Engaging With Climate Skeptics 822
In the wake of the CRU "climategate" leak, reader Geoffrey.landis sends along a New York Times blog profile of Judith Curry, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech. "Curry — unlike many climate scientists — does not simply dismiss the arguments of 'climate skeptics,' but attempts to engage them in dialogue. She can, as well, be rather pointed in criticizing her colleagues, as in a post on the skeptic site climateaudit where she argues for greater transparency for climate data and calculations (mirrored here). In this post she makes a point that tribalism in science is the main culprit here —- that when scientists 'circle the wagons' to defend against what they perceive to be unfair (and unscientific) attacks, the result can be damaging to the actual science being defended. Is it still possible to conduct a dialogue, or is there no possible common ground?"
ESR said it very well - Open Source Science (Score:5, Insightful)
Open-sourcing the Global Warming Debate [ibiblio.org]:
In short, if computer models are the primary tool in making all sorts of climate predictions, then let's have transparency in building the models and getting conclusions from them.
Uh yeah, whatever... (Score:4, Insightful)
"...tribalism in science is the main culprit here..."
Funny, the old word used to be 'fraud'.
What's the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe now the debate will actually occur? (Score:3, Insightful)
This way when the debate finally is over, the statements about such can be true.
Of course, this does overshadow the real debate, which is whether or not Governments are the right organizations to correct any issues, which, if we look at similar historic pollution agreements, they have failed miserably.
Extraordinary claims... (Score:4, Insightful)
Scientists are not Politicians (Score:4, Insightful)
It is up to the politicians to use (or misuse) those facts and data.
But once the scientist sees himself as a politician, it is far too easy for ego and self-interest to blind them to what they should be observing, instead of what they wish to observe.
Re:ESR said it very well - Open Source Science (Score:5, Insightful)
While I do think there is climate change, I think that many of the "disaster scenarios" are over hyped.. and I think that Gore and his "it is all already completely decided everything I is fact and no reasonable scientist can argue with me" is bullcrap.
Re:Extraordinary claims... (Score:1, Insightful)
You're confusing Hollywood nonsense with scientific argument. The scientific argument is simple: the Earth will grow warmer in the next century, and as a result sea levels will rise by at least a meter, but probably 4 or so.
Is it anthropogenic? Skeptics have reason to question this. But at the same time, given the massive damage humans have definitely caused to the atmosphere (the depletion of the ozone layer was a real problem that we had to deal with) it seems somewhat disingenuous to claim that humans aren't at least in part responsible for atmospheric trends.
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Uh yeah, whatever... (Score:2, Insightful)
For twenty years, it's been "stop asking questions, the science is settled, you're evil people for questioning our well-established and peer-reviewed science!"
Now, after we find out that much of the experimental and observational basis for Global Warmology is actually a scam, it's "you're still evil for asking all of those questions (even though they turned out to have a good foundation for skepticism, and you were pretty much right about the weak science), but we're now very willing to work with you to find out what the REAL science is. And, by the way, we're still going to want to control the debate, and the peer review is going to be under our control, but feel free to submit any questions you may have to our Web page..."
Re:Common Ground? (Score:5, Insightful)
There very much is a common ground. Truth.
To paraphrase Dr. Henry Jones Jr...
Science is the search for FACT, Not Truth. If you want Truth, try the philosophy department.
Engaging with whom exactly? (Score:2, Insightful)
"Engaging with skeptics" is an approach that I find improvised and naive at best.
First on the list of naivete is accepting their self-description as skeptics without any second-thought. They are anything but skeptics. They are out to destroy the legitimacy of climate scientists in public opinion and they use all the dirty tricks in the book toward that objective. Their self-description as skeptics and their talking points have been carefully laid out by PR firms working for powerful vested interests.
Theirs is a concerted strategy to influence public opinion and the last salvo with this "hacking" thing happens just before the Copenhagen summit. She does not even question the legitimacy of those emails.
Engaging with the public and with legitimate political representatives is what climate scientists must do. "Skeptics" doing disinformation should be exposed, not engaged with.
People like you are a large part of the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
This attitude that when it comes to climate science it is a "With us or against us," sort of thing. Either someone accepts that humans are causing climate change, that the results will be catastrophic and so on or they are the ENEMY. Skepticism, dissent, etc are not tolerated. If you don't tow the party line, you are clearly in the pocket of the industry or a moron or whatever, worthy only of being shouted down and silenced.
That sort of attitude is a large part of what leads to the polarization of the issue, and is precisely what it seems that this person is trying to work against. If you have the attitude that anyone who is skeptical of your theory at all is to be dismissed a priori, well then you aren't going to win many converts, are you?
Also I should note that attitudes like this make many people like me extremely skeptical. Whenever people act in a manner that demands unquestioning support, when they simply shout down those that disagree and attempt to silence them, when they are secretive about their methods and data, when they appeal to a consensus, when they say debate is over, well that raises my bullshit alarm. The reason is that is precisely how con artists operate. They present you with what they say as absolute truth and shout down those who would dare question it. They want to present you with only their reality, because they are indeed full of shit and they don't want that to come out. As such they attack those that question them and try to silence them, because they want to deflect from the questions.
Well, when you act like a con man, that really sets off warning bells for me. Why would you do that? Why would you simply try to shut down those that question you if you are so sure of your position? While it doesn't make you a con to do that, it sure as hell makes me suspicious you are one.
So really, shit like that doesn't help. If you are going to dismiss anyone who is skeptical of your viewpoint out of hand, you accomplish nothing. You won't convert any of them, obviously since you just dismiss them, and you'll make others wonder what it is you are so worried about.
Climate skeptics have no arguments (Score:1, Insightful)
... just personal attacks and outright lies.
Re:Maybe now the debate will actually occur? (Score:2, Insightful)
I think you're entirely correct. From what I have seen, most of the denial of AGW is actually resistance to heavy government intervention. Since most of the proposals for dealing with AGW involve significant government economic control, there is a tendency for people to link AGW with big government and act accordingly. If you think about it, someone who is very much against government intervention would likely tend toward scepticism. The problem as I see it is that there is such a great divide between the two political ends of the spectrum that they aren't willing to agree on even the simplist of things let alone anything like AGW.
Re:Engaging with whom exactly? (Score:3, Insightful)
That was a pretty genius stroke by energy companies, enlisting one half of the two political poles as allies. It basically ensured the entire debate couldn't take place on scientific grounds. And it's done a vast disservice to those who really DO question the science from a scientific standpoint, as well. How do you present a creditable case when the guys next to you are babbling some nonsense conspiracy theory about socialism?
Eric Raymond's take on this (Score:5, Insightful)
Interestingly, ESR has gotten in on the discussion and is a little more damning in his condemnation of the entire Climategate ordeal
http://rebootcongress.blogspot.com/2009/11/eric-s-raymond-on-east-anglia-crus.html [blogspot.com]
There is only one way to cut through all of the conflicting claims and agendas about the CRU's research: open-source it all. Publish the primary data sets, publish the programs used to interpret them and create graphs like the well-known global-temperature "hockey stick", publish everything. Let the code and the data speak for itself; let the facts trump speculation and interpretation.
We know, from experience with software, that secrecy is the enemy of quality -- that software bugs, like cockroaches, shun light and flourish in darkness. So, too. with mistakes in the interpretation of scientific data; neither deliberate fraud nor inadvertent error can long survive the skeptical scrutiny of millions. The same remedy we have found in the open-source community applies - unsurprisingly, since we learned it from science in the first place. Abolish the secrecy, let in the sunlight.
Re:Extraordinary claims... (Score:4, Insightful)
... require extraordinary evidence. The global-warmists, or climate change proponents need to pony-up some real evidence for all the wild, alarmist claims about doomsday they've been making for the past 20 years... not just anecdotal bunk like misc. ice sleets falling off Antarctica, etc.
I agree with your subject statement but I disagree with that very last part. Apparently the West antarctic ice sheet was the part with "ice sheets falling off it" while the East side remained relatively stable. That's recently changed [time.com]. I don't think this proves anything but I admit it's alarming to me that we might just be sitting on our hands while Antarctica breaks apart. Hell, we're already opening up shipping lanes through the north pole [nationalgeographic.com]. It's true, I am just another internet moron but I would really prefer we don't have to find out what results from Antarctica breaking apart or melting. At this point, I'm open to suggestions and theories ... although for any of them to be unquestionably valid, I refer to your first statement.
No one seemed to refute our decision to stop using CFCs. We all seemed to agree as a planet that they were bad. And so on and so forth you can look back historically at man negatively altering his environment to varying degrees. I think more than sufficient evidence has been provided to prove that we need to get a better grip on what emissions and carbon proliferation mean for the Earth and -- most importantly -- us. I'm a small government kind of guy but if that means more government funding being dumped into unbiased investigations than so be it. I don't want Earth to end up like Easter Island.
this isn't just about beliefs (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually this is about *policy*, not science (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, while we'd all feel better if science was going to determine the policy outcome, I think we're all aware here that the truth about global warming is only a secondary factor in the success or failure of enacting policy to prevent it.
This is true for both sides, and *both* sides know it. Simply put, the issue is way too important to be left to mere science.
AGW is only a secondary issue to many of the non-scientists in the game. The pro-AGW crowd has many people who would like to see Western society's materialistic, high-energy-use lifestyle forcibly curbed, and AGW provides a convenient club.
Likewise, many of the anti-AGW would be willing to sacrifice hundreds of millions of poor people in geographically challenged areas if the only alternative was strict curbs on their lifestyle, but would prefer not to have to actually say it. So they'd deny the science rather than admit the underlying sentiment.
I strongly suspect that among the voters, there's only a small minority for whom the science is the principal factor in determining the preferred policy.
Proof? For all those who hold a strong opinion on AGW in one direction or the other, ask yourself this. What proof would it take for you to accept that the opposite position was actually the correct one? Exactly.
Re:Great... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, the imprecision of the language here always irks me. When you say climate change skeptics, that's not a single entity. Do they mean the hard core 'the earth can't change' types, the ones who think climate change is influenced by both people and natural cycles to one degree or another, the ones who just say it happens but it isn't the end of the world, or some other group who simply doesn't buy into the next scheduled apocalypse? When you say evolution skeptics (deniers), you're almost always talking about a member of a fairly homogeneous group who started with a conclusion and worked backwards, a position that rarely has much merit in its entirety. Not so with this. Yeah, there are some out there like that, but that's hardly the full range of things.
Re:People like you are a large part of the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The opponent of human-induced climate change is humbling. It is namely the status-quo. (Human induced) climate change is bad news not just for oil companies, but for banks, industry, anything that depends on burning fossil fuels: i.e., the economy. So the fight is between the climate change scientists + their hippie groupies and the economy, all 400 trillion dollars of it.
So, from this perspective, you might be able to infer that opposition has been a bit on the heavy side. Why should we kill our economy for some unproven stuff that some hippie scientists have been providing? That was the tune of the nineties. So nothing happened. Now there is some more proof that actual climate change is occuring, but ha! you cannot prove it was us humans doing it! No this cannot be proven but it's a dishonest cop out.
So it is a set of hippie scientist that are obviously overconcerned with the figures they are measuring versus 400 trillion dollars worth of people 100% concerned with next quarter's financial report, combined with all people that like their way of life as it is know thank-you-very-much.
And you are complaining about the defensiveness of the hippies?
Re:Scientists are not Politicians (Score:5, Insightful)
Scientists have always been egotistical, with their own pet theories and human idiosyncrasies. The saving grace of science has never been the scientists, but the method in which science is conducted. Peer review, vigorous debate, and cat-fights. What we believe scientists should be and what scientists are are two very different things. The problem here is the outside influences. You and me.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
"Notice Dawkins doesn't seem willing to apply the same test to his views, despite the reality that he is asking us to *believe* him?"
Sorry, you lose. Dawkins provides EVIDENCE, he does not require belief. True skeptics will discard a belief when presented with better evidence. Most people who call themselves skeptics aren't-they search for information that fits with their beliefs. In short, skepticism requires rational, logical and reasonable thought.
Re:Great... (Score:5, Insightful)
The short version of everything that's come out so far is: the leading climate scientists pushing AGW were lying left, right, and center, and there is absolutely no evidence, not even a little, to support global warming, let alone AGW. If you haven't done so already,
I've seen it, it shows nothing of the sort. It shows people having considerable difficulty in combining data sets in a consistent and reliable way. This is always a tricky problem. Your "data manipulation" could easily be correction factors for systematic errors or problems with particular data sets. But of course a private note that was never meant to be read is hardly going to be a complete, detailed and fully explained document, is it?
I can only assume that people are reading into it what they want to see.
Re:Maybe now the debate will actually occur? (Score:3, Insightful)
True, and this is of course a fine example of the Appeal to Consequences [wikipedia.org] fallacy. I like it when that one crops up as I can instantly reject any arguments they make as being most likely poorly thought out.
Oftentimes, simply no... (Score:5, Insightful)
In a lot of cases, if not most, dialogue on the merits of your scientific work is simply impossible with a layperson.
I work with this stuff. Every day. 40 (well more like 50-60) hours a week. It took years of study for me (and everyone else)
just to get to the level where you can properly understand what it is, exactly, that I do. That's what being an expert at something entails.
Now when I get into a dispute with someone, they typically have the same level of expertise. They know more or less everything I do. I know what they're saying, and they usually know what I'm saying.
Now you bring into that situation some layperson with their religious reasons or ideological reasons or crank personality, who wants to dispute the results of my work. So they pore over it, and they simply don't understand it. (And ignorance breeds arrogance more often than humility, as Lincoln said) But they think they do. And then they formulate their criticism. Even if that criticism makes sense (often not), it's typically wrong at the most basic level. And that will practically always be the case - because there's virtually *nothing* in the way of criticism that a beginner would be able to think of that an expert hadn't thought about already. You're just not going to find a professor of physics having made a mistake of forgetting the first law of thermodynamics.
Now I'm happy to defend my science against legitimate, good, criticism. But a scientific debate is *NOT* where anybody should be TEACHING anybody science. What kind of 'debate' is it if every answer amounts to "That's not what that word means, read a damn textbook." It's not the scientists who are being arrogant then. Hell, since when didn't scientists bend over backwards to educate the public? We write textbooks, and popular-scientific accounts. Research gets published in journals for everyone to see, etc. It's not like we're keeping it a big secret - The problem is that some people are simply unwilling to learn, yet arrogant enough to believe they should be entitled to 'debate' with me, and that I should be personally burdened with educating them in the name of 'open debate'!
(Just to pick one out of the climate bag. How often haven't you seen someone say "Yeah but climate change is cyclical!" - What? As if _climate scientists_ didn't know that?! Refuting someone's research with arguments from an introductory textbook)
The fact that these climate-skeptics were prepared to take these e-mails, pore over them for some choice quotes (which didn't even look incriminating to me out of context), blatantly misinterpret them without making any kind of good-faith effort to understand the context or the science behind it, and trumpet it all out as some kind of 'disproval' of global warming (which wouldn't have been the case even if they were right), just goes to show that they're simply not interested in either learning the science, or engaging in a real debate. And it's in itself pseudo-scientific behavior in action: Decide there's a big conspiracy of fraud behind climate change, and go look for evidence to support your theory, and ignore all other explanations.
Re:Common Ground? (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, if you do it smartly, the worst thing that would happen if we regulate, cap, retard and tax energy and our economy is that our economy will be prepared for an energy-sparse world even before oil runs out. Saves maybe a few wars and a couple of life-or-death situations. Yes I know, the free market can solve all without any foresight whatsoever, but maybe, just maybe the free market is a random grab-for-all that will run out of steam the moment that you cannot 'take' energy from the soil anymore?
Re:Scientists are not Politicians (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But it goes beyond the computer models. (Score:1, Insightful)
ARRGGGGHHHH. If the data is consistant, it doesn't matter where it is located!
Re:Great... (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish I had mod points - this needs modding up!
I don't doubt the anthropogenic basis for climate change - you can take a look at the IPCC Synthesis Report [www.ipcc.ch] for a persuasive outline of the case. However, once you get past the most basic assertions, the scientific community is doing an absolutely terrible job. Most of the time when I read a paper on climate change I can immediately spot lots of methodological and deductive errors, and, conveniently, they always come out in favour of anthropogenic climate change. Some argue that science is just another religion. This isn't true. However, the sort of 'science' most climate scientists are doing nowadays may as well be a religion, basing conclusions on manifestly insufficient data, and inferring causation based on correlation alone. Right now the climate sceptics don't need to make straw men to argue against - the scientific community is making the straw men for them.
Scientists shouldn't be arguing against sceptics - scientists should be the sceptics. Even ignoring faulty reasoning, many published scientific results are wrong (see this article [marginalrevolution.com]). Scientists should be constantly questioning results to try to arrive at a refined, unbiased analysis of the facts - instead we have become defensive, treating every sceptical inquiry as an attack, and as a result, the research doesn't get the sort of scrutiny necessary to advance our understanding. Something needs to change.
Re:Extraordinary claims... (Score:3, Insightful)
I was hoping you were being sarcastic but then I saw you posted the original question. The data collection is not the likely cause for problems here. The size of an ice sheet in a satellite photo isn't somethign delicate oyu need to carefully get right in a lab.
The real issue is whether the event is significant or whether chance just caused more ice to melt for whatever reason.
Re:Extraordinary claims... (Score:3, Insightful)
I would say the position of:
"we can pour as much greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere as we want and it will affect nothing"
is the extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. It flies in the face of reason. It's like saying "When you add 1+1, it equals 2, expect when one of the 1s is anthropogenic, then 1+1=1."
Re:Uh yeah, whatever... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
How about no.
I'm going with Sagan on this one: "The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge and there is no place for it in the endeavor of science."
Not enough people in charge of public policy will be convinced as long as the appearance of secrecy and misconduct are present. If we do not listen to the criticism of skeptics, politicians will, and they already do, and this sets back the efforts of the scientific community to contribute to proper, well-reasoned decisions of public policy. The rush to stop the damage being done to the environment which has supported us is, ironically, the very thing slowing us down.
MOD PARENT UP (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously. They're called experts for a reason.
Re:Burden of proof (Score:3, Insightful)
No, the burden of proof is on the person making claims.
"who just approach things like recycling and increased efficiency as a no-brainer."
excepot recycling isn't a no brainier and efficiency always has a cost. Neither topic is a no brainer.
Forcing people into impoverished lives (Score:4, Insightful)
The real AGW arguments (and the motivation of all the parties involved) seem to be about the remedies rather than the climate. The AGW believers want to use governments to force people to lead objectively poorer lives. Many of them have wanted this since before Global Warming was even theorized.
They demand the power to do this, but they refuse to release their data. They refuse to publish the code for their computer models. They refuse to rationally refute skepticism. They refuse to understand human behavior as described by the discipline of Economics. They refuse to address the question of whether warmer may be better than colder. They refuse to identify the "correct" temperature, let alone describe how they arrived at that temperature. They refuse to close the loop on their proposed remedies to objectively weigh the benefits against the cost.
If Global Warming was simply an academic question rather than a life-or-death political struggle for power (or against power and for freedom), then it could be discussed as such.
AGW is going to lose the political struggle because of Climategate. It was already reeling from the fact that it hasn't warmed in the last decade. And it faced an uphill battle due to the depression: rich people can afford to pay for environmental spirituality, poor people can't. If the political struggle ends, this can go back to being about whether carbon release causes warming, and how much, and what it really means.
Re:Great... (Score:1, Insightful)
The last 10 years have been filled with ball freezing anomalities, and some melts, i won't deny that.
The problem however is that the general climate predictions from the all mighty computer models tells me that my balls should be bueried in the sand to escape the infernal heat. Not that they've migrated to my kidneys to escape the dozen or so record cold levels measured so far this year.
Re:People like you are a large part of the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know what you can't understand. It's not about being right. It's about scenario planning.
Scenario 1. Climate change is not happening.
skeptic: wait for more data.
result: life goes on.
activist: execute global emissions changes
result: millions are inconvenienced as governments struggle to achieve futile targets. The air and water is cleaner though.
Scenario 2. Climate change is not primarily man-made
skeptic: wait for more data.
result: humans deeply impacted. millions die of starvation, cities are relocated, numerous mass extinctions.
activist: execute global emissions changes
result: humans deeply impacted. millions die of starvation, cities are relocated, numerous mass extinctions. Depth and speed of problem is slowed by human change.
Scenario 3. Climate change is primarily man made
skeptic: wait for more data.
result: humans deeply impacted. millions die of starvation, cities are relocated, numerous mass extinctions, possible irreversible climmate trends.
activist: execute global emissions changes
result: nothing happens.
If you can show me enough data that I will believe that the skeptic's response and resultant outcome of scenario #3 or #2 is sooo much more heinous than the activist's response and outcomes of #1 and #2, then you might have a point. Otherwise, you're just arguing about something which doesn't matter. Who cares if we might be wrong? The terrible part is we might be right.
Re:Great... (Score:1, Insightful)
It shows people having considerable difficulty in combining data sets in a consistent and reliable way.
Yet, these people have no qualms about pushing for costly policy decisions on the basis of the output they provide, despite the fact that their ways aren't consistent and reliable; and they try to massage the data first, and keep quiet about it. I read the emails, and while I saw many instances of "let's try to fit the data to our model" (and frustration that it doesn't fit), I saw very little of "let's try to see if there is another explanation outside of the model". That is very indicative of the mindset of that particular group (and also understandable - they have put years of their life developing that model). It maybe echoed all over the field, in which case all the data sets and methodology may need to be scrutinized from the outside. Unless, as the email says, these folks delete "their" data (obtained with public funding) first.
The article seems quite right to call climatology a tribal discipline, and the lack of desire of the top shamans to open up, and the opposition they present to anyone that questions their models (and motives) that is revealed in those emails looks very childish to me. I have seen a point in the ... errr ... "forumsphere" that this is what "real scientists" do, but it isn't - if you're making extraordinary claims, you better be ready to open up your extraordinary proof to maximum scrutiny, not fight FoI requests as hard as possible.
If anything, the attitude reminds me of the developer team of a certain dot-com I used to work with. They may have high IQs, but their EQs seem to be in the lower 20s. Still, overpaid 20-year-olds is one thing, people who shape my future - quite another. I wouldn't have been so worried, but the "world government leaders" have seized on this as an excuse to push for another major tax hike.
It is just another, gigantic swine flu.
Re:Oftentimes, simply no... (Score:1, Insightful)
You sound very intelligent. Maybe you can see how (if you read what you wrote), the average layperson will hear you saying:
1. I'm smarter than you, you're an idiot, go away.
2. Scientists get to have a dialogue that excludes everybody that doesn't have enough letters after their names.
3. I'm arrogant, and that's okay, it's part of how we do science.
Warren
Which questions? (Score:3, Insightful)
"you're still evil for asking all of those questions (even though they turned out to have a good foundation for skepticism, and you were pretty much right about the weak science)
Which questions had a good foundation?
My experience is that a good number of "those questions" -- at least as they filter out into popular discussion -- are either ridiculous or end up having credible responses in support of anthropocentric climate change.
"How can it be global warming if some places are getting cooler?"
"Why is no one talking about urban heat island effect on measurement?"
"The 'consensus' in the 1970s was that we were in for a new ice age! Why should we believe climate scientists now?"
"Ice is getting *thicker* in some places in Greenland. Doesn't this disprove the whole thing?"
"Aren't concerns about global warming are based largely on unreliable computer models?"
"Scientist in is a skeptic for reasons not clearly discussed! Doesn't that mean there's not a consensus?"
Maybe I'm strawmaning the debate, but this is seriously the level of questioning I see. I'd be happy to engage tougher questions if they exist, but as it looks to me right now, either skeptics are either largely represented by people who are poorly articulating whatever substantial objections might exist, or they deserve the scorn they're met with.
Re:Burden of proof (Score:3, Insightful)
Meh, less cost isn't always better. The main environmentalist claim is "look at the externalized costs".
Yeah, it would be interesting to convince Japan to try spend the energy trying to reign in the pile of waste swirling around in the Pacific, and feed it to their plasma incinerators or something.
Yeah, I saw the Penn & Teller BS episode on recycling too. And I'd still rather expend the extra energy to recycle, the same as I'd rather spend the extra energy to clean my house once in a while. I think people and civilizations can be evaluated by the quality of their waste byproducts.
Anyway, as far as the climate change argument goes, I'd say the burden of proof for "hey, we ought to get something in the legislature to provide incentives for better efficiency" is a lot different from "hey, my industrial and consumer waste makes negligible impact on the environment". We've just been running under the assumption of the latter for a long, long time.
That said, legislature and policy is seldom driven by proof, but mostly panic and maybe a brief window of retrospect. So I can understand why the science community is so confused.
Re:Great... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, you're right.
None of that melting ice caps, record glacial melts, and lack of ozone layer above the Antartic stuff means anything. All of it's BS.
How do you know any of what you say is true if can't see or trust the raw data?
I'll grant you that transparency hasn't been very good. But you can ignore that little passage between Thule and Vancouver that's nearly ice free now.
No one is denying climate change. The climate is and always has changed for billions of years. What is up for debate is WHY the climate is changing.
Re:Great... (Score:3, Insightful)
Rubbish, the scientists aren't "pushing for" anything, they're just presenting results. These results may of course suggest the need for action, but that's in the realm of politics. And if you actually look at the full range of published literature, not a few cherry picked background-free private communications, you might see the evidence and methodology described in a way that's fully "scrutinizable". And indeed has been scrutinized, by other experts in the field - that's rather the point of publishing.
If you get some new data that disagrees with a model that's been built up over years and based on vast quantities of other data, which would you first believe might be suspect:
a) the large quantities of well tested, understood and mutually agreeing data
b) the new data point consisting a small amount of data which hasn't been scrutinized very closely yet.
If they were to *dismiss* the disagreeing data that would be a problem, but they haven't done that, just tried to understand it.
The points I saw in the emails were:
1) complaints about poor quality papers being published in a particular journal, and the suggestion that the journal has been hijacked to push an agenda rather than publish quality science. Therefore, they shouldn't publish there any more or cite articles from it. This was then spun as an attempt to suppress dissenting views.
2) descriptions of analysis and data presentation methods that some bloggers immediately quoted, including slang phrases such as "Mike's Nature trick", as evidence of deception, when it's no such thing.
3) An amusing but incomplete description of the difficulties involved in combining data sets to produce a valid final result.
4) one item that's possibly of legal if not scientific concern - the request to delete data relating to AR4.
One dodgy item - and one that doesn't affect the science.
Re:ESR said it very well - Open Source Science (Score:5, Insightful)
While I do think there is climate change, I think that many of the "disaster scenarios" are over hyped..
What possible motivation would the climate scientists have to do so? What do they gain from over hyping the possible scenarios? To promote renewable energy? Again, what do they gain from this?
Re:ESR said it very well - Open Source Science (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortuantely, this dramatic over simplification results in personal observations by most people that are obviously inconsistent with what the talking heads on TV are trying to scare them with. That creates the skeptics, but it's the tribalism in the climatologist community (along with a handful of vocal and qualitifed critics) that turn skeptics into deniers.
Re:Climatology software is not an OS kernel (Score:3, Insightful)
Well I don't think anyone is suggesting that we set it up on github so every clown coding in his mothers basement can can start contributing. I don't know that the important thing here is a true "free software(tm)" or "opensource(tm)" license. The important thing is that before we start looking at this research and assuming it is all correct because a few other scientists did a peer review and then making sweeping and expensive policy changes at the highest levels we should open up what they did so that people can look for problems in their methodology.
Now I don't think that anyone will care what I think of their code but I'm guessing that there is more than one person out there with a Ph.D in climate change that could look at this stuff, if it was public, and either confirm that the work is valid or point out it's flaws. At least there could be a debate about it among scientists. It is understandable that they are worried that powerful lobbies will try to distort their work and lie about it. But there is no other option. This is science that is affecting public policy and it can not be done in the dark.
On the other hand given how poorly some of this stuff appears to be coded it seems that they could use all the coding help that they could get: http://di2.nu/200911/23a.htm [di2.nu]. Hopefully these assessments of how sloppy their work is are not accurate, and that most of the work that has gone into the IPCC reports is less error prone than the stuff that has been leaked.
Re:People like you are a large part of the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
So, I am not saying our conclusion is wrong, and I don't think your point hinges on that last paragraph, so you might want to consider not using it as an argument.
Dirty tricks (Score:3, Insightful)
People are debating the wrong question (Score:5, Insightful)
"Global warming is caused by CO2 and the CO2 comes from human sources. "
Most intelligent people who have researched the issue have come to this conclusion.
"Curtailing carbon emissions is the only way to prevent further global warming."
Intelligent people should immediately recognize the fallacy in this statement. Curtailing carbon emissions is but ONE possible response, it is not the only response and it is not necessarily the best response. The debate, at this point in time, should focus on the response. "Believing" in global warming does not need to translate into "believing" politicians can fix it with more power.
What is wrong with giving the government(s) power to curtail carbon emissions?
For one, it gives the government control of every faculty of human life. Almost everything we do, from eating, to breathing, breeding, and working has a carbon footprint. Giving the government control of carbon emissions gives the government control of everything. Students of history should recognize this pattern very well. An external force will harm us all unless the government is given enough power to protect us. Governments don't protect, they repress. What happens if the government decides large dogs have too much of a carbon footprint. Or horses? Or more than one child?
Secondly, cutting emissions in the US will do nothing about China and India. In fact, cutting oil consumption in the US will make oil cheaper for third world factories. It is supply and demand. Personally, I would rather see the fossil fuels burnt in the US, under EPA standards, creating American jobs than to have it sent to China or India where it will be used in a much less efficient manner.
Third, it is unclear that cutting carbon emissions drastically in the near future will save us from tragedy. Global warming proponents admit this, but still advocate cutting emissions for lack of a better alternative.
What is the alternative?
While it isn't my preferred approach, one alternative is to do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Oceans will rise, the world will get hotter, and people will adapt. All of the carbon we are pumping out of the ground and burning once existed in the atmosphere anyways. Plants and animals consumed it, fell to the ocean floor, and were buried under ground. The world survived with extra carbon in the past and could again. The Earth is not going to turn into Venus, no matter how much oil we burn.
Of course there will be costs for doing nothing. For one, a lot of very wealthy people are going to lose their expensive beach front properties. Many bailed out bankers will see their mansions succumb to the tides. Tough shit.
A lot of poor people, mostly in third world countries will have to move. Even in the US we may have to move certain cities like New Orleans instead of spending hundreds of billions of dollars trying to wall them off from the seas. This will be expensive, but probably less expensive than curtailing global emissions enough to have an effect.
Arable farming land will lost. Some will be gained, but overall there will probably be a decrease in the amount of land available for agriculture. Farmers may have to stop selling their prime lots to housing developments. People may have to stop bitching about genetically modified food and learn to adapt. But most people will not starve to death, we will adapt.
Is there a better solution than doing nothing?
Like I said, I am not a proponent of doing nothing. I think we should do something that actually stands a chance of working. The best way (notice how I didn't use the word "only" here) to curtail carbon emissions is to give people cheaper options. I don't mean solar or wind, or osmosis generators or tide machines or biofuel or nuclear fission.
Perhaps I have read one to many sci-fi novels, but I think we should take the hundreds of billions being spent on cutting emissions and put it into nuclear fusion research. If nuclear fusion can be perfected in the next decade or two then there will be no reason to burn fossil fuels, conserve energy, or give the government a fascist grip on the economy.
You missed one. Or two. (Score:3, Insightful)
"It's not about being right"? Really?
And you miss a couple of alternate scenarios and outcomes.
Scenario 2a. Climate change is not primarily man-made, but emissions are keeping the next ice age from happening.
Activist result: Depth and speed of problem is accelerated by human change.
Scenario 3a. Climate change is primarily man-made, but emissions are keeping the next ice age from happening.
Skeptic result: Nothing happens.
Activist result: Ice age. Humans deeply impacted. millions die of starvation, cities are relocated, numerous mass extinctions, possible irreversible climate trends.
and for that matter
Activist result 1a. Convinced by faulty data that there is no hope unless emissions are controlled, governments struggle to achieve futile targets, concentrate more power in fewer hands, focus more resources on the problem, blame other countries for cheating on targets and dooming us all, attack industrial targets in cheating countries, humans deeply impacted. millions die of starvation, cities are relocated, etc.
I don't know for sure how I can be expected to show you enough data if scientists with opposing views are keeping that data from journals with threats of withdrawing their own results from the journals, but the Vostok Ice Core data [wikipedia.org] suggests to me, anyway, that the change in temperature is consistent with other increases in the past, and is likely to be followed by a steep drop...soon.
I'm no climate scientist, but I felt better about taking out AGW before I knew actual climate scientists were behaving this way.
TSG
Re:Climate skeptics have no arguments (Score:5, Insightful)
1. They did no such thing. This stems from a personal out of context note.
2. There were concerns about a journal starting to have an agenda and they should consider not publishing in it. ONE journal. Hardly preventing peer review.
3. One comment about one set of data we know very little about. again and out of context accusation. For all we know that data may have been bad.
4. this is a case of a smear compaign. EVERYTHING is based on out of context notes and innuendo
Quite frankly I am getting really sick and tired of ignorant people getting time spouting off crap they know nothing about.
Re:ESR said it very well - Open Source Science (Score:5, Insightful)
Millions of pounds in research money is a pretty motivating factor to anyone, including scientists, politicians and whoever has a stake in carbon credit companies.
Re:Great... (Score:2, Insightful)
The short version of everything that's come out so far is: the leading climate scientists pushing AGW were lying left, right, and center, and there is absolutely no evidence, not even a little, to support global warming, let alone AGW. If you haven't done so already,
I've seen it, it shows nothing of the sort. It shows people having considerable difficulty in combining data sets in a consistent and reliable way. This is always a tricky problem. Your "data manipulation" could easily be correction factors for systematic errors or problems with particular data sets. But of course a private note that was never meant to be read is hardly going to be a complete, detailed and fully explained document, is it?
I can only assume that people are reading into it what they want to see.
So have I, and so can anyone that wants to. Here [thepiratebay.org].
I invite you to peruse the last Slashdot entry about this [slashdot.org].
OVERWHELMINGLY we determined there was definitely more going on than "considerable difficulty".
Hiding from FOIA requests, conspiring to lock out a publication that wasn't swallowing their bate (how dare a peer review journal ask difficult questions of AGW!).
Then we have Phil working to keep these two papers [populartechnology.net] from being seen at the next IPCC meeting--
I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !
Cheers, Phil
If those 2 articles don't present valid arguments questioning AGW (and they do, I've read them and invite you to as well) then they shouldn't be afraid of people getting their hands on them. Instead they're afraid of dissenting opinions because they don't want to lose their money. Duh.
Yessir, "considerable difficulty" indeed. Sure looks like science to me.
What a joke.
In my parents time it was global cooling, when I was younger it was a giant hole in the ozone above Australia caused by big evil America, a year ago it was Global Warming, and now it's become "Climate Change".
All a farce and an sleight of hand scheme to misuse taxpayer money. Notice CNN didn't once run a story on this. BBC did, credible enough for me.
"Considerable difficulty" indeed.
Re:Forcing people into impoverished lives (Score:3, Insightful)
The AGW believers want to use governments to force people to lead objectively poorer lives. Many of them have wanted this since before Global Warming was even theorized.
And the great thing about the leaked CRU emails is that you should now be able to provide evidence for this otherwise unbelievable claim! Surely, from that enormous heap, you will be able to pull out many internal communications along the lines of "our evil plan to make people lead poorer lives is advancing apace".
So, er, go on then. Where's the evidence? Come on, you've got a goldmine of source material now from those conspirators: I'm sure you can find something more damning than a tenuous, out-of-context usage of the word "trick" in a discussion about combining tree-ring datasets. If these people have a hidden agenda, presumably they've alluded to it at some point in all those internal emails.
Re:Great... (Score:3, Insightful)
Were they short-term, perhaps you'd have an argument. Indeed they've melted something that hadn't seen that in say, well, over twenty thousand years.
Re:Great... (Score:3, Insightful)
Reading the comments, I see a programmer struggling with a chaotic data set, trying his best to figure out how to run sensible experiments on disorganised raw data. Data which is stored in various inconsistent formats and accessed by ancient unmaintained software. I sympathise with the poor guy, I know how frustrating such tasks can be.
Based on this I say it is no surprise that the CRU were completely unwilling to provide information about where their raw data came from, when Steve McIntyre and the others asked for it. The CRU did not know, because their databases were a total mess.
That's what really damages them. The programs were producing the "right" answers so the CRU management did not care where the numbers were coming from. The CRU staff already knew what the right answers were before they even got started, and when they got those answers, they asked no questions about them. This is not science.
It is fortunate that the CRU is not the only organisation involved with AGW, and that the some of the other organisations (e.g. NASA) are publishing raw data and experimental models.
Re:Great... (Score:1, Insightful)
the scientists aren't "pushing for" anything, they're just presenting results.
Huh? Did you miss the large number of petitions to governments started and endorsed by leading climatologists? Have you missed them collecting signatures from people in all field, even tangential to climate science, as long as those people agree to sign and have a degree? Have you missed their participation in the IPCC and the various government institutions? Have you missed them making predictions and discussing policy options in various forums, in the media, etc.?
The scientists are actively involved in politics, and saying they aren't, or that their involvement doesn't influence their research is just not true.
posting as AC because I already moderated here
Re:Great... (Score:2, Insightful)
Eirik Raude [wikipedia.org] and Leiv Eiriksson [wikipedia.org]
No need for evidence. We have peer review (Score:2, Insightful)
My peers have reviewed my original comment and determined that it's accurate. They also say I'm "Insightful".
The question is settled. I don't have to waste my time dealing with "deniers" like you.
Re:Engaging with whom exactly? (Score:1, Insightful)
They are out to destroy the legitimacy of climate scientists in public opinion and they use all the dirty tricks in the book toward that objective.
Like pressuring journals to not publish papers that go against their beliefs? Like trying to get editors sacked? Like badgering the BBC because they published an article that you didn't agree with? Those kinds of dirty tricks? Oh no wait.....those dirty tricks weren't used by the 'skeptics', they were used by the 'believers'.
Re:But it goes beyond the computer models. (Score:5, Insightful)
How long has the air conditioner been there. Has the AC been replaced with one that blows more strongly or directly on the sensor. Was the nearby driveway originally gravel, how frequently is it repaved (Fresh pavement is much darker than old pavement).
If you actually downloaded the pdf from surfacestations.org you'd see that many of the sensors have been upgraded from manual temperature gages that needed to monitored daily with a pencil and paper, to electronic sensors that report back automatically. In many of the cases the new sensor was located much closer to the sources of extranious heat that then old sensor. Usually becase the old sensor was on the other side of a perminant structure such as a paved road and it would be prohibitively expensive and troublesome for those installing the new sensor to rip up the road and bury the power and data cables. Instead the moved the sensor to a more convenient, but more biased location
Some of these sensors have been around a long time and the environment has changed, or the sensors have been moved without anyone taking note of it. In the PDF is a smattering of photo's and their associated temperature data, and the 2 sensors that were actually well placed had COOLING trends in the data. Bad data is bad, no matter how (in)convenient the trends it contains.
Testability (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scientific%20method [merriam-webster.com]
and the formulation and testing of hypotheses
So, in what way is Anthropomorphic Climate Change testable? It is a hypothesis, yes. How can it be tested?
Basically. ACC is not science at all. It is philosophy or rather, politics, until it is made testable.
Your are committing a fallacy (Score:3, Insightful)
In particular, what you are doing is a modern version of Pascal's Wager. You are saying "Here is a scenario that only has these simple outcomes, as such you must logically make this choice."
If you aren't familiar with the original it is about the question of to believe in god or not. Pascal said that you could plot the outcomes on a 2x2 matrix. If you do believe in god, and there is a god, you are infinitely rewarded. If you do believe in god and there isn't a god you get a small reward (that was his argument). If you don't believe and there is a god, you are infinitely punished. If you don't believe and there's isn't, nothing happens. His argument was thus that you should believe in god, since the risks just weren't worth it.
Of course a freshman philosophy student can point out the problems with that, it is way to simplistic to say that is how it works.
Well same shit here. You are constructing the situation such that yours is the only choice by simplifying it as you see fit. So let me give you just one of many other alternative scenarios:
Climate change is happening, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. We may accelerate it in either direction, but we can't stop it. If we drastically cut our energy usage, we will be unequipped to deal with the change, and will die off in the billions. However if we continue to use plenty of energy towards industrial development and scientific research, we will be able to adapt to the climate change and survive.
Any time you present your side as having no downsides, you are kidding yourself. All action has cost, everything has a downside. Also any time you are convinced a complex situation has a couple simple outcomes, you are also kidding yourself. As I said, one possibility is that we are headed for climate change no matter what. There is evidence to indicate this, it would seem the climate has been much warmer and colder in the past than it is now. As such maybe the real issue isn't what do we do to stop it, as that may not be possible, but how do we adapt to survive it.
Re:Great... (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps you can supply some links. I'm not saying such things don't exist, just that I haven't seen them. However, one thing I did see was a list of signatures from people opposed to the climate change theory - almost all of whom had no science qualifications.
Yes, they get involved with IPCC or the media from time to time. But IPCC's role is not to set policy, but to present evidence and options.
Finally, I don't see any reason as to why any involvement in this way this would influence their research. The other way round, yes.
Re:But it goes beyond the computer models. (Score:4, Insightful)
You linked to a Hartland Institute report and got modded up? Seriously?
Apparently the mods don't realize who that group is....or you've got some help trolling.
Global warming wasn't pulled out of someone's ass (Score:2, Insightful)
It took decades of measurement and decades of modeling to finally reach consensus that CO2 is causing unusual warming, just as it took decades of testing and modeling to figure out the mechanism of genetic inheritance or to verify the standard model in particle physics.
The vast majority of climate skeptics are working outside their field. That'd be fine if they were presenting testable theory, but they're not. They are opposing testable theory with non-falsifiable assertions-- the data strongly suggests warming. The proposed mechanism seems to explain the data very well. There are plenty of wrinkles still to work out, but unless the "skeptics" start proposing alternate models that fit the data (something 99% of them can't do, because they don't have the background), then they need to STFU and GTFO.
Re:You missed one. Or two. (Score:3, Insightful)
Collapsing antarctic ice shelves, melting Greenland glaciers, a soon-to-be snow-free Kilamajaro, the opening of the Arctic passage, frost-heave in permafrost.
Ice age?
Current CO2 levels are off your chart. They're around 390ppm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Co2-temperature-plot.svg [wikipedia.org]
Re:Great... (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny and on topic. definitely going to get modded flamebait.
If you get modded down this line would explain why... Probably worth a +5 funny without it.
Re:Great... (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you know any of what you say is true if can't see or trust the raw data?
This is a false argument. How can you ever be sure about the integrity of anything unless you are the one doing it? How can you trust the raw data if you are not collecting it? How can you trust the analysis if you are not the one analyzing it? How can you trust the satellite data if you didn't build the satellite?
How can you trust the food from the store if you're not the one making it? How can you trust your prescription if you're not the one giving it? How can you trust your car if you didn't build it?
Or in other words, you are arguing from the standpoint of paranoia/conspiracy. Everyday you rely on total strangers to make sure your life keeps humming along. You are surrounded by black boxes that you don't have access to yet you seem perfectly content in assuming that people are doing their jobs. Why are climate scientist suddenly the target?
For example, how do you know if your local transportation authority is really doing the best job to keep traffic moving? They could have incentive not to, such as increased tax flow to the coffers by making motorists spend just that much more on gasoline. Or perhaps their even getting kickbacks from a couple oil boys for making sure consumers spend their quota.
Conspiracy? Well, how do you know it's not happening? Can we get access to the raw data of the traffic grid? Can we get the source code for the programs running the traffic network? It's publicly funded, so WE should be able to get access and review ourselves, right?
No one is denying climate change.
I take it you haven't visited any mad dog skeptic sites lately. There are plenty of people denying exactly that with a passion and dedication that most religions would kill for
The climate is and always has changed for billions of years. What is up for debate is WHY the climate is changing.
The mountains of research done on this is pretty clear about why it's happening. But I don't expect facts to get in the way of beliefs anytime soon. Be that as it may, why is not the important. The important questions, and the ones the climate scientists spend a lot of time working out, are how it's going to affect us and what we can do to prepare for it.
~X~
Re:Great... (Score:5, Insightful)
Rubbish, the scientists aren't "pushing for" anything, they're just presenting results.
Rubbish yourself, the "scientists" at CRU were clearly "pushing for" a pro-AGW outcome. Why else the attempt to banish anti-AGW papers from the IPCC reports regardless of their merit, or to blackball a scientific journal based on its editorial practices?
Good science stands on its own merits. It doesn't require backroom deals or underhanded methods.
The end result of Climategate should be academic discreditation for several of those involved, and jail for a few - most likely to include Phil Jones. He very blatantly disregarded valid Freedom of Information requests. That's a felony in Great Britain.
Re:Great... (Score:3, Insightful)
Rubbish, the scientists aren't "pushing for" anything, they're just presenting results. These results may of course suggest the need for action, but that's in the realm of politics.
There are multiple problems with this stance. The first is that scientists almost always have preferred answers. When the first Hubble results were coming in an the value of Ho seemed anomalously high, I recalled someone commenting that if so-and-so had a religion, it would be 50 (the low end of expected Ho values.)
Most of the time, this doesn't matter. With AGW it does, precisely because people with money and power would like to use the purported risk of AGW to get more money and power, and Big Hydrocarbons would like to kill everyone and invade Poland, or whatever the industrial equivalent of that is.
There are huge economic and political stakes in this game, and they ultimately turn on the quality of the data and the strength of the results. Those are complex things to analyze, and when scientists have an agenda--which they almost always do--they tend to overstate the quality of their data and interpretations over others (in paleoanthropology I believe this is called the "Leakey Effect").
I don't think there's anything going on in the AGW crowd beyond typically optimistic group-think, but if you don't think that's a problem, well... we disagree with each other.
As for finding common ground: we find it in the data--all of which should be openly published, unmassaged, to allow for honest dialog--and in the fundamental theories--physics and chemistry, mostly--that underpin the often unphysical climate models.
Insofar as sceptics deny those things, they are hopeless. But if they play the game of science by the rules, using their biases to provide viable alternatives to the AGW consensus or valid criticisms of other work, they should be fully engaged in the scientific process.
The public policy issues related to AGW are too important to leave any honest voices unheard.
Are you kidding me? (Score:5, Insightful)
Here are just a few reasons:
1) Further their own careers. Big (positive) claims about AGW are important if you want to get published in the high impact journals.
2) To get grant Money to stay publish and stay employed.
3) Face time with the media
4) Genuine-belief in AGW--even if not well supported by the actual evidence.
5) Insider politics -- why criticize a peer's research that largely agrees with your own? The incentives are reversed.
6) Other environmental motives, e.g., "even if AGW is wrong, reducing pollution, sprawl, cars, oil dependency, etc is good" (I have heard this argument a lot)
7) (Mistaken) belief in the precautionary principle, i.e., AGW is a risk and refusal to see it in cost vs benefit terms.
Re:Great... (Score:3, Insightful)
It is unfortunate that the signal to noise ratio on the skeptic side is low.
I have no problem with thinking skeptics. I think there should be more of them. But the problem is almost all the skeptics are fanatical mad dog skeptics with solid Ph.Ds in arcmchair climatology backed by B.S's in BS. It's become like evolution vs. intelligent design, only worse.
There are few good skeptics out there, but the overall onslaught of the mad dog skeptics have made it so that it is that much harder for them to be heard. It's clear from the emails that the science community now views any skeptic, no matter how reputable, as 100% hostile, and this hack has done nothing than make it 100 time worse than it already was.
It's really sad, but the mad dogs have done it to themselves. Every idiotic thing they do, they only make skeptics in general look worse. If all the mad dogs would just shut the hell up so the skeptics who know what they're talking about could engage into a useful scientific dialog then perhaps things could get back to science instead of political mud-slinging.
~X~
Re:ESR said it very well - Open Source Science (Score:3, Insightful)
Source and data to one of the models: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/ [nasa.gov]
This has been available for some time. And despite all the whining and yelling about closed source models and the like, over the years there have been no submissions from the open source community for fixes to bugs, aside from the occasion tweak for the makefile to compile on yet another platform.
There are also several books, multiple papers, etc. on how to write your own. There are several public sites that contain data you can use in your model as well.
In short, nobody is preventing you from educating yourself about atmospherics, computational fluid dynamics, and other related topics. Write your own. Write a paper. Show that the current consensus is horribly wrong. Win a Nobel.
~X~
Re:Great... (Score:3, Insightful)
Lock out? They thought the publication was publishing poor quality papers. If that was their belief, why would they not refrain from publishing there or citing articles?
The problem is that by their lights *every* dissenting paper is of "poor quality".
The analogy here, where the AGW proponents are the sole source of knowledge, is to the Christian church in the Middle Ages. The Bible was in Latin, which no one but the (better educated) priests could read. Instead of the laity being encouraged to learn Latin, or instead of translating the Bible to the local language, the priests and bishops decided what meanings the Bible would have.
Similarly, the AGW priest-kings deny raw data to the public and hold themselves as the exclusive interpreters of the data. It seems to me high time that this Global Warming belief system underwent its own Reformation.
Re:ESR said it very well - Open Source Science (Score:5, Insightful)
While I do think there is climate change, I think that many of the "disaster scenarios" are over hyped..
What possible motivation would the climate scientists have to do so? What do they gain from over hyping the possible scenarios? To promote renewable energy? Again, what do they gain from this?
I hope you were being sarcastic and aiming for funny (I laughed!) but since you've been modded to insightful, I fear this needs an answer.
Scientists are under immense pressure to publish, and, as long as an article can pass peer review, the more sensational the claims you make, the better the odds of being published. Once you have published, more sensational claims make it more likely you'll be cited, and generally lead to your article getting more attention, which is purely to the scientist's benefit so long as his claims aren't so outrageous that the scientific community responds with ridicule. Scientists have every incentive to make the most dramatic claims they can get away with, and the peer review process seems to let them get away with an awful lot. Publication in major journals is one of the primary determining factors in employment and promotion in academics, yet hiring is usually done by people with expertise in a different subfield (schools like a range of researchers) who won't necessarily look too carefully at the articles themselves relying instead on number of publications, the reputation of the journals, and number of citations.
So, short answer: scientists have every reason to exaggerate and overstate.
Re:Oftentimes, simply no... (Score:3, Insightful)
A common refrain is - "you are not a climatologist therefore you can not comment on anything we do". However, when one examines what is being done it immediately becomes apparent that 'climatologist' is a useless definition. Much of the more controversial stuff is pure statistics. I am a scientist and my statistical ability is greater than most of the climatologists. But, for some reason, people would claim that because I am not a 'climatologist' I can not comment.
Is that your position? That highly educated people who didn't happen to tick the 'climatologist' box when they graduated can't comment? While you might not find a physicist making a mistake about the first law of thermodynamics you can find them making a mistake about the central limit theorem or the asymptotic properties of estimators. As a person with a high level of statistical training I am shocked by how bad the statistics used in some of these climatological papers is. You then get into a bizarre situation where a statistician is telling a 'climatologist' that R-squared is an invalid statistics to use in a particular situation and the 'climatologist' saying 'I'm the expert here because the topic is the climate and I reject your criticism. Some 'climatologists' aren't prepared to defend their work against legitimate, good, criticism.
Re:Great... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Great... (Score:3, Insightful)
>And nothing on Wikileaks invalidates any of the work done at CRU or any other climate research institute.
As soon as I read the email of two scientists planning to delete all data requested under FOIA or the UK version of that law, yes, their work became invalidated.
Re:An olive branch to climate change sceptics (Score:1, Insightful)
I think your missing the point--- climategate has made skeptics out of normal intelligent people that were trusting with the scientists before. Unfortunately it looks like the actions of a few have ruined the trust of the general public and scientists will have a much heavier burden of proof going forward because of it.
Re:Are you kidding me? (Score:5, Insightful)
But don't an equal number of opportunities exist for the contrary side? Wouldn't Exxon be willing to sponsor a whole scad of research grants if it disproved climate worries? Wouldn't a researcher who proved AGW was a hoax be bathed in media attention, career opportunities, etc.? With good enough research, couldn't journals be shamed into publishing?
Anyone foolish enough to think they'll advance their careers with false science will be caught out soon enough.
Re:Great... (Score:4, Insightful)
What you say is largely true. Scientists do have preconcieved ideas just like anyone else (well, rather less than the average person if they're any good, but there nonetheless). Group-think is also a possibility, and would be a problem if it was happening. But is it?
I don't know, but those leaked emails don't provide much if any evidence of it. On the other hand, I see it in vast quantities in most of the climate "sceptics", along with logical fallacies, superficial analysis (just enough to support their view but no more), personal attacks, lack of understanding of the issues, and many more failures. If they conducted honest, robust and high quality analysis then I have no problem with them contributing. But the vast majority that I've seen do not do this.
Re:A question (Score:3, Insightful)
In fact, ALL scientists should be skeptical of global warming, and every other theory they come across. Blind acceptance of ANY theory is the ticket to scientific stagnation, and eventually dogmatic quasi-religions.
Re:Good faith and bad faith (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should climate skeptics be asked to make a good faith effort when the climate scientists have been so clearly and obviously shown to be acting in bad faith?
Can you cite a source for that?
:)
I'm dead serious. Show me a solid, scientific study that shows a concerted effort by climate scientists to be acting in bad faith.
The fact that you got moderated interesting is ridiculous. There's this big uproar about climate science in ONE place. Where? In the media. Why? Because nothing sells like scandal or death.
I'm working on a PhD directly related to climate modeling. I've got access to four climate models, from four competing organizations, ranging from middle-school simple to research grade. And they all give about the same results. In my office, I have a poster from a paper presentation where my research group compared seven different climate models, and looked at how well they agreed. There were differences, for sure. But they all were similar. Why are they all similar?
IT'S ALL A BIG CONSPIRACY BY THE CLIMATE SCIENTISTS!!!!!
Well, except for the fact that we would love to rip the shit out of another organizations research. In that seven-model comparison, we were looking to rip apart some of the models. Where they were different, we did. Had we found one that was totally different from the rest, we would have figured out why, and published that. The fact of the matter is that the science is well settled.
While I think you're an asshat, I do agree with your last statement. It is a big pseudo-scientific world out there, provided you define "out there" as "in the media". Those of us actually involved in science know that it's not. You get ahead in science by taking heads. We know Darwin's name because he wiped out hundreds of scientists' work on biological diversity. We know Einstein's name because he wiped out hundreds of theories on atomic interaction and the nature of space-time. We know Maxwell's name because he invented coffee.
As a scientist, surrounded with scientists, and friends with a lot of scientists, I can tell you, there's nothing any of us would like to do than destroy the establishment. If I could disprove evolution, I'd do it in a heartbeat. If I could prove General Relativity wrong, I wouldn't hesitate. It would put me in the text books. It would make me famous. If I could prove climate change wrong, I'd do the same.
But I'm in the middle of that science. And I can't. It's solid, despite what the media makes it out to be. If it wasn't, I'd be famous. You have to realize that most scientists want to know the truth. And as humans, we like nothing better than to be able to yell, DUMBASS in a very loud voice, while pointing at the dumbass so everyone notices. I believe in science because if I screw up, that will happen to me. So I try really hard not to screw up. As do all scientists. The ridicule of your peers is a very good tool to keep you honest. While there are some bad scientists, we all know who they are. They're the ones that we watched get called a dumbass at the last conference. They're the ones who published an article last year, which was utterly demolished by one this year. I've been to those conferences. I've read those articles. Scientists are blood-thirsty, brutal individuals. If you do poor science, you'll be ripped to shreds. That's how scientists advance in levels.
Re:ESR said it very well - Open Source Science (Score:3, Insightful)
If you believe money is the best motivator and a few millions would pursuade all the earth's scientists to side with the hippie catastrophy freaks, then why is the trillions of pounds in fossil fuels companies aiming to disprove them, not succeding?
The dirty truth is a climate sceptic makes more money than a regular climatologist because there are specific grants and positions available to disprove AGW, while there are no grants available specifically to prove or support it, Greenpeace does not fund a research department.
Re:But it goes beyond the computer models. (Score:1, Insightful)
Yet when the "spurious" stations with AC:s, grills, pavement, etc are left out, the temperature data is practically unchanged. Hence you haven't heard from surface stations much lately.
Of course, they always knew they never had a point anyway, the objective is just to generate images in the heads of people who can't gauge the significance.
Same with the CRU email hacks. People claiming "this proves the fraud" all over. Yet no substantiation ever.
It's of course cheap to call a scientist a fraud. It actually takes much more effort to create a scientific career. Especially at the higher levels, people have publ
Re:ESR said it very well - Open Source Science (Score:2, Insightful)
No, really, seriously: if you're in it for the money, why would you make it harder by pitting yourself *against* the oil companies and (at least for 2000-2008) the US Government? Wouldn't the lazy way be -- especially if as you seem to be positing, it's also the truth -- to say, "no global warming and here's my carefully cooked data to prove it. Hello, Chevron, big checks gladly accepted at the following address"?
This is where the "big bucks in AGW" theory seems to totally and irrevocably fall apart.
The science IS settled (Score:2, Insightful)
The science IS settled.
Where is the unsettled "CO2 is a greenhouse gas" in the science?
Where is the unsettled "Combustion of fossil fuel hydrocarbons produce CO2" in the science?
Where is the unsettled "Temperature rises are underway and nothing else changes enough to explain the pattern of change except greenhouse gasses" in the science?
Now, when the denialist STILL says "Volcanoes produce more CO2 in one year than humans have over their history", what do YOU think they think of as "unsettled science"? Where do you think they get their observational proof of that from?
Re:Great... (Score:1, Insightful)
Trauma doctors were some of the biggest proponents of seatbelts and airbags while the auto industry moaned about the expense and fought legislation strenuously. Yeah, there are still idiots and suicidal maniacs who avoid using either seatbelts or airbags, but both have saved many, many lives since their legislative imposition. It shouldn't come as a surprise that those most familiar with the likely impact of a destructive action would be the most vocal about needing legislative action to stop it.
Re:Great... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, is this the so-called lying you mentionned in your first line ?
Reducing carbon emissions will NOT lead directly to mass starvation.
putting caps on industrial production
you sir/ma'm, are UNimaginative. investing in a green economy is likely to be good for the economy; while keeping the short-sighted burning of limited resources will ... very abruptly run into ... limits.
Re:Great... (Score:3, Insightful)
Deliberate attempts to delete email and data even those pending FOI requests
Yes, possibly. Not scientifically relevant.
- Deliberate attempts to scuttle peer review
No, it was a response to someone else's hijacking of a peer-reviewed journal, which then published low quality papers. Their concerns were not unique, indeed there were several resignations from the journal as a result.
As for your other link, which says:
Without replication, science cannot move forwards.
And then goes on to suggest that providing data is necessary for this. It is not. It is necessary to provide a full description of what was done so that somebody can go off and reproduce the work.
The big fuss about providing data doesn't make much sense, as it's neither necessary to determine scientific validity (a full, published description of the analysis will do that) nor sufficient to detect fraud (the data could be falsified prior to its release).