4 ms·

This writer missed or is ignoring both the deliberate fraud known as Climategate, and the new discovery about the importance of sunspots; does he know or care a

This writer missed or is ignoring both the deliberate fraud known as Climategate, and the new discovery about the importance of sunspots; does he know or care about climate change in the past, the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period, the freeze towards the end of the Roman Empire, and the like? He seems to be too committed to American liberalism, and to have spent too much time arguing with creationists (which, from my personal experience arguing with them, is not good for anyone's sanity), to be able to discuss these issues scientifically. Also, does anyone else get tired of the canard about apes evolving into humans? Recent science indicates that apes and humans are different evolutionary paths; no human or human-precursor species ever evolved knuckle-walking or the simian proportions of arms to legs (and both Neandertals and Cro-Magnons looked mostly like Germans, Scandinavians, or Finns). Pop-cultural understanding of human evolution -- including the pop-cultural understanding held by the evolutionary apologist culture -- is frozen in time at 1945 or earlier; the Holocaust has frightened us away from discussing human evolution (and its natural corollary, human race). This is all the more ironic because, if we _were_ willing to discuss human evolution and race, we would discover pretty quickly that the Nazis were wrong. There is an Aryan race, but it's local to Persia and the Indian Subcontinent (hint: languages and cultures can spread without genetically significant numbers of people spreading with them); there is no Nordic race, but two mostly-unrelated races coexisting in northern Europe; the whole narrative of the development of Western man is the evolution of the Iberian race and its descendants... I'll get off my hobby-horse now.

cromulent 17y ago
Hang on, stay on the horse for a moment. Do sunspots, climate change in the past, the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period, etc answer the question of whether producing large amounts of greenhouse gases is bad for the planet and its current inhabitants? And does the deliberate fraud of one group of scientists mean that the question has gone away or been definitively answered?
- epochwolf 17y ago
  And does the deliberate fraud of one group of scientists mean that the question has gone away or been definitively answered? No, but it does call the evidence into question even if it wasn't directly related to the fraud.
  - glymor 17y ago
    Even if CRU was full of evil. It's only one of three different sources of the same information. Which is only part of the weight of evidence towards AGW. Given the sheer enormity of attention given to this; that a few non-peer reviewed items in the IPCC report and comparatively small number of bad emails out of years is all thats turned up should give more weight to the remaining evidence not less. The idea that one part was wrong therefore we are allowed to not consider the rest is what the article is trying to remove. If CRU means we should reduce probabilities then do so. But after you update deal with the question again. Don't feel that it's then safe to ignore it until absolute evidence appears.
    - yummyfajitas 17y ago
      Even if CRU was full of evil. It's only one of three different sources of the same information. Which is only part of the weight of evidence towards AGW. There are multiple sources for climate data, some of which are independent of the CRU data. This increases redundancy and the reliability of our conclusions. However, much of the "weight of evidence towards AGW" has CRU/other historical climate data as a dependency. For example, climate models (which are a necessary component of the evidence for AGW) are calibrated against historical data. These dependencies make the rest of the evidence potentially less reliable. Until we can sort out which CRU results are correct, which are not, and which external results depend on them, the reliability of many results has taken a serious hit.
    - fnid2 17y ago
      Humans are evil. The CRU is full of humans. The CRU is full of evil. QED. It's not just the CRU. Any large organization like the CRU should be held with extreme skepticism. Members make lots of money off grants to study climatological effects on the planet. There are billions of dollars involved and people are extremely greedy. I think the question the OP of this thread raised is this: There have been times in the past without lots of CO2 where extreme climate change has occurred. Is it possible, that the same causes of those changes are the causes of the current changes? If not, why not? It could be possible that those factors are contributing -- even more dramatically -- to the rise of CO2, than man. No one has answered that question yet as far as I know, but there is a correlation between the same causes of past warmings the current physical space in this environment, so why aren't the same things then doing the same things now?
madair 17y ago
Explaining my vote down: (1) You make a lot of bold statements to refute a highly researched article full of references, with not so much as a nod to your sources (2) Your first sentence makes an assumption that he's missed or ignoring the very thing that the article is reacting to. The _whole_ point of the article is to discuss first principles. The author of the article is pretty well known for his ability to do so (3) I'm unclear on your statements about human evolution, all sorts of potential background for those statements spring to mind, but whatever it is, it is on you you to provide _strong_ references or original research in order to refute evolutionary science (4) Godwin's law in the very first comment!
- nathanwdavis 17y ago
  Where are the references? Mostly I just see links to other lesswrong articles.
- Eliezer 17y ago
  Thank you for your defense, but it is only with respect to probability theory that I can claim to write anything highly researched. Where AGW is concerned I'm an outsider.
ZeroGravitas 17y ago
I was under the impression that all humans were of the same race (i.e. species) and that humans are apes, which would make any common ancestor apes too. Wikipedia agrees, got any links to support your hobby horses?
- nathanwdavis 17y ago
  Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information.
dkimball 17y ago
I'll try to answer objections here in two sets of comments, one on climate, the other on human evolution. On climate change: from what I understand of the subject, there is only one body of research -- three sets of "cross-pollinated" research of which the CRU was one. Again from what I understand, all three of these sets do not have the raw data available. I can also say more confidently that none of these people have theories with operant mechanisms that explain the Medieval Warm Period or the cooling cycles towards the end of the Roman Empire and during the Little Ice Age -- nor do they seem to be in a hurry to discover the operant mechanisms behind these changes to world climate. This does not mean that toxic effluvia like DDT, or the sulfides contributing to acid rain, or whatnot are harmless; but it does mean that it's not clear that "the science is settled" on global warming -- which seems to have stopped and started going the other way in the past 20 years, regardless. I'm not a climate scientist even as an amateur, but recent research seems to point to sunspots as an, or the, operant mechanism.
- Locke1689 17y ago
  You are mistaken. On climate change: from what I understand of the subject, there is only one body of research -- three sets of "cross-pollinated" research of which the CRU was one False. There is data from weather stations, tree rings, ice cores and others. Again from what I understand, all three of these sets do not have the raw data available. Again, false. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/ http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/ See the "Raw" section for unadjusted results. I highly doubt you are qualified to adjust them, though. I can also say more confidently that none of these people have theories with operant mechanisms that explain the Medieval Warm Period or the cooling cycles towards the end of the Roman Empire and during the Little Ice Age -- nor do they seem to be in a hurry to discover the operant mechanisms behind these changes to world climate. From the IPCC: "current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this time frame, and the conventional terms of 'Little Ice Age' and 'Medieval Warm Period' appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries." Also, recent publications seem to suggest "little to no effect" from the sun: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/climate-science/sun-earth-connections/ http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/clima... I can also say confidently that you should stop getting your information from random people on the internet.
dkimball 17y ago
On human evolution, human race, and Godwin's Law: My information is from Wikipedia and from a general amateur interest in the subject. (I find that Wikipedia is reliable when you stay away from the politicized and widely-known subjects.) For knuckle-walking or its absence in early hominids, see http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/full/410324b0.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/full/410324b... -- which admittedly only establishes the possibility, not the certainty, that the human-chimpanzee MRCA did not knuckle-walk -- as well as http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327213.700-humans-may-have-learned-to-walk-in-the-trees.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327213.700-humans-ma... and the work of Tracy Kivell of the Max Planck Institute. (Annoyingly, both these sites are behind paywalls.) The obscure field of forensic anthropology has a fair amount of information about the dichotomy between Iberians and Upper Paleolithic survivors (Cro-Magnons, plus Neandertal genes if the two subspecies of H. sapiens were inter-fertile). However, the whole question of human races and human differentiation in general is anathema in this day and age because of Hitler -- although for some reason social engineering is (mostly) not anathema because of Stalin. The result of this is that somewhere in the back of everyone's mind is the tripartate division into "Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid" of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is not correct. I know much more about Europe than about the rest of the world; but Europe was first peopled by Cro-Magnons, who evolved "Race" and "species" are not the same thing in this context. I don't want to get into semantic games, but the difference between an Iberian (dark-white, small, long-headed, fine-boned) and a Germanic or UP Survivor (pinkish-white skin, tall, broad-faced, 'uncouth', large-boned, broad-headed) is plainly visible, and the differences between either of these and, say, the mainstream Chinese type (broad, stocky, somewhere between these two in height) or the small "Bushmen" type (related to the Iberians, but with a different type of hair) or the large, "archaic" "Bantu" type of Africa. While there seem to be some correlations of race with temperament, intelligence, social fluency, and so on, these are generally not very strong, and individuals can generally overcome them -- and as a Catholic, I'm not about to start advocating apartheid or genocide or anything _regardless_ of what the genetic studies say. For a little more on Iberian spread in Europe, see Stephen Oppenheimer's _The Origins of the British_; Iberian or pre-Iberian descent tends to correlate with mtDNA haplogroup H and Y-DNA haplogroup R1a and its relatives; but I'm afraid that most of what I've figured out here has been my own piecings together, and I have more urgent things to do than to write a book on the subject. And it's not Godwin's Law if Hitler was actually a factor. (http://xkcd.com/261/ http://xkcd.com/261/) I don't have a dog in the fight of evolutionism versus creationism, but if I had to pick an "ism" I'd pick the former. I'm a Catholic, but I'm certainly not a Creationist -- and I find evolution to be thoroughly consistent with the style of a God Who, as Dawkins lamented, couldn't even be bothered to tell his followers to wash their hands before eating. (However, I find it troubling that "posting something that may be an oblique challenge to my beliefs" is an adequate criterion for a down-vote.) Regardless, I'll say one thing: this comment has taught me a lot about the contents of "what you can't say" (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) on Hacker News. (Yes, that was a sneer, but I hope a sneer can be forgiven me after getting as badly flamed as I just did. And perhaps it'll inspire some of my interlocutors and down-modders to reconsider their beliefs...?) Edit: I have another comment in response on my position on global warming, so look for that as well as this one.

cromulent 17y ago

Hang on, stay on the horse for a moment. Do sunspots, climate change in the past, the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period, etc answer the question of whether producing large amounts of greenhouse gases is bad for the planet and its current inhabitants? And does the deliberate fraud of one group of scientists mean that the question has gone away or been definitively answered?

epochwolf 17y ago
And does the deliberate fraud of one group of scientists mean that the question has gone away or been definitively answered? No, but it does call the evidence into question even if it wasn't directly related to the fraud.
- glymor 17y ago
  Even if CRU was full of evil. It's only one of three different sources of the same information. Which is only part of the weight of evidence towards AGW. Given the sheer enormity of attention given to this; that a few non-peer reviewed items in the IPCC report and comparatively small number of bad emails out of years is all thats turned up should give more weight to the remaining evidence not less. The idea that one part was wrong therefore we are allowed to not consider the rest is what the article is trying to remove. If CRU means we should reduce probabilities then do so. But after you update deal with the question again. Don't feel that it's then safe to ignore it until absolute evidence appears.
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    Even if CRU was full of evil. It's only one of three different sources of the same information. Which is only part of the weight of evidence towards AGW. There are multiple sources for climate data, some of which are independent of the CRU data. This increases redundancy and the reliability of our conclusions. However, much of the "weight of evidence towards AGW" has CRU/other historical climate data as a dependency. For example, climate models (which are a necessary component of the evidence for AGW) are calibrated against historical data. These dependencies make the rest of the evidence potentially less reliable. Until we can sort out which CRU results are correct, which are not, and which external results depend on them, the reliability of many results has taken a serious hit.
  - fnid2 17y ago
    Humans are evil. The CRU is full of humans. The CRU is full of evil. QED. It's not just the CRU. Any large organization like the CRU should be held with extreme skepticism. Members make lots of money off grants to study climatological effects on the planet. There are billions of dollars involved and people are extremely greedy. I think the question the OP of this thread raised is this: There have been times in the past without lots of CO2 where extreme climate change has occurred. Is it possible, that the same causes of those changes are the causes of the current changes? If not, why not? It could be possible that those factors are contributing -- even more dramatically -- to the rise of CO2, than man. No one has answered that question yet as far as I know, but there is a correlation between the same causes of past warmings the current physical space in this environment, so why aren't the same things then doing the same things now?

madair 17y ago

Explaining my vote down: (1) You make a lot of bold statements to refute a highly researched article full of references, with not so much as a nod to your sources (2) Your first sentence makes an assumption that he's missed or ignoring the very thing that the article is reacting to. The _whole_ point of the article is to discuss first principles. The author of the article is pretty well known for his ability to do so (3) I'm unclear on your statements about human evolution, all sorts of potential background for those statements spring to mind, but whatever it is, it is on you you to provide _strong_ references or original research in order to refute evolutionary science (4) Godwin's law in the very first comment!

nathanwdavis 17y ago
Where are the references? Mostly I just see links to other lesswrong articles.
Eliezer 17y ago
Thank you for your defense, but it is only with respect to probability theory that I can claim to write anything highly researched. Where AGW is concerned I'm an outsider.

ZeroGravitas 17y ago

I was under the impression that all humans were of the same race (i.e. species) and that humans are apes, which would make any common ancestor apes too. Wikipedia agrees, got any links to support your hobby horses?

nathanwdavis 17y ago
Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information.

dkimball 17y ago

I'll try to answer objections here in two sets of comments, one on climate, the other on human evolution. On climate change: from what I understand of the subject, there is only one body of research -- three sets of "cross-pollinated" research of which the CRU was one. Again from what I understand, all three of these sets do not have the raw data available. I can also say more confidently that none of these people have theories with operant mechanisms that explain the Medieval Warm Period or the cooling cycles towards the end of the Roman Empire and during the Little Ice Age -- nor do they seem to be in a hurry to discover the operant mechanisms behind these changes to world climate. This does not mean that toxic effluvia like DDT, or the sulfides contributing to acid rain, or whatnot are harmless; but it does mean that it's not clear that "the science is settled" on global warming -- which seems to have stopped and started going the other way in the past 20 years, regardless. I'm not a climate scientist even as an amateur, but recent research seems to point to sunspots as an, or the, operant mechanism.

Locke1689 17y ago
You are mistaken. On climate change: from what I understand of the subject, there is only one body of research -- three sets of "cross-pollinated" research of which the CRU was one False. There is data from weather stations, tree rings, ice cores and others. Again from what I understand, all three of these sets do not have the raw data available. Again, false. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/ http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/ See the "Raw" section for unadjusted results. I highly doubt you are qualified to adjust them, though. I can also say more confidently that none of these people have theories with operant mechanisms that explain the Medieval Warm Period or the cooling cycles towards the end of the Roman Empire and during the Little Ice Age -- nor do they seem to be in a hurry to discover the operant mechanisms behind these changes to world climate. From the IPCC: "current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this time frame, and the conventional terms of 'Little Ice Age' and 'Medieval Warm Period' appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries." Also, recent publications seem to suggest "little to no effect" from the sun: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/climate-science/sun-earth-connections/ http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/clima... I can also say confidently that you should stop getting your information from random people on the internet.

dkimball 17y ago

On human evolution, human race, and Godwin's Law: My information is from Wikipedia and from a general amateur interest in the subject. (I find that Wikipedia is reliable when you stay away from the politicized and widely-known subjects.) For knuckle-walking or its absence in early hominids, see http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/full/410324b0.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/full/410324b... -- which admittedly only establishes the possibility, not the certainty, that the human-chimpanzee MRCA did not knuckle-walk -- as well as http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327213.700-humans-may-have-learned-to-walk-in-the-trees.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327213.700-humans-ma... and the work of Tracy Kivell of the Max Planck Institute. (Annoyingly, both these sites are behind paywalls.) The obscure field of forensic anthropology has a fair amount of information about the dichotomy between Iberians and Upper Paleolithic survivors (Cro-Magnons, plus Neandertal genes if the two subspecies of H. sapiens were inter-fertile). However, the whole question of human races and human differentiation in general is anathema in this day and age because of Hitler -- although for some reason social engineering is (mostly) not anathema because of Stalin. The result of this is that somewhere in the back of everyone's mind is the tripartate division into "Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid" of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is not correct. I know much more about Europe than about the rest of the world; but Europe was first peopled by Cro-Magnons, who evolved "Race" and "species" are not the same thing in this context. I don't want to get into semantic games, but the difference between an Iberian (dark-white, small, long-headed, fine-boned) and a Germanic or UP Survivor (pinkish-white skin, tall, broad-faced, 'uncouth', large-boned, broad-headed) is plainly visible, and the differences between either of these and, say, the mainstream Chinese type (broad, stocky, somewhere between these two in height) or the small "Bushmen" type (related to the Iberians, but with a different type of hair) or the large, "archaic" "Bantu" type of Africa. While there seem to be some correlations of race with temperament, intelligence, social fluency, and so on, these are generally not very strong, and individuals can generally overcome them -- and as a Catholic, I'm not about to start advocating apartheid or genocide or anything _regardless_ of what the genetic studies say. For a little more on Iberian spread in Europe, see Stephen Oppenheimer's _The Origins of the British_; Iberian or pre-Iberian descent tends to correlate with mtDNA haplogroup H and Y-DNA haplogroup R1a and its relatives; but I'm afraid that most of what I've figured out here has been my own piecings together, and I have more urgent things to do than to write a book on the subject. And it's not Godwin's Law if Hitler was actually a factor. (http://xkcd.com/261/ http://xkcd.com/261/) I don't have a dog in the fight of evolutionism versus creationism, but if I had to pick an "ism" I'd pick the former. I'm a Catholic, but I'm certainly not a Creationist -- and I find evolution to be thoroughly consistent with the style of a God Who, as Dawkins lamented, couldn't even be bothered to tell his followers to wash their hands before eating. (However, I find it troubling that "posting something that may be an oblique challenge to my beliefs" is an adequate criterion for a down-vote.) Regardless, I'll say one thing: this comment has taught me a lot about the contents of "what you can't say" (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) on Hacker News. (Yes, that was a sneer, but I hope a sneer can be forgiven me after getting as badly flamed as I just did. And perhaps it'll inspire some of my interlocutors and down-modders to reconsider their beliefs...?) Edit: I have another comment in response on my position on global warming, so look for that as well as this one.