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Are you saying I have been proven wrong? The assertion is not really backed up by anything, so I guess I could be totally wrong about the amount of remaining al

by guscost 11y ago

Are you saying I have been proven wrong? The assertion is not really backed up by anything, so I guess I could be totally wrong about the amount of remaining alarmist material. Paraphrasing Popper, it is easy to find confirmations for any theory if you are looking for confirmations. So we will see plenty more global warming anecdotes in the coming years. But the last proxy study to get big attention was Marcott 2013, no? And I'm sure you didn't read about it on CNN, but the meaning of the abstract had to be "clarified" on that one.

CarVac 11y ago
First of all, when you call it alarmist that's inherently reinforcing your bias that the concern for the climate is exaggerated. I find it difficult to believe that you could be evaluating them objectively with that sort of mindset. Regarding Marcott 2013: are you saying that your scepticism is mainly for proxy studies, and there haven't been many recently? What about that paper don't you trust? Have you read it yourself? (I'm reading it right now) Do you think it's intentionally underestimating the temperatures in the past to confirm that global warming is occurring?
- guscost 11y ago
  The "alarmist" label is tongue-in-cheek, riffing off the corresponding "denier" rhetoric. Sorry for any confusion. Marcott 2013 was cited in a lot of newspaper claims that the 20th century was "the warmest of the past 10,000 years" or something to that effect. It turns out they only kept a few proxies all the way through the 20th century to generate the uptick, removing the ones that did not contribute, and eventually had to concede that their study was not a reliable basis for any conclusions about the past century: > Thus, the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.[0] The claim they opted to make instead is that the temperature estimates from their proxy study can be compared with thermometer readings and that the thermometers indicate higher values in recent years, a much weaker conclusion for a proxy study. Given the history of problems with every high-profile proxy study that comes along, and considering that they are the cornerstone of any logical reasoning connecting modern temperature data to measurable long-term climate-scale trends, I suggest that the conclusions about temperature anomalies (going back more than a few hundred years) are a lot less robust than many believe. [0]http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/03/response-by-marcott-et-al/ http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/03/respon...

by guscost 11y ago

CarVac 11y ago

First of all, when you call it alarmist that's inherently reinforcing your bias that the concern for the climate is exaggerated. I find it difficult to believe that you could be evaluating them objectively with that sort of mindset. Regarding Marcott 2013: are you saying that your scepticism is mainly for proxy studies, and there haven't been many recently? What about that paper don't you trust? Have you read it yourself? (I'm reading it right now) Do you think it's intentionally underestimating the temperatures in the past to confirm that global warming is occurring?

guscost 11y ago
The "alarmist" label is tongue-in-cheek, riffing off the corresponding "denier" rhetoric. Sorry for any confusion. Marcott 2013 was cited in a lot of newspaper claims that the 20th century was "the warmest of the past 10,000 years" or something to that effect. It turns out they only kept a few proxies all the way through the 20th century to generate the uptick, removing the ones that did not contribute, and eventually had to concede that their study was not a reliable basis for any conclusions about the past century: > Thus, the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.[0] The claim they opted to make instead is that the temperature estimates from their proxy study can be compared with thermometer readings and that the thermometers indicate higher values in recent years, a much weaker conclusion for a proxy study. Given the history of problems with every high-profile proxy study that comes along, and considering that they are the cornerstone of any logical reasoning connecting modern temperature data to measurable long-term climate-scale trends, I suggest that the conclusions about temperature anomalies (going back more than a few hundred years) are a lot less robust than many believe. [0]http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/03/response-by-marcott-et-al/ http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/03/respon...