171–180 of 247 posts
And they are trying to convince me using charts with a truncated y axis? How about doing it with charts that are not misleading?
The charts are fine.
Meta question: am I being suckered by his presentation of an unsuckered baseline? What about 1850? 1800? 1200?
However, the point of the article is to reverse engineer a biased chart, and to show it's biased intentions. The article does not try to determine whether climate change is real or not (even though the author's opinion is obvious).
So it doesn't matter if the author's data is limited... it matters that the author of the biased chart has been cherry picked.
And they are trying to convince me using charts with a truncated y axis? How about doing it with charts that are not misleading?
What would you propose for a zero value on the Y axis? The only number that actually makes sense is zero Kelvin (since 0C and 0F are just arbitrary numbers). At that scale you will not see anything. But that doesn't mean nothing is happening. The charts are fine.
I'm not saying nothing is happening, but those charts are completely deceiving.
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The irony is that the phrase "climate change" was actually pushed initially by a Republican advisor (Frank Luntz) as it was considered less frightening to the public than "global warming". The other irony is that this phrase was used a lot of few years back when many were claiming there was no warming going on by cherry picking the 1998 El Nino spike as a starting point for temperature graphs. Then the argument was -…
The irony is that the phrase "climate change" was actually pushed initially by a Republican advisor (Frank Luntz) as it was considered less frightening to the public than "global warming". Academic publications were using the phrase "climate change" to discuss the warming effects well before Frank Luntz. He may have been important to putting that phrase in front of the general public, but "climate change" isn't a eup…
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I think part of that is a sign of our time, everything is either black or white, the good guys against the villains, "whoever disagrees with me is a bastard, no discussion, no debate, let's aim at the throat". At the moment the right is taking the blunt of these insults. Whoever disagree with the current feminist campaign is a misogynist bigot, a traditional patriarchy advocate. Whoever disagrees with the black lives…
Problem is that most of your examples are things where disagreement is actually a valid thing. They’re are all political in nature and different opinions are just that, opinions. Climate change isn’t. It’s a scientific fact. On the same footing as the second law of thermodynamics at this point. There just is no disagreement to be had that isn’t as ludicrous as debating political sides of the flat earth “theory” The o…
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Same reason for the vitriol against anti-vax. These are people who are claiming to know better than the vast majority of the scientific community (seriously, it's something like 99%+), despite having little to no expertise in the field. Multiple independent governments, thousands of peer reviewed studies across multiple disciplines, data collected from satellites, billions of dollars across decades of research... but…
All this may be true, but appeal to authority is still a logical fallacy. You can't just shame people into believing something they don't understand because "smarter" people believe it. It's a shameful failure of communication more than anything else. And I don't understand why people like you don't understand that.
Honest question: Why such vitriol against "climate deniers?" The term "climate denier" is loading with negative connotation just on it's face, and it's rarely used in isolation in an otherwise respectful way. There will always be people that disagree with you about something. Some are honest, some are not. Why be an asshole and treat people poorly and disrespectfully? That makes you as bad or worse than them IMHO. Ev…
> Why such vitriol against "climate deniers?" Climate deniers are either dishonest people spreading lies aimed at sacrificing the future of humanity for short-term personal gain or people following them in the destruction of humanity out of tribal allegiance. There is literally no conceivable level of verbal vitriol that isn't far better than they deserve; the only reason for any restraint in that dimension is tactic…
This seems a little extreme. Do you really think everyone labelled a denier is dishonest, in that they actually know the "truth" and instead are choosing for personal gain to spread "lies"? Is there really no room for "misguided", or even simply "wrong"?
Here's the autobiographical note for the originator of the graph that's being skewered: https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/who-is-steven-goddard/. He describes himself as a bicycle-riding lifelong-environmentalist who worked to get the clean air act passed. He says he never uses heat or air conditioning, and guesses that he has "the smallest electricity bill in Columbia, Maryland because I am very careful not to waste".
This isn't the self-narrative I'd expect for someone "aimed at sacrificing the future of humanity for short-term personal gain". Instead, he sounds like someone who genuinely believes there are flaws in the current version of climate science, and that a better approach is necessary to save (not sacrifice) humanity. What makes you so convinced he's dishonest, rather than a true believer with different beliefs?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The irony is that the phrase "climate change" was actually pushed initially by a Republican advisor (Frank Luntz) as it was considered less frightening to the public than "global warming". Academic publications were using the phrase "climate change" to discuss the warming effects well before Frank Luntz. He may have been important to putting that phrase in front of the general public, but "climate change" isn't a eup…
I don't think we are disagreeing. I'm just pointing out that the phrase was deliberately pushed out into the wider public discourse for specific political motivations, and it is ironic that this phrase is now being used by those same political forces to cast aspersions on scientists.
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Same reason for the vitriol against anti-vax. These are people who are claiming to know better than the vast majority of the scientific community (seriously, it's something like 99%+), despite having little to no expertise in the field. Multiple independent governments, thousands of peer reviewed studies across multiple disciplines, data collected from satellites, billions of dollars across decades of research... but…
All this may be true, but appeal to authority is still a logical fallacy. You can't just shame people into believing something they don't understand because "smarter" people believe it. It's a shameful failure of communication more than anything else. And I don't understand why people like you don't understand that.
You can say this same thing about almost any scientific finding.
A less controversial example:
General Relativity is extremely odd and widely accepted.
If someone refuses to believe General Relativity, would you really say the problem is "failure of communication"?
Any kind of meaningful communication on the subject would take years, and also (if you insist in not trusting others) require a lot of expensive experiments to be carried out.
Any "communication" short of that is in a sense propaganda; in that how believable you make it seem to the layperson is not correlated with how true it is.
No, rather than a problem with communication, the problem is arrogance in believing that General Relativity (or Climate..) is something you can have an opinion about without years of physics training.
(There are physics professors that may dispute GR. That is fine; it did not seem that your topic was communication with sceptical academics in the climate sciences)
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Problem is that most of your examples are things where disagreement is actually a valid thing. They’re are all political in nature and different opinions are just that, opinions. Climate change isn’t. It’s a scientific fact. On the same footing as the second law of thermodynamics at this point. There just is no disagreement to be had that isn’t as ludicrous as debating political sides of the flat earth “theory” The o…
The change in temperature observed is a fact. The explanation is a mathematical model of a very complex mechanism that we barely understand. For instance there was an article on hn recently about how the ocean could capture a lot more co2 than anticipated [1]. And none of these models had the benefit of being tested for their capacity to predict the future. Anyone who has toyed with any predictive model knows how eas…
The reason I don’t need to is this https://skepticalscience.com/97-percent-consensus-cook-et-al...