What's Really Warming the World? • Hacker News Board

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#301

Post by moultano » Wed, Jun 24, 2015, 5:35 PM UTC

thadd wrote: post #223

My only problem is that the planet is over 4 billion years old and as this shows, we've been collecting climate data for a little over 100 years. The natural skeptic in me isn't ok with establishing a trend based on 1/40,000,000 of the available data, the sample size is simply too small. Am I completely off-base with this?

This has happened several times before, and killed much of the life on earth. In a bit of cosmic irony, the life that was killed in previous anoxic events is what turned into the fossil fuel we're burning today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event#Occurrence

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#302

Post by scarmig » Wed, Jun 24, 2015, 5:36 PM UTC

loganu wrote: post #245

hackuser wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also question how we know the difference between nature/cycles and man-made pollution. It's a great question, one which has occupied many scientists. It has been addressed in detail in the scientific research. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9772353 > The problem is that it's too political now. Remember that's a well-documented, established technique often used by people who want to obstruct things; cre…

It's become a politicized issue, and as such, the media has created a narrative of 2 sides and a "debate." Take the 97% and put it into a different context and it makes the situation seem absolutely ludicrous. If you had a sore stomach, and asked 2 groups of people to help you figure out why, would you trust the diagnosis from a group with 100 world-class doctors, surgeons, dieticians, etc... or 100 random people? Wh…

Your medical example has happened before. And, it gives us the answer! People will believe the people who have better access to the media, which, in this case, was tobacco companies hiring hacks to push a certain line of evidence demanding that the media teach the debate and give equal time. And as a result we got hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.

Ironically, many of the same tobacco-cancer link deniers are now working in the service of the global warming denialist bloc. I guess oil barons pay better than southern planters.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#303

Post by ehvatum » Wed, Jun 24, 2015, 5:37 PM UTC

darkstar999 wrote: post #181

At this point, any rational person understands the problem. Ok. We get it. So how do we fix it? It seems like everyone is focusing on proving that it is caused by humans, but where is the solution?

If humans are causing it and it is going to be very bad for humans, humans might do some long term planning and make decisions that are less desirable in the short term in order to obtain a more desirable long term outcome.

The best way to short circuit this if you personally profit from behavior with extremely negative long term impacts is to prevent recognition that the bad behavior has those impacts.

This turns out to be so easy to achieve in a free society that a solution to any large scale, long term problem is no solution at all unless it also solves the problem of people not wanting to accept the pain of implementing that solution.

IE, either the solution to global warming must be very desirable in the short term, or we fight a civil war to stamp out dissent against the solution, or the problem happens.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#304

Post by bildung » Wed, Jun 24, 2015, 5:37 PM UTC

tosseraccount wrote: post #231

hackuser wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Statements like "provide some evidence" for gets translated into "this proves". For what it's worth, the IPCC reports are very, very careful about this. They have a chart (though it can be hard to find) of exactly what confidence/probability is meant by each phrasing. EDIT: for example, from the Sythesis Summary for Policymakers report: The following terms have been used to indicate the assessed likelihood of an ou…

OK. I'm curious. What prestige science journal article says "virtually certain" that man is primary cause of global warming? What phrasing in the results section makes you feel that it is "near proof" ? I'm not asking for "it is likely or probable". I'll buy that. I want solid proof ... or , uh "almost proof". [edit: nobody up to it ? ]

> I want solid proof ... or , uh "almost proof".

Proofs don't exist in sciences concerned with the physical world. For proofs to work in the real world, you'd need certainty that you have recognised and correctly measured every variable that could affect the outcome of an observation/experiment.

The last philosophy of science that allowed proofs was positivism. For the natural sciences, it has been replaced by critical rationalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_rationalism). CR gave a solution to the proof problem: While positive proofs like in your quote don't work, you can still falsify a theory. By continuously falsifying theory after theory about an observed outcome, something resembling truth remains. Truth, but never certainty. Hence the talk about likelihood and probability.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#305

Post by mikeash » Wed, Jun 24, 2015, 5:38 PM UTC

harshreality wrote: post #179

mikeash wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you agree with the conclusion that we should cut emissions, but you object to... what? The wording?

We don't know what other explanations there might be. Trotting out a limited number of counter-explanations like solar activity or volcanoes, and showing they don't explain the phenomenon, and therefore your pet explanation is true because it matches the data more closely, is logically specious. We don't know the dynamics of the system. All we know is that for the data we have so far, the models work pretty well. We…

The science is settled, in the sense that the vast majority of people working in the field think this is probably what's happening. I think people who object to "settled" want it to mean "absolute certainty" but that's just a quibble over wording.

Deniers are morons. That's not the same as saying that there's no room for debate. There's always room for debate. But it's also a fact that the loud public face of the deniers is a bunch of politically motivated faith-based science illiterates peddling terrible rationalizations. Now, the fact that one side is full of idiots doesn't make the other side correct. But neither does the lack of complete definitive proof for one side mean that the other side isn't full of idiots.

And I've never seen anyone say that the Earth will be hell in 100 years. I have seen a lot of deniers say that this is said, in order to discredit climate change. What's actually said is that there will be a lot of disruption and chaos from changes, but of course there will always be lots of nice places to live, climate-wise. They just may not be where they are today.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#306

Post by scarmig » Wed, Jun 24, 2015, 5:38 PM UTC

crygin wrote: post #299

narrator wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple years back I read the IPCC reports trying to find out if global warming was real or not. I noticed the Vostok ice core data in the earlier reports showed the temperature rose first and then the CO2 rose. Likewise, the temperature fell first and then the CO2 fell later on. They fixed this little inconvenient data problem in the later reports.

Ugh. This is exactly the type of poorly-informed response you generally get when people attempt to "read the data" for themselves with little to no understanding of the science behind it. Seems to be a lot of that going around HN today.

It's exacerbated when it's less someone reading it for themselves, than reading it in a blog post by someone who's motivated to try to strip context and mislead about results.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#307

Post by buckbova » Wed, Jun 24, 2015, 5:38 PM UTC

IanDrake wrote: post #259

phkahler wrote: post #166

Notably absent is con-trails. The jury is still out, but there is strong evidence that they can have a significant effect. The rise of jet travel has also coincided with hydrocarbon use. Water vapor is also a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2.

Con-trail data would match the CO2 and temperature line. It would show another correlation that might call into question the validity of the absolute undeniable fact that CO2's correlation is causation. There are people with simple minds that would then question CO2's role in Global Warming. We can't give those deniers anything else to hang their hat on. It's the same reason we need to use the "Land Use" data instead…

> We can't give those deniers anything else to hang their hat on.

Is this sarcasm? I can understand this kind of nonsense on r/politics but we should be speaking plainly and of facts at HN. I hope HN isn't turning into another propaganda machine hivemind.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#308

Post by CONTRARlAN » Wed, Jun 24, 2015, 5:39 PM UTC

loganu wrote: post #245

hackuser wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also question how we know the difference between nature/cycles and man-made pollution. It's a great question, one which has occupied many scientists. It has been addressed in detail in the scientific research. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9772353 > The problem is that it's too political now. Remember that's a well-documented, established technique often used by people who want to obstruct things; cre…

It's become a politicized issue, and as such, the media has created a narrative of 2 sides and a "debate." Take the 97% and put it into a different context and it makes the situation seem absolutely ludicrous. If you had a sore stomach, and asked 2 groups of people to help you figure out why, would you trust the diagnosis from a group with 100 world-class doctors, surgeons, dieticians, etc... or 100 random people? Wh…

Apparently on HN we can now be condescending, insulting, narrow-minded, and straw-man those with whom we disagree with, so long as we're aligned with conventional wisdom.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#309

Post by wnewman » Wed, Jun 24, 2015, 5:41 PM UTC

possibilistic wrote: post #176

wnewman wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The real trick is to see how well your model extrapolates from the data you have out into the future." That is the most common way to show the modeller is not shamelessly overfitting.:-| Another way, though, is less common but not vanishingly uncommon: the model may be so much simpler than the data it fits that overfitting is not a plausible explanation. (Roughly there are too many bits of entropy in the match to th…

Do you happen to have this one to five pages of QM equations somewhere as reference? I would be very interested in reading that.

No, it was a thought experiment I made up, not an exercise I've ever seen performed: how abbreviated a description of quantum mechanics could I get away with and still convey the idea to on-the-eve-of-QM scientists?

The QM equations are naturally very short, the stuff that I would worry about expressing concisely are concepts like what probability amplitude is, how it connects to prior-to-QM concepts of probability, the interpretation of what it means to make an ideal measurement, stuff like that. I don't know of any bright concise formulation of that stuff, and I'm not sure how I'd do it. I am fairly sure, though, that 5 pages could get the job done well enough to connect to spectroscopic observations.

Note also in the original story it was intended to be given to Einstein and Planck, deeply knowledgeable in classical physics, so it'd be natural to use analogies that would be more meaningful to them than to the typical CS/EE-oriented HN reader. For example, I'd probably try to motivate the probability amplitude by detailed mathematical analogy to the wave amplitudes described by the classical wave PDEs that E. and P. knew backwards and forwards, and I don't think a concise version written that way would work as well for a typical member of the HN audience.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#310

Post by unabridged » Wed, Jun 24, 2015, 5:43 PM UTC

thadd wrote: post #223

My only problem is that the planet is over 4 billion years old and as this shows, we've been collecting climate data for a little over 100 years. The natural skeptic in me isn't ok with establishing a trend based on 1/40,000,000 of the available data, the sample size is simply too small. Am I completely off-base with this?

Exactly, we don't even know if a 2F degree rise over a 125 year period is statistically significant, in may well be within a one standard deviation.

Also the global mean surface temperature has not been well defined during this time period, it has changed as stations close and new ones are added, and as new technology is introduced.