Agreeing on the provenance of the warming seems to be a red herring when we urgently need to figure out how climate change affects us. Which areas will be flooded, which areas will become inhabitable, will we be able to grow more food or less, how many more people can we expect to starve, how many jobs will be created and lost, how will it affect life expectancy? I realize such research is going on -- I'd like it to be promoted better. The world is already an inhospitable place for many people and we already don't respond well enough. Currently I don't see why we would respond any better if things get worse.
What's Really Warming the World?
371–380 of 549 posts
Re: What's Really Warming the World?
#372Earlier 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.
Please try to be specific in your criticism. What misunderstanding does the above poster have about the science or the data?
Re: What's Really Warming the World?
#373Very cool visualization and great way to display it.
As someone who refuses to trust authority and wants to understand things for myself before making a decision, global warming is very frustrating because nobody will answer my questions without personal attacks or appeals to authority. I don't have an agenda either way, I just have a very inquisitive mind. Have any of you felt the same?
Some of the questions I have that never seem to get an adequate answer:
1) How are the models validated? Is it like backtesting a trading strategy? Come up with a hypothesis that seems to fit historical data, then let it run with actual data, and see how accurate it is? If so, how have the models held up?
2) How do they account for confounding factors and how do they separate causal correlations from mere correlations?
For example, at 95% of fires firemen were present. Firemen and fires are strongly correlated. But nobody would say firemen are the cause of fires.
Cholesterol was thought to be a causal factor for heart problems because it is strongly correlated but they later found it is not a causal factor. Something else causes the heart disease and cholesterol raises when heart disease is present. They can use it as a predictor of heart disease but it is now understood that cholesterol doesn't actually cause the problem.
3) It seems to me that for a model to be trusted it must have predictive capability, and it must fit a physical model of our current understanding. How do the various models hold up with these criteria? It seems like climate is still a very complex field that we don't fully understand.
Re: What's Really Warming the World?
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Okay, show me a study that has the details on which parts are human made and which parts are caused by nature (with numbers). I have never seen this anywhere and You would think if they actually knew, we would have seen it by now. This isn't that difficult and it doesn't really make any sense that humans are causing 100%. Especially with things like the little ice age before we were around to pollute the earth. Hon…
"Honestly dude, do the fucking research. Read the IPCC. Hell even Wikipedia has the fundamentals extremely well explained. We know very, stupid well what's causing the climate to change. CO2 concentration is not just a correlation in the models, but has a directly observable physical effect that has been known about in labs and was later shown to be the primary reason for global warming." Again, "Do the fucking resea…
> Maybe I'm just smarter than most climate scientists?
You're really not, and your comments bear that out.
Re: What's Really Warming the World?
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I'm sure you have the time, inclination and expertise to look over billions of data points and make your own conclusions.
If you can link to the raw data so that I can wget it I will take a look at it.
You should just stop with this line of thinking. You have to understand the scientific context and the limits of the data to learn anything. (Source: I know several contributors to the IPCC AR5 report, and I try to have the proper respect for their expertise.)
Re: What's Really Warming the World?
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also question how we know the difference between nature/cycles and man-made pollution. Here is a good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age "Several causes have been proposed: cyclical lows in solar radiation, heightened volcanic activity, changes in the ocean circulation, an inherent variability in global climate, or decreases in the human population." It seems we don't even know how the little ice…
I bring up some simple questions and I am immediately silenced. I guess I didn't realize HN was anti-science and anti-intellectual.
You aren't being intellectual, not in the least.
Re: What's Really Warming the World?
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The first four stages have always baffled me. Anyone who knows basic chemistry Well, there you go. A lot of people don't.
The baffling part about it is how someone can ignorantly argue correlations of basic chemistry when they don't know basic chemistry.
Well, a lot of people argue that the moon landing was a hoax (without knowing basic engineering) and that the holocaust didn't happen (without knowing basic history). I find it more depressing than baffling.
Re: What's Really Warming the World?
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that you have to have a disclaimer up front makes me sad.
It's a serious problem in multiple areas in society these days; the inability to ask simple questions that may go against the "accepted" narrative without being personally attacked. Science, religion, politics, sports, it's everywhere. It's a seriously sad state of affairs, but nothing new really, if you think about it. The reach of modern communications has inflated the problem in my opinion.
Here's the thing: honest enquiry is something that should be encouraged. Sea-lioning[1], JAQing off[2] and Gish gallops[3] should not. When you are buried to your eyeballs in bullshit, it's hard to see who is really someone willing learn, and who is just shoveling on more.
[1] - http://simplikation.com/why-sealioning-is-bad/
Re: What's Really Warming the World?
#379Cool visualization. It's worth keeping in mind that the modeled data lines up with reality because it's supposed to. That's how you calibrate your model, by making sure it fits reality. The real trick is to see how well your model extrapolates from the data you have out into the future. As in, if you feed it data up to, say, 1990, will it correctly spit out 2015 temperatures that fit the reality of 2015, or will it s…
"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…
It's not just a question of how the model extrapolates from the input data itself. The actual input data may be in question as well, because there are always judgments involved in deciding how to measure, what "unreasonable" datapoints will be discarded, etc.
Read, for example, here:
"It is indisputable that a theory that is inconsistent with empirical data is a poor theory. No theory should be accepted merely because of the beauty of its logic or because it leads to conclusions that are ideologically welcome or politically convenient. Yet it is naive in the extreme to suppose that facts – especially the facts of the social sciences – speak for themselves. Not only is it true that sound analysis is unavoidably a judgment-laden mix of rigorous reasoning (“theory”) with careful observation of the facts; it is also true that the facts themselves are in large part the product of theorizing. ..."
http://cafehayek.com/2015/04/theorizing-about-the-facts-ther...
Re: What's Really Warming the World?
#380So, a graph and no units. Wonderful. As far as I know we're talking squirrels per cubic meter equivalent production of CO2 lol