Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A troubling idea about climate change found new evidence in its favor

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 117 posts

Re: A troubling idea about climate change found new evidence in its favor

#21

Post by panglott »

d--b wrote: post #9

Let's just admit it: we have no clue about what's going to happen weather-wise. A warmer planet will have a massive impact on seas, winds, and life, at all levels. Each effect may cause more effects or cancel other effects out. I don't think it's we'll ever be able to make an all-encompassing model that can assess that there will be more dramatic weather locally. At this stage, all we can say is that the planet is gl…

"We don't know yet" is the whole point of science, and of research. Over the past 30-40 years progress in our understanding of this field has been rapid, and there's no reason to think that won't continue.

Re: A troubling idea about climate change found new evidence in its favor

#22

Post by rdiddly »

mainframe-mess wrote: post #3

Idea finds evidence in its favor, isn't that backwards for a rigorous evaluation of the evidence? Shouldn't conclusions be drawn from all evidence?

I was more thinking, who writes a headline where an idea is suddenly sentient and goes out and finds evidence for itself? Oh, the same person who assures me how bewildering the synoptic-scale wave thing is, twice, and uses enough words doing it, that they could've just defined it.

Re: A troubling idea about climate change found new evidence in its favor

#23

Post by mabbo »

maxerickson wrote: post #20
mabbo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> urban landscape and population density. Interestingly, flooding is made worse by low density housing, like suburbs. Forests, meadows, wetlands, they all act like sponges. They soak up recent rainfall and release it slowly, or just keep it. Cut that down, replace it with suburbia- concrete roads, short-grass lawns, nothing that holds much water for long but instead does it's best to get it into a drain and then a ri…

Grass is generally treated as a permeable surface.

After it permeates, then what? The water still has to go somewhere, and usually it's into nearby ditches (and then streams, and then rivers). As well, with any larger rainfall the local water table below the grass will fill up quickly- now the water is running on the surface.

Permeation is definitely good, but having more stops before it gets there is important to prevent floods.

(To be clear, I'm not expert on this at all. But I did marry one, and you sort of absorb a lot just from conversations over dinner).

Re: A troubling idea about climate change found new evidence in its favor

#24

Post by maxerickson »

mabbo wrote: post #23
maxerickson wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grass is generally treated as a permeable surface.

After it permeates, then what? The water still has to go somewhere, and usually it's into nearby ditches (and then streams, and then rivers). As well, with any larger rainfall the local water table below the grass will fill up quickly- now the water is running on the surface. Permeation is definitely good, but having more stops before it gets there is important to prevent floods. (To be clear, I'm not expert on this…

The point is that it is more similar to a meadow than to a parking lot.

Re: A troubling idea about climate change found new evidence in its favor

#25

Post by d--b »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #19
d--b wrote: post #9

Let's just admit it: we have no clue about what's going to happen weather-wise. A warmer planet will have a massive impact on seas, winds, and life, at all levels. Each effect may cause more effects or cancel other effects out. I don't think it's we'll ever be able to make an all-encompassing model that can assess that there will be more dramatic weather locally. At this stage, all we can say is that the planet is gl…

I'll admit you have no clue? It seems like there are some competing groups in climate science, but so far the trend of the warming, regional precipitation, jet stream changes, ocean ph changes, methane in warming tundra, the pattern of polar ice melt all seem to have been pretty well predicted years or decades ago by the most mainstream groups (that financially motivated groups have worked hard to undercut and delegi…

Ok I agree, that was clearly an overstatement. I guess I am annoyed by news outlets commenting on scientific studies that are sensational.

Re: A troubling idea about climate change found new evidence in its favor

#27

Post by acomjean »

d--b wrote: post #9

Let's just admit it: we have no clue about what's going to happen weather-wise. A warmer planet will have a massive impact on seas, winds, and life, at all levels. Each effect may cause more effects or cancel other effects out. I don't think it's we'll ever be able to make an all-encompassing model that can assess that there will be more dramatic weather locally. At this stage, all we can say is that the planet is gl…

Weather is very short term. Hard to predict more than 5 days in advance. There are a lot of factors that effect it, but within 3 or so days, the weather is pretty good.

Climate models are the long term. What climate scientists seem to do, is create the model, then test it against the last period of time where they have good data. (Given what we know about past climate, what would we predict for the last 5? years. since the last 5 years already happened, they can compare the model to reality). Obviously since we only have only one planet and a short time to test on this verification isn't perfect, but they have a lot of computing power and its the best we can do.

Re: A troubling idea about climate change found new evidence in its favor

#28

Post by wflynny »

jessriedel wrote: post #14

I know nothing about this topic, but I can caution to point out that Scientific Reports is the lowest rung of the Nature journal heirarchy. When I published there, I was very unimpressed with the quality of the refereeing and editing. Certainly doesn't mean the work is wrong, but laymen shouldn't interpret this as having the same sort of seal of approval as a normal Nature article. In my field (physics), Scientific R…

Having reviewed several papers for Scientific Reports in the past year, it was very similar to my experience reviewing for PLoS One. You are mandated not to factor in the significance of the work and only to critique the methodology and conclusions [1]. My experience reading articles there ranges from complete junk to papers that probably just missed the mark of getting into Nature proper.

Articles should make it more clear the distinction between Nature Publishing Group, Nature (journal), and Scientific Reports (open access journal). Confusion then propagates to the headlines of the articles when posted to content aggregators, take /r/science and it's related subreddits for example.

[1]: http://www.nature.com/srep/journal-policies/referees#criteri...

Re: A troubling idea about climate change found new evidence in its favor

#29

Post by padseeker »

I hate when people call it Climate Change. Thats a phrase right wing think tanks cooked up to soften the blow of the sound of Global Warming.

No amount of evidence is going to convince Global Warming deniers. But those who deny but also suffer from the effects will be the first ones with their hands out asking the government for money to save to bail them out.

I'm glad the WashPo is writing these kinds of articles, but nothing is going to convince climate 'skeptics'. Stop wasting your time trying to reason with people who cannot be reasoned with.

Post reply on HN