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What makes me mad about these kinds of data based climate change arguments is that they don't engage with the data in an honest way. The huge problem is 1880 w

by vivekd 10y ago

What makes me mad about these kinds of data based climate change arguments is that they don't engage with the data in an honest way. The huge problem is 1880 was one of the coldest years in history. That cold period was caused by volcanism, several volcanos erupted causing a cold period that lasted from the 1600s to the late 1800s. This period is known as the little ice age. The worst of this period was in 1816 which was known as the "year without a summer." The Earth has gradually been warming since then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age So when we track from the little ice age to now and say the world as gotten warmer and present this as unusual or surprising findings, you know that they are not being honest with you. I'm not saying that climate change isn't happening, I'm not saying it isn't man made. All I'm pointing out here is that proponents of global warming aren't engaging with the facts in an honest and forthright way.

corradio 10y ago
You're right. However, it's hard to argue with the speed at which this warming occurs. It's never seen before if you look at all the records we have. That's what's worrying.
- karl11 10y ago
  The sample size of our records is incredibly small when stacked against the history of the earth and all the records we're missing.
  - euyyn 10y ago
    What makes you think so? There's plenty of ways to indirectly know past temperatures, even if there wasn't a human writing it down.
    - Udik 10y ago
      Not with the accuracy and resolution of the data we have since last century. When you compare the current time series with the reconstructed ones from the past, you're comparing a day by day thermometric reading with the assembled averages of multiple, very noisy and extremely low frequency samples. Very tricky to say from those what might have been the actual speed of change in the past.
      - euyyn 10y ago
        Tricky for sure, as in it requires scientists to understand statistics and probability. Thankfully, many do, and many university departments hire mathematicians to keep the quality there high.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - mememachine 10y ago
        With the quality of data we have from the past your reconstruction can only be so accurate. Its not a stretch to say our reconstructions cant really predict the short term spikes were trying to compare against.
  - corradio 10y ago
    We'd be incredibly unlucky to have missed a temperature change as fast as the one we're measuring now, if it indeed would have been caused by a small sample size of past measurements.
    - mememachine 10y ago
      How unlucky we would have to be sounds like something you can calculate rather than just claim off hand.
      - euyyn 10y ago
        That's what's called a "p-value", and as you guessed it is indeed calculated. It's a basic tool of science, to the point that even better probabilistic tools have been advocated for years, and it's one of the first things you check when you're reviewing a paper.
        mememachine 10y ago
        I'm aware of what a "p-value" is but what were talking about is reconstruction from historical samples and its perfectly calculable what kind of events wouldnt show up in that reconstruction (and p-values have almost nothing to do with it). Your attitude is obnoxious.
        euyyn 10y ago
        You say it's calculable and I agree. What's make you think it isn't calculated? Sorry if I came out as obnoxious, but "you should be able to calculate that" is a veiled accusation that it is in fact not calculated, as if no scientists take this seriously. "How unlucky we would have been to see this data of the past, if a spike in temperatures had actually happened then" is P(data|hypothesis), the frequentist argument for or against a hypothesis. It's what a p-value is, but arguing what to call it is pointless anyway.
        mememachine 10y ago
  - briandear 10y ago
    In addition, the quality of our data is subject to debate. For example, using ship-water inflow temperature measurements which are warmer than buoy-measured temperatures as well as using models of suspicious provenance to extrapolate data where none exists. NOAA researchers corrected for the "cold bias" from buoy measurements compared to measurements made in ship engine rooms. My point isn't to deny the climate is changing but to call into question the quality of the data being used to create models and formulate policy. Each source of measurement has inherent bias and error -- that's the nature of scientific measurement -- especially measurements that often occur in the hulls of a ship. Who calibrates the measurement devices? Who calibrated them 50 years ago?
    - euyyn 10y ago
      > using models of suspicious provenance As in "I learned this model in a dark alley in Stalingrad, and I won't defend it in my paper"? Good luck trying to publish a paper if your model isn't well known and you don't explain it.
- izend 10y ago
  The end of the last ice age had much faster warming, see: http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-climate-change-during-the-last-ice-24288097 http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-clim...
  - acqq 10y ago
    It wasn't "much faster" then at all. First, the work you've sent doesn't have the temperature graph, it's the "oxygen isotope record" on the y axis. Second, it's true that the last glacial period had much colder climate, but the changes were across a thousand of years for a few degrees, now we can have that amount of changes over a hundred years if nothing is done -- some ten times faster! And at that time there were no 7 billion people and no world economy that would be affected. Also, the temperatures that we can reach are going in the direction that can be higher than those recorded in the last 5 million years! If we "do something" we can stay at one or two degrees, not crossing that target. If we "don't do anything" it can be 4 (or even 6) degrees warming, 2 (or 4) degrees more than the maximum(!) in the last 5 million years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#/media/File:Five_Myr_Climate_Change.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#/media/File... That's why there's so much worry.
euyyn 10y ago
> proponents of global warming aren't engaging with the facts in an honest and forthright way. You want to read about global warming from climate scientists, as your questions are easily answered. Peer reviewers are as vicious as in any other science: the concerns you raise here would be the least of their ammunition.
- haberman 10y ago
  He was not complaining about a lack of available information. He was complaining about non-rigorous arguments being passed off as a sufficient justification of a political position. If I say global warming is caused by the decline in the population of pirates in the world, my conclusion may be correct but my reasoning is flawed. If people pressured you to believe in global warming on the basis of the pirate argument, you would be right to push back on that.
  - euyyn 10y ago
    If all he wanted to say is "this infographic should have included the last 400 years instead, so people aren't misled by learning about the Little Ice Age", "proponents of global warming aren't engaging with the facts in an honest and forthright way" is a very poor way of expressing that.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- lrenaud 10y ago
  That gives me even less faith in the quality of findings. Having seen the pathetic state of literature review in the various engineering fields, I cannot expect it to be better in meteorological fields. No doubt there is a certain subset of effective and critical reviewers, but I expect dogma, exciting findings, and name recognition still rule the day. The most the volume of politics in engineering where our work is not overtly political to those outside outfield is astounding. I don't buy that in a field with so many non-expert pressures applied the review process escapes unadulterated.
briandear 10y ago
It's because global warming politics has nothing to do with temperature. The incentive isn't to cool the planet, but alter the world economic model. Whether or not that's a worthy goal is irrelevant -- using the climate to advance that apparent agenda is fraudulent. Here's more on that theory -- with appropriate links to source material from the UN. https://www.reddit.com/r/climateskeptics/comments/441rl6/un_climate_chief_christianafigueres_admits_goal/ https://www.reddit.com/r/climateskeptics/comments/441rl6/un_... This is not dissimilar to the Eugenics debates in the early 20th century: it was 'settled science' advocated by thought leaders and politicians at the time -- some with noble intentions but ultimately the core of the issue was the elimination of so-called undesirables in society using 'science' as a rationale. Look at documents and speeches by Eugenics proponents at the time -- strangly similar to the "settled science" arguments one hears today. The purpose of the Eugenics movements was far different than the climate movement today -- but no less nefarious depending on the side of the issue you may fall.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  I do not see any will to abandon the current world order or really even take anything like adequate steps to address the problem.
- rpedela 10y ago
  Maybe that is the UN's position but I think most people just want energy produced cleanly which helps the environment beyond just global warming which is important for long-term economic health. And it will likely reduce respiratory illness.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    I think the parent post is just confusing cause and effect. A UN official says that addressing climate change will require massive changes to the global economy and he hears that that's the goal all along.
- svantana 10y ago
  That's completely ridiculous and a total mischaracterisation of what was said. What environmentalists are saying is that the negative externalities of fossil fuel burning are affecting everyone, and perhaps most of all the people in a lot of poor countries. I'm really amazed at how climate skeptics try their best to twist and distort reality to rationalize their comfortable but unsustainable lifestyle. Why not pull out Occam's razor and realize that 99% of all environmentalists are worried about the future of human life on this planet, because a lot of data is pointing in that direction, and are not involved in any nefarious global conspiracy theory?
graeme 10y ago
What do you propose? You raised a nit, and didn't propose a solution. As another commentor pointed out, this is a trivial fact known to all researchers in the field. If this was actually a devastating reply, then it would be pointed out in peer reviewed journals.
twelfthnight 10y ago
Here is a look going back further in time (1). If you choose a time earlier than 1880, I think it actually strengthens the case for global warming. The concerning bit is not the record heat we see today, but the rate of change. (1) https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/ EDIT: To explicitly address the argument here: It's not disingenuous to compare to 1880 because if you were to choose any date earlier, you would come to the same conclusion. (It's nice to start with 1880 where we have actual records because then you can avoid arguments about the method you used to make projections about past temperatures).
uncle_d 10y ago
From NASA - volcanic vs solar activity: https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/st07500u.html https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/st07500u.html "volcanos erupted causing a cold period that lasted from the 1600s to the late 1800s" Correlation vs causation - while the volcanic winter phenomenon is well-known, there are those that propose that solar activity is the primary driver of climate on Earth: https://www.amazon.com/Neglected-Sun-Precludes-Catastrophe-Independent/dp/1909022241 https://www.amazon.com/Neglected-Sun-Precludes-Catastrophe-I... http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/08/12/winter-is-coming-warns-the-solar-physicist-the-alarmists-tried-to-silence/ http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/08/12/winter-is... Not to say that the greenhouse effect is not real, or that anthropogenic CO2 does not cause warming - just that the magnitude of the effect may well be greatly over-hyped.
- mememachine 10y ago
  You'll probably get flak for linking to breitbart.
pdog 10y ago
Welcome to the world of "data journalism".
nitwit005 10y ago
> aren't engaging with the facts in an honest and forthright way. One of the more roundabout ways of calling someone a liar that I've seen.
imh 10y ago
At first, you might think it's just something like this (http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations), but as far as I can tell, the arguments come largely from first principles physics, validated through both experiments and historical observations including both human and natural records. I don't think this is a dishonest "look these line up!" argument. I agree that it's frustrating when lay person proponents make arguments that don't hold up, and initially thought this article was doing that, but it's really just a snapshot into what's mentioned in the Methods section, which points to ModelE2 which is a physical simulation. It's being honest, just super brief.
zzzeek 10y ago
There are many other indicators of global temperature which have been used to make assertions going back anywhere from 500-100000 years depending on what methodology you use: http://grist.org/climate-energy/one-hundred-years-is-not-enough/ http://grist.org/climate-energy/one-hundred-years-is-not-eno...
uberrr 10y ago
I find it interesting that a self professed lawyer would create an account on a technology news website during an election year and regularly post against government regulation. How do you have so much time to argue against climate change and other "liberal" topics?
- seizethecheese 10y ago
  Please don't attack the messenger if you have nothing to say about the message.
  - uberrr 10y ago
    Is questioning a person's motivations ad hominem? How else could we have a discussion about potential "shaping" in online pseudonymous discussions?
    - seizethecheese 10y ago
      Motivation is irrelevant if he makes a valid point.
scatters 10y ago
You say that 1880 was one of the coldest years in history. The data series used in the article indicate that the entire decade 1903-1913 was significantly colder. If you then look at the contribution to climate from volcanic activity (CO2 and sulphates, in both directions), the fourth graph in the article ("Is It Volcanoes?"), the data show that 1880 did not have a significant negative temperature contribution from volcanic activity, and although 1884-5 did, so too did 1964-66, 1983, and 1992. There is no consensus on the cause of the Little Ice Age; although volcanism is one possible cause, there are other possible causes both external (solar activity, orbital cycles) and anthrogenic (reafforestation following pandemic-induced population collapse in Europe and the Americas). If that last cause is indeed a contributing factor, it supports the anthrogenic climate change theory. Even if it is excluded, the removal or reversal of external factors is totally insufficient to explain observed warming in the last century.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
throw_away_777 10y ago
It is interesting to note that the statistical evidence for global warming is relatively weak (at least compared to particle physics, where 3 to 5 sigma is expected for discoveries), https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/04/07/no-statistically-significant-satellite-warming-for-23-years-now-includes-february-data/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/04/07/no-statistically-sign... it is only because we have a known causal mechanism that we can say with confidence that man-made global warming is occurring. I liked that this article focused on causes of global temperature change, even if it did not present the data in a good manner.
Theodores 10y ago
I am not so sure about 'natural causes' being the cause of the Mini Ice Age. I am open minded to believing that it was Western diseases that killed off 'native' people in the Americas and plagues that killed people in Eurasia resulting in the forest reclaiming man made clearings, sucking CO2 into the plant life and out of the atmosphere and oceans. There was more to it than a dinosaur style die-off with some mega event causing the woe.
bunderbunder 10y ago
You're criticizing what you consider to be an oversimplification, and your criticism is itself based on an oversimplification. It seems you're implying that the argument being presented is basically just, "The world is getting warmer, aaaa!!!" There's much more to it than that. In fact, even the article you're criticizing provides a more nuanced justification than that, which opens you up to criticism for constructing a strawman argument. The real argument is, "Researchers have built detailed models to try and understand how the climate behaves, and sussed out many, if not all, the factors that influence global climate, and based on those models we can make certain worrying inferences about the current state of things and how we expect them to develop in the future." Those models do a very good job of hindcasting global climate over the period for which we have good, detailed data. This period admittedly and unfortunately does not cover much of the Little Ice Age. In climate science, as everywhere else, the GIGO principle applies. But since we do still get non-garbage out when we put non-garbage in, that leaves us in a state where they seem to be our most reliable source of information. If you want to challenge them, it's not enough to point out various historical events that are primarily hard to explain due to lack of data. You need to be able to propose a better model. Concrete example: Nobody threw Newton out the window just because, despite all the myriad places where his model worked stunningly well, there were a few things it couldn't explain. They waited until Einstein came up with a model that explained everything Newton's model could handle and more. And then they used that in some spots, but still mostly just stuck with Newton because the math is easier and accurate enough for almost any practical use. That's the way science works for physics, and that's the way it works for climatology, too.
- jjoonathan 10y ago
  You'll see someone like this in every global warming discussion that happens with an educated audience. They'll put on all the plumage of reasonable dissent: "I don't think that the argument for AGW takes into account <pet theory>." In an audience of non-experts, they will go unanswered, and appear to have a point, until you spend an hour or two digging through the relevant IPCC reports and discover that not only has <pet theory> been investigated, it has been extensively investigated by dozens of labs across hundreds of studies using methodologies you never dreamed possible, along with 3 or 4 variants of the argument, all of which were quite thoroughly put to rest. If you confront them with this evidence, citing all the reports and papers, they'll just switch from <pet theory> to <pet theory 2>, possibly after firing off a final riposte defending <pet theory> that makes it abundantly clear they couldn't even be bothered to read the links you dug up, forcing you to ask yourself if you really want to do all that homework again. Fake-reasonable arguments are easy. Countering them is hard. If you don't discard them as a matter of policy (peer review or STFU), they will dominate the decision making process with 100% certainty.
yongjik 10y ago
I disagree. As you said, by 1880 the world was recovering from Little Ice Age. That is, between 1880 and mid-20th century the world showed a natural tendency to become progressively warmer. This natural warming reduces the contrast with what followed, and makes the graph look more like a smooth transition. As others commented, if you look farther back, natural temperature variations smooth out, and the "hockey stick" shape becomes unmistakable.
acqq 10y ago
Kindly see the longer time period: https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/ "When the people say ''the climate has changed before'' these are the kinds of changes they're talking about"
- twelfthnight 10y ago
  Great minds think alike ;) (that is, we posted the same link at roughly the same time)

by vivekd 10y ago

corradio 10y ago

You're right. However, it's hard to argue with the speed at which this warming occurs. It's never seen before if you look at all the records we have. That's what's worrying.

karl11 10y ago
The sample size of our records is incredibly small when stacked against the history of the earth and all the records we're missing.
- euyyn 10y ago
  What makes you think so? There's plenty of ways to indirectly know past temperatures, even if there wasn't a human writing it down.
  - Udik 10y ago
    Not with the accuracy and resolution of the data we have since last century. When you compare the current time series with the reconstructed ones from the past, you're comparing a day by day thermometric reading with the assembled averages of multiple, very noisy and extremely low frequency samples. Very tricky to say from those what might have been the actual speed of change in the past.
    - euyyn 10y ago
      Tricky for sure, as in it requires scientists to understand statistics and probability. Thankfully, many do, and many university departments hire mathematicians to keep the quality there high.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - mememachine 10y ago
      With the quality of data we have from the past your reconstruction can only be so accurate. Its not a stretch to say our reconstructions cant really predict the short term spikes were trying to compare against.
- corradio 10y ago
  We'd be incredibly unlucky to have missed a temperature change as fast as the one we're measuring now, if it indeed would have been caused by a small sample size of past measurements.
  - mememachine 10y ago
    How unlucky we would have to be sounds like something you can calculate rather than just claim off hand.
    - euyyn 10y ago
      That's what's called a "p-value", and as you guessed it is indeed calculated. It's a basic tool of science, to the point that even better probabilistic tools have been advocated for years, and it's one of the first things you check when you're reviewing a paper.
      - mememachine 10y ago
        I'm aware of what a "p-value" is but what were talking about is reconstruction from historical samples and its perfectly calculable what kind of events wouldnt show up in that reconstruction (and p-values have almost nothing to do with it). Your attitude is obnoxious.
        euyyn 10y ago
        You say it's calculable and I agree. What's make you think it isn't calculated? Sorry if I came out as obnoxious, but "you should be able to calculate that" is a veiled accusation that it is in fact not calculated, as if no scientists take this seriously. "How unlucky we would have been to see this data of the past, if a spike in temperatures had actually happened then" is P(data|hypothesis), the frequentist argument for or against a hypothesis. It's what a p-value is, but arguing what to call it is pointless anyway.
        mememachine 10y ago
- briandear 10y ago
  In addition, the quality of our data is subject to debate. For example, using ship-water inflow temperature measurements which are warmer than buoy-measured temperatures as well as using models of suspicious provenance to extrapolate data where none exists. NOAA researchers corrected for the "cold bias" from buoy measurements compared to measurements made in ship engine rooms. My point isn't to deny the climate is changing but to call into question the quality of the data being used to create models and formulate policy. Each source of measurement has inherent bias and error -- that's the nature of scientific measurement -- especially measurements that often occur in the hulls of a ship. Who calibrates the measurement devices? Who calibrated them 50 years ago?
  - euyyn 10y ago
    > using models of suspicious provenance As in "I learned this model in a dark alley in Stalingrad, and I won't defend it in my paper"? Good luck trying to publish a paper if your model isn't well known and you don't explain it.
izend 10y ago
The end of the last ice age had much faster warming, see: http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-climate-change-during-the-last-ice-24288097 http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-clim...
- acqq 10y ago
  It wasn't "much faster" then at all. First, the work you've sent doesn't have the temperature graph, it's the "oxygen isotope record" on the y axis. Second, it's true that the last glacial period had much colder climate, but the changes were across a thousand of years for a few degrees, now we can have that amount of changes over a hundred years if nothing is done -- some ten times faster! And at that time there were no 7 billion people and no world economy that would be affected. Also, the temperatures that we can reach are going in the direction that can be higher than those recorded in the last 5 million years! If we "do something" we can stay at one or two degrees, not crossing that target. If we "don't do anything" it can be 4 (or even 6) degrees warming, 2 (or 4) degrees more than the maximum(!) in the last 5 million years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#/media/File:Five_Myr_Climate_Change.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#/media/File... That's why there's so much worry.

euyyn 10y ago

> proponents of global warming aren't engaging with the facts in an honest and forthright way. You want to read about global warming from climate scientists, as your questions are easily answered. Peer reviewers are as vicious as in any other science: the concerns you raise here would be the least of their ammunition.

haberman 10y ago
He was not complaining about a lack of available information. He was complaining about non-rigorous arguments being passed off as a sufficient justification of a political position. If I say global warming is caused by the decline in the population of pirates in the world, my conclusion may be correct but my reasoning is flawed. If people pressured you to believe in global warming on the basis of the pirate argument, you would be right to push back on that.
- euyyn 10y ago
  If all he wanted to say is "this infographic should have included the last 400 years instead, so people aren't misled by learning about the Little Ice Age", "proponents of global warming aren't engaging with the facts in an honest and forthright way" is a very poor way of expressing that.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
lrenaud 10y ago
That gives me even less faith in the quality of findings. Having seen the pathetic state of literature review in the various engineering fields, I cannot expect it to be better in meteorological fields. No doubt there is a certain subset of effective and critical reviewers, but I expect dogma, exciting findings, and name recognition still rule the day. The most the volume of politics in engineering where our work is not overtly political to those outside outfield is astounding. I don't buy that in a field with so many non-expert pressures applied the review process escapes unadulterated.

briandear 10y ago

It's because global warming politics has nothing to do with temperature. The incentive isn't to cool the planet, but alter the world economic model. Whether or not that's a worthy goal is irrelevant -- using the climate to advance that apparent agenda is fraudulent. Here's more on that theory -- with appropriate links to source material from the UN. https://www.reddit.com/r/climateskeptics/comments/441rl6/un_climate_chief_christianafigueres_admits_goal/ https://www.reddit.com/r/climateskeptics/comments/441rl6/un_... This is not dissimilar to the Eugenics debates in the early 20th century: it was 'settled science' advocated by thought leaders and politicians at the time -- some with noble intentions but ultimately the core of the issue was the elimination of so-called undesirables in society using 'science' as a rationale. Look at documents and speeches by Eugenics proponents at the time -- strangly similar to the "settled science" arguments one hears today. The purpose of the Eugenics movements was far different than the climate movement today -- but no less nefarious depending on the side of the issue you may fall.

emodendroket 10y ago
I do not see any will to abandon the current world order or really even take anything like adequate steps to address the problem.
rpedela 10y ago
Maybe that is the UN's position but I think most people just want energy produced cleanly which helps the environment beyond just global warming which is important for long-term economic health. And it will likely reduce respiratory illness.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  I think the parent post is just confusing cause and effect. A UN official says that addressing climate change will require massive changes to the global economy and he hears that that's the goal all along.
svantana 10y ago
That's completely ridiculous and a total mischaracterisation of what was said. What environmentalists are saying is that the negative externalities of fossil fuel burning are affecting everyone, and perhaps most of all the people in a lot of poor countries. I'm really amazed at how climate skeptics try their best to twist and distort reality to rationalize their comfortable but unsustainable lifestyle. Why not pull out Occam's razor and realize that 99% of all environmentalists are worried about the future of human life on this planet, because a lot of data is pointing in that direction, and are not involved in any nefarious global conspiracy theory?

graeme 10y ago

What do you propose? You raised a nit, and didn't propose a solution. As another commentor pointed out, this is a trivial fact known to all researchers in the field. If this was actually a devastating reply, then it would be pointed out in peer reviewed journals.

twelfthnight 10y ago

Here is a look going back further in time (1). If you choose a time earlier than 1880, I think it actually strengthens the case for global warming. The concerning bit is not the record heat we see today, but the rate of change. (1) https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/ EDIT: To explicitly address the argument here: It's not disingenuous to compare to 1880 because if you were to choose any date earlier, you would come to the same conclusion. (It's nice to start with 1880 where we have actual records because then you can avoid arguments about the method you used to make projections about past temperatures).

uncle_d 10y ago

From NASA - volcanic vs solar activity: https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/st07500u.html https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/st07500u.html "volcanos erupted causing a cold period that lasted from the 1600s to the late 1800s" Correlation vs causation - while the volcanic winter phenomenon is well-known, there are those that propose that solar activity is the primary driver of climate on Earth: https://www.amazon.com/Neglected-Sun-Precludes-Catastrophe-Independent/dp/1909022241 https://www.amazon.com/Neglected-Sun-Precludes-Catastrophe-I... http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/08/12/winter-is-coming-warns-the-solar-physicist-the-alarmists-tried-to-silence/ http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/08/12/winter-is... Not to say that the greenhouse effect is not real, or that anthropogenic CO2 does not cause warming - just that the magnitude of the effect may well be greatly over-hyped.

mememachine 10y ago
You'll probably get flak for linking to breitbart.

pdog 10y ago

Welcome to the world of "data journalism".

nitwit005 10y ago

> aren't engaging with the facts in an honest and forthright way. One of the more roundabout ways of calling someone a liar that I've seen.

imh 10y ago

At first, you might think it's just something like this (http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations), but as far as I can tell, the arguments come largely from first principles physics, validated through both experiments and historical observations including both human and natural records. I don't think this is a dishonest "look these line up!" argument. I agree that it's frustrating when lay person proponents make arguments that don't hold up, and initially thought this article was doing that, but it's really just a snapshot into what's mentioned in the Methods section, which points to ModelE2 which is a physical simulation. It's being honest, just super brief.

zzzeek 10y ago

There are many other indicators of global temperature which have been used to make assertions going back anywhere from 500-100000 years depending on what methodology you use: http://grist.org/climate-energy/one-hundred-years-is-not-enough/ http://grist.org/climate-energy/one-hundred-years-is-not-eno...

uberrr 10y ago

I find it interesting that a self professed lawyer would create an account on a technology news website during an election year and regularly post against government regulation. How do you have so much time to argue against climate change and other "liberal" topics?

seizethecheese 10y ago
Please don't attack the messenger if you have nothing to say about the message.
- uberrr 10y ago
  Is questioning a person's motivations ad hominem? How else could we have a discussion about potential "shaping" in online pseudonymous discussions?
  - seizethecheese 10y ago
    Motivation is irrelevant if he makes a valid point.

scatters 10y ago

You say that 1880 was one of the coldest years in history. The data series used in the article indicate that the entire decade 1903-1913 was significantly colder. If you then look at the contribution to climate from volcanic activity (CO2 and sulphates, in both directions), the fourth graph in the article ("Is It Volcanoes?"), the data show that 1880 did not have a significant negative temperature contribution from volcanic activity, and although 1884-5 did, so too did 1964-66, 1983, and 1992. There is no consensus on the cause of the Little Ice Age; although volcanism is one possible cause, there are other possible causes both external (solar activity, orbital cycles) and anthrogenic (reafforestation following pandemic-induced population collapse in Europe and the Americas). If that last cause is indeed a contributing factor, it supports the anthrogenic climate change theory. Even if it is excluded, the removal or reversal of external factors is totally insufficient to explain observed warming in the last century.

deleted 10y ago

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throw_away_777 10y ago

It is interesting to note that the statistical evidence for global warming is relatively weak (at least compared to particle physics, where 3 to 5 sigma is expected for discoveries), https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/04/07/no-statistically-significant-satellite-warming-for-23-years-now-includes-february-data/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/04/07/no-statistically-sign... it is only because we have a known causal mechanism that we can say with confidence that man-made global warming is occurring. I liked that this article focused on causes of global temperature change, even if it did not present the data in a good manner.

Theodores 10y ago

I am not so sure about 'natural causes' being the cause of the Mini Ice Age. I am open minded to believing that it was Western diseases that killed off 'native' people in the Americas and plagues that killed people in Eurasia resulting in the forest reclaiming man made clearings, sucking CO2 into the plant life and out of the atmosphere and oceans. There was more to it than a dinosaur style die-off with some mega event causing the woe.

bunderbunder 10y ago

You're criticizing what you consider to be an oversimplification, and your criticism is itself based on an oversimplification. It seems you're implying that the argument being presented is basically just, "The world is getting warmer, aaaa!!!" There's much more to it than that. In fact, even the article you're criticizing provides a more nuanced justification than that, which opens you up to criticism for constructing a strawman argument. The real argument is, "Researchers have built detailed models to try and understand how the climate behaves, and sussed out many, if not all, the factors that influence global climate, and based on those models we can make certain worrying inferences about the current state of things and how we expect them to develop in the future." Those models do a very good job of hindcasting global climate over the period for which we have good, detailed data. This period admittedly and unfortunately does not cover much of the Little Ice Age. In climate science, as everywhere else, the GIGO principle applies. But since we do still get non-garbage out when we put non-garbage in, that leaves us in a state where they seem to be our most reliable source of information. If you want to challenge them, it's not enough to point out various historical events that are primarily hard to explain due to lack of data. You need to be able to propose a better model. Concrete example: Nobody threw Newton out the window just because, despite all the myriad places where his model worked stunningly well, there were a few things it couldn't explain. They waited until Einstein came up with a model that explained everything Newton's model could handle and more. And then they used that in some spots, but still mostly just stuck with Newton because the math is easier and accurate enough for almost any practical use. That's the way science works for physics, and that's the way it works for climatology, too.

jjoonathan 10y ago
You'll see someone like this in every global warming discussion that happens with an educated audience. They'll put on all the plumage of reasonable dissent: "I don't think that the argument for AGW takes into account <pet theory>." In an audience of non-experts, they will go unanswered, and appear to have a point, until you spend an hour or two digging through the relevant IPCC reports and discover that not only has <pet theory> been investigated, it has been extensively investigated by dozens of labs across hundreds of studies using methodologies you never dreamed possible, along with 3 or 4 variants of the argument, all of which were quite thoroughly put to rest. If you confront them with this evidence, citing all the reports and papers, they'll just switch from <pet theory> to <pet theory 2>, possibly after firing off a final riposte defending <pet theory> that makes it abundantly clear they couldn't even be bothered to read the links you dug up, forcing you to ask yourself if you really want to do all that homework again. Fake-reasonable arguments are easy. Countering them is hard. If you don't discard them as a matter of policy (peer review or STFU), they will dominate the decision making process with 100% certainty.

yongjik 10y ago

I disagree. As you said, by 1880 the world was recovering from Little Ice Age. That is, between 1880 and mid-20th century the world showed a natural tendency to become progressively warmer. This natural warming reduces the contrast with what followed, and makes the graph look more like a smooth transition. As others commented, if you look farther back, natural temperature variations smooth out, and the "hockey stick" shape becomes unmistakable.

acqq 10y ago

Kindly see the longer time period: https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/ "When the people say ''the climate has changed before'' these are the kinds of changes they're talking about"

twelfthnight 10y ago
Great minds think alike ;) (that is, we posted the same link at roughly the same time)