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What's Really Warming the World?

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Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#111
post #99
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about a pile of papers that have been accepted at Nature and Science over a span of decades, not a paper about how Agile is the best programming methodology.

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…

Why would any climate scientist be out of a job? The climate is constantly undergoing changes that include more than temperature. Air and water currents, precipitation, movement of glaciers, etc.

I don't agree with the down vote applied to your post. However, the rhetorical device of claiming an opponent has ulterior motives is frowned upon on HN.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#112
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say it's calculable and I agree. What's make you think it isn't calculated? Sorry if I came out as obnoxious, but "you should be able to calculate that" is a veiled accusation that it is in fact not calculated, as if no scientists take this seriously. "How unlucky we would have been to see this data of the past, if a spike in temperatures had actually happened then" is P(data|hypothesis), the frequentist argument…

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 woul…

I don't have the data, and it'd be a cool trivia to know. I don't think corradio said "incredibly unlucky" because he just flipped a coin. Rather because if the probability weren't so, global warming, as an unprecedented thing, wouldn't be discussed outside of scientific circles yet.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#113
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wait a second: with that kind of logic, how would you distinguish "economic reasons" from "scientific reasons"? What, to your mind, distinguishes genuine scientific discoveries from "stuff people believe because they want a job"? Every successful scientific discovery ever got/kept someone a job, and sometimes even a Nobel prize. I can't help but notice that your logic works on every single scientific field, without e…

I don't that's true.

For an example that would apply to computer science: "99% of computer scientists agree that computers are the future of mankind". I don't think you even need to do a study here, it's obvious that around 99% of computer scientists would believe that, because it's what their lives are built around. Climate change scientists' lives are built around the existence of climate change, and so obviously they'd have the same beliefs.

Where the value of a scientific paper comes in is within the discipline: how do a I best use this computer to accomplish something? How do I best cut down on the effects of carbon on the atmosphere? If I increase oxygen density, what will happen? Regardless of the answer to these questions, the people involved will be able to continue their lives. They're disconnected with economic reasons because no matter the answer to the question, there is more work for them. Economic reasons come in when the results of a study would directly threaten the livelihood of the scientist. In that case, we can't just assume that because all the scientists agree that it's automatically perfect.

> In the end, the only proper way to do this is with arguments based on merit, rather than perceived motivations of other people.

Correct! My point was more about how the Agile paper is disparaged. I have more reason to believe the results of an accredited and published Agile paper than I do a paper on the very reason an entire field of study exists.

My personal belief that climate change is real and a huge problem is irrelevant here: I still find the Agile paper to be more convincing. The only reason I believe in climate change is because I've checked the science myself to the best of my ability, and not because of the peer reviewed papers which I believe would say the same exact thing even if climate change does not exist. Hopefully that makes it clearer.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#114
A far more interesting question for me is the system response.

Let's stipulate, for the purposes of the next bit of discussion, that it a fact that human activity is changing the balance of gases in the atmosphere and causing a net increase in warmth. So the planet is warming up and up and up.

Our planet is a system, and by that I mean it has a number of dynamic processes that all run along that are being influenced by other processes. The basis of a climate model is to capture all of those processes and include them in the model so that given changes to a particular part of the system you can predict how the other parts will respond.

To Vivek's point, the "best" model would let you take all of the data you can get and put that in for the various modeled parameters at any given time and get back an answer. But we don't have one of those models.

For example, none of the IPC's models allow for an ice age even though we know we have had ice ages. I haven't looked recently but the literature on what might be the factor behind the cycle of warm and cold cycles is still unknown.

Second, we have ice cores which suggest that with much lower CO2 levels the planet was warmer than it is now, and which much higher CO2 levels it was cooler than it is now. As a result, the research we've done, the models we've produced, are accurate for a small set of conditions which we have been observing for a very short period of time (even giving credit for the first Sumerian tablets).

We also know that there have been periods of time where this planet was unable to support human life. Not that we hadn't evolved or emerged yet, completely unable to exist. Once, like Mars today, our atmosphere was nearly all CO2!

And the really important bit, we don't know how to control climate change, it is pretty clear we can dump a lot of CO2 into the air and affect it but we don't have the necessary understanding, and models, needed to drive it in one direction or another. As a result, if we cut our carbon foot print to zero, we are still 100% at risk of extinction from climate change. Only then it will be due to one of the other things that we're not in control of doing it instead of us. There isn't a climate scientist out there who has ever gone on the record to say "do this and it will 'end' global warming." They can't because we don't know enough to know what would drive the climate to stay in it's current state forever.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#115
post #99
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about a pile of papers that have been accepted at Nature and Science over a span of decades, not a paper about how Agile is the best programming methodology.

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…

> 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.

1. That's a bit like saying if powered aviation goes away tomorrow (as in, it is to be completely proven to be impossible), every single engineer at Boeing would be out of a job.

2. The incentive structure doesn't work that way. If you could show that global warming isn't real, yes, all the other climate scientists will lose their job, but you will be rich beyond your dreams. Every billion-dollar petro-business will shower you with praise and contracts. You will be hailed as a savior of mankind, saving a million jobs and preventing policy mistakes that would have cost many billion dollars. The stake has never been higher.

So who's brainwashing all those French, Japanese, Chinese climate researchers to conspire with NASA against their own interest?

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#116
post #4

What makes me mad about these kinds of data based climate change arguments is that they don't engage with the data in an honest way. The huge problem is 1880 was one of the coldest years in history. That cold period was caused by volcanism, several volcanos erupted causing a cold period that lasted from the 1600s to the late 1800s. This period is known as the little ice age. The worst of this period was in 1816 which…

Kindly see the longer time period:

https://xkcd.com/1732/

"When the people say ''the climate has changed before'' these are the kinds of changes they're talking about"

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#117

Regrettably at the moment cannot parse through this entire thread but surely proponents are aware that global temperature seems to have fluctuated within historical record, and not just the Little Ice Age Extending further, we know that paleoclimates could be radically different and have oscillated. I knew this even in elementary school Is Earth's climate changing? Of course; and that is because of course it will. Sh…

> Should we tax ourselves to feel good about it? Respectfully, I think you might be entirely missing the point of why people want to do something about climate change. > Then there is always curiously left out the consideration, now forgotten depending on your birthyear, that scientists of a recent generation were up in arms about global cooling instead It is not forgotten, but it is untrue: see for example the discu…

Climate change destroyed civilizations. Any student of history knows this, and that, without even to tease apart the mysterious circumstances of, say the Bronze Age - it is as simple as Greenland getting too cold.

The impulse just "to do" something is a religious impulse.

Global cooling is an ancillary matter; it doesn't change the point. After all, the globe really will cool sometime in the future

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#118
post #45
post #8

> The only real question is: What are we going to do about it? Zilch, so long as politicians corrupted by the fossil fuel industry are in power. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -- Upton Sinclair

There is a substantial percentage of the electorate who are ideologically opposed to the very notion of climate change. They're ideologically opposed to conservation, they're ideologically opposed to large scale government interventions for any purpose, they are specifically opposed to any sort of tax so a carbon tax is right out, and they are even ideologically opposed not simply to environmentalism, but to (it seem…

Calling it ideological blinders is an easy dismissal, and also one that, IMO, isn't terribly useful.

I think what you're really dealing with is cognitive dissonance: Accepting what the science says on climate probably means accepting that you yourself could be be contributing to a situation that could be a serious problem for your children and grandchildren. It probably also implies making some lifestyle modifications that may feel severe, such as cutting way back on high-carbon activities like driving and meat consumption. In a situation like that, which option is less daunting: Accepting the consensus opinion of climate scientists and all the worry that implies, or going with the denialists so that you can get back to business as usual?

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 constructin…

You'll see someone like this in every global warming discussion that happens with an educated audience. They'll put on all the plumage of reasonable dissent: "I don't think that the argument for AGW takes into account ." In an audience of non-experts, they will go unanswered, and appear to have a point, until you spend an hour or two digging through the relevant IPCC reports and discover that not only has been invest…

A trap most of us will fall in to is to assume intents of the anonymous strangers with which we talk on these message boards. In serious academic-ish discussion, I think we should stick as closely to the topic at-hand and avoid pointing out patterns of argumentation where we're easily led into the abyss of us-vs-them and accusations of manipulation. (Manipulation might be rampant, but hard to objectively define anonymously.)

The GP does some finger pointing ("you know that they are not being honest with you.") which might have detracted subsequent (and valid) questions that could be answered in a more pleasant sense by other HNers. We should set an example, if we're feeling superior.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#120
post #99
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about a pile of papers that have been accepted at Nature and Science over a span of decades, not a paper about how Agile is the best programming methodology.

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…

> 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.

Your mental model of how grants get distributed to scientists is incorrect.

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