141–150 of 213 posts
I'm certainly on the climate change team (if that's what you call it). But are articles like this good or bad? When confronting climate change deniers the standard response is "weather is not climate". Saying it's hot today or cold today isn't an indication of climate change. It's what occurs over hundreds of years but especially the last 150 years. It seems we are sending mixed signals saying that one day or a decad…
I'm certainly on the climate change team (if that's what you call it). But are articles like this good or bad? When confronting climate change deniers the standard response is "weather is not climate". Saying it's hot today or cold today isn't an indication of climate change. It's what occurs over hundreds of years but especially the last 150 years. It seems we are sending mixed signals saying that one day or a decad…
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The problem is is that the average is presented without the range and called normal or typical. you may live your life and never experience an average day.
Thank you ! Most people never understand this aspect of statistics. Living in Houston, and having survived 3 out of 4 years with an above-100-year floods, I understand firsthand the clumping of events. But the "typical" guy on the street (oops, now I just violated my own rule!) has no clue what a distribution is. Not sure how to solve this problem. Teaching statistics to everyone in not a solution (see the Monty Hall…
1) Scientists predicting the probability of an earthquake in a region that just had one. "If it doesn't occur, they'll say it was only a probability, and if it does, they'll claim they predicted it! Stop wasting taxpayer's money on this nonsense!"
2) "My mother chain smoked all her life and she's in her 90's. So smoking doesn't cause cancer."
This is a terrible headline, too.
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> Anecdotal evidence isn't very reliable. True. Yet, as climate change accelerates it's absolutely reasonable to expect that we will be able to sense its effects in our daily lives. I also have quite a number of personal observations that point to the idea that the planet is warming up. On the one hand I try to remain rational and say that this is a long-term trend, but on the other I'm thinking: holy crap, things ar…
No we shouldn't! You don't give up the principles of science just to expedite your political ideals. If you were going to do that, why bother with science in the first place? Just declare it so and shout it until everyone believes you! I have memories of world 30 years ago being hotter than it is today. I don't credit it to "global cooling" because I'm not that silly. You shouldn't be either. You'll never notice a de…
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Complaining about presentation formats, including the colors or fonts or use of scripts on linked articles, ought to be against the guidelines: it doesn't contribute to discussion about the content of the linked article and devolves into bickering.
Why is the content a more appropriate topic than the format? This is a tech forum, not a climate news forum.
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True. That’s why powerpoints are so popular. I never stop hearing people rave about watching slideshows. They’re all like, damn, I’d love to get this information in slideshow format.
On the other hand give them a 10 page report and they'll put it down and never read it.
recommended words per slide: 20
recommended time per slide: 2 minutes
Average academic words per page: 600
nobody is sitting through a 10 hour ppt deck either.
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No we shouldn't! You don't give up the principles of science just to expedite your political ideals. If you were going to do that, why bother with science in the first place? Just declare it so and shout it until everyone believes you! I have memories of world 30 years ago being hotter than it is today. I don't credit it to "global cooling" because I'm not that silly. You shouldn't be either. You'll never notice a de…
Is there any level or consistency of anecdotal evidence that you would find acceptable?
What I have found more frustrating than those in denial of climate change lately, is those who deny responsibility. That the real problem is in other countries. India. China. America. Little old X in Europe can't possible be the ones that need to sort it out. Therefore there's no point changing our habits. I feel a little hopeless in these discussions. I have little hope for change. I cannot argue against the fact th…
It's worse than that. And this always receives a negative reaction...yet this is the truth nobody seems to want to talk about save a very few brave researchers:
We can't do a thing about it. Period.
I've written about this many times. This isn't about denying climate change or our contribution to atmospheric CO2 concentration --that would be silly, it's as real as it gets.
This is about pulling our heads out of the sand to take a look at the data in order to understand what it is screaming at us very loudly. It goes something like this:
If humanity --all of us-- left the planet tomorrow and we took all of our technology, cars, planes, buildings --everything-- with us...it would take somewhere in the range of 50K to 100K years for atmospheric CO2 to come down by 100 ppm (which is roughly what we need).
This isn't me saying it. This is the very accurate data we have. We know, with a very high degree of certainty, what the atmosphere looked like and how long it took for CO2 to increase and decrease when humanity was but a bunch of apes on trees.
This data is provided to us by the 800,000 years of ice core atmospheric data we already have. Ice core atmospheric composition sampling is a highly accurate way to learn about what the atmosphere looked like in the past. And, again, to be redundant, we have data going back 800,000 years.
This means we KNOW how the atmosphere behaved when we were not here.
This also means we KNOW how it will behave is we all left.
If it takes the planet 50,000 to 100,000 years for a 100 ppm reduction there's NOTHING we can do at a small scale (solar panels world-wide, stop using cars, stop using planes, ban all fossil fuels, etc.) that will accelerate the slope at all. If we stay on the planet the rate of change is GREATER than 50K to 100K for 100 ppm, because we are contributing more CO2 to the equation.
Please don't take my word for it. Look at the data and you should have the same revelation about this issue I had many years ago. This does not mean we should not make an effort to clean-up our act, there are many reasons for which this is a good idea and none of them anything to do with climate change. I does mean we need to not lie to ourselves and start having real conversations about this stuff rather than, on the one hand, denying it, and, on the other, thinking we can actually affect planetary scale problems with truly insignificant measures. Hint: Everything is insignificant when compared to humanity leaving the planet. Both extreme positions are unreasonable and delusional.
Finally, a problem: Scientists, researchers, don't want to talk about this reality because their careers would be over if they did. At the very least their grants would evaporate. This is a terrible side-effect of the religion climate change has become. We need to free our researchers so that they can be honest about what we know and we can put them to work on how to deal with reality.
Here's were you will find the 800,000 years of ice core data:
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical...
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
Here's a paper that explains why it is that atmospheric CO2 will continue to rise exponentially even if we switch the the most optimal forms of renewable energy world-wide:
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
I have looked into this issue in depth and I have yet to find any argument or proposed solution that can do better than all of humanity leaving the planet, which is to say we can't fix it. We better start talking about how to live with it soon rather than propose ridiculous "solutions" that are far more likely to kill us all than fix anything.
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Is there any level or consistency of anecdotal evidence that you would find acceptable?
No. See the enormous volume and consistency of anecdotal evidence for ineffective medicine. Most of China has believed and recreated the same false anecdotes about their TCM for thousands of years! Remember bloodletting? astrology? praying to God? If you don't apply methods for protecting yourself from human bias, then you're bound to fall victim to human bias.
