Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Earth Day and the Hockey Stick: A Singular Message

blogs.scientificamerican.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 91 posts

Re: Earth Day and the Hockey Stick: A Singular Message

#51

Post by specialist »

southern_cross wrote: post #37
js8 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, despite your claim: "I think that alarmism has hurt climate science ever since the 1960s." Only one person in the above quotes is talking about climate (10, 18). And you could certainly find 10 climate "skeptics" who have been horribly wrong in the 90s. I don't understand who is exactly being hurt by alarmism. Most people choose to ignore it anyway. Maybe you could provide some example where overzealous appl…

If you've been keeping up with such things, then you know that there is currently a move to shut down many coal and nuclear plants, much of which is due to the economics of natural gas, but also due to environmental concerns. However, in parts of the U.S. there is also a movement to prevent the building of natural gas plants and the pipelines that feed them, again due to environmental concerns. If this path continues…

Reality is having a chilling effect on the fossil fuel industry?

Re: Earth Day and the Hockey Stick: A Singular Message

#52

Post by IncRnd »

f_allwein wrote: post #5
sgt101 wrote: post #4

A good thing would be to see the graph up to today - am I right that the article only shows the graph from 20 years ago and then some affirmation of the validity of that artefact? If so does anyone have a link to the picture up to 2018?

NASA has one up to 2017. It does not look pretty. https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/

My first question, looking at that graph, is "how does that graph calculate a global temperature for an entire year?" Do you know the actual source of the global temperature readings going back to 1880? Sure, the webpage says the dataset came from https://climate.nasa.gov/system/internal_resources/details/o..., but where did they come from?

These are the first 10 lines of the linked dataset, showing land and sea temperatures for the entire earth from 1880 to 1889.

  1880	-0.19	-0.11
  1881	-0.1	-0.14
  1882	-0.1	-0.17
  1883	-0.19	-0.21
  1884	-0.28	-0.24
  1885	-0.31	-0.26
  1886	-0.32	-0.27
  1887	-0.35	-0.27
  1888	-0.18	-0.27
  1889	-0.11	-0.26
I'm curious where this data originated - and that curiosity has nothing to do with belief in or disbelief of climate change.

Re: Earth Day and the Hockey Stick: A Singular Message

#53

Post by thaumaturgy »

tzs wrote: post #42
southern_cross wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So every time you get in your car and start personally spewing excess CO2, that's a crime against humanity? Or you fire up your oil or gas furnace? Or you eat a burger or pretty much anything else produced by Big Ag? Or you build a concrete structure? And so on and so forth. As the old saying goes: "Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones."

Is there a recognized name for the fallacy southern_cross is using here?

It could be "Argument of the Beard", "Causal Reductionism", or "Fallacy of Composition" (http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html).

In any case, you're right to point out that it's troll behavior to dump all of the effects of industrial pollution and the resultant politics on a single individual's shoulders, as though one person would have a measurable impact on global climate.

~southern_cross is just framing their argument as, "if you haven't killed yourself yet, then you can't care about the environment", and that's an easy argument to ignore.

Re: Earth Day and the Hockey Stick: A Singular Message

#54

Post by IncRnd »

tzs wrote: post #48
southern_cross wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called "Avoiding taking personal responsibility by trying to point the finger of blame at others." And it's something that children and immature adults often do. For those who are so torn up about the situation, nothing's stopping you from finding a piece of cheap real estate out in the middle of nowhere (maybe by a nice stream or a lake), building a yurt or whatever and then just living off the land. That's the…

So by your logic, because I have on occasion urinated outside in my backyard, where some small part of my urine will perhaps find its way to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I cannot object to Victoria, BC's dumping of 21 million gallons a day of raw sewage into it without being a hypocrite? Your argument is based on the assumption that if X and Y and Z all have a particular bad consequence, then X and Y and Z are all equ…

> if X and Y and Z all have a particular bad consequence, then X and Y and Z are all equally bad

> That's not valid reasoning. I'm curious if it has a name.

The type of reasoning you describe is called a false equivalence.

Re: Earth Day and the Hockey Stick: A Singular Message

#55

Post by sgt101 »

IncRnd wrote: post #52
f_allwein wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NASA has one up to 2017. It does not look pretty. https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/

My first question, looking at that graph, is "how does that graph calculate a global temperature for an entire year?" Do you know the actual source of the global temperature readings going back to 1880? Sure, the webpage says the dataset came from https://climate.nasa.gov/system/internal_resources/details/o... , but where did they come from? These are the first 10 lines of the linked dataset, showing land and sea tem…

I believe in climate change, but I am very much with you on the curiosity. Is this a long running carefully curated experiment or is this a case of data science - many experiments carefully integrated with confounding and conflating factors managed out of the picture?

Re: Earth Day and the Hockey Stick: A Singular Message

#56

Post by dash2 »

stareatgoats wrote: post #6

Much as I agree that fossil fuel burning is a horrendous thing that has sent us on a life-threatening trajectory, I also think this narrative is overly simplified. The fight to minimize fossil fuel would benefit from a more realistic (i.e. humble) approach IMO. Doubting if Thomas Mann will be the person to do that though. To be clear, climate science has come a long way and has shown beyond any reasonable doubt that…

Heh. You mean Michael Mann. Thomas Mann was the German novelist.

Re: Earth Day and the Hockey Stick: A Singular Message

#57

Post by SiempreViernes »

IncRnd wrote: post #52
f_allwein wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NASA has one up to 2017. It does not look pretty. https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/

My first question, looking at that graph, is "how does that graph calculate a global temperature for an entire year?" Do you know the actual source of the global temperature readings going back to 1880? Sure, the webpage says the dataset came from https://climate.nasa.gov/system/internal_resources/details/o... , but where did they come from? These are the first 10 lines of the linked dataset, showing land and sea tem…

To be precise, these are global averages, so from this alone it is clear the numbers aren't measurements but rather the output of some analysis.

The linked file is simply the analysis output, the source is the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, presumably their GISTEMP dataset (since that's the one about global average surface temperature).

The original GISTEMP analysis is documented here: https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha00700d.html

with later refinements found elsewhere on the GISS site.

In brief they simply use weather station data, and build their global average from that. They also talk about change in the average rather than the absolute value, which makes sense since you are then much less sensitive to the absolute calibration error of each station.

Then they do a lot of statistics on it to compensate for lack of coverage etc etc, read it yourself if 30 year old statistics papers are interesting to you.

Re: Earth Day and the Hockey Stick: A Singular Message

#58

Post by Certhas »

assblaster wrote: post #18
SiempreViernes wrote: post #17

So the history of climate change goes something like: confusion about overall sign in the 1960's, mounting evidence for warming due to CO_2 in 1970's, consensus about overall warming caused by human CO_2 emission in the eighties, and then clarifying in the details since then. The fact that there still isn't mainstream discussion about how society must change, but rather eternal growth society is still the default tar…

I think that alarmism has hurt climate science ever since the 1960s. Past mistakes matter because people generally won't trust the naysayers when they've been proven wrong so obviously that grade school children won't trust them. From https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/04/21/18-examples-of-the-sp... >Here are 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) s…

Were some people wrong about the limits of resources? Yes. Are resources therefore limitless? No.

Did some theorists dramatically underestimate the complexity of the world and rely too much on simple models in the 70s? Yes. Did scientists learn their lesson? Yes. Nobody's been doing that shit for decades.

Even so, in your "alarmism" list:

> “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”

10.000 deaths a year are attributable to air pollution in London alone. That is despite the widespread introduction of environmental measures that reduced the pollution this quote is warning about:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/15/nearly-9...

In high pollution areas, regulation and cutting emissions has drastically improved health:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Triangle_(region)

Coal combustion in China’s power plants causes an estimated 250,000 deaths per year. according to the IEA (which is _far_ from an activist/alarmist organization. On the contrary it's been hilariously underestimating renewables: https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/931869221386104832).

> “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity_loss

"The current rate of global diversity loss is estimated to be 100 to 1000 times higher than the (naturally occurring) background extinction rate."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity#Species_loss_rate...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/18/warning-...

"Three-quarters of flying insects in nature reserves across Germany have vanished in 25 years."

Re: Earth Day and the Hockey Stick: A Singular Message

#59

Post by IncRnd »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #57
IncRnd wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first question, looking at that graph, is "how does that graph calculate a global temperature for an entire year?" Do you know the actual source of the global temperature readings going back to 1880? Sure, the webpage says the dataset came from https://climate.nasa.gov/system/internal_resources/details/o... , but where did they come from? These are the first 10 lines of the linked dataset, showing land and sea tem…

To be precise, these are global averages , so from this alone it is clear the numbers aren't measurements but rather the output of some analysis. The linked file is simply the analysis output, the source is the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, presumably their GISTEMP dataset (since that's the one about global average surface temperature). The original GISTEMP analysis is documented here: https://pubs.giss.nasa.g…

Thank you for that, but if you look once more, you will see that you didn't answer my question.

Re: Earth Day and the Hockey Stick: A Singular Message

#60

Post by SiempreViernes »

sgt101 wrote: post #55
IncRnd wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first question, looking at that graph, is "how does that graph calculate a global temperature for an entire year?" Do you know the actual source of the global temperature readings going back to 1880? Sure, the webpage says the dataset came from https://climate.nasa.gov/system/internal_resources/details/o... , but where did they come from? These are the first 10 lines of the linked dataset, showing land and sea tem…

I believe in climate change, but I am very much with you on the curiosity. Is this a long running carefully curated experiment or is this a case of data science - many experiments carefully integrated with confounding and conflating factors managed out of the picture?

The latter, its simply weather station data carefully examined, see my other comment.

I guess you could do an actual global measurement if you put a satellite fairly far out with capable of measuring the IR and optical. Then you could define a black body effective temperature, but I'm not sure that straightforwardly tells us about surface temperatures.

Post reply on HN