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What's Really Warming the World?

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Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#451
post #403
post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though I wouldn't accept #5 and #6 exactly as phrased, it does seem like positive effects ought to be balanced against the negative, and the uncertainty of future technological developments ought to inform our current decision of how much to spend addressing climate change. Does that make me a climate change denier?

Your position is similar to that of Swedish environmentalist and academic, Bjorn Lomberg who accepts that rising CO2 levels are the cause of warming, and that this is a problem, but argues that the dangers are overstated and resources would be better devoted to mitigation of climate change and addressing other pressing issues such as global poverty. Despite his relatively orthodox views, he was recently run off campu…

Bjorn Lomborg is a sad case. He titled his book The Skeptical Environmentalist and everyone got the message, without reading the book, that he was a climate-change skeptic -- and for the most part labeled him as an "enemy" and rebuffed him. It was just a public relations disaster.

For what it's worth, he's not a "skeptic" in any of the conventional ways. I also remember looking at the IPCC reports once when I was a young physics student and saying, "hey, it's only a couple degrees Celsius over many years?" I was educated enough to realize that you could predict bad storms etc -- what I like to tell people right now is that it's like having a really huge boulder and, right next to it, digging a little ditch, only to cause the boulder to smack you down: the small change in the height of an equilibrium can still have a huge effect if a big enough system is relaxing to the new equilibrium. Someone came up with a memorable name for it: it's less of a concern about "global warming" and more about "global weirding." It took me a while to appreciate that there is a small (but scary) probability that the slope that the boulder is on might have a net incline one or the other way, so that the boulder might not just hit us but roll over us if it gets disturbed far enough from equilibrium. It makes a lot of sense for there to be a big scientific research program about that, even though no IPCC model predicts runaway climate change because the probability is so low and the possible causes are typically unexpected.

With that said: though hurricanes, floods and tornadoes certainly can have a massive economic impact, Bjorn has a good point of "the weather disasters that we know will happen due to the warming that we know is happening are important, but let's figure out how this compares to other things which we can predict really well, and see where our money is best spent: climate-change relief efforts, or climate-change mitigation, or general alleviation of poverty, or what?"

What I think is most missing from all of this is: we're talking about so little money, especially if we compare to governments' military expenditures, going towards the science. What would be great is if a government said, "hey, we're putting forward this huge grant to climate change research just because we think research is intrinsically good and want to support this huge project of, y'know, knowing more."

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I can see through most of the political BS that people even here on HN can't seem to grasp. Why is that?

I am a little older and more experienced, that might be it. But I shouldn't really be that surprised from a community that willingly rallies around ideas that continues to subjugate them.

It puts me about 10 steps ahead of the majority of people.

I don't need your acceptance.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#453

Earlier 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.

A layperson named Steve McIntyre did just that, after reading the IPCC's 3rd Assessment Report and seeing the prominently featured "Hockey Stick" based on a paper by Mann et al., and wondering, hmm... perhaps this study is reproducible? The rabbit hole that McIntyre and his colleagues have found themselves in over the last 10 years has, in my view, demonstrated the value of hacker-types taking an interest in climate…

IIRC, despite the criticsim, the 'hockey stick' study and its author were proven right. Lots of criticism doesn't make it wrong, especially in politicized debates.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sarcasm? Yes it was; I was just testing a social hypotheses I had.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#455
post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/ [2] - http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions [3] - http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/G…

It boggles my mind that people use the term sealioning unironically. How can it possibly be that a sensible person thinks it's ok to make a hateful statement in a public place and when someone asks clarification about it they are the harassers?! You are not a priest preaching to the ignorant congregation, if you don't want to deal with the bullshit get off the fucking podium.

Here's my sealion of a question. What parts of climate change research are actually backed up by the scientific method (experiments with falsifiable hypotheses and all that) and what parts are more akin to natural history or something else? To clarify, I believe humans caused the problem (it appears that stating this makes people like you more, which is weird, but ok) but I cringe every time I hear the word science attached to the debate. Is it like a social science? I think someone told me that we know for sure that greenhouse gas emissions cause ozone depletion but I can't remember anymore. What is the actual hard science here?

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe I'm just smarter than most climate scientists? You're really not, and your comments bear that out.

I can see through most of the political BS that people even here on HN can't seem to grasp. Why is that? I am a little older and more experienced, that might be it. But I shouldn't really be that surprised from a community that willingly rallies around ideas that continues to subjugate them. It puts me about 10 steps ahead of the majority of people. I don't need your acceptance.

> Why is that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The baffling part about it is how someone can ignorantly argue correlations of basic chemistry when they don't know basic chemistry.

Another interesting tidbit: You'll find this on both sides of most public discussions I guess. A whole lot of the people who tries to defend man made global warming in public forums seems to be parroting what they have heard, just like the naysayers. Getting to the facts instead of gettings served up brochures seems hard and asking questions gets you smacked down by a bunch of zealots. Which is why I found this piece…

Yeah, there is nothing more frustrating than someone who agrees with you but for totally horrible reasons.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#458

Earlier 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 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…

> IIRC, 97% of climate scientists believe it's happening and caused by humans

No, you didn't recall correctly. It's published papers taking a position on AGW and even that number is questionable at best:

  To manufacture their misleading asserted consensus, Cook and his colleagues also misclassified various papers as taking “no position” on human-caused global warming. When Cook and his colleagues determined a paper took no position on the issue, they simply pretended, for the purpose of their 97-percent claim, that the paper did not exist.

  Morner, a sea level scientist, told Popular Technology that Cook classifying one of his papers as “no position” was “Certainly not correct and certainly misleading. The paper is strongly against AGW [anthropogenic global warming], and documents its absence in the sea level observational facts. Also, it invalidates the mode of sea level handling by the IPCC.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/05/30/global-wa...

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#459
post #391
post #346

Helpful when reading this thread to keep in mind Michael Mann's six stages of climate change denial: 1. CO2 is not actually increasing. 2. Even if it is, the increase has no impact on the climate since there is no convincing evidence of warming. 3. Even if there is warming, it is due to natural causes. 4. Even if the warming cannot be explained by natural causes, the human impact is small, and the impact of continued…

I don't think the general population is thinking about it that much. To me, the main denial seems to be a dislike and/or distrust of the people advocating the AGW theory. For example, having Al Gore as a prominent figure of the AGW theory movement for a number of years is enough to make them suspicious. They see him fly in private jets, own multiple humongous homes, make investments that will pay off if things like c…

There's also the pretty standard *these scientists' intuitions about causal links between human activity, atmospheric CO^2 and recorded temperature might well be right. But you're not convincing me to pay carbon taxes or cycle. Which is less unreasonable than it sounds when you consider the evidence of human ability to slow or reverse climate change (at all, never mind through eyecatching civic initiatives) is in rather shorter supply than the evidence of human ability to adapt to climate change.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#460
post #429

Honest question: This data is correlational, and I always thought it was important to distinguish between correlation & causation?

Generally causation and correlation can only be distinguished by running experiments. Given that we only have 1 earth climate, long time needed to gather reliable results, and the quite apparent correlation, which experiment would you like to run for next 50 years, slow down co2 output to see if climate warming slows down, or continue increasing co2 output, and see where that leads?

Infact, increasing co2 output would be kind of boring experiment, we've tried that already.

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