wrong and here's why.
I hope that this article's right and being New Scientist I have a lot more faith in it. I just wish I had more time to understand all the factors of climate change for myself.
FUD. That's the point of the decades long propaganda campaign by the energy companies. If they can't convince you outright they at least want to create the confusion and doubt.
It's propaganda versus propaganda now.
I will never forgive whoever has made global warming a political issue, because it means debating rationally about it has become impossible.
Climate is a very complicated thing, especially when studied on a planetary scale. It's a bunch of chaotic parameters, and any prediction about it is likely to be wrong, or imprecise.
Much of science works that way, but problems arise when you need to make political decisions about such matters. You can't make large-scale decisions that will affect millions based on flimsy predictions that may turn out to be wrong.
That's right. Want to see the real stuff with your own eyes? Revisit the glacier you have have been at 10 years ago. If you you are not into mountaineering, use historical pictures.
The issue is that it has become a political issue before we were sure what the issue was. Now we don't know whether or not we should act, instead of deciding what we should do.
Well, it was a plausible scenario, if not definitely certain. It would have been wise to reduce the worldwide emission of greenhouse gases while the science was being done, but were in a typical prisoner dilemma situation here, and convincing everyone has proven impossible (notoriously because of the USA, China, India and probably others).
By focusing public attention on something else. It's not as if we had a shortage of problems.
Then, the matter of climate change could be settled in a scientific manner, as opposed to a religious debate involving legions of people who don't know what they're talking about.
Obviously, i'm being unrealistic. Once it's become politicized, it's already too late.
Engineers can't do that. You have to give them a goal and then you have to decide whether you like their plan for achieving the goal. The political process becomes important before engineers spring into action.
Yes, but they're usually not the ones making a fuss in the media about it, and they're not the ones who will ultimately make or not make political decisions.
Long before people started measuring CO2 concentrations in ice cores we knew, unequivocally that the climate on the planet "changes." It has been both warmer and colder in the past, there are fossil records, there are glacial valleys, there are even pictures painted on cave walls.
Some scientist asked the question "Since we know climate changes, is it changing now? And if it is changing now, how is it changing?" And in response to that question lots of great research was done to look at factors which could affect climate.
Generally the science has always started with a basic model describing net energy, energy added to the planet minus energy radiated from the planet. The theory being that the laws of thermodynamics tell us that if the net energy was positive the overall planet would get warmer over time and if the net energy were negative it would get cooler over time.
Once that was established as the basic framework, people set out to try to identify every way in which energy is 'added' to the planet (sources) and every way in which energy 'leaves' the planet (sinks). Each of these sources or sinks have an unknown contribution to the overall equation.
Many of the sources and sinks are variable, which is to say they change in magnitude over time. So a sub-problem that people have invested a lot of time and energy in trying to identify 'proxies' or direct ways to identify variability. The classic example is of course CO2.
CO2 is a 'greenhouse' gas in that it traps energy because it is opaque to infra-red light. Higher frequency light passes through it and is absorbed or reflected by what that light hits. Light that is reflected returns to space, light that is absorbed is re-radiated as infra-red light (black body radiation). CO2 in the atmosphere prevents that radiation from leaving the planet. So like a car with the windows up, or a green house, the infra-red light is ‘trapped.’ The amount of infrared light that will be trapped (and its energy content) is proportional to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. More CO2, more energy is trapped, less goes to space.
Once you have a bunch of sources and sinks, and measurements of their variability over time, and measurements of the temperature over time, you construct a 'model' for how they all contribute to the climate. The model is a series of coefficients to attach to each source or sink based on its relative contribution to the other sources and sinks.
You pick numbers kind of out of the air as to the co-efficients to give each source or sink, and you use the measurements you've taken and put them in your model and get back a predicted set of temperatures. You compare that to the temperatures that were actually measured and look to see how well they correlate.
You continue to measure these things, you feed your new measurements into your model, and you predict future changes. Then when the future becomes the present, you look at what you predicted and compare that to what the model said would happen and if they don't agree you go back and fiddle with the co-efficients until they do.
That is all good solid science. But in climate science something unfortunate happened.
Of all the things folks were putting into the models, the one that had the biggest co-efficient (which defined it as the greatest overall contributor to the climate) has been 'greenhouse gases' (which includes CO2 and Methane). Scientists being scientists identify all the sources of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And one of them, CO2, is a byproduct of 'industrialization' (aka human activity).
That observation, created a religion. The religion's first principles were:
) The climate is changing. (remember this)
1) Greenhouse Gas is the biggest factor affecting the climate.
2) CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
3) Human activity creates CO2.
4) Human activity is the* dominant factor in the warming of the climate.
5) If Humans would apply themselves to eliminating the production of CO2 the climate will stop changing.
The first tragedy here is that science didn't "discover" the climate was changing, they knew the climate changed, they were only trying to figure out if the current change was a warmer period or a colder period. That green house gases was the dominant factor was a surprise because it creates a new question “What are all the factors that change the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere?” One of the things the science agreed on was that the climate changes whether or not humans are present, so the religious tenet that we can control the climate by eliminating our production of CO2 is false.
Several people did however recognize that the religion met the model for enacting large scale changes. That model is :
1) Find a really big threat, explain how the threat will kill you.
2) Describe how only by following the religion can the threat be averted/met.
3) Explain that people who aren’t part of the religion aren’t just stupid, they are threatening our ability to meet the threat and should be eliminated/marginalized.
This scheme works and so people use it. Whether you’re un-american for not agreeing that Communisim will destroy life as we know it, or that your un-american for not reducing your carbon footprint and averting the coming flood of rising seawater, if you’re not fighting with us against the boogeyman, you are the Enemy.
So the science of climate change is still working on their models. This solar minimum will give us new data to update our models and co-efficients. If it exposes the Global Warming religion for what it is, then I don’t think Al Gore will take the fall, I think science will, and that makes me sad.
No, it wasn't, you started to make a point, but then veered way off into some BS about 'religion'. Even if there's a dreadlocked hippie somewhere who views this stuff as a religion that has nothing to do with its veracity.
I take it you don't see two different ways in which Global Warming conversations take place? How about discussions on the merits of nuclear power? gun control? reproductive rights? gay marriage? Generally all of these share the properties that there are some people who want to talk about them rationally and there are some people who want to talk about them emotionally. At least that has been my observation.
And btw its 'not some dreadlocked hippie' (what a horrible generalization) its people like you and me.
I get angry with people who hijack legitimate scientific enquiries to manipulate others into doing their bidding. And I get frustrated with people who argue conjecture and theory as fact.
There is great science in climatology. Its fascinating and we learn new things every day. None of it suggests that any actions humans take will change the fact that the earth's climate is changing. Just like you can't simulatenously both believe in the science of evolution and that it no longer is a factor in humans.
So its scientific to say that our models show that CO2, as a green house gas, has a significant influence on climate. Its not scientific to say if humans make less CO2 the climate will stop changing. It is perfectly reasonable to say that if humans reduce their CO2 generation it will change the rate of change of CO2 in the atmosphere.
A great web site which focuses on the science is Skeptical Science [1]. I like it because they are pretty aggressive at seeking out all the journal articles and papers and seem to be pretty good about even talking about papers they don't agree with.
A recent article they posted talked about the PETM extinction event [2]. In that event, where there were no humans present, CO2 levels on the planet shot up, the planet warmed and lots of things died off. The study is great, the science is sound, and I'm sure the paper is cited often. Unfortunately nobody has yet figured out why the CO2 shot up.
So when you read this, on the one hand you can say "Look it doesn't matter why, human activity is causing a similar jump in CO2 and it killed lots of stuff then we need to address this." I don't disagree with that statement at all.
I disagree with the non-scientific statement "if we address human CO2 generation this won't happen." Is that a subtle difference? I don't think so. What ever caused CO2 to spike without human help could happen again, and if it does we're in a world of hurt. So people who approach this issue less emotionally talk about both changing how much CO2 (or any other green house gases) we liberate into the atmosphere and ways to survive climate changes. When people try to tell me that if I do what they say it will "help stop climate change" I get irritated with them.
Well, empirically speaking, we're dumping an absurd amount of CO2 into the atmosphere, there's a pretty clear model that suggests it warms the planet, and the planet is in fact warming. You don't need to religiously care about change or warming perse in order to notice that said warming will be very inconvenient for coastal areas, where most major cities and population reside. If that's the case.. who cares if idiots agree with you? They're useful. Trust me, disbelieving in global warming lines you up with all kinds of useful idiots.
It's unlikely you can understand all the factors of climate change since there's far more variables of Earth than most scientists can comprehend so they could only study and make scientific theory based understandings. I think it's best to leave it to the academics.
As guelo points out, this is part of the propaganda campaigns,but who's propaganda.
I say go with your gut and do what's right. We know that burning gasoline and coal releases carbon and are dirty.
We know we should be clean.
Strip mining, not clean. Recycling, clean. Wind looks cleaner than a smokestack, go wind. Solar, well, if the panels are made from plastics are they really cleaner than gas? I think so, go solar, etc. etc. etc.
It gets confusing when you get down to the level of ethanol, but I think for the most part you know in your gut what's right.
Except your gut is wrong. Recycling is not really clean. For some things maybe but not for everything (it uses far too much water).
Solar? Not clean at all. (For photovoltaic which is what most people mean. Solar thermal is good though.)
And just because they are made from plastic means nothing. Plastic is cleaner than wood you know (i.e. uses less energy to make and use).
There is a fact that no one wants to acknowledge: In timeframes of under 20 or so years there are NO energy technologies that are clean. None. For timeframes longer than 20 there is exactly one: Nuclear. There is nothing else.
A solar cell will probably fail before it manages to return more energy than it took to make (it's hard to say for sure though how long they will last, none have been around long enough yet). Wind can never be more than a minor part of the energy supply. Hydro is fully tapped out. Geothermal causes earthquakes. What else is there? Maybe solar thermal, but that requires a huge amount of electrical wires (the energy source is very far from the consumption point), too much apparently since no one is doing it except for some tests.
Fusion. The ultimate, clean energy generation potential.
Also, don't discount wind that fast. The typical "it will have to whole country with these 1-2 MW turbines" line of argument is old. Modern offshore turbine designs are 6MW, getting to 10MW by 2012 and 20MW designs are in the works now. Advances in the field have been massive just in under a decade, with higher output efficiency (gearless designs) and less overall maintenance effort.
The trouble with wind is the variability. And even if you assume that there is always good wind somewhere, the energy grid just can't handle shifting power back and forth so quickly.
It takes time for the other generators to change output levels, so during high speed wind turbines tend to get disconnect from the grid because of the harmful effects they have on it.
The net result is that they don't produce out as much energy as expected.
> It takes time for the other generators to change output levels, so during high speed wind turbines tend to get disconnect from the grid because of the harmful effects they have on it.
Traditionally, a wind turbine generator works only in narrow range of speeds (say, 2000 rpm). In older designs the variable speed of wind was addressed by using a (massive) gearbox, not unlike what you have in your car. The newer designs (e.g. what Siemens Windpower is churning out now) are gearless, don't suffer from that problem, and have in ballpark of 40% better energy efficiency.
The cap/penetration effects of wind power on the grid are being studied, but on levels below 1/5th of total consumption it is believed to not cause any substantial problems. Most of the existing grids can accommodate that. I think no country approached the 20% wind power penetration yet.
I forget the name of the company, but some guy is working on electric cars with swappable batteries: the idea is that instead of plugging your car in overnight to “refuel” it, you would take it to a service station and change the discharged batteries for charged ones.
Now imagine that the outlets for charging those batteries were connected to a wind-powered grid, where the power company charged a lower rate in exchange for less reliable availability. That kind of service would suck for running, say, an Internet data center, but it would be adequate to make sure that all the batteries that came in by 6:00 pm were fully charged by 6:00 am.
Most of the big car companies are experimenting with some sort of battery swapping concept. The problem is that they all have to get together and agree on some sort of standard interface, power ratings and dimensions. If a service station has to stock dozens of different models of batteries then the idea has basically failed before it even gets started.
Yes, we need a smarter grid, we need a breakthrough in battery technology, etc., etc. The way forward is going to be hard and take serious investment in technology, but what else is new?
I would love to see some offshore wind turbines, but as soon as that's brought up the rich people from both the left and right decide they don't want to ruin the views from their beach houses.
It seems like so many people want everyone else to be clean while being dirty themselves.
Thorium molten salt reactors are potentially a good option - nuclear that doesn't produce much in the way of dangerous byproducts, and can't melt down. China's investing quite heavily in them iirc.
Except your gut is wrong. Recycling is not really clean. For some things maybe but not for everything (it uses far too much water).
Well, recycling might use too much energy to be clean (depending on how we get the energy), but using too much water doesn't seem a useful complaint, since cleaning and reusing water is just a matter of more energy.
Energy which, the parent argues, comes from un-clean sources - that's the complaint. How is this complaint not "useful", as long as you don't rebut it by listing those possible energy sources which you consider "clean"? Then I might be convinced and say: "He's right, dirty water doesn't matter, since we can just clean it, using this guy's clean energy sources."
The parent was arguing that recycling processes use too much water, which implies taking in fresh water and tossing it after "use". I didn't infer that the later energy discussion was part of that, since it seemed clear that filtering or distilling the water to clean it wasn't part of the assumed cleanliness of recycling. It would, of course, make it more expensive, but reducing externalities by such means makes the price reflect the true cost better, so that's all to the good, whether or not it turns out that recycling is really a good idea for a given material.
> There is a fact that no one wants to acknowledge: In timeframes of under 20 or so years there are NO energy technologies that are clean. None. For timeframes longer than 20 there is exactly one: Nuclear. There is nothing else.
I'm skeptical of this figure, but it's not particularly relevant. The issue is whether directing energy towards renewable energy production has a better environmental impact vs directing that same amount of energy towards fossil fuel energy production.
Total evaluations of the costs (in dollars, to the environment, etc.) are extremely important in comparing energy production methods, but your 20 year figure is fairly meaningless on its own.
> for the most part you know in your gut what's right.
For complex issues, that is the worst advice possible. Humanity is barely rational as it is. The last thing we need is politicians (and those who elect them) 'going with their gut'. This really is an anti-intellectual stance.
No it's not. Something like "Stupid academics and their ivory tower global warming theories" is anti-intellectual. The grandparent just values intuition above hard data. I don't necessarily agree, but don't go calling the grandparent anti-intellectual and rant about humanity's lack of "rationality" just because you disagree with them.
Paraphrased from Wikipedia: Anti-intellectualism is a mistrust of intellect, and the derision of science as impractical. Gut feelings are emotional reactions, generally regarded as not modulated by conscious thought, and as a reflection of intuition rather than rationality.
That seems pretty clear to me, so I will gladly call this advice to follow the gut anti-intellectual.
Furthermore, I think it's to be actively opposed in the public sphere. Politics in general is all about the gut feeling, and favouring non-rational solutions to complex issues is simply dangerous, especially far-reaching ones like this one. If that is 'ranting' to you, then so be it.
Lastly, I am not disagreeing with his opinions (I agree with several of them, though that's not relevant), I am disagreeing with the 'go with gut feeling' stance.
The problem is that climate change and green energy are so complicated and political, it's hard to tell what is propaganda (and there's strong incentives in many different directions for the results to come out in a given direction).
Ethanol used to sound like a good idea; now it sounds like it's mostly a corn/sugar-lobby way of getting money and not practical (although I'm sure it's not that straightforward).
For 'wind looks cleaner' - the Register argues that mostly it'll end up making energy more expensive without being much cleaner (in this one case in the UK), due to perverse incentives:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/14/national_grid_2020/
I think 'gut feeling' is exactly what we don't need. Things are not always intuitively obvious.
climate change and green energy are so complicated and political
There isn't much complicated about it climate change: the full consensus is that it's happening because we're burning too much oil.
The politics? Less than 10 years ago, the world's largest industry was oil when the price was roughly stable at around $20 a barrel.
Today a barrel costs $100. For something the world consumes at a thousand barrels a second, that's huge. At the price a couple weeks ago, it was a better investment to buy the world's biggest commodity than Google when it IPO'd. You might want to read that again.
Climate change is a force of urgency in the switch away from oil to green energy. You can be sure it will be fought every step of the way with every tool available.
If by “green energy” you are referring to energy production that is renewable or doesn’t produce significant CO2 emissions, then it does exist.
Here are some examples from Sweden:
District heating systems in Sweden has switched from being nearly entirely fossil fuel based (oil mainly) in the early 70s (15 TWh) and following decade (35 TWh) to be nearly entirely renewable energy in 2009 (59 TWh total of which biofuel, waste, peat, heat pumps and waste heat make up more than 45 TWh). [1]
District cooling has gone from zero in the early 90s to supply 800 GWh in 2009. This includes using sea or lake water in district cooling systems, where the system in Stockholm makes up for nearly half of that production. [2]
Swedish total energy use in 2009 is about 568 TWh. [3] Sweden has increased its renewable energy use from about 34% in 1990 to 44% in 2009. [4]
Electricity production in Sweden is about 49% large hydro, 1.9% wind, 37% nuclear (adds up to about 89%), most of the rest comes from combined heat and electricity production, which uses primarily biofuel, but also some coal, oil, gas and peat.
Sweden has a policy to promote renewables and over the years this has paid off. You can do the same.
A nit: aren't biofuels, waste and peat only "green" in the sense that they are renewable. In terms of climate change (which is the point of this discussion), these sources still release CO2, no?
Indeed. There is a campaign ongoing in Sweden to classify peat as fossil fuel as it takes thousands of years to recreate a peat bog. However that is how it happens to be classified in Sweden at this moment. If we didn't make waste out of oil, such as plastic bags, but paper bags etc. then waste would be "more"green than it is today. Of course a true recyclables would be preferred.
Except paper bags are far worse for the environment than plastic. The use more water, more energy to make, more energy to transport, more energy to trash, and more energy (and water) to recycle. They also can not be reused.
I personally use very few bags as I have cloth bags with me when I am shopping for food etc. A nit, paper bags can certainly be reused, I do it all the time for our recycling, which is kept in paper bags i the garage and sometimes for shopping.
More energy and water use in Sweden is less of a problem, as our energy is largely biofuel, hydro or nuclear, but of course it is better to use less energy. Water we have quite a lot of.
Plastics isn't biodegradable and paper is, but yes, you are right, this is not an easy good/bad choice.
I think the greenhouse effect is totally uncontroversial. To what extent the climate will change due to that is slighlty more scientifically controversial, but as uninformed lay person I'd say is fairly broad consensus.
Which green energy choices are economically feasible is much more controversial - there's counterintuitive things like - is it better to subsidize solar/wind while not really feasible to subsidize technology development or build natural gas plants (which are proven to be economically feasible and cleaner than oil I believe - but obviously still a fossil fuel).
For some reason the global warming crowd doesn't talk about the fact that the primary greenhouse gas is water vapor. CO2 only makes up something like 10%, and the human caused part only about 4% of that, which is 0.4% overall.
At least according to the Wikipedia “Greenhouse gas” article, it’s hard to measure exactly how much each gas contributes to the greenhouse effect, because different gases absorb and emit radiation at different frequencies.
Regardless of how you work out the proportions, there used to be a homeostasis, where the biological and physical processes that put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere balanced the processes that took them out. The additional CO₂, CH₄, and N₂O from human activity is upsetting that homeostasis.
But is it? Where for instance does Doug Keenan go wrong?
http://www.informath.org/media/a42.htm
(an essay originally published in the WSJ 'What is arguably the most important reason to doubt global warming can be explained in plain English.'.
if this is propaganda then this reporter that wrote this:
(Michael Marshall, environment reporter) and newscientist works for whoever pay the propaganda. make mental note. (for future reference)
I decided to take some time and read the sections on the climate being a chaotic system and, frankly, I'm still thoroughly unconvinced that it isn't one.
The main argument against it being a chaotic system is that the climate is a boundary condition system, determined by it's input and output energy. This does not satisfy me as an explanation because the sun, being the main input, is chaotic in it's energy output, as demonstrated by the unpredictability of the current lull. So if we can't predict the main input, why do we think that we can predict the behavior of something that has a chaotic input? It does not compute.
All of these discussion really miss the point though, which is that pollution of our environment is generally a bad idea. In other words, I agree with the sentiment but not the rationale.
The problem I have is the whole approach of the warmists, going beyond the basic question of are carbon emissions changing the climate.
It seems to me that nobody can show particularly convincingly that current/historical CO2 emissions are affecting the climate, hence why it's always 'the consensus is that....' rather than 'paper X conclusively showed that...'. But starting from an already shaky premise, we then move on to far shakier territory. Predicting how much the climate will warm, how much we'll have to reduce emissions by to stop the warmth, things which rely on dubious computer models. And then we get to what the effects will actually be, where the basic assumption that rising sea levels will cause more catastrophe than cap&trade etc is the just the beginning. Global warming becomes a sort of bogeyman, in which any and every undesirable environmental affect can be attributed to AGW. It's like someone just looked through a list of possible warming side-effects and wrote down any imaginable connection they could have to environmental trouble. Mooses disappearing in Canada? Warming. Hurricanes in the carribean? Warming. Famine? Disease? Drought? Overpopulation? Third world poverty? Colder weather in Britain? (we'd really love warmer weather) Warming.
Throw in the whole climage-gate scandal ('we admit that we no longer have the original data to show') and the usual 'recursive' nature of public-sector activity ('give us money to do research, and we will get results that show you need to give us more money to do research, and we will get results that show...')
It stinks. They want us to globally embrace the arbitrary for policy making. Which, AGW aside, is a horrible precedent to set for the future.
There are numerous studies establishing that the globe is warming with > 95% confidence.
The greenhouse effect as a phenomenon is also not debated, nor is the amount of CO2 we've put into the atmosphere.
None of these thing above are contested, they're all established facts.
It's possible that some other mysterious force is causing the warming, but if that's not the case, then greenhouse gasses are the most reasonable conclusion. I'd posit that advocates of a mysterious other force behind warming have the burden of explaining what it is.
The original article on Hacker News - from The Register - was a bit sensational, that's just their style, a tech tabloid.
To be honest, I don't think sun spots were exclusively to blame for Dickens era of cold weather in Europe. Wasn't there some talk about the Atlantic belt faltering as well? Perhaps the jet stream moved too.
You are right that it is not known for a fact that the Maunder sunspot minimum was responsible for the Little Ice Age recorded in Europe and elsewhere.
It started out as an interesting speculation and has remained there.
This was earlier than Dickens' time -- it was mid 1600s. Galileo and others first saw and drew sunspots in 1610 (due to the invention of the telescope). So their disappearance happened very close in time to their first definitive sighting (they had been seen earlier, but only huge ones, and not clearly, so it was not systematic at all, they were confused with planetary transits).
The original article in the Register was trash, actually. Utter trash.
You can really only know who is right after the fact, before that its all 'my model is more accurate than your model' bullshit.
I always feel like the 'rational' view point is that the climate will change for any number of reasons, some we control and some we don't. We should be prepared.
But folks who have bought into the Global Warming religion (which is to say they stepped away from the science and turned it into a political crusade) if this Solar event causes severe freezing across the northern hemisphere for decades it won't be the political zealots who get hung, it will be innocent bystander scientists, and science in general.
I liked jgc's response to people trying to recruit him to the 'anti-warming' side:
"I've received yet another email indicating that the author thinks I don't believe man is responsible for global warming. This comes about because of an insidious sort of tribalism that has turned conversations about climate change into a 'you're either with us or against us' situation."
This has been my experience as well when I try to discuss the science. People want me to come out as either 'pro-Warming' or 'anti-Warming' and I'm not either. I'm interested in the systems problem that global climate represents.
I see lots of evidence of global warming: Arctic sea ice melt, permafrost melt, growing season lengthening, earlier bird migration, bird overwintering, animal range changes, etc. etc. etc. What evidence do you see that it isn't happening?
So in all my postings here, and when I talk with folks in person, and at conferences and the topic comes up. I start with "The climate changes, we know it changes because we have lots of evidence in the geologic record that it has been very different than today, both colder and hotter. This process is continuous."
And yet you, MaysonL ask "What evidence do you see that it isn't happening?"
When I had stated categorically that it was happening. The only solid difference between my position on global warming and the 'alarmists' that I can find is that I don't believe that humans can control the global climate. I agree we can change our contribution to its change, but I strongly disagree that if we eliminate our contribution that change will stop happening.
I'm a strong supporter of climate science, and I try to keep an open mind to avoid confirmational bias and I seek out conflicting data in an effort to 'keep myself honest' that I'm looking as all the data and not just data that supports my point of view.
And still in some groups if I ask "what is your opinion of this conflicting report?" or "what do you think of Boyd's iron hypothesis?" or any question which reveals that I don't think humans can control the climate, the cry 'Denier! Denier! Denier!' is raised with metaphorical pitch forks and clubs.
Its unsatisfying to just shrug my shoulders and leave but my experience is that anything said once the cry goes up is effectively white noise. So if you have any suggestions on how I might state my position without triggering the 'denier! denier!' mode I'm all ears.
My conclusion has been that the models are not accurate enough to say with any sort of certainty, since the 90's. It's pretty easy to decide when you look at how they're supposed to work from a physical perspective.
And that's what it seems like to me. But everyone writes and discusses it so authoritatively that you almost feel silly if you question it.
In computer science, no one seems to say "This is a fact" unless they know (or can prove) it is. Doesn't seem to hold true for climate change, which is what frustrates me.
In computer science, no one seems to say "This is a fact" unless they know (or can prove) it is.
If you mean theoretical papers and such, you're probably right. But that's not the case for practical work. Take a look to the "ORM is an Antipattern" story, currently in the front page..
The scientific consensus is that humans have had a significant, adverse impact on the global climate -- this conclusion is presented with scientific certainty.
In the absence of any better way of ascertaining objective truth about the world than the scientific method, I choose to accept the fact of consensus -- that a large number of scientists have failed to falsify the theory -- as being a meaningful indication about the truth of global warming.
EDIT -- I assume with your reference to Einstein, you mean that the whole world was wrong about the motion of physical bodies, with their notions from Newtonian models, until relativity came along? If so, you may care to read this: http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
It's about the difference between a wrong theory and an incomplete one.
Just curious, how is climate change falsifiable? What we have is a lot of data and a lot of models. We don't have any way to test this data and models, no? Furthermore, we don't know if we know everything about the subject, although we would appear to know a lot.
So the only way to falsify it is if new data comes out? But for something so complicated, future data is likely a crapshoot? We can only estimate future data based on current models, which may or may not be able to model reality well, given how complex and nonlinear the entire system is?
It seems really difficult to falsify the idea of global warming.
The only way I could see it being falsified is if we got access to a new source of historical data that somehow was more accurate than all existing sources (which seems unlikely) or by waiting to see what happens and obtaining new data that way (which might give an unpleasant answer).
I'm not sure how the concept of a theory being falsifiable applies when you can't really run repeated controlled experiments.
You're right -- it's an established fact that the median temperatures have increased over a period of time. What would need to be falsified is the theory of anthropogenic global warming -- i.e., that the warming is caused by humans.
"It has been often said that the science is settled on the issue of CO2 and climate. Let me put this claim to rest with a simple one-letter proof that it is false.
The letter is s, the one that changes model into models. If the science were settled, there would be precisely one model, and it would be in agreement with measurements.
Alternatively, one may ask which one of the twenty-some models settled the science so that all the rest could be discarded along with the research funds that have kept those models alive.
We can take this further. Not a single climate model predicted the current cooling phase. If the science were settled, the model (singular) would have predicted it."
> Consensus, although comforting, is irrelevant in hard science. Particularly so when uncertainty is high, as in climate change modelling.
When you say "irrelevant," do you mean to say that the attempts of thousands of scientists to use the scientific method to repeat findings which constitute the body of research -- and consequently fail to falsify the theory of anthropogenic global warming -- do you mean to say that this is irrelevant?
Consensus is not merely opinion -- it's opinion informed by the results of experimental and observational science. I'm not sure what else you consider to be "hard" science.
EDIT: okay, this guy mrvc deleted everything he posted here, which were quite a few comments to the effect that the theory of global warming is comprised of guesses, drastic underestimation of uncertainty in the data, and propaganda.
He's probably getting downmodded, which isn't right. Don't downmod someone just because you disagree. Upmod what you agree with, and leave what you disagree with alone. Reserve downmods for stupid comments.
There is "flag" for stupid comments. If I turn the steering wheel to the right to make the right turn I'd expect to make the left turn when turning it to the left, not stopping the car. Symmetrical controls imply symmetrical actions.
The moderation is not symmetrical - it only goes to -4, but has no limit in the other direction.
And it doesn't matter what you think it implies. The reality is that the custom here is not to downmod comments you disagree with. It wasn't always so, even pg at one time thought differently. But experience shows that the discussion is much better when this custom is followed.
Symmetry is symmetry, no matter what I do think of it. If you make symmetrical actions for asymmetrical intents, that is just bad UI.
I've had enough comments downvoted purely on disagreement (including the one above. Or was it "stupid"?) to not to buy your "custom" argument.
I'd love to see more engineering efforts going towards improving our standard of living regardless of what the climate does. By all means, worry about whether the planet is getting warmer or cooler or a bit of both dependent on the place...but let's find a way to live regardless of CO2-induced warming, sunspot rarity or some other, unforeseen dramatic change.
A lot of the political and societal measures are aimed at making energy more expensive, reducing consumption and promoting a rather righteous view of how people should live. Why not spend the same effort to promote technologies that allow people to live however they want in a way that is sustainable regardless of the environment?
I don't think the aim of politics is to make people's live more miserable. Energy is being made more expensive to account for the externalities . The markets can then figure out how to make us live well with the proper energy costs.
What kind of tech promotion do you imagine, other than more efficient energy production and consumption?
I do genuinely believe that a lot of the reporting and comment on climate-related issues is a form of frenzy by the people involved - not rationally thought-out but a tendency on one side to claim that nothing's wrong and everything's fine (for optimists) and on the other to claim that everyone's going to die and terrible things will happen (for pessimists). The debate is too polarised to be useful, or even interesting, any more. Mixed-in with that, there are politicians, corporations and pressure groups seeking to distort the issue so as to create more power or profit.
I'd love to see more promotion given to sustainable agriculture that's tolerant of temperature drops or rises, city-structures that re-use the heat that they give off for something productive, research into how to build and live effectively in regions subject to hurricanes or earthquakes that don't come down to rebuild-everything-every-30-years, flood defences that are something more than 'build-a-wall', etc. I'm not saying that these things don't exist, but we spend so much time talking about how to change societies (unfeasibly, in my opinion) so as to mitigate climate change and not very much on what to do to mitigate that change into sustainable habitats.
"The debate is too polarised to be useful, or even interesting, any more"
Except that is probably part of the strategy - FUD. If you give up, the people in control are free do act as they please.
How do you propose to give incentives for development of those things you suggest? Don't you think more expensive energy would make people build more efficient things, recycle better, create cleaner energy?
It is part of the strategy - and one I have no heart to fight. There is simply no point in listening when the signal-to-noise ratio is too low and your chances of effecting the outcome are minimal.
Yes, expensive energy may do that - but is it the best way to do it? I would have thought that anyone who manages to do those things would probably make money from it regardless of whether the government takes a cut or not.
Yep, and we still don't understand what causes ice ages.
Let's stop and think about that for a minute. We're still pretty darn ignorant of the climate. Look at a plot of temperature over the last mere million years. Climate scientists will at this point tell you they know all about the variation over the last few decades. But point to the huge swings that occur on ten-thousand-year timescales and periodically freeze the entire Earth over and they'll say "Yeah, well y'know, that could be a number of things..."
Climate science is a dodgy form of science. Too many model parameters, too few observations.
It's all well and good to come up with a model for what the climate should do based on basic physics. The main trouble with climate prediction is that we don't have enough data points to check whether the models are really correct.
I do physical modelling for a living, but I know not to trust a fitted-but-untested model any further than I can comfortably spit a rat.
My friend writes:
Also, the 10-12 year cycle of sunspots does not have a significant effect on climate. In fact, the climate scientists desperately trying to find other causes of global warming investigated them thoroughly, studies show that the change in solar insolation to be roughly one and a half orders of magnitude smaller than needed to be comparable to the current temperature changes. The temperature decrease from even the little ice age was less than a third of the temperature increase we've already experienced, and you know we're in for another three times that best case scenario. A little ice age now would be a wonderful coincidence, but would hardly change the dire outlook as the heating well surpasses it. That fortuitous event would only effect the price we put on carbon by ~1/31/3.
Right, so there was a grand minima between 1645-1715, which has been widely attributed to the last mini-ice age and yet there is no way that this one can do the same because our models do not predict it, even though our models couldn't predict the current grand minima in the first place. From a logical standpoint, this argument makes absolutely no sense and suggests that the model is incorrect.
Now before you jump in to mock me, it's just that I don't have time to keep really up-to-date with climate change anymore. Are we really getting warmer? Are we cooling? What's causing it?
For each article I read that tells me one thing, a few days later another comes out and tells me the previous one was wrong and here's why.
I hope that this article's right and being New Scientist I have a lot more faith in it. I just wish I had more time to understand all the factors of climate change for myself.