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Physicist offers $10,000 for anyone to scientifically disprove climate change

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Re: Physicist offers $10,000 for anyone to scientifically disprove climate change

#91

Post by glenra »

asgard1024 wrote: post #87
glenra wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our descendants will be vastly richer and smarter and better informed than we are, so you're saying we should tax the poor to help the rich. Making energy more expensive now reduces economic progress, which is exactly the thing we need to outgrow this and all other future potential threats.

Yeah. Or our descendants will be doomed. We have no idea. This could be a good argument if the actual profits from coal and oil were really going to development of sustainable technologies (or poor people, in case of argument from streptomycin). In fact, that's precisely what the carbon tax proposals try to induce. But I am not convinced; oil and coal companies fight this tooth and nail.

Profits are irrelevant. What matters are the benefits, which include the consumer surplus as well as the producer surplus. So long as coal and oil are the cheapest most reliable source of energy, using them makes the economy more efficient than not using them and an efficient, functioning economy buys us more safety margin for just about any conceivable future threats, not just climate-related ones. Whereas a crippled economy where we use less energy automatically makes us more vulnerable to many other conceivable future threats, even ones we didn't explicitly prepare for. (Getting hit by an asteroid, disease epidemics, global cooling...)

Switching to less CO2-intensive technologies will happen anyway regardless but if you want to push it along, how about removing some of the roadblocks to nuclear power? (Including recycling/reprocessing waste into more fuel, which has been illegal in the US since the 1970s)

Re: Physicist offers $10,000 for anyone to scientifically disprove climate change

#92

Post by glenra »

msandford wrote: post #21

I was just commenting to my girlfriend the other day after the John Oliver "Statistically Accurate Climate Science Debate" that I would love to see the US government spend $100mm or $1b or $10b (say over 5 years) on grants to try and disprove climate change. Now obviously there might be some issues ensuring that you get researchers who want to make a real go of trying to disprove it rather than erect straw men and te…

In context, that John Oliver debate segment was dumb. They took a perfectly reasonable Gallop poll result - that 1 in 4 Americans think the threat of climate change has been exaggerated - and rhetorically pretended the claim being made was that climate change "isn't real" or "doesn't exist".

But establishing that a threat exists is quite a lot different from establishing whether it's being overestimated or underestimated in the media, so the whole segment was a non sequitur - it didn't respond in any way at all to the news article it was allegedly answering.

My guess is that they had Bill Nye, wanted to do this gag, couldn't come up with any valid reason to do it based on any actual news stories, then said "heck, let's do it anyway; maybe nobody will notice!"

(As a side note, if you look into how the claims of "97% agreement" were determined, you'll find that most "skeptics" would also be in the 97%. It's pure propaganda at this point to claim 97% support for some vague "the consensus" without actually specifying what exactly "the consensus" they agree to IS. The original value of "the consensus" seems to have been: (a) CO2 is a greenhouse gas, (b) it's gotten warmer recently, (c) human activity has had a significant warming effect, where both the nature of the "human activity" and the meaning of "significant" are usually left vague and unstated.

Oh, and to get a number as high as "97%" what gets measured is usually not the level of agreement among "scientists" but rather among a tiny subset, such as "those climate scientists who publish the most in the field".)

Re: Physicist offers $10,000 for anyone to scientifically disprove climate change

#93

Post by talmand »

Iftheshoefits wrote: post #81
talmand wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually see the opposite, the people with extreme opinions are often told their intolerance doesn't have to be tolerated. Often times this bothers me because the people who choose not to tolerate the intolerable are the ones who seem not interested in honest dialogue. My reasoning is because most often they are the people who also get to label what is considered intolerance and extreme opinions. Then, the use of su…

Nah; you're just repeating the same "tolerance means tolerance of every single idea in every context" idea I wrote about. It has nothing to do with objectivity--that's your own subjective opinion and projection.

I see your mistake, but I was not referring to the argument that you describe. Which I would agree is a rather silly argument to make.

I'm speaking of situations where the opposing viewpoint is labeled as intolerant before the label-er even knows what the opposing viewpoint is or is mistaken of what the opposing viewpoint is; usually from emotional reactions. In those instances it is rather easy to remain objective enough to see what's going on.

I would believe you provided an example of what I'm describing. You labeled me as a "tolerance means tolerance of every single idea in every context" person before you knew whether I believed that or not.

Re: Physicist offers $10,000 for anyone to scientifically disprove climate change

#94

Post by DCKing »

msandford wrote: post #83
DCKing wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying that people should not discuss this. I'm saying that the debate is over unless substantial other facts are presented than we do now. Discussion value based on evidence and not conjecture. Claiming that this is the same as the dogma and falsehood of religions is plain insulting. Besides, the last time anyone thought the world was flat was a lot longer ago than 500 years, and 'scientists' as such did not…

The thing that bugs me is that there's all this "it's CO2 stupid!!!" and a lot less "what if it were something else?" Has the planet gotten warmer in the last 150 years? Yes. Does that correlate with increasing CO2 concentration? Yes. Does that prove the causal link? No. There are about a million confounding factors that could disprove that causality. I mean there are enough man-made refrigerants in the atmosphere to…

> Does that prove the causal link? No.

Yes, for all reasonable definitions of 'prove', the vast amount of evidence collected that is a proven fact. Although correlation of one metric does not necessarily imply causation of some other, evidence upon evidence upon evidence does imply causation. And that is what we have.

The fact that you can casually obtain this information from Wikipedia already means that the scientific community is open to, and aware of, other greenhouse gases. Your information also confirms that CO2 in itself is probably the biggest problem. It is also the one that people likely can control most in their day-to-day lives. So if that's what's driving public policy, that's probably not a bad thing either.

Re: Physicist offers $10,000 for anyone to scientifically disprove climate change

#95

Post by facepalm »

glenra wrote: post #88
facepalm wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why do you say "we have no idea"? Lots of things are known, like temperature averages and trends. As I said, I am not a climatologist myself. I am a bit surprised that tree rings are supposedly not accurate enough to say things about a 150 year interval. I was under the impression tree rings develop on a yearly basis? I suppose there are other factors besides temperature that affect their growth. Then again, for…

For tree rings to tell you what you want, trees would need to have a linear growth-response pattern with respect to temperature, and they don't. It's more of an inverse U-shaped pattern. Trees in temperature-limited areas do tend to grow better if it gets a little warmer, but if it gets a LOT warmer they'd grow worse again. The rings get smaller if it gets too cold, but they also get smaller if it gets too warm. For…

So would you say the claims are unfounded? I don't think it all hinges on tree rings, they are just one indicator of many.

Re: Physicist offers $10,000 for anyone to scientifically disprove climate change

#96

Post by msandford »

DCKing wrote: post #94
msandford wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that bugs me is that there's all this "it's CO2 stupid!!!" and a lot less "what if it were something else?" Has the planet gotten warmer in the last 150 years? Yes. Does that correlate with increasing CO2 concentration? Yes. Does that prove the causal link? No. There are about a million confounding factors that could disprove that causality. I mean there are enough man-made refrigerants in the atmosphere to…

> Does that prove the causal link? No. Yes, for all reasonable definitions of 'prove', the vast amount of evidence collected that is a proven fact. Although correlation of one metric does not necessarily imply causation of some other, evidence upon evidence upon evidence does imply causation. And that is what we have. The fact that you can casually obtain this information from Wikipedia already means that the scienti…

No, correlation does not imply causation. There are a dozen things which can correlate with rising temperatures and CO2 is only one of them. Some of them aren't even in/on the Earth!

Here's atmospheric methane: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#mediaviewer...

Here's atmospheric refrigerants: http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/mguidry/Unnamed_Site_2/Chapter%2...

Here's sunspot activity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle#mediaviewer/File:Su...

Here's a paper that shows that poor station siting could explain all the upwards trend in temperatures: http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/r-367.pd... Here's the website journaling the research: http://www.surfacestations.org/

Here's the Wikipedia page that would tend to indicate that such a journal isn't a sham made up by the Koch brothers to discredit climate science: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Geophysical_Research

Remember, "prove" means that ANY reliable information to the contrary overwhelms all the other evidence and/or theories because at it's core science is about falsifiability. If your theory cannot be falsified by new evidence, it's not science, it's religion.

Re: Physicist offers $10,000 for anyone to scientifically disprove climate change

#97

Post by glenra »

facepalm wrote: post #95
glenra wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For tree rings to tell you what you want, trees would need to have a linear growth-response pattern with respect to temperature, and they don't. It's more of an inverse U-shaped pattern. Trees in temperature-limited areas do tend to grow better if it gets a little warmer, but if it gets a LOT warmer they'd grow worse again. The rings get smaller if it gets too cold, but they also get smaller if it gets too warm. For…

So would you say the claims are unfounded? I don't think it all hinges on tree rings, they are just one indicator of many.

I'm not sure which claims you mean.

The specific claim that it's significantly warmer now than it was about a thousand years ago during the MWP does mainly hinge on (a) tree rings, (b) ignoring the difference between high frequency and low-frequency information sources, (c) ignoring the error bars. We can't say with any certainty that current temperatures are "unprecedented" compared to the last big peak and it seems likely to me that they are not. (The MWP is making a comeback, scientifically speaking). A couple of relevant reconstructions are plotted here:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/28/loehle-vindication/

Re: Physicist offers $10,000 for anyone to scientifically disprove climate change

#98

Post by Andys »

tedunangst wrote: post #15

It seems longbets.org would be a more appropriate arena. "The average temperature of the earth will (not) rise by more than X degrees in the next twenty years."

Not really, because you'd have to agree on how to measure average temperature of the earth.

Re: Physicist offers $10,000 for anyone to scientifically disprove climate change

#99

Post by headShrinker »

eglover wrote: post #80
headShrinker wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of areas to pick apart this article and motivations behind it. 97% consensus isn't one of them. Denial, is old and dead amongst the well informed. Join us.

Denial indeed. About 50% worldwide including both public and private science. You might want to look into the source of that 97% and stop acting like you've got everything figured out.

There are 7.8 billion people on the planet, all consuming, reproducing, driving and expelling, burning, cutting, killing, clearing, digging, and searching for the American dream. The very existence of humankind is now completely outside of the natural food cycle. Most everything humans eat is farmed in numbers by weight that you or I simply can not imagine. Our economy is based on the processing and consumption of planetary resources multiplied by a rate of exponential growth. There are over 1 billion cars on the planet, and 2,300 coal power plants. 1.3 billion cows bred almost solely for human consumption, each cow eats about 4 tons of food per year. Humans are killing all the animals, burning all the fossil fuels, and toxifying all the potable water. We give back to the natural cycle; plastic garbage, VOCs, heavy metals, radioactive waste, trillions of tons of carbon bonded to oxygen. The only other organism that functions with such destruction and haste is a virus.

There is no mistake and scientists are not confused. This is the 6 major extinction the planet has ever seen in its 4.5 billion years of existence. This extinction is occurring faster than the dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago. If humans all disappeared today, it would take the planet 12 million years to repair the damage we have done. In human terms, that 12 million years longer than human existence itself.

Oh and CO2 (produced by all human action), and methane (of which cows produce tons) are greenhouse gases proven to increase temperatures of an inclosed area when IR light is applied.

> you've got everything figured out

I'm not going to pretend I don't, so you can feel better about your unfortunate unwillingness to accept the obvious and unfortunate truth.

Re: Physicist offers $10,000 for anyone to scientifically disprove climate change

#100

Post by DCKing »

msandford wrote: post #96
DCKing wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does that prove the causal link? No. Yes, for all reasonable definitions of 'prove', the vast amount of evidence collected that is a proven fact. Although correlation of one metric does not necessarily imply causation of some other, evidence upon evidence upon evidence does imply causation. And that is what we have. The fact that you can casually obtain this information from Wikipedia already means that the scienti…

No, correlation does not imply causation. There are a dozen things which can correlate with rising temperatures and CO2 is only one of them. Some of them aren't even in/on the Earth! Here's atmospheric methane: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#mediaviewer... Here's atmospheric refrigerants: http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/mguidry/Unnamed_Site_2/Chapter%2... Here's sunspot activity: http://en.wikipedia.org…

I can't tell whether you are deliberately being dishonest or genuinely don't understand how to have a proper debate.

> Correlation does not imply causation.

You can't simply wave this around to invalidate information that does not suit your liking. You can use also use this statement to disqualify the fact that sex causes the spread of AIDS. It's a hollow statement if the evidence is overwhelming.

You can point to all other contributing factors to climate change. Yes, climate change is complex, there are many contributing factors, and not all of them are CO2. It's very important to realize, but these things are not ignored. In any case, those do not invalidate the claim that CO2 is one of the most important driving factors of current climate change, and that it is man-made.

Next you pretend that it is somehow a religion. Thirty to fifty years of gathering information, getting to know our environment and recognizing patterns in them is not a religion. That is an insult to all hard work humanity has put into this partial understanding of our world. There are thousands of ways to falsify man-made climate change (eg. CO2 increase is largest on the ocean floor, temperatures decrease over ten years, molecular nitrogen is found to be a significant greenhouse gas) none of which have any real support.

In the end you are advocating critical debate, which is fine. But don't do that by ignoring the larger discussion and only picking out the parts you like.

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