4 ms·

It would be good if there was some website that would aggregate and preserve these predictions along with the names of people who have made them, and then compa

by 0xbear 9y ago

It would be good if there was some website that would aggregate and preserve these predictions along with the names of people who have made them, and then compared them against what actually happened years or decades down the road. Right now climate science seems to suffer from confirmation bias, that is, people only remember the few predictions that have come true, and forget everything else, such as "Florida will be underwater" from the 00s or "we're all gonna freeze to death" from the 70s. There is perverse incentive to come out with these outlandish claims, which on the one hand make it easier to get funding, and on the other imply no responsibility whatsoever, since the timeline is often decades in the future, and people's attention spans are short.

transverse 9y ago
Is it really outlandish, for example, to have claimed the Arctic ice would disappear? It has been happening and the disappearance is almost complete. I have seen glaciers break and fall into the see in my front of my very eyes. Also, need I remind you of the planet Venus. It once had liquid water. It later became a victim of runaway climate change.
- 0xbear 9y ago
  And Earth once was frozen all over, and there were times when concentration of greenhouse gases was much higher than it is today, with no "runaway" effects.
  - throwawaywonk 9y ago
    Found the climate change denialist.
  - transverse 9y ago
    In other words, you don't deny that outlandish events do happen. Clearly we don't want them to happen. Or did you mean to throw your hands up in the air and call yourself a victim of circumstance? Not me.
  - stouset 9y ago
    Nobody's saying the runaway effects are going to boil the oceans, for fuck's sake. Do you seriously not realize that the people who've been doing climate research for decades are aware that there were previous eras with more CO2 in them? If you weren't just out to validate your own political goals, you might stop for a moment and reflect on how poorly-suited current life on the planet is for those previous eras with drastically more carbon in the air.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- slackingoff2017 9y ago
  Earth has had CO2 levels far higher than currently in the geologically recent past. We will run out of fossil fuels well before we destroy the planet. The biggest effect of global warming so far is arguably positive. Plants are making good use of higher CO2 levels and it's estimated that farming yields have increased 30% in the last century from this faster plant growth.
  - dpark 9y ago
    The biggest effects are that it's getting goddamned hot in places that used to be temperate and that the ice caps are melting. Neither of these are positive and your 30% higher plant growth claim is undoubtedly BS. Most improvements to agriculture have come from fertilizers, the production of which contribute to global warming.
    - slackingoff2017 9y ago
      The increase amount is debated but higher CO2 levels have caused significant gains in farming efficiency. http://www.climatecentral.org/news/study-finds-plant-growth-surges-as-co2-levels-rise-16094 http://www.climatecentral.org/news/study-finds-plant-growth-...
      - dpark 9y ago
        I have no disagreement with the claim that higher levels of CO2 increases plant growth. That is a fact. I seriously doubt the 30% claim without compelling evidence, though. Especially for agriculture, where water limits are rarely the concern and we dump fertilizer like it's free.
        slackingoff2017 9y ago
        Actually our use of fertilizer and irrigation makes CO2 level a significant limiter on plant growth rates. CO2 fixation is so expensive that plants adapted to arid environments have developed a better way of doing it, C4 carbon fixation. I found the study: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/04/05/study-suggests-increased-atmospheric-co2-creates-a-30-growth-in-plant-photosynthesis-during-last-two-centuries/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/04/05/study-suggests-increa...
throwawaywonk 9y ago
Science is full of failed predictions. If you're poking around for some nefarious behavior (which seems to be common among climate change deniers), I suggest looking at oil companies.
comicjk 9y ago
> people only remember the few predictions that have come true, and forget everything else, such as "Florida will be underwater" from the 00s or "we're all gonna freeze to death" from the 70s. I deny your premise. These two predictions are two of the most remembered, precisely because they were mistaken and thus politically useful to the party in power in the US today. > There is perverse incentive to come out with these outlandish claims...since the timeline is often decades in the future Your aggregator proposal would do little to change the incentives. The reckoning would still be decades away, it would just be more convenient for the future fact-checkers.
- 0xbear 9y ago
  There were literally hundreds of outlandish predictions and most people only remember a few, and the one from the 70s has no names tied to it. For all we know those same people might still be getting grants and making insane predictions, some of which could have multi trillion dollar policy consequences . On the flip side the proposed aggregator would also help to identify the scientists who are mostly right about things, even if their predictions might stray from the prevalent political dogma of the time. That said, you're right that accountability is a hard problem. Case in point is Al Gore, a dude who was about as right in his predictions as a random number generator, yet continues to be considered as some sort of preeminent authority on the topic of global warming.
  - pavlov 9y ago
    Do you have some evidence that grants go to the scientists who make the most outlandish predictions? That sounds like claiming physics is rotten because cold fusion turned out to be unverifiable. "Those frauds, just trying to get grants to build their phony particle accelerators that don't actually do anything. Who ever saw a boson?"
    - 0xbear 9y ago
      It's common sense, no? Who do you think will get more grants, the "we're definitely all gonna die of heat, drought, and hurricanes" group, or "there is 40% probability that the temperature might rise by 1C in a hundred years" group? For the record, the latter hypothesis is made up to illustrate the point, but the former is in wide circulation.
Someone 9y ago
You would have to discriminate between the science (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-07536-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-07536-7), which says (emphasis added): "The *apparent* temperature peak during such humid-heat waves can be greater than 55 °C" , and the journalism, which drops the "apparent", turning some technical unit that readers don't know into one that they do know, but also hugely changing the statement. Apparent temperature (defined in http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0450%281979%29018%3C0861%3ATAOSPI%3E2.0.CO%3B2#/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0450%281979%29018%3C0861%3ATAOSPI%3E2.0.CO%3B2 http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0450%281979..., which isn't behind a paywall) can already be around 50 degrees Celsius if it is 32 degrees Celsius at 90% humidity (so, it is similar to wind chill factor (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_chill https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_chill) or heat index (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_index), but not only compensates for physical effects, but also for physiological ones)
jaclaz 9y ago
>It would be good if there was some website that would aggregate and preserve these predictions along with the names of people who have made them, and then compared them against what actually happened years or decades down the road. Not the best source, but from time to time this or that news site makes something like that, one I have bookmarked, JFYI: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2010/12/30/botched-environmental-forecasts.html http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2010/12/30/botched-environmental...
yongjik 9y ago
I think you can start with all those people who cried "Global warming has stopped for X years!" in recent years. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/10/02/its-official-no-global-warming-for-18-years-1-month/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/10/02/its-official-no-globa... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2217286/Global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago-reveals-Met-Office-report-quietly-released--chart-prove-it.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2217286/Globa... http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/mar/20/ted-cruz/ted-cruzs-worlds-fire-not-last-17-years/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/mar/... ...and on and on...
darkmighty 9y ago
This empty criticism is extremely old and tired by now. Maybe you could inform yourself a little better. There are various public sources of serious predictions (usually done with supercomputers) made more than a decade ago, some of which you can find in the IPCC report. You can compare that to the actual outcome and see if it falls within the set bounds of uncertainty. I bet pretty much every professional climate scientist has run this kind of analysis once.
Brakenshire 9y ago
> "we're all gonna freeze to death" from the 70s This is pop science in two ways: * In that these were science articles knocked up to interest an audience in magazines like Newsweek with little to no scientific backing, and very few research publications. And only a handful of them at that. * In that you have picked up this factoid, and passed it on, without checking its validity.

by 0xbear 9y ago

transverse 9y ago

Is it really outlandish, for example, to have claimed the Arctic ice would disappear? It has been happening and the disappearance is almost complete. I have seen glaciers break and fall into the see in my front of my very eyes. Also, need I remind you of the planet Venus. It once had liquid water. It later became a victim of runaway climate change.

0xbear 9y ago
And Earth once was frozen all over, and there were times when concentration of greenhouse gases was much higher than it is today, with no "runaway" effects.
- throwawaywonk 9y ago
  Found the climate change denialist.
- transverse 9y ago
  In other words, you don't deny that outlandish events do happen. Clearly we don't want them to happen. Or did you mean to throw your hands up in the air and call yourself a victim of circumstance? Not me.
- stouset 9y ago
  Nobody's saying the runaway effects are going to boil the oceans, for fuck's sake. Do you seriously not realize that the people who've been doing climate research for decades are aware that there were previous eras with more CO2 in them? If you weren't just out to validate your own political goals, you might stop for a moment and reflect on how poorly-suited current life on the planet is for those previous eras with drastically more carbon in the air.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
slackingoff2017 9y ago
Earth has had CO2 levels far higher than currently in the geologically recent past. We will run out of fossil fuels well before we destroy the planet. The biggest effect of global warming so far is arguably positive. Plants are making good use of higher CO2 levels and it's estimated that farming yields have increased 30% in the last century from this faster plant growth.
- dpark 9y ago
  The biggest effects are that it's getting goddamned hot in places that used to be temperate and that the ice caps are melting. Neither of these are positive and your 30% higher plant growth claim is undoubtedly BS. Most improvements to agriculture have come from fertilizers, the production of which contribute to global warming.
  - slackingoff2017 9y ago
    The increase amount is debated but higher CO2 levels have caused significant gains in farming efficiency. http://www.climatecentral.org/news/study-finds-plant-growth-surges-as-co2-levels-rise-16094 http://www.climatecentral.org/news/study-finds-plant-growth-...
    - dpark 9y ago
      I have no disagreement with the claim that higher levels of CO2 increases plant growth. That is a fact. I seriously doubt the 30% claim without compelling evidence, though. Especially for agriculture, where water limits are rarely the concern and we dump fertilizer like it's free.
      - slackingoff2017 9y ago
        Actually our use of fertilizer and irrigation makes CO2 level a significant limiter on plant growth rates. CO2 fixation is so expensive that plants adapted to arid environments have developed a better way of doing it, C4 carbon fixation. I found the study: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/04/05/study-suggests-increased-atmospheric-co2-creates-a-30-growth-in-plant-photosynthesis-during-last-two-centuries/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/04/05/study-suggests-increa...

throwawaywonk 9y ago

Science is full of failed predictions. If you're poking around for some nefarious behavior (which seems to be common among climate change deniers), I suggest looking at oil companies.

comicjk 9y ago

> people only remember the few predictions that have come true, and forget everything else, such as "Florida will be underwater" from the 00s or "we're all gonna freeze to death" from the 70s. I deny your premise. These two predictions are two of the most remembered, precisely because they were mistaken and thus politically useful to the party in power in the US today. > There is perverse incentive to come out with these outlandish claims...since the timeline is often decades in the future Your aggregator proposal would do little to change the incentives. The reckoning would still be decades away, it would just be more convenient for the future fact-checkers.

0xbear 9y ago
There were literally hundreds of outlandish predictions and most people only remember a few, and the one from the 70s has no names tied to it. For all we know those same people might still be getting grants and making insane predictions, some of which could have multi trillion dollar policy consequences . On the flip side the proposed aggregator would also help to identify the scientists who are mostly right about things, even if their predictions might stray from the prevalent political dogma of the time. That said, you're right that accountability is a hard problem. Case in point is Al Gore, a dude who was about as right in his predictions as a random number generator, yet continues to be considered as some sort of preeminent authority on the topic of global warming.
- pavlov 9y ago
  Do you have some evidence that grants go to the scientists who make the most outlandish predictions? That sounds like claiming physics is rotten because cold fusion turned out to be unverifiable. "Those frauds, just trying to get grants to build their phony particle accelerators that don't actually do anything. Who ever saw a boson?"
  - 0xbear 9y ago
    It's common sense, no? Who do you think will get more grants, the "we're definitely all gonna die of heat, drought, and hurricanes" group, or "there is 40% probability that the temperature might rise by 1C in a hundred years" group? For the record, the latter hypothesis is made up to illustrate the point, but the former is in wide circulation.

Someone 9y ago

You would have to discriminate between the science (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-07536-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-07536-7), which says (emphasis added): "The *apparent* temperature peak during such humid-heat waves can be greater than 55 °C" , and the journalism, which drops the "apparent", turning some technical unit that readers don't know into one that they do know, but also hugely changing the statement. Apparent temperature (defined in http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0450%281979%29018%3C0861%3ATAOSPI%3E2.0.CO%3B2#/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0450%281979%29018%3C0861%3ATAOSPI%3E2.0.CO%3B2 http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0450%281979..., which isn't behind a paywall) can already be around 50 degrees Celsius if it is 32 degrees Celsius at 90% humidity (so, it is similar to wind chill factor (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_chill https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_chill) or heat index (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_index), but not only compensates for physical effects, but also for physiological ones)

jaclaz 9y ago

>It would be good if there was some website that would aggregate and preserve these predictions along with the names of people who have made them, and then compared them against what actually happened years or decades down the road. Not the best source, but from time to time this or that news site makes something like that, one I have bookmarked, JFYI: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2010/12/30/botched-environmental-forecasts.html http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2010/12/30/botched-environmental...

yongjik 9y ago

I think you can start with all those people who cried "Global warming has stopped for X years!" in recent years. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/10/02/its-official-no-global-warming-for-18-years-1-month/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/10/02/its-official-no-globa... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2217286/Global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago-reveals-Met-Office-report-quietly-released--chart-prove-it.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2217286/Globa... http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/mar/20/ted-cruz/ted-cruzs-worlds-fire-not-last-17-years/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/mar/... ...and on and on...

darkmighty 9y ago

This empty criticism is extremely old and tired by now. Maybe you could inform yourself a little better. There are various public sources of serious predictions (usually done with supercomputers) made more than a decade ago, some of which you can find in the IPCC report. You can compare that to the actual outcome and see if it falls within the set bounds of uncertainty. I bet pretty much every professional climate scientist has run this kind of analysis once.

Brakenshire 9y ago

> "we're all gonna freeze to death" from the 70s This is pop science in two ways: * In that these were science articles knocked up to interest an audience in magazines like Newsweek with little to no scientific backing, and very few research publications. And only a handful of them at that. * In that you have picked up this factoid, and passed it on, without checking its validity.