Top Journal Retracts Study Predicting Catastrophic Climate Toll 130
Nature has retracted a headline-grabbing climate-economics study after critics found flawed data that massively inflated its predicted global economic collapse. The New York Times reports: The decision came after a team of economists noticed problems with the data for one country, Uzbekistan, that significantly skewed the results. If Uzbekistan were excluded, they found, the damages would look similar to earlier research (PDF). Instead of a 62 percent decline in economic output by 2100 in a world where carbon emissions continue unabated, global output would be reduced by 23 percent.
Of course, erasing more than 20 percent of the world's economic activity would still be a devastating blow to human welfare. The paper's detractors emphasize that climate change is a major threat, as recent meta analyses have found, and that more should be done to address it -- but, they say, unusual results should be treated skeptically. "Most people for the last decade have thought that a 20 percent reduction in 2100 was an insanely large number," said Solomon Hsiang, a professor of global environmental policy at Stanford University who co-wrote the critique published in August. "So the fact that this paper is coming out saying 60 percent is off the chart."
Of course, erasing more than 20 percent of the world's economic activity would still be a devastating blow to human welfare. The paper's detractors emphasize that climate change is a major threat, as recent meta analyses have found, and that more should be done to address it -- but, they say, unusual results should be treated skeptically. "Most people for the last decade have thought that a 20 percent reduction in 2100 was an insanely large number," said Solomon Hsiang, a professor of global environmental policy at Stanford University who co-wrote the critique published in August. "So the fact that this paper is coming out saying 60 percent is off the chart."
This is a MAJOR problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Climate sceptics are desperate to be able to reject the results from scientific studies because the conclusions demand actions that they don't want to take. Every time some story like this comes along, they are able to justify their rejections of other, better data.
There are no easy solutions to this problem. We need to be open to admitting errors - that's how science works! But every admission is very damaging...
Re:This is a MAJOR problem (Score:5, Insightful)
There may be no easy solutions, but if the peer-review system worked as intended, a lot more results like this would be picked up before being published rather than after. At the moment, there are few incentives for people to spend their time peer-reviewing others' papers or reproducing others' experiments, and thus there are not enough reviews or time spent reviewing to pick up a lot of errors. Surely it's not beyond the wit of man to find some way to fix that?
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I see you have never been part of this system. Your claims are pure hallucinations. There is no "enforcing" of any "consensus". Peer review checks, if done right, whether arguments hold up, data is plausible, etc.
The problem with peer review is that it is entirely unpaid while actually getting the publication can be very expensive, and many do it badly, just so they can claim they are doing it. I still regularly get contacted by journals wit requests to review one paper or another based on my publishing his
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Science is not broken, peer review is. And no, Science is not religion. It is the very opposite of it. A Science-denier like you will never understand that though, you are simply not smart enough.
Re: This is a MAJOR problem (Score:2)
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Indeed. The difference is that everything you assume (not believe) to be a fact needs to come with evidence and need do be falsifiable (i.e. evidence that proves it is wrong could be obtained if it is wrong). Obviously, you, personally, cannot verify everything. But you can verify some things and it is expected that you did, usually in school. The only assumption that you need to be able to make is that all the other facts were verified by somebody.
In contrast, with faith/belief, there is no verification. N
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Don't be a (mentally) lazy fuck. There is a large body of literature on this question.
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> every dire prediction from the past FIFTY YEARS all turned out to be wrong...
Climate models have accurately predicted global heating - https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
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Reminder: most of these papers cite numbers by which growth will be reduced by the end of the century. Projected total growth in the same time frame is several hundred percent. This is a factor that slightly reduces that number.
"Climate sceptics" generally argue that this sets a ceiling on cost of efforts to mitigate climate change, because otherwise cure is worse than the disease.
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Yes, that is the argument of the climate zealot side. "But none of it matters because planet is going to die. We need to stop raping Mother Gaia and start worshiping her".
These are the same people who predicted in 2000 that we'd have a "global starvation event by 2020", as well as that Pacific island nations would be underwater and cease to exist by this time. And that were talking about "global boiling" in 2020.
Turns out reality doesn't bend that way. Regardless of strength of faith of the zealots.
Re:This is a MAJOR problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: This is a MAJOR problem (Score:2)
Science is allowed to be wrong. And we're allowed to ignore scientists we think are wrong.
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See, this is the problem with faithful. They find observation of reality to be an insufficient standard of proof.
This problem is universal in all religions, as religious circuitry in humans is specifically intended to be able to rally the tribe against overwhelming odds. I.e. "you cannot reason people out of positions they didn't reason themselves into".
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But generally speaking there will be problems for many other places.
Too much rain, too little rain, most places the temperature will rise.
The changes happen so quickly nature can't keep up moving to new areas, a single example is coffee.
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Globally. Planet greening is so massive, it's observable from space.
"Nature" isn't a goddess. It doesn't "keep up". It is.
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You clearly have not the slightest idea what the problem actually is. Well done, you are an idiot.
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And you have clearly proven by several of your posts in this discussion that you are an ignorant fool who thinks that he can win arguments simply by insulting his opponent. Twit!
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Well, if that is your take-away here, you clearly are a dangerous moron and asshole.
And no, there are NOT the same people. You are just lumping idiots in the press and in politics together with actual scientists because you have no idea how things actually work.
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Thank you, I enjoy slaying religious idols when they're counter-productive to my species' well being.
One of them being that High Priesthood Of Climate Science is beyond critique and that observing reality and concluding that they're wrong is Heresy to Faith of Science.
As in reality, process of observing things and concluding that hypotheses raised by other people are wrong has a name: science, practiced by scientists. Note the lack of capitalization. It's a descriptor, not a name of religion people like you
Re: This is a MAJOR problem (Score:2)
Generally burning (new growth) vegetation is carbon neutral. All the carbon emitted had to come out of the atmosphere in the first place.
Re: This is a MAJOR problem (Score:2)
No one with any knowledge of climate would suggest that conclusions can be drawn by simple math.
Re:This is a MAJOR problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice denier nonsense you have there. The problem, which you are clearly not smart enough to understand is that this basically a permanent reduction and it is one that will be getting worse. You seem to think that at the end of the century, there is one point, where there will be some reduction. That is not the case. The reality is that each year will see an increasing reduction and that will last for a very long time. The problem is that very soon this will overtake total growth and then we will have negative growth each year.
Not a surprise that somebody like you does not get what is essentially a simple school-level "interest over multiple years" calculation.
Re: This is a MAJOR problem (Score:2)
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We're not desperate. You are just wrong.
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Just because climate skeptics are desperate, doesn't mean rational scientists should also be desperate. The reality is that, despite the current US administration, cooler heads *are* prevailing. Those calls for "drill baby drill" today are viewed as absurd by the vast majority of people, and even the oil companies themselves aren't rushing to the Gulf (what was the name of that body of water again???) to set up new rigs. Solar and wind power are increasing *fastest* in Texas, which is now by far the leading
Re: This is a MAJOR problem (Score:2)
How is the Texas government resistant to clean energy? Aren't they pretty laissez-faire?
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Ironic, right?
Yes, low regulatory hurdles are precisely what has allowed green energy to flourish in Texas. But that hasn't stopped Texas politicians from blaming green energy for the state's electricity problems. https://www.texastribune.org/2... [texastribune.org] And he's tried to exclude it from any economic incentive programs. https://www.texastribune.org/2... [texastribune.org]
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"We need to be open to admitting errors"
Well, most errors...
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but the media has an addiction to reporting on the findings that are weird outliers. But those weird outliers are the most likely to be incorrect, which feeds a cycle of mistrust.
Was "we're going to have an ice age because of pollution" in the 70s an outlier or broadly agreed upon "scientific consensus"? Yeah, I thought so.
There is very obviously something going on with the climate but there is also very obviously something going on with the peer review system. And a bunch of people green grifting, causing conflicts of interests and perverse incentives. It's very difficult for someone not in the field but with enough intelligence and intellectual curiosity to simply accept the
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but the media has an addiction to reporting on the findings that are weird outliers. But those weird outliers are the most likely to be incorrect, which feeds a cycle of mistrust.
Was "we're going to have an ice age because of pollution" in the 70s an outlier or broadly agreed upon "scientific consensus"?
Turns out to it was mostly media hype. The media love catastrophe scenarios. The American Meteorological Society did a review of it a while back, which you can find here: https://journals.ametsoc.org/v... [ametsoc.org]
...
It's very difficult for someone not in the field but with enough intelligence and intellectual curiosity to simply accept the current version of this consensus.
Worse than that, it's difficult for somebody not in the field to even figure out what the consensus is, because the media love stories of the type "new theory overturns scientific consensus!"
The solution, by the way, is to get your science from actual science sources, rather than from popular media.
Re:This is a MAJOR problem (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't a problem at all. The issue was picked up on a peer review and corrected. This is how science works.
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Indeed. And the issue was detected by looking at the data, finding fault with it and that is perfectly fine. Now, if the MAGAs and other denier-idiot assholes were right, the correction would never have happened. But it did. And that means things work and deliver good results. The process is just a bit more complex and takes a bit longer than their tiny brains can handle.
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Not really. Science works on facts and evidences and sometimes there are errors and mistakes that then get corrected at a later time.
The Deniers work on stupidity. There is no fixing that and they do not need ammunition. They will just make stuff up.
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They will just make stuff up.
"they had to - otherwise, nothing would be done"
Re: This is a MAJOR problem (Score:2)
I think you mean "they had to... otherwise something would be done"
Re: This is a MAJOR problem (Score:2)
I think the bigger problem is a major journal is accepting papers that produce results outside of what you'd expect from existing public research, and there was never a thorough peer review before publishing.
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Nah... (Score:2)
'the climate debate is long over'
I suggest you get outside the bubble of the opinions you generally live within if you think that is true in the wider community, however much it might be within the science community. There are a lot of politicians playing up to the views of people who don't want to believe. Convincing them is a hard task, and every time something like this happens politicians who are happy to use the lie to gain power, will do better.
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One bad data point was discovered. Isn't it possible that there might be more?
The Pentagon's $600 toilet seat was outed as cover for black project funding. Do you really thing that they were hiding their entire Area 51 budget in nothing other than invoices for plumbing parts?
Time to subpoena some client scientists e-mails.
Has Climate Doom Modeling Turned Into Clickbait? (Score:2, Insightful)
Let’s say climate change is real, fine, but some of these papers are drifting into doomsday fanfic territory with a few equations stapled on. Are we meant to treat every climate-catastrophe model like holy writ now? The idea that humans in 2100 will politely sit on their hands while the planet burns is genuinely adorable.
Humans invent things. AI is already chewing through research faster than half the committees publishing these forecasts. We’re developing materials, energy systems, geo-tech and
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At this point, someone should write a paper on whether these legacy models are even relevant
Some already did. Unless you ignore the evidence on purpose, climate change models from 30 years ago are completely relevant [slashdot.org]
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"Humans invent things."
No shit, including that anthropomorphic driven climate change is not a problem.
"AI is already chewing through research faster than half the committees publishing these forecasts."
Really? AI is now doing climate forecasting. Do tell. How's it doing on physics? Or chemistry outside of a few edge cases? Mathematics is not science but much science is based on mathematics. Where's the AI research breakthroughs on math?
"We’re developing materials, energy systems, geo-tech and carbon-c
Re:Has Climate Doom Modeling Turned Into Clickbait (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea that humans in 2100 will politely sit on their hands while the planet burns is genuinely adorable.
It's happening now. There are serious effects now. And there is mostly a lot of thumb-sitting going on.
Humans invent things.
Yes, for profit.
AI is already chewing through research faster than half the committees publishing these forecasts.
AI is chewing through NATURAL RESOURCES faster.
Pretending society wonâ(TM)t respond, wonâ(TM)t adapt and wonâ(TM)t innovate is probably the most unrealistic assumption in the whole exercise.
We don't have to pretend, we can see it happening right now. Or rather, not happening.
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"There are serious effects now"
Really?
As far as I can tell, the "current serious effects" are always handwavy either wrong or framing-dependent bullshit like:
1) "there's a drought in California" (entirely disregarding that we happen to have settled it in an extremely wet phase, while for the last 1000+ years the US SW has been much drier for *centuries* at a time), or
2) every time it rains in Charleston "global warming is making hurricanes worse" or "...more frequent" or both (both of which have been repea
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As far as I can tell, the "current serious effects" are always handwavy
Your lack of perception is irrelevant.
'look at all the people that die from heat!' (invariably after a hot week in summer; again routinely and repeatedly debunked by statistics that show 6-10x more people die from cold than heat
And now we see what it stems from, a total lack of logic. Run along now.
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Are we meant to treat every climate-catastrophe model like holy writ now?
You realise what this story is about right? The answer is no. The entire premise here is that bullshit gets retracted from publication.
We’re developing materials, energy systems, geo-tech and carbon-capture methods that simply didn’t exist when the early models were written.
You're an optimist, but in the past 30 years we have developed fuck all. We've only taken existing developments and mildly improved them. Not only have we in 30 years not stopped a catastrophic rise in emissions thanks to our new inventions, several of them (AI, crypto, etc) have contributed massively towards them, wasting energy without any practical benefit to society mass
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Let’s say climate change is real, fine, but some of these papers are drifting into doomsday fanfic territory with a few equations stapled on. Are we meant to treat every climate-catastrophe model like holy writ now?
No, of course not. The idea is to look at the information and learn as accurately as we can.
The idea that humans in 2100 will politely sit on their hands while the planet burns is genuinely adorable. Humans invent things.
The whole point of the discussion is deciding what to do. Your statement "surely we will do something!" is more or less useless.
But your implication that we can just wait until 2100 and then do something (the path the oil companies want us to take)-- do keep in mind that a lot of climate change will have already happened. The earlier we implement these innnovations, the less bad the problem will be. And, the earlier
Re: Has Climate Doom Modeling Turned Into Clickbai (Score:2)
It's been click bait since Al Gore made An Inconvenient Truth. People love climate porn.
Re: Has Climate Doom Modeling Turned Into Clickbai (Score:2, Informative)
It's a reasonable position, and one he can make without resorting to personal insults.
I'm old enough to remember being told that we were all going to freeze due to global cooling. Panic, oh the horror and terror!
And then we were all going to be living under water in 20 years. Be afraid!
Whatever the truth may be, the climate scientists have overplayed their hand with fear mongering. Their credibility with a large share of the population has dropped to zero and it is their fault.
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I'm old enough to remember being told that we were all going to freeze due to global cooling.
We remember enough of the scientific literature of the times to know that you've never read a major science paper on the subject. [ametsoc.org]
So you either remember wrong or you got your information about "science" from the tabloids back then.
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Re: Has Climate Doom Modeling Turned Into Clickbai (Score:5, Informative)
You can "gently disagree" with the facts of life and quote hand-picked AI slop all you want, but that doesn't make any difference. "Global cooling" was a small subset of the field ever since old Svante came up with his model. By the early 70s no peer-reviewed models considered relevant were predicting "global cooling".
The second article you quote, Bryson et al from 1974, makes the point that small changes in controlled variables can cause abrupt climate changes and that turbidity and CO2 increase could be such factors, not predicting "global cooling".
By mid-70s, mention of "global cooling" was either erroneous or in a slightly ironical context:
https://www.science.org/doi/ab... [science.org]
And the verdict was out before the end of the decade
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
There are those who reason that other pollutants stop stop more incoming radiation and will outbalance the CO2 to create a cooling than a warming trend... but there are few left who now subscribe to it".
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makes the point that small changes in controlled variables can cause abrupt climate changes
This is a problem with a model, not climate. Long before industrial age there were massive CO2 dumps (super volcanoes, asteroid impacts, etc.) that we know spiked CO2 past even current levels and it did not result in effects these models predict.
/. debates on this topic, but we have various historical records, like various Viking sagas, that describe MUCH warmer climate, like Greenland full of forests. In 2025 we are nowhere near historical peaks of CO2 or temperatur
I mentioned this many times in various
Re: Has Climate Doom Modeling Turned Into Clickbai (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a problem with a model,
No, it isn't.
Long before industrial age there were massive CO2 dumps (super volcanoes, asteroid impacts, etc.) that we know spiked CO2 past even current levels and it did not result in effects these models predict.
Had you read at least the article abstract, you'd perhaps realize that you have no idea what you're talking about.
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Long before industrial age there were massive CO2 dumps (super volcanoes, asteroid impacts, etc.) that we know spiked CO2 past even current levels and it did not result in effects these models predict.
Nope.
Volcanoes can dump large amounts of carbon dioxide, but for short periods of time [scientificamerican.com]. Cumulative, no, volcanoes produce less CO2 than humans do. (And supervolcanoes are more of a problem with ash deposition, not CO2.)
Asteroid impacts, on the other hand... the Chixulub asteroid impact killed every species of life larger than a squirrel (and a large amount of smaller life). Do you really want to say "no worries, carbon dioxide is no worse than a mass extinction?
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There is even a technical term for it - interglacial period. Which we are entering now.
The interglacial started about eight thousand
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There was scientific speculation, yes.
It was never a dominant part of the research, but it was amplified out of proportion by the tabloids, which is what y'all remember.
Otherwise, what pray tell ignited the media hype?
The gasoline sales, another well-known influence in the game.
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That's ex-post facto bs.
That's your opinion, which is, like, your opinion, man.
When people have to fight this hard over their "thing" to the point of demonizing anyone who
WUT?
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I'm also old enough to remember and no you weren't. You were told that, absent human interference, we were in a warm period (inter-glacial) in an ice age and would be heading back into a colder period where much of the northern hemisphere developed world would see glaciers return.
Over tens of thousands of years.
Natural climate change is slow. The Earth has enormous thermal inertia an
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Let's not deny that bad information has been given in the past. Bad information is also likely being given today, and will be tomorrow as well. Mistakes happen. I like that this paper has been
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>I'm in the UK, and I clearly remember a school textbook with drawn pictures of Trafalgar Square fully iced up.
*Science* has never said that. Either some idiot who writes textbooks for money said that, or YOU misunderstood what was in the text book. There are zero scientists that say glaciation would happen that fast, even if the average global temperatures would drop to constantly below freezing.
There just plain isn't enough precipitation to grow giant ice sheets in a decade or two. It takes thousands t
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I'm in the UK, and I clearly remember a school textbook with drawn pictures of Trafalgar Square fully iced up. This would be early 80s.
I'm in the US, and I remember news articles about this idea. They passed quickly. If you wound up with a textbook with such ideas in it presented as anything other than a possibility which had been or could be researched, that is unfortunate, but it is not indicative of anything widespread.
Let's not deny that bad information has been given in the past.
Nobody is denying that at all. Nobody is even denying that there was a global cooling article fad. What was different about the global cooling scare from AGW's broad scientific consensus is that it didn't have broad scien
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You're full of shit; I remember sitting in school watching a video about how the world was going to freeze over ( in 2nd grade no less. Wild times ) by 2000.
I remember when my second grade teacher told us that the earth was hotter in summer because it was closer to the sun!
The lesson is, maybe you should learn more science after 2nd grade.
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Climate scientists didn't really overplay their hand. The media took what they reported and whipped it into panic inducing headlines. Actual climate scientists are now having to deal with a legacy of media hype on the subject on top of doing their actual jobs, because people are remembering the hype cycles, and then blaming the science rather than the shit-slingers.
Sometimes it pays to dig beneath the headlines and the media itself. I learned this lesson as a teen when they were reporting on something we we
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Of course they overplayed their hand, it was the only way to get funding. One side of this debate got funded and the other didn't. The scarier your thesis the more money you got. Continuing to deny this objective fact just demonstrates the damage you have done to the credibility of real science in the name of your religion.
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Of course they overplayed their hand, it was the only way to get funding. One side of this debate got funded and the other didn't.
For years the oil companies were heavily funding people to create doubt about climate science. They eventually got publicly outed for paying for bad science, and stopped because it looked bad.
As for atmospheric science, the main funding for atmospheric science is in improving weather models, including hurricane path predictions and aviation weather. Climate predictions are pretty much just another application of the models made for other purposes.
As for the oil companies, they shifted their strategy to fund
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I find this hilarious. You are a copy of the South Park caricature for climate change deniers.
You are part of the problem. This attitude is not only damaging to your own preferred position/understanding but it's also not how science works or should work beause someone asked a question you didn't like.
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I like having serious conversations on Slashdot at least as much as the next nerd, but arguments on Slashdot can only be taken slightly seriously today. There's a lot of people here who are not arguing in good faith.
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IKR? What a loon!
It doesn't add up (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, when Putin finally nukes them, there will be nuclear winter.
Nature (Score:2)
I've been watching Nature for a very very long time. Nature is reliable when it comes to biochemistry and other technical biology fields. Not so in other fields, where it just gives a platform to the flavor of the day.
Mental decline (Score:2)
Reading all these comments makes it clear that we on Slashdot have become who we used to ridicule: Science-denying zealots.
Paging Mr. Outlier. (Score:2)
* pulls Uzbekistan to the side *
(Data Analyst) "There, now see? That's much better! I think we can all relax a bit now."
* Uzbekistan starts walking to the door *
(Reality) "Uh, hold up there. What-The-Fuck doesn't even begin to describe my curiosity."
We screwed up, but we're still right (Score:2)
I don't know what the definition of "accountability" is in climate research, but a threefold error is terrible science, it should have been caught in peer review, and everyone involved owes the scientific world an apology.
"We're still right, it's a terrible problem," only shows clear bias towards demonstrating there is a terrible problem, and that's how they missed this. All of them, peer review, everything. It's a massive methodology screw up that can easily be accounted for in STATA or whatever they're us
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I don't know what the definition of "accountability" is in climate research, but a threefold error is terrible science, it should have been caught in peer review, and everyone involved owes the scientific world an apology.
To be more accurate, this was an error in an economic study. Economists might think their field is a science, but scientists don't.
We are so fucked! (Score:2)
If we're very lucky, we will only see linear increases in temperature. Far more likely, the ocean has been easing us into our dooms. Far more likely, immense amounts of carbon are going to come out of the world's permafrost, and increasing wildfires will add even more. Then we will see logarithmic growth in global temperatures. Large swathes of the planet will become uninhabitable. We'll try all sorts of crazy things to fix the issue, from sunshades to reflecting sprays in the upper atmosphere. They'l
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Lying for the good cause (Score:2)
Somehow the lying for the allegedly good cause has become completely normalized, especially when any progressive topics are concerned, for some reason. The allegedly good people want to force everyone into the only one trve-true allowed solution and will gladly bend the truth and avoid democratic process or fair discussion. They build their lies on foregone conclusions that they demand everyone has to respect.
And now this allows even so important topics like climate to topple in the public eye. Because even
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I'm not worried about people who make errors, discover the errors, and retract the work. I worry about the people who lie, and when the lie is pointed out, double down with bigger lies.
Excellent (Score:1)
Bad or false findings should not be tolerated in any science publication....if it's found, it should be retracted immediately.
Ferret
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.. there is no disastrous climate change, just normal cycles. The climate-fanatics almost convinced me that there is some disaster incoming, but thanks for I have still have some brainb capacity left.
The normal cycles-- known as "Milankovitch variations"-- happen on a time scale of tens to hundreds of thousands of years. The current climate change is much faster than that.