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

An insider’s story of the global attack on climate science

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 94 posts

Re: An insider’s story of the global attack on climate science

#81

Post by crusso »

scarmig wrote: post #45
crusso wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep it civil. Seems like you're trying to augment your argument by asserting some sort of language dominance. Do you find that helps with other people? You clearly privilege Judith Curry's work over the rest of the scientific community Her work? Partially. I prefer her calm approach to Science that demands evidence and remains skeptical vs the all-too-often politically-driven one I see at the IPCC. That said, I read…

Seems like you're trying to augment your argument Yes, it is. When someone's getting emotional about a topic, particularly a scientific one, it's useful to point it out, to rhetorically place yourself on the side of scientific, rational debate. You do the same thing one line down when you emphasize how much you prefer her "calm approach to Science." Her work Which work? Is it her scientific papers you respect, or her…

entirety of the climate science community

That's the point, though, isn't it? It's not the entirety of the climate Science community.

Re: An insider’s story of the global attack on climate science

#82

Post by acqq »

seehafer wrote: post #79
onetwofiveten wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The talk of "consensus" emerged because previously there was a concerted effort from vested interests to make the public believe that climate change was a controversial issue amongst the scientific community. This severely muddied the waters of public opinion. So it's important to continue the message of scientific consensus. The scientific consensus is our best model for reality. That isn't about having faith in any…

> Once new evidence was found, the new explanation was quickly adopted into the scientific consensus (so it remained the best model for reality). The problem with a direct comparison in this case, that we ought to accept the consensus and be as dismissive about anthropogenic climate change skeptics as we are about someone who still claims that the Sun revolves around the Earth, is that in the case of stomach ulcers,…

Your insinuations aren't true at all. The scientist do the science, nobody can claim that politics had any influence of any relevant scientific results: all of them were independently rechecked many times over.

Re: An insider’s story of the global attack on climate science

#83

Post by jeremyt »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #75
jeremyt wrote: post #51

Global warming is one of those tough issues for me. I guess you could call me a skeptic, but I try very hard to be a thoughtful skeptic. What makes the whole conversation unproductive is there appears to be two sides: one which argues there is no problem and we must do nothing, and the other side says that the problem is going to end the world as we know it and we must change our entire way of living and make it our…

> What makes the whole conversation unproductive is there appears to be two sides: one which argues there is no problem and we must do nothing, and the other side says that the problem is going to end the world as we know it and we must change our entire way of living and make it our number one priority. This is called a false dichotomy. There are an entire range of viewpoints on this; you've just chosen two extremes…

I think you've missed the point that I was making, so I'm a little puzzled as to why you're spending all the time to do a line by line takedown. My main point is that I think any money that we are thinking about spending to mitigate global warming now could probably be better used solving world hunger or malaria or something. I don't KNOW that for a fact, and I'm open to arguments one way or the other. Just, to me, real people dying today is just more urgent than hypothetical people dying in the future.

Re: An insider’s story of the global attack on climate science

#84

Post by jeremyt »

yongjik wrote: post #78
jeremyt wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying very hard to be constructive here, and I'm not exactly making an argument I'm just telling you where I am on the issue. Clearly I'm not an expert and I haven't read everything there is to read about it. I still don't really see what's wrong with the statement that I made. Would you argue that we know everything that is necessary to know about, say, solar cycles? Or CO2 sequestration? I am willing to admit…

Sigh, I don't know how I could explain "the science is settled" without sounding condescending, but let me try. > I still don't really see what's wrong with the statement that I made. Would you argue that we know everything that is necessary to know about, say, solar cycles? Or CO2 sequestration? Do we know everything that is necessary to know about, say, hurricanes? No. But when the weather service warns a category-…

Here's my problem with the "the science is settled" argument:

Every time I go to investigate specific issues, it appears that there are credible people that disagree with the "settled science".

Let me be clear, I'm not arguing the actual point, I'm just trying to explain to you how hard it is for somebody who really does want to know the truth to actually find it. For every person that says one thing, I find another one that makes an equally compelling argument that it is the opposite. I just don't know who to believe.

Take the "global warming pause" problem. I did a Google search and started reading some of the results, and on the first page I came across this apparently well respected scientist who doesn't agree with the consensus. What criteria am I to use to disregard his opinion in favor of someone else's who appears to me to be equally qualified?

Here's the relevant parts:

The claim that the pause has been caused by heat is going into the deep ocean below 700 m is speculative and relies on models undergoing many data adjustments. That speculation is contradicted by two major issues.

First the Argo data has definitively shown the upper 300 meters have cooled slightly since 2003 (Read Xue 2011) and the consensus among oceanographers is that it is in the upper 100 meters that most of the heat is exchanged with the atmosphere.

Second is it defies known physics. IPCC expert Dr. Hans von Storch said in a recent interview "there is evidence that the oceans have absorbed more heat than we initially calculated. Temperatures at depths greater than 700 meters (2,300 feet) appear to have increased more than ever before. The only unfortunate thing is that our simulations failed to predict this effect." He went on to lament “If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models. A 20-year pause in global warming does not occur in a single modeled scenario. But even today, we are finding it very difficult to reconcile actual temperature trends with our expectations.”

“There are two conceivable explanations — and neither is very pleasant for us. The first possibility is that less global warming is occurring than expected because greenhouse gases, especially CO2, have less of an effect than we have assumed. This wouldn’t mean that there is no man-made greenhouse effect, but simply that our effect on climate events is not as great as we have believed. The other possibility is that, in our simulations, we have underestimated how much the climate fluctuates owing to natural causes.”

The Dr. von Storch interview can be seen in its entirety at Stampf, O. and Traufetter , G. (2013) Spiegel International, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-hans-von...

Re: An insider’s story of the global attack on climate science

#85

Post by thaumaturgy »

jeremyt wrote: post #83
thaumaturgy wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What makes the whole conversation unproductive is there appears to be two sides: one which argues there is no problem and we must do nothing, and the other side says that the problem is going to end the world as we know it and we must change our entire way of living and make it our number one priority. This is called a false dichotomy. There are an entire range of viewpoints on this; you've just chosen two extremes…

I think you've missed the point that I was making, so I'm a little puzzled as to why you're spending all the time to do a line by line takedown. My main point is that I think any money that we are thinking about spending to mitigate global warming now could probably be better used solving world hunger or malaria or something. I don't KNOW that for a fact, and I'm open to arguments one way or the other. Just, to me, r…

I was just responding to the things you said.

If that's your main point, I already replied to it. Efforts are already underway by governments, scientists, companies, non-profits, foundations, and even somewhat poor individuals like myself to resolve the other issues facing people around the world.

Why do you believe that money spent on environmental technology is slowing the progress in other areas? Do you really think that if countries would just stop building wind power for a few years, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation would cure malaria more quickly?

Even if that were true, aren't there, I dunno, dozens of other sources of funding that would make more sense to borrow from?

The thing is, your objection here is a really common one, and it always takes the same form: don't spend money on environmental technology, it would be better spent doing (anything at all other than environmental technology) instead. But nobody ever justifies it. Nobody ever bothers to figure out what the relative impacts on human life of environmental technology vs., say, increased funding for malaria research are.

The Dust Bowl disaster in the 1930s was directly caused by human activity. It displaced hundreds of thousands of people (or millions, depending on how you count) and contributed to starvation conditions in large parts of the country. It caused dust pneumonia, which killed people (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/transcri...).

A single typhoon in the Phillipines last year killed thousands and left millions more homeless (http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/08/us/typhoon-haiyan-one-month/).

The pollution in Beijing might be taking as much as 16 years off of the average resident's life span there (http://www.businessinsider.com/beijing-air-quality-hits-life...).

Drought, extreme weather (both hot and cold), tropical storms, hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes, bad air quality -- these things are not hypothetically affecting people. While we can't altogether stop these disasters any time in the near future, we can start doing things now to make them less severe.

Real people have been dying for, at least, close to a hundred years because of human impacts on the environment.

Re: An insider’s story of the global attack on climate science

#86

Post by jeremyt »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #85
jeremyt wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've missed the point that I was making, so I'm a little puzzled as to why you're spending all the time to do a line by line takedown. My main point is that I think any money that we are thinking about spending to mitigate global warming now could probably be better used solving world hunger or malaria or something. I don't KNOW that for a fact, and I'm open to arguments one way or the other. Just, to me, r…

I was just responding to the things you said. If that's your main point, I already replied to it. Efforts are already underway by governments, scientists, companies, non-profits, foundations, and even somewhat poor individuals like myself to resolve the other issues facing people around the world. Why do you believe that money spent on environmental technology is slowing the progress in other areas? Do you really thi…

Well, after searching, it appears there is a book that does exactly this. I'm going to read it, and then maybe I will have a better idea of what the relative cost benefits are.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/digital/fiona/thank-you?ie=UTF8&a=...

Re: An insider’s story of the global attack on climate science

#87

Post by crazy1van »

acqq wrote: post #80
crazy1van wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the article. It seems like the gist is - (please correct me if I'm wrong) 1) We have much better ways of measuring CO2 than we ever have before. 2) The amount we're detecting is going up and recently passed a major milestone 3) Serious and politically difficult cut backs in fossil fuels are required to decrease CO2 totals Taking all that as fact because I certainly don't know enough to dispute it, that's f…

1) As humans are causing it, they are making the change much much faster than the natural effects did. The living world has much less time to adapt. Humans are producing the massive extinction. 2) No, the Earth would certainly not fix it for us, we know how CO2 behaves. A third of CO2 goes in the oceans at the moment, raising acidity which dissolves , for example, corals. It's another place where humans produce extin…

I'm afraid you may understand this science well, but not human nature. I'm not a climate scientist. 99% of the population are not climate scientists. So if the experts can't convince the population, they will never affect their behavior.

Precisely predict some measurable events in the future and people will start to believe you. Until then, it is a lost cause.

So again, I ask, if predicting the average temp in 2014 is too narrow of a window, what is a window of time you feel confident predicting?

Re: An insider’s story of the global attack on climate science

#88

Post by thaumaturgy »

jeremyt wrote: post #86
thaumaturgy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just responding to the things you said. If that's your main point, I already replied to it. Efforts are already underway by governments, scientists, companies, non-profits, foundations, and even somewhat poor individuals like myself to resolve the other issues facing people around the world. Why do you believe that money spent on environmental technology is slowing the progress in other areas? Do you really thi…

Well, after searching, it appears there is a book that does exactly this. I'm going to read it, and then maybe I will have a better idea of what the relative cost benefits are. https://www.amazon.com/gp/digital/fiona/thank-you?ie=UTF8&a=...

Link's busted.

Re: An insider’s story of the global attack on climate science

#89

Post by acqq »

crazy1van wrote: post #87
acqq wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) As humans are causing it, they are making the change much much faster than the natural effects did. The living world has much less time to adapt. Humans are producing the massive extinction. 2) No, the Earth would certainly not fix it for us, we know how CO2 behaves. A third of CO2 goes in the oceans at the moment, raising acidity which dissolves , for example, corals. It's another place where humans produce extin…

I'm afraid you may understand this science well, but not human nature. I'm not a climate scientist. 99% of the population are not climate scientists. So if the experts can't convince the population, they will never affect their behavior. Precisely predict some measurable events in the future and people will start to believe you. Until then, it is a lost cause. So again, I ask, if predicting the average temp in 2014 i…

Once again that what is being predicted is confimed every day on different independent places by different independent teams. If you don't understand the details and close your eyes to the fact that the "predictions" are confirmed by the different scientists in fully different research areas, then there's nothning anybody can do.

Re: An insider’s story of the global attack on climate science

#90

Post by crazy1van »

acqq wrote: post #89
crazy1van wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid you may understand this science well, but not human nature. I'm not a climate scientist. 99% of the population are not climate scientists. So if the experts can't convince the population, they will never affect their behavior. Precisely predict some measurable events in the future and people will start to believe you. Until then, it is a lost cause. So again, I ask, if predicting the average temp in 2014 i…

Once again that what is being predicted is confimed every day on different independent places by different independent teams. If you don't understand the details and close your eyes to the fact that the "predictions" are confirmed by the different scientists in fully different research areas, then there's nothning anybody can do.

I really wish you would directly answer the question I've asked in several previous posts:

What is the window of time you feel confident predicting the average global temperature? Initially I asked about an average within 2014, but you implied from your ant analogy that was too small of a window. So, what is a reasonable window of time and what is the predicted value?

Post reply on HN