7 ms·

Everything you know about Global Warming is wrong

50 points by inm 16y ago

steerpike 16y ago
I wish someone smarter than myself could explain to me why I find articles written in this style (or tone of voice or rythmn or whatever the correct term is) so nauseating and irritating?
- nimai 16y ago
  102 paragraphs with no sections, organization, or even an introduction to the article? A title that immediately puts you on the defensive? Quotes like this? “I don’t know anyone I would say is smarter than Nathan,” Gates, an investor in IV, once observed.
  - MC27 16y ago
    It's not really an article, it's a book extract. A demo to get you to purchase the book and it fills the paper.
- Tycho 16y ago
  I'm not sure either but I think it might be because in the back of your mind you know there's about 5-10 sentences worth of actual meat to the article (ie. quotes from the interviewees) but they spread them out over dozens of paragraphs. And act like this is entertaining for the reader. edit: there's a cute widget/plug-in/extension for someone to build - make something that strips newspaper articles of all text except the quotes. May need some jiggering about to make it readable.
ohnonono 16y ago
...apart from all the bits of Superfreakonomics that have been debunked, that is. I believe the proportion of error is somewhere in the region of "every damned thing they wrote".
markkat 16y ago
I am tired of this hand-waving crap. These guys are making money by pushing flashy contrarian views with half-baked theories and little to no actual data. IMHO, this stuff is to science what FoxNews is to politics.
- meric 16y ago
  The article refers to a paper. Is the paper then not actual data? I'm surprised to see everyone so far just say the article is wrong, without being specific. Did the article connect the dots wrong, are the 'facts' the article claim to be true misleading, do the people the article refer to not exist, or are all the sources the article linked to wrong/irrelevant? I'm not someone who's acquainted with formal scientific journalism, so it's not something I can judge well by myself. That means I can't judge whether people saying the article is wrong are a valid claim either! And that's why I think it'd have been better if the commenters were a bit more specific. Part of article I was referring to: >> Would it work? The scientific evidence says yes. Perhaps the stoutest scientific argument in favour of it came from Paul Crutzen, a Dutch atmospheric scientist whose environmentalist bona fides run even deeper than Caldeira’s — he won a Nobel prize for his research on atmospheric ozone depletion. In 2006 he wrote an essay in the journal Climatic Change lamenting the “grossly unsuccessful” efforts to emit fewer greenhouse gases and acknowledging that an injection of sulphur in the stratosphere “is the only option available to rapidly reduce temperature rises and counteract other climatic effects”. Crutzen’s embrace of geoengineering was considered such a heresy within the climate science community that some of his peers tried to stop the publication of his essay. How could the man reverently known as “Dr Ozone” possibly endorse such a scheme? Wouldn’t the environmental damage outweigh the benefits? Actually, no. Crutzen concluded that damage to the ozone would be minimal. The sulphur dioxide would eventually settle out in the polar regions but in such relatively small amounts that significant harm was unlikely.
  - markkat 16y ago
    I read it again. Which paper are you referring to? The essay? -That's not a scientific paper, it is speculation by a scientist. You see, the problem is that the issue is too complex to wrap up like they did here. It is not sexy, but every component that could contribute to climate change requires careful data collection, analysis and objective consideration. For example, the article seems to infer that solar panels would result in global warming because they are dark, and have a 15% efficiency converting sunlight to electricity. However, this does not take into consideration factors such as: estimates in increased efficiency as the solar panel technology matures, or (probably more important) the offset of warming effects of current fuel sources that solar panels will replace, particularly the burning of fossil fuels. The real problem here, IMO, is that people walk away from an article like this thinking an issue such as global climate change can be understood and resolved simply by having the correct perspective. However, the reality is that the issue is much more complex, and that more important than our perspective, is what we can infer from data and the diligent analysis of that data by people that are motivated to understand the issue, and not to sell the discourse.
Construct 16y ago
The proposed solution for cooling the Earth in the article is questionable at best. Furthermore, even if you lower global temperatures through stratosphere manipulation, there are many other scary unknowns in the field of climate change. Take ocean acidification for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification The ocean is a substantial sink for atmospheric CO2. Our best guess is that 1/3 of the CO2 we produced is absorbed by the ocean. As the ocean absorbs CO2, however, the pH of ocean water drops. Unfortunately, we don't know how this will affect all of the different species of marine life that live in the ocean, but early experiments show that shellfish in particular do not tolerate more acidic waters very well. Furthermore, there is reason to believe that the ocean's CO2 absorbing capabilities will decrease as the pH decreases, leaving us with even more CO2 in the atmosphere. Basically, there are a whole lot of unknowns in the whole debate, many of which could have unpleasant (to say the least) consequences. Brushing the entire field of climate science aside and declaring that all of our problems can be solved by pumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere is wildly irresponsible.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  But the climate models say that we can do this. The models are so accurate and trustworthy that we can totally predict what global climate will be 100 years in the future depending on whether or not we adopt Kyoto. We can also predict what they would be now if humans didn't emit CO2. Why are you denying the consensus and being anti-science? You must also be a creationist. </snark> This is an interesting topic, because it really forces us to evaluate how much we actually know about climate. To draw conclusions like "the modern warming trend is anthropogenic in origin", we need to believe that our climate models are really good. So good, in fact, that they can accurately model virtually the entire climate, which is what allows us to pinpoint CO2 emissions and rule out all other forcings as the cause of modern warming. We do this by running the models with those other forcings, but without CO2, and observe less warming. But then, we turn around and say "we can't model $geoengineering_scheme". Why not? Are our models simply incapable of predicting the response of climate to various forcings?
  - leot 16y ago
RyanMcGreal 16y ago
The Peter Principle of pundits and policy analysts is at work.
aresant 16y ago
For anything like this to get approval they need to have a clear "how do we undo this" plan, that is fundamental to selling this.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Sulfur dioxide rapidly leaves the atmosphere. That's how we undo it.
spacemanaki 16y ago
Elizabeth Kolbert expressed more than a little disdain for the Freakonomics guys last year in the New Yorker; she's pretty thoughtful about this issue I think. newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/11/16/091116crbo_books_kolbert
gjm11 16y ago
This article: 1. Is from 2009. 2. Does not in fact even claim that everything anyone knows about global warming is wrong. (e.g.: "Everyone in the room agrees that the Earth has been getting warmer and human activity probably has something to do with it.") 3. Doesn't do much to substantiate what claims it does make. 4. Is largely about not global warming as such but possible ways to mitigate it. 5. Mostly describes the opinions of people who are not in fact climate scientists. 6. Does purportedly give the opinions of one climate scientist, Ken Caldeira -- but it turns out that he says he's been severely misrepresented by these people; see, e.g., http://climateprogress.org/2009/10/18/error-riddled-superfreakonomics-stephen-dubner-says-romm-has-done-a-great-job-amazon-search/ http://climateprogress.org/2009/10/18/error-riddled-superfre... .
- 16s 16y ago
  "Everyone in the room agrees that the Earth has been getting warmer and human activity probably has something to do with it." --- No direct evidence of this exists. Humans may have something to do with it, and they may not. There is still debate on what the causes might be and much research still needs to be done. I find it ironic that scientists can act so religious-like on this topic and have faith in the belief that humans are the sole reason behind global warming without solid scientific proof. Edit: Spelling. No comments, but lots of down votes. Do please cite the evidence rather than just throw stones.
  - jasonlotito 16y ago
    > but lots of down votes. Because you are making a lot of assumptions. For example: "the Earth has been getting warmer and human activity probably has something to do with it." Is different from "The earth is getting warmer because of human activity." In fact, you go on to say: "Humans may have something to do with it, and they may not. There is still debate on what the causes might be and much research still needs to be done." A debate on this implies that their are those who think human activity is partly to blame. Finally, you go on to say this: >I find it ironic that scientists can act so religious-like on this topic and have faith in the belief that humans are the sole reason behind global warming without solid scientific proof. Religious-like? Faith? Humans are the sole reason? "human activity probably has something to do with it." That's why you are getting down voted. Stop overreacting. =)
eogas 16y ago
I think books like this sell because the subject matter is easy to understand, but brings about some sense of superiority in the reader for knowing contradicting theories. These books succeed due to the shock value of the information they contain. This is in a similar vein to the Penn and Teller show "Bullshit". If you say something loud enough, and sound relatively intelligent in the process, people feel smarter when they hear it. I feel that the same is true about Malcolm Gladwell's writings. The only problem is that the shock value of the content is in no way related to how valid the information is. "Bullshit" is terribly biased towards the presenters opinions, whereas books like these are biased towards whatever makes headlines, which results in varied levels of validity.
todayiamme 16y ago
Wait hasn't anyone else noticed how big a PR job this is for intellectual ventures? In fact, this is the one chapter in the entire book (superfreakonomics) that was too hard to stomach. It's just too fake. There are a lot of rants on HN about this. Pointing out that Intellectual Ventures is just a patent troll; http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134762 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134762 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134743 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134743 and more.
MattGrommes 16y ago
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/10/why_everything_in_superfreakon.php http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/10/why_everything_in_su... This is a good look at the various rebuttals to basically everything in this chapter of Superfreakonomics.

50 points by inm 16y ago

I wish someone smarter than myself could explain to me why I find articles written in this style (or tone of voice or rythmn or whatever the correct term is) so nauseating and irritating?

nimai 16y ago
102 paragraphs with no sections, organization, or even an introduction to the article? A title that immediately puts you on the defensive? Quotes like this? “I don’t know anyone I would say is smarter than Nathan,” Gates, an investor in IV, once observed.
- MC27 16y ago
  It's not really an article, it's a book extract. A demo to get you to purchase the book and it fills the paper.
Tycho 16y ago
I'm not sure either but I think it might be because in the back of your mind you know there's about 5-10 sentences worth of actual meat to the article (ie. quotes from the interviewees) but they spread them out over dozens of paragraphs. And act like this is entertaining for the reader. edit: there's a cute widget/plug-in/extension for someone to build - make something that strips newspaper articles of all text except the quotes. May need some jiggering about to make it readable.

ohnonono 16y ago

...apart from all the bits of Superfreakonomics that have been debunked, that is. I believe the proportion of error is somewhere in the region of "every damned thing they wrote".

markkat 16y ago

I am tired of this hand-waving crap. These guys are making money by pushing flashy contrarian views with half-baked theories and little to no actual data. IMHO, this stuff is to science what FoxNews is to politics.

meric 16y ago
The article refers to a paper. Is the paper then not actual data? I'm surprised to see everyone so far just say the article is wrong, without being specific. Did the article connect the dots wrong, are the 'facts' the article claim to be true misleading, do the people the article refer to not exist, or are all the sources the article linked to wrong/irrelevant? I'm not someone who's acquainted with formal scientific journalism, so it's not something I can judge well by myself. That means I can't judge whether people saying the article is wrong are a valid claim either! And that's why I think it'd have been better if the commenters were a bit more specific. Part of article I was referring to: >> Would it work? The scientific evidence says yes. Perhaps the stoutest scientific argument in favour of it came from Paul Crutzen, a Dutch atmospheric scientist whose environmentalist bona fides run even deeper than Caldeira’s — he won a Nobel prize for his research on atmospheric ozone depletion. In 2006 he wrote an essay in the journal Climatic Change lamenting the “grossly unsuccessful” efforts to emit fewer greenhouse gases and acknowledging that an injection of sulphur in the stratosphere “is the only option available to rapidly reduce temperature rises and counteract other climatic effects”. Crutzen’s embrace of geoengineering was considered such a heresy within the climate science community that some of his peers tried to stop the publication of his essay. How could the man reverently known as “Dr Ozone” possibly endorse such a scheme? Wouldn’t the environmental damage outweigh the benefits? Actually, no. Crutzen concluded that damage to the ozone would be minimal. The sulphur dioxide would eventually settle out in the polar regions but in such relatively small amounts that significant harm was unlikely.
- markkat 16y ago
  I read it again. Which paper are you referring to? The essay? -That's not a scientific paper, it is speculation by a scientist. You see, the problem is that the issue is too complex to wrap up like they did here. It is not sexy, but every component that could contribute to climate change requires careful data collection, analysis and objective consideration. For example, the article seems to infer that solar panels would result in global warming because they are dark, and have a 15% efficiency converting sunlight to electricity. However, this does not take into consideration factors such as: estimates in increased efficiency as the solar panel technology matures, or (probably more important) the offset of warming effects of current fuel sources that solar panels will replace, particularly the burning of fossil fuels. The real problem here, IMO, is that people walk away from an article like this thinking an issue such as global climate change can be understood and resolved simply by having the correct perspective. However, the reality is that the issue is much more complex, and that more important than our perspective, is what we can infer from data and the diligent analysis of that data by people that are motivated to understand the issue, and not to sell the discourse.

Construct 16y ago

The proposed solution for cooling the Earth in the article is questionable at best. Furthermore, even if you lower global temperatures through stratosphere manipulation, there are many other scary unknowns in the field of climate change. Take ocean acidification for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification The ocean is a substantial sink for atmospheric CO2. Our best guess is that 1/3 of the CO2 we produced is absorbed by the ocean. As the ocean absorbs CO2, however, the pH of ocean water drops. Unfortunately, we don't know how this will affect all of the different species of marine life that live in the ocean, but early experiments show that shellfish in particular do not tolerate more acidic waters very well. Furthermore, there is reason to believe that the ocean's CO2 absorbing capabilities will decrease as the pH decreases, leaving us with even more CO2 in the atmosphere. Basically, there are a whole lot of unknowns in the whole debate, many of which could have unpleasant (to say the least) consequences. Brushing the entire field of climate science aside and declaring that all of our problems can be solved by pumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere is wildly irresponsible.

yummyfajitas 16y ago
But the climate models say that we can do this. The models are so accurate and trustworthy that we can totally predict what global climate will be 100 years in the future depending on whether or not we adopt Kyoto. We can also predict what they would be now if humans didn't emit CO2. Why are you denying the consensus and being anti-science? You must also be a creationist. </snark> This is an interesting topic, because it really forces us to evaluate how much we actually know about climate. To draw conclusions like "the modern warming trend is anthropogenic in origin", we need to believe that our climate models are really good. So good, in fact, that they can accurately model virtually the entire climate, which is what allows us to pinpoint CO2 emissions and rule out all other forcings as the cause of modern warming. We do this by running the models with those other forcings, but without CO2, and observe less warming. But then, we turn around and say "we can't model $geoengineering_scheme". Why not? Are our models simply incapable of predicting the response of climate to various forcings?
- leot 16y ago

RyanMcGreal 16y ago

The Peter Principle of pundits and policy analysts is at work.

aresant 16y ago

For anything like this to get approval they need to have a clear "how do we undo this" plan, that is fundamental to selling this.

yummyfajitas 16y ago
Sulfur dioxide rapidly leaves the atmosphere. That's how we undo it.

spacemanaki 16y ago

Elizabeth Kolbert expressed more than a little disdain for the Freakonomics guys last year in the New Yorker; she's pretty thoughtful about this issue I think. newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/11/16/091116crbo_books_kolbert

gjm11 16y ago

This article: 1. Is from 2009. 2. Does not in fact even claim that everything anyone knows about global warming is wrong. (e.g.: "Everyone in the room agrees that the Earth has been getting warmer and human activity probably has something to do with it.") 3. Doesn't do much to substantiate what claims it does make. 4. Is largely about not global warming as such but possible ways to mitigate it. 5. Mostly describes the opinions of people who are not in fact climate scientists. 6. Does purportedly give the opinions of one climate scientist, Ken Caldeira -- but it turns out that he says he's been severely misrepresented by these people; see, e.g., http://climateprogress.org/2009/10/18/error-riddled-superfreakonomics-stephen-dubner-says-romm-has-done-a-great-job-amazon-search/ http://climateprogress.org/2009/10/18/error-riddled-superfre... .

16s 16y ago
"Everyone in the room agrees that the Earth has been getting warmer and human activity probably has something to do with it." --- No direct evidence of this exists. Humans may have something to do with it, and they may not. There is still debate on what the causes might be and much research still needs to be done. I find it ironic that scientists can act so religious-like on this topic and have faith in the belief that humans are the sole reason behind global warming without solid scientific proof. Edit: Spelling. No comments, but lots of down votes. Do please cite the evidence rather than just throw stones.
- jasonlotito 16y ago
  > but lots of down votes. Because you are making a lot of assumptions. For example: "the Earth has been getting warmer and human activity probably has something to do with it." Is different from "The earth is getting warmer because of human activity." In fact, you go on to say: "Humans may have something to do with it, and they may not. There is still debate on what the causes might be and much research still needs to be done." A debate on this implies that their are those who think human activity is partly to blame. Finally, you go on to say this: >I find it ironic that scientists can act so religious-like on this topic and have faith in the belief that humans are the sole reason behind global warming without solid scientific proof. Religious-like? Faith? Humans are the sole reason? "human activity probably has something to do with it." That's why you are getting down voted. Stop overreacting. =)

eogas 16y ago

I think books like this sell because the subject matter is easy to understand, but brings about some sense of superiority in the reader for knowing contradicting theories. These books succeed due to the shock value of the information they contain. This is in a similar vein to the Penn and Teller show "Bullshit". If you say something loud enough, and sound relatively intelligent in the process, people feel smarter when they hear it. I feel that the same is true about Malcolm Gladwell's writings. The only problem is that the shock value of the content is in no way related to how valid the information is. "Bullshit" is terribly biased towards the presenters opinions, whereas books like these are biased towards whatever makes headlines, which results in varied levels of validity.

todayiamme 16y ago

Wait hasn't anyone else noticed how big a PR job this is for intellectual ventures? In fact, this is the one chapter in the entire book (superfreakonomics) that was too hard to stomach. It's just too fake. There are a lot of rants on HN about this. Pointing out that Intellectual Ventures is just a patent troll; http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134762 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134762 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134743 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134743 and more.

MattGrommes 16y ago

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/10/why_everything_in_superfreakon.php http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/10/why_everything_in_su... This is a good look at the various rebuttals to basically everything in this chapter of Superfreakonomics.