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What's Really Warming the World?

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Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#471

Post by astrodust »

tosseraccount wrote: post #437
astrodust wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, so you're capable of writing highly parallel cluster-scale code in C that does intensive precision numerical analysis? Most choose vectorized FORTRAN or a combination of C++ and CUDA, but hey, knock yourself out. CERN has a 3700 core supercomputer to crunch through this kind of data. You can rent that on Amazon for about $800 an hour, so I guess you're good to go. Sorry to be so harsh here. While there's alway…

I bench marked fortran vs. x86_64 SSE extensions in C and .... C's fine. I'd rather have local clusters than Amazon or Google "cloud" any day of the week. Spotting a methodology bias is not that hard. Why the heck would you need CUDA ? NVIDIA ??? C'mon man.

Are you simply trolling at this point?

If you're so confident in your ability to process this sort of data, please, post your follow-up on HN.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#472

Post by wtbob »

themgt wrote: 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…

Is the seventh stage suing one's opponents for libel when they poke fun of one[1]?

[1] http://www.steynonline.com/6565/the-lonesomest-mann-in-town

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#473

Post by jameshart »

tosseraccount wrote: post #19
jasonkester wrote: post #3

Cool 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…

Is there a scorecard for which models have performed well?

Yes there is! In fact, this very visualization which you are commenting on is based upon the data produced by NASA Goddard from their climate model by running a historical data prediction, as their contribution to precisely such a comparison/consensus building study sponsored by the IPCC, called the "Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase Five". There are links to the sources for all of this in the original article. This information, which I'm sharing with you now, is in the first three paragraphs of endnotes on the actual article.

So.... please don't believe other posters who might come along and try to get you to believe that historical comparisons haven't been performed, or the results haven't been published, or that the IPCC ignored them, or whatever else they might choose to argue today.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#474

Post by noobermin »

natermer wrote: post #40
tosseraccount wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a scorecard for which models have performed well?

None of the models have performed very well. You probably won't find a scorecard because it's embarrassing.

As someone else shared above:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/lessons-from-past-climate-pr...

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#475

Post by patrickdavey »

birdsbolt wrote: post #336
jasonkester wrote: post #3

Cool 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…

There's a lovely book called The Limits to Growth published in 1972, through the years authors have updated their book and their models (there's more than 20). It turned out that business-as-usual model extrapolated very well from '70s to '00s. So, even them modelling was fairly good.

Yip, great book, good warnings, of which we have done very little about. Another book to recommend is "This changes everything" ... sets out a very reasonable argument while capitalism as it stands is basically incompatible with doing much to prevent climate change. Worth a read.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#476

Post by jameshart »

seizethecheese wrote: post #372
crygin wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, for one, that their uneducated skim through the IPCC report found a mistake which thousands of qualified scientists had missed, one so fundamental that it undermines all of the rest of the work in the report and the conclusions it leads to.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#477

Post by jonah »

moultano wrote: post #301
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

The BBC just posted this article[1]. Pretty good review of the Anoxic extinctions.

[1]"The Devonian extinction saw the oceans choke to death" http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150624-the-day-the-oceans-d...

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#478

Post by jameshart »

reitanqild wrote: post #415
paulhauggis wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why do you want to debate instead of learn?" I do learn. I learn by looking at all evidence and facts rather than just the ones that tell me what I want to hear. Even when it's been shown that evidence has been doctored (like during Climate gate and more recently with the temperature readings), it's just explained away to further write the narrative that man has caused Climate change and anybody that questions it is…

While I fully understand paulhauggis being downvoted here a few of the statements are interesting and I haven't seen them refuted. Anyone has an (link to) explanation to this one: > I've done research on many of the people that claim to be a 'Climate scientist' and most aren't even close.

looks like a combination of weasel words, original research, and no true scotsman to me.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#479

Post by hackuser »

guscost wrote: post #467
hackuser wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paul, I disagree with your points on climate science, but I do agree there's a bit of overreaction to what could be honest questions. However maybe this explains the response: * Your questions do seem a little like assertions with question marks at the end, because they repeat some climate denial propaganda. In fairness, maybe that's all you've read (Suggestion: Don't get your climate science from mainstream media th…

As someone who definitely doesn't agree with the mainstream opinion about all this, it comes across as fundamentally un-serious when you casually refer to the opposing argument as "propaganda" without any elaboration. I've used that kind of rhetoric probably too often and it is counterproductive. If you are genuinely interested in communicating what you believe to be good information to those who don't agree, please…

I generally agree, but at the same time I'm not going to create a false equivalency. A significant portion of climate change denial is, in fact, a propaganda campaign. The points are not fact or information, but propaganda. Still, I could have and should have phrased it in a less inflamatory manner. Thanks for the reminder.

Re: What's Really Warming the World?

#480

Post by Aloha »

cholantesh wrote: post #353
marcus_holmes wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ad-hominem. Who cares who wrote it, what does it say?

Really? You think it doesn't matter that the primary author on a paper about climate science doesn't even have an undergraduate-level education in the subject? That the second one credited has a history of accepting large sums of money to write papers endorsing spurious claims DIRECTLY RELATING to climate change?

Are you going to tell me that every person who has ever written a paper on computer science needs to have a degree in it? While I won't question this guys qualification might be questionable - making a blanket statement that someone must be specifically educated in a subject to write a good paper on it is specious.
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