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What's Really Warming the World?

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Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#151

Post by RyanZAG »

conistonwater wrote: post #133
RyanZAG wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Why do you insist that the economic incentive is the only, the primary, and most relevant incentive there? Surely you must understand that a lot of people want to do a good job , which in this case means doing good science (which is an abstract concept, unrelated to people's personal motivations). Wanting to do a good job that stands up to scrutiny of one's peers is as much of an incentive as anything. Haven't you ex…

> Historically, science has got a lot of things right.

Can you name any historical outcome of science that did not align in some way with the financials? I cannot name a single scientist who ever researched himself out of a job. Yet that is what would happen to climate science researchers if they were able to prove climate change isn't real. It's unprecedented and I don't think using the historical track record of financially beneficial science is a good argument.

As for doing a good job -- sure, I try do a good job always. But that is entirely within the confines of my job. I'm not going to do a good job that would directly get me fired. Most people wouldn't. Most climate science researchers wouldn't.

Economic incentive is usually not the primary incentive, but in the case of climate science, there is a massive peer incentive to prove that climate change is an enormous risk. Saying something like "I don't think climate change matters" is going to get you snide comments from your peers and nobody is going to want to co-author papers with you. It's a big problem of science and exists in many other areas too. Politics matters.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#152

Post by pg314 »

command_codes wrote: post #106

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…

> 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

Scientists in the past thought that the earth was flat. That doesn't mean that present scientists that believe that the earth is round are wrong.

Science evolves, usually in the direction of greater understanding.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#153

Post by uberrr »

seizethecheese wrote: post #86
uberrr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it interesting that a self professed lawyer would create an account on a technology news website during an election year and regularly post against government regulation. How do you have so much time to argue against climate change and other "liberal" topics?

Please don't attack the messenger if you have nothing to say about the message.

Is questioning a person's motivations ad hominem? How else could we have a discussion about potential "shaping" in online pseudonymous discussions?

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#154

Post by acqq »

izend wrote: post #67
corradio wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. However, it's hard to argue with the speed at which this warming occurs. It's never seen before if you look at all the records we have. That's what's worrying.

The end of the last ice age had much faster warming, see: http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-clim...

It wasn't "much faster" then at all. First, the work you've sent doesn't have the temperature graph, it's the "oxygen isotope record" on the y axis. Second, it's true that the last glacial period had much colder climate, but the changes were across a thousand of years for a few degrees, now we can have that amount of changes over a hundred years if nothing is done -- some ten times faster!

And at that time there were no 7 billion people and no world economy that would be affected.

Also, the temperatures that we can reach are going in the direction that can be higher than those recorded in the last 5 million years! If we "do something" we can stay at one or two degrees, not crossing that target. If we "don't do anything" it can be 4 (or even 6) degrees warming, 2 (or 4) degrees more than the maximum(!) in the last 5 million years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#/media/File...

That's why there's so much worry.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#155

Post by AlexB138 »

vectorjohn wrote: post #127
jjoonathan wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I like the response peer review or STFU. Maybe PRoSTFU. What is that technique the fake-reasonable argument makers use? It's like a Gish gallop but slower. Maybe that's the best description of it.

The Gish Trot, then?

I joke, but the whole point of the Gish Gallop is to rapid fire weak arguments. I don't think it exactly fits.

As an aside, does anyone know of a good source that categorizes and explains these modern underhanded argument techniques?

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#156

Post by ScottBurson »

RyanZAG wrote: post #99
euyyn wrote: 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…

There is some risk of institutionalized bias such as you are suggesting. The possibility should not be dismissed entirely.

But I don't think it's true that every scientist expressing a belief in anthropogenic global warming has a conflict of interest. Some number of them are tenured professors, for example. This is a good example of the value of the tenure system in academia.

As for the papers in Nature and Science, well, I haven't read them, but given the extreme politicization of the issue, it doesn't surprise me that the authors are tending to omit qualifications and caveats, since many people who want to dismiss the evidence would pick up on these -- as we're seeing in this very discussion.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#157

Post by JoBrad »

olavgg wrote: post #83
rectang wrote: 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

This is what we can do https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade It may not be cost effective today, but it may be later. There are bigger threats out there than the current climate change. Antibiotics losing effectiveness is one, yet is seems like almost all countries in the world still ignores that fact.

The pro is that it is a single thing that we can do no matter who believes what.

The negative is that it allows us to bypass one problem of pollution (climate change) but does noting to address the problem itself, which has other side effects that also harm humans.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#158

Post by pg314 »

olavgg wrote: post #83
rectang wrote: 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

This is what we can do https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade It may not be cost effective today, but it may be later. There are bigger threats out there than the current climate change. Antibiotics losing effectiveness is one, yet is seems like almost all countries in the world still ignores that fact.

> There are bigger threats out there than the current climate change. Antibiotics losing effectiveness is one, yet is seems like almost all countries in the world still ignores that fact.

I'm not sure antibiotic resistance is a greater threat to humanity than global warming. Sure, people dying from simple infections and pretty much all surgery becoming very risky is bad, but humanity has survived for thousands of years without antibiotics. We've never experienced a 5+ degree increase in global temperatures. Relying on unproven climate engineering seems risky.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#159

Post by euyyn »

mememachine wrote: post #143
euyyn wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's fine, given that I nor that commenter have the data. But if you believe your critique against the science of the matter is something the whole set of climate scientists happen to have overlooked for decades, the burden is on you to read the actual papers and find out if you're right or not. If you're right and all of them have overlooked it, you'll have material for a hell of a paper yourself: There's noth…

Of course I don't think all climate scientists would've over looked it, I think probably the friction is between climate scientists and people who report on (and thus people who end up talking about) climate scientists. I think its perfectly possible that the results arent as dramatic or causally linked as theyre portrayed to be, and I have yet to see a genuine consensus to prove me wrong. And lets not pretend one or…

Agreed: you have to read the papers, or literature reviews by experts, to convince yourself. I'm a physicist and when it comes to physics, the articles journalists write might as well be completely made up.

The AGW papers I've read, though, are very solid, and more sophisticated than I expected.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#160

Post by RyanZAG »

conistonwater wrote: post #137
RyanZAG wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's lots of evidence to show that climate science deserves a lot of funding -- our world kind of depends on it. Believe me, I'm not in disagreement with you there. However, I think there is a massive causal link there. If you're looking to do your PHD and your advisor tells you to research climate change because of all the grant money, that seems like a massive link to me. Then once you have your PHD on climate c…

Then in what way does any of that condemn climate science? The PhD student in your example decides to study climate science because a committee of scientists somewhere decided climate science is objectively important enough to get people to study it. Seems okay to me.

Yes, seems okay to me too. It's how you'd expect it to work. But now that we're in the position we're in, there is a financial incentive for climate science researchers to never research anything to disprove the basis for those committees to keep giving them money. And any non-climate science researcher would never be taken seriously. And any climate science researcher who found evidence against climate change would be heavily incentivized not to publish. And it's why it's not convincing for climate scientists to tell you that climate science exists.

Although really what I was trying to get at originally is simply that multiple climate change scientists endorsing each other on the existence of climate change does not make their work any more convincing than just a single author in a good journal discussing Agile. It went on a major windy path, but hopefully you at least understand my point even if you disagree.

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