What's Really Warming the World?

Yes, SOX were regulated to mitigate acid rain, and particulates for health reasons. But then China starting burning massive amounts of dirty coal, with virtually no emissions controls. And that reduced global warming.

The problem you're thinking of is when you display two different kinds of data on the same axis and so there's two degrees of freedom in how you choose their relative scaling and offset. This makes it very easy to show "obvious" relationships. But the data here all has a very natural sense in which they share the same axis: they're all temperatures of the world, or simulated values thereof. So the choice in scaling and offset makes little to no difference in how the data is perceived.

You're criticizing what you consider to be an oversimplification, and your criticism is itself based on an oversimplification.

It seems you're implying that the argument being presented is basically just, "The world is getting warmer, aaaa!!!" There's much more to it than that. In fact, even the article you're criticizing provides a more nuanced justification than that, which opens you up to criticism for constructing a strawman argument. The real argument is, "Researchers have built detailed models to try and understand how the climate behaves, and sussed out many, if not all, the factors that influence global climate, and based on those models we can make certain worrying inferences about the current state of things and how we expect them to develop in the future."

Those models do a very good job of hindcasting global climate over the period for which we have good, detailed data. This period admittedly and unfortunately does not cover much of the Little Ice Age. In climate science, as everywhere else, the GIGO principle applies. But since we do still get non-garbage out when we put non-garbage in, that leaves us in a state where they seem to be our most reliable source of information. If you want to challenge them, it's not enough to point out various historical events that are primarily hard to explain due to lack of data. You need to be able to propose a better model.

Concrete example: Nobody threw Newton out the window just because, despite all the myriad places where his model worked stunningly well, there were a few things it couldn't explain. They waited until Einstein came up with a model that explained everything Newton's model could handle and more. And then they used that in some spots, but still mostly just stuck with Newton because the math is easier and accurate enough for almost any practical use. That's the way science works for physics, and that's the way it works for climatology, too.

Im not making an accusation that climate scientists wouldnt calculate this, because its not something thats in the content of the paper were discussing. My accusation is that you (or whoever i replied to) didnt have that data.

At the same time I wouldn't be surprised if there were climate scientists who chose to avoid these sorts of calculations.

Also, the p-value might tell you whether or not an event like this would literally be one of your samples, but its not whats going to tell you whether or not a reconstruction from these samples contains information about these events. Although I guess its not much of a distinction.

While that's true, there is another issue here. If global warming went away tomorrow -- as in, it were to be completely proven to not exist -- every single climate change scientist would be out of a job. They'd literally have to start over their entire professional career from scratch with almost zero chance of getting any kind of funding. This includes everyone who peer reviews the papers too.

Meanwhile if Agile is proven to be terrible, it would be a huge boon for those writing about programming methodology as they could easily invent a new one and sell that.

So there is far more economic reason for almost every scientist involved to argue that global warming is definitely happening, while there is almost no economic reason for a computer scientist to argue it. So I don't think sheer quantity of papers in journals is necessarily a proof that global warming papers are any better than Agile papers in good journals.

EDIT: Instantly downvoted on posting! I've struck a nerve. That, to me, proves that people have a lot more to hide than they let on. I've certainly never been downvoted when discussing an Agile paper.

I was also thinking about the papers on Agile vs global warming, and the Agile papers generally read as far more balanced and generally go into much deeper detail than any global warming paper. So I think I'd personally trust the Agile papers more because they do at least have significant discussion on the negatives of the approach and generally cite negative studies themselves.