Climate Change may not be a bad our best brains feared.
Discussion
mondeoman said:
Here's one for you - if this (climate change(!)) REALLY is a threat to mankind and the world as we know it (because the science is settled after all), why have we seen a worldwide [u]decrease[/u] in the number of weather stations, why aren't there a swarm of up-to-date satellites with state-of-the-art instrumentation monitoring earth wide energy influx and outflow, fleets of weather balloons providing global day-to-day atmospheric energy content data, a veritable armada of Argo bouys (not the 3500 there are to cover 370million square kilometres ie 1 for every 100,000km2) and enormous, concerted, UN-driven boycotts of Chinese, US, Russian and Indian products (4 top CO2 producers). Because if it's real, we should be diverting huge funds to monitor and measure. But we're not. We're pissing around with windmills, landowner subsidies and solar subsidies and and and.
Because a lot of the time, energy, effort, money and resources that might be spent on that is still being spent convincing people that science is a better way of understanding the world than shouty people with opinions.durbster said:
Because a lot of the time, energy, effort, money and resources that might be spent on that is still being spent convincing people that science is a better way of understanding the world than shouty people with opinions.
Shouty people? That is you that is.
Clueless, and without any comprehension of the subject under consideration
Wait Here Until Green Light Shows said:
If you took a 5m tape measure and stretched it out on your table, then shrank it down so it fitted into the last half centimetre.
This would put this 140 year snapshot into a scale of about 140,000 years.
I don't know when humans first discovered how to make their life better by releasing carbon into the atmosphere, but I genuinely wonder whether this blip would be statistically different from a longer term view.
Ian
Colonial said:
skyrover said:
Th coast has always eroded.
The north sea used to be forest and grasslands.
People/the world will adapt.
Oh. Ok. Thanks random internet dude. You clearly know more than the international scientific community. The north sea used to be forest and grasslands.
People/the world will adapt.
Skyrover is right though...the world will adapt.
People will adapt.
Will 7bn will adapt...? probably not.
Will Ethiopia et. al still be able to double their population each generation? Probably not.
Will the developed world still enjoy hugely privileged lives so many others watch and suffer? (that is to say, billions could never hope to attain a fraction of the security and luxury we take for granted) Probably not.
I think if anything is going to stir people to try and protect the status quo (of a stable-ish climate), it wil be self interest in response to this last one.
It won't be a few doctored stats and selectively presented charts though.
Ian
Kawasicki said:
Disco Infiltrator said:
Isn't the planet still warming up after the last ice age?
This figure shows the Antarctic temperature changes during the last several glacial/interglacial cycles of the present ice age and a comparison to changes in global ice volume. The present day is on the right.
The first two curves shows local changes in temperature at two sites in Antarctica as derived from deuterium isotopic measurements (δD) on ice cores (EPICA Community Members 2004, Petit et al. 1999). The final plot shows a reconstruction of global ice volume based on δ18O measurements on benthic foraminifera from a composite of globally distributed sediment cores and is scaled to match the scale of fluctuations in Antarctic temperature (Lisiecki and Raymo 2005). Note that changes in global ice volume and changes in Antarctic temperature are highly correlated, so one is a good estimate of the other, but differences in the sediment record do not necessarily reflect differences in paleotemperature. Horizontal lines indicate modern temperatures and ice volume. However, since geological records such as ice cores and sediments represent an average often on the scale of thousands of years, direct comparison to current values can be misleading. Larger, short term variations in ancient climate are not present in the fossil record. Hence the comparison is not comparing like with like and is scientifically invalid. Differences in the alignment of various features reflect dating uncertainty and do not indicate different timing at different sites.
The Antarctic temperature records indicate that the present interglacial is relatively cool compared to previous interglacials, at least at these sites. The Liesecki & Raymo (2005) sediment reconstruction does not indicate significant differences between modern ice volume and previous interglacials, though some other studies do report slightly lower ice volumes / higher sea levels during the 120 ka and 400 ka interglacials (Karner et al. 2001, Hearty and Kaufman 2000).
Colonial said:
Wiccan of Darkness said:
As a scientist myself, whilst many things bug the hell out of me, this is probably the one thing that grates my gonads the most.
In science, people do studies. Those studies are published in peer reviewed journals, and are repeated and reviewed.
Nothing is ever black or white. Not at the level I work at. Instead, the scientific community reach a consensus as a result of the collective direction that studies conclude. Let me give a wonderful example as an explanation.
A hippy type person I occasionally socialise with, is adamant that homeopathy works. A quick bio-net search for 'homeopathy is effective' threw up just over 9,000 studies that show homeopathy works. She was delighted and started singing and dancing saying see, it's true.
I did another search, for the antithesis and it threw up some 150,000 results. So for every study that says it works, another 15 says it doesn't. Naturally, being the pseudoscientist she is, she only chooses to pay attention to the 9000 studies that support her argument, and not the 150,000 that didn't.
However, consensus can and does change. I suspect homeopathy will do the same, although my knowledge of atomic physics is patchy I know about spin and resonance and I think it's possible to alter the spin or resonance of certain molecules which would explain why homeopathy has a slightly higher rate of success than the placebo effect alone. But homeopathy does not fall in to the criteria of nuclear physics and thus will be a long time before a bottle of water pills are put in to a resonance imaging machine.
The article is pretty much the same. The media have this habit of twisting academic papers and reporting them in a way that fits a certain agenda, and once again they've done this. Just because the telegraph decides to report on one study that says we're not doomed, there will be a hundred out there that say we're screwed. But nope, those are conveniently forgotten.
The climate change issue is such a vast field of science that it has its own specialisation, and the consensus is we're f
ked. But it has only been going for 30 years.
That said, we (that is, smart cookies like me) stopped calling it global warming in the 1990's and started calling it climate change, as it became apparent that as the earth warmed up, the nice big watery oceans acted like a car radiator and soaked up the heat energy. That in turn gives extra energy to individual weather events. Climate change will turn a drizzle in to a flood, a dusting of snow in to a blizzard and a warm spell in to a drought. The rate at which weather records are being broken is increasing annually. Since 2010, the number of consecutive days where a temperature above 40 degrees C is recorded on the earths surface is broken.
The undeniable consensus is the climate is changing. It is also undeniable that this is largely contributed by human activity. What is not known is the proportion that is natural and what can be apportioned to human activity, nor the precise measurements of the results.
I'd like to know who funded that study. I bet it was Exxon. They have their grubby prints all over dozens of 'climate change is not as bad as we feared' studies. Always useful to find out how a study was financed.
Take this (likely fictitious as I'm making this up but wouldn't surprise me if it was real) example. "Potatoes are the best source of fibre and micronutrients and are the new superfood" according to a study by scientists. The research, carried out at the potato research institute, found that everyone should be eating three times as many potatoes for a healthier, longer life.
Really? So if we all treble our intake of chips, we'll live longer? Wow.... but doesn't the potato research institute have a vested interest in a study like this? Oh.....but chips are so gorgeous and now scientists say they're good for us. So lets ignore all the other stuff and cherry pick the stuff we want to hear, irrespective of the fact the study was funded by people who have a pecuniary interest in results falling in a certain way.
I often hear stuff on radio 4 that starts off with the reader saying "scientists/research has shown/found that blah blah blah" and before the reader has finished the article I've mentally shredded the 'report' and can often be heard at the traffic lights going 'Bah!! Bloody idiots'.
Anyway, I'm not going to go in to what constitutes a proper scientific study. It's long, complex and unbelievably dull. Plus its gone midnight and I want my 7 hours of snooze.
Excellent post. In science, people do studies. Those studies are published in peer reviewed journals, and are repeated and reviewed.
Nothing is ever black or white. Not at the level I work at. Instead, the scientific community reach a consensus as a result of the collective direction that studies conclude. Let me give a wonderful example as an explanation.
A hippy type person I occasionally socialise with, is adamant that homeopathy works. A quick bio-net search for 'homeopathy is effective' threw up just over 9,000 studies that show homeopathy works. She was delighted and started singing and dancing saying see, it's true.
I did another search, for the antithesis and it threw up some 150,000 results. So for every study that says it works, another 15 says it doesn't. Naturally, being the pseudoscientist she is, she only chooses to pay attention to the 9000 studies that support her argument, and not the 150,000 that didn't.
However, consensus can and does change. I suspect homeopathy will do the same, although my knowledge of atomic physics is patchy I know about spin and resonance and I think it's possible to alter the spin or resonance of certain molecules which would explain why homeopathy has a slightly higher rate of success than the placebo effect alone. But homeopathy does not fall in to the criteria of nuclear physics and thus will be a long time before a bottle of water pills are put in to a resonance imaging machine.
The article is pretty much the same. The media have this habit of twisting academic papers and reporting them in a way that fits a certain agenda, and once again they've done this. Just because the telegraph decides to report on one study that says we're not doomed, there will be a hundred out there that say we're screwed. But nope, those are conveniently forgotten.
The climate change issue is such a vast field of science that it has its own specialisation, and the consensus is we're f
ked. But it has only been going for 30 years.That said, we (that is, smart cookies like me) stopped calling it global warming in the 1990's and started calling it climate change, as it became apparent that as the earth warmed up, the nice big watery oceans acted like a car radiator and soaked up the heat energy. That in turn gives extra energy to individual weather events. Climate change will turn a drizzle in to a flood, a dusting of snow in to a blizzard and a warm spell in to a drought. The rate at which weather records are being broken is increasing annually. Since 2010, the number of consecutive days where a temperature above 40 degrees C is recorded on the earths surface is broken.
The undeniable consensus is the climate is changing. It is also undeniable that this is largely contributed by human activity. What is not known is the proportion that is natural and what can be apportioned to human activity, nor the precise measurements of the results.
I'd like to know who funded that study. I bet it was Exxon. They have their grubby prints all over dozens of 'climate change is not as bad as we feared' studies. Always useful to find out how a study was financed.
Take this (likely fictitious as I'm making this up but wouldn't surprise me if it was real) example. "Potatoes are the best source of fibre and micronutrients and are the new superfood" according to a study by scientists. The research, carried out at the potato research institute, found that everyone should be eating three times as many potatoes for a healthier, longer life.
Really? So if we all treble our intake of chips, we'll live longer? Wow.... but doesn't the potato research institute have a vested interest in a study like this? Oh.....but chips are so gorgeous and now scientists say they're good for us. So lets ignore all the other stuff and cherry pick the stuff we want to hear, irrespective of the fact the study was funded by people who have a pecuniary interest in results falling in a certain way.
I often hear stuff on radio 4 that starts off with the reader saying "scientists/research has shown/found that blah blah blah" and before the reader has finished the article I've mentally shredded the 'report' and can often be heard at the traffic lights going 'Bah!! Bloody idiots'.
Anyway, I'm not going to go in to what constitutes a proper scientific study. It's long, complex and unbelievably dull. Plus its gone midnight and I want my 7 hours of snooze.
just one of thousands of comments from people that have been involved with some of the "eminent" institutions living it large on the taxpayers hard earned.
"So, as they said in Watergate, follow the money. I am going to concentrate on NASA GISS, where I was for 7 years, but it applies to all climate research institutions, of which I have been at several and am familiar with several more.
The wasted and misspent money at NASA GISS and all climate research institutions is staggering. But what do you expect when you shovel money at herds of unqualified carpetbaggers?
NASA GISS, in the building over Tom’s Restaurant, used to have its own supercomputer, which are very expensive. Unfortunately, NASA GISS decided to hire unqualified incompetent friends for tech support.
I swear I am not making any of this up. I couldn’t possibly. I just don’t have that much of a comedic imagination.
One of the guys hired/promoted to provide tech support was the NASA GISS mail boy. He was a good kid so why not give him a high-paying tech job?
Similarly, a NASA GISS secretary was hired/promoted to provide tech support. She was very nice but c’mon.
Another of the guys hired was so incompetent a bunch of the climate scientists finally got together and demanded Jim Hansen, head of NASA GISS then, fire him, WITHOUT REPLACEMENT. Tech support got BETTER after that.
While I was nearing completion of my dissertation at NASA GISS, an exposed water pipe to the bathroom overhead broke in the computer room, destroying thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment and data, including mine; the “data recovery” by incompetent NASA GISS tech support destroyed even more. To start, you should be shaking your head and saying, “why are there exposed bathroom water pipes going through a computer room?”
NASA GISS no longer has a supercomputer. It now runs its climate model on supercomputers at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt Maryland, where I spent a summer studying high-performance computing.
I was talking to a guy from GSFC a few months ago and he said the program for NASA GISS’s climate model — named Model E, an intentional play on the word “muddle” — is called the “jungle” because it is so badly coded. I know this to be true from my own extensive experience programming it (I tried to fix as much as I could…).
NASA GISS has Columbia University graduate students. Funding grad students in climate science is not as straightforward — i.e., honest — as it would seem it should be. Most grants don’t last long enough to fund a grad student to graduation and no grad student is going to work where he might lose funding before graduation. Note that grants are from funding proposals for specific projects, which are peer reviewed (for what little that is worth) to make sure exactly what the project is about is worth paying for.
What usually happens is that money for specific projects is pooled to pay the grad students, although usually there is one big money project paying the lion’s share. That means that many grad students are paid off grants for specific projects but are not working on those projects. I remember once at NASA GISS having to write up a progress report for a project I didn’t really work on but was paid off of. That is the definition of “misspent”.
I have no proof, but when I was at NASA GISS there was a rumor that the head of NASA GISS before James Hansen had to leave due to um, mixing up government money and his own. And I’ve wondered — again with no proof — whether Hansen was forced out of NASA GISS due to his violations of the Hatch Act, like using government money to travel to protests. As we have said, we are pressing a case against Gavin Schmidt, current head of NASA GISS, for violations of the Hatch Act.
About travel, one of the largest contributors to carbon emissions. This has been talked about quite a bit, although mostly for failing celebrity climate spokespeople.
Even though nowadays conferences could easily and more efficiently be done as teleconferences, climate scientists love to travel to FUN places for conferences, paid for by the taxpayer. We were no different, as we said in AGU’s “Climate Change: Believe It Or Else” Prize:
“Both Kubatzki and I have presented at AGU Meetings. They are a load of fun and we thank the taxpayers for the vacations in expensive fun-filled distant San Francisco.”
At some climate conferences, climate scientists can even donate some of their conference travel money to offset the carbon emissions from the travel. The tiny number of participants would make Scrooge blush.
Speaking of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), after much careful thought — about how painful it would be to forgo the money — the AGU decided to continue to take money from the oil companies. Those climate scientists are so noble.
Following the money would be a much better use of the Freedom of Information Act than to demand to look at data that most are not qualified to understand anyway, including many climate scientists using it. The data is often fundamentally flawed. How you process it after that is irrelevant. Garbage in, garbage out.
If you must question the data, question its transformation from its rawest form. What (almost always far from the tree) weather station data was used to transform tree ring widths to temperature? (I’ve taken courses and done research on tree rings.) How is the satellite sensor data transformed into surface temperature? (I’ve taken courses in remote sensing. How do you tell the difference between high white clouds and surface white ice?) That is where you should start scoffing, not down the line about how ignorant “climate” scientists are using the garbage data. The whole Hockey Stick controversy completely missed the point.
I wanted to be like FBI agent Mark Felt, who was the Watergate informant Deep Throat, or Edward Snowden, the NSA informant. Secretly supplying inside information to bring down a government agency gone bad. (Due to lawmakers actually hating whistleblowers, Snowden isn’t covered by whistleblower laws, but I might be.) I even tried that at first (did you know that you can’t simply email information to WikiLeaks but have to use Tor, which can be a bit of a hassle?).
Journalists weren’t interested. This shouldn’t have surprised me. Read Glenn Greenwald’s No Place To Hide, which is about Edward Snowden and the NSA. Snowden practically begged Greenwald for months to take his information but Greenwald was too lazy. The Washington Post (which also stalled Snowden), The New York Times (“Pravda On The Hudson”), and the rest are worthless at this point so we became our own newspaper. Recognize our masthead font?"
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/09/18/follow-the-...
durbster said:
mondeoman said:
Here's one for you - if this (climate change(!)) REALLY is a threat to mankind and the world as we know it (because the science is settled after all), why have we seen a worldwide [u]decrease[/u] in the number of weather stations, why aren't there a swarm of up-to-date satellites with state-of-the-art instrumentation monitoring earth wide energy influx and outflow, fleets of weather balloons providing global day-to-day atmospheric energy content data, a veritable armada of Argo bouys (not the 3500 there are to cover 370million square kilometres ie 1 for every 100,000km2) and enormous, concerted, UN-driven boycotts of Chinese, US, Russian and Indian products (4 top CO2 producers). Because if it's real, we should be diverting huge funds to monitor and measure. But we're not. We're pissing around with windmills, landowner subsidies and solar subsidies and and and.
Because a lot of the time, energy, effort, money and resources that might be spent on that is still being spent convincing people that science is a better way of understanding the world than shouty people with opinions.But the data doesn't show that. So the shouty people have to "convince" the heretics to "believe".
glazbagun said:
How many bad rice or corn harvests would it take for wars to start breaking out, for example?
Crop yields improve with more CO2 freely available in the atmosphere. If anything adding more CO2 has been a significant benefit to agriculture ( from NASA )and the natural world in the current time frame - all the bad stuff is "expected" in 50 -100 years. mondeoman said:
Again, really? Surely the best way to convince people is with real data - you know, a proveable causal link between fossil fuel based CO2 and global climate changes, where all changes are detrimental to human life, no positive benefit at all.
But the data doesn't show that. So the shouty people have to "convince" the heretics to "believe".
The data is all out there, in the public domain.But the data doesn't show that. So the shouty people have to "convince" the heretics to "believe".
And when you show people the data and it upsets them, they claim the data is corrupt, and instead choose to believe the version that makes them feel more comfortable.
durbster said:
The data is all out there, in the public domain.
And when you show people the data and it upsets them, they claim the data is corrupt, and instead choose to believe the version that makes them feel more comfortable.
The unmodified data is not in the public domain Durbs - this has been pointed out to you many times. Some of the raw data has even been lost by those charged with it's upkeep (step forward Prof. Phil Jones). You can get hold of some of the underlying data used to plot the various global temperatures but do not confuse these values with raw data. And when you show people the data and it upsets them, they claim the data is corrupt, and instead choose to believe the version that makes them feel more comfortable.
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