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With respect, people have been coming up with their "common sense" objections to what those high-falutin' scientists have been saying every time one of them say

With respect, people have been coming up with their "common sense" objections to what those high-falutin' scientists have been saying every time one of them says absolutely anything at all. It's "common sense" that Climate Change isn't occurring - or man made. It's "common sense" that we can't effect the health of the oceans - they're just so big. It's also "common sense" that the earth is flat - just look around! It's worthwhile raising and examining alternative hypothesis to explain phenomena but rejecting science out of hand on the basis of folk-knowledge is getting pretty old. Rejecting the science needs a higher bar than anecdotes.

dpark 8y ago
Automatically assuming everything negative is caused by climate change is not science. If there is no evidence that salmon are changing spawning due to climate change, then it's just a hypothesis and no more scientific than the hypothesis that fishing is changing spawning. People are as guilty of blindly accepting climate change as the root cause for random things as they are of blindly rejecting it. A thing doesn’t become “scientific” because some group of scientists believes it. I say this as someone who fully believes in man made climate change and its potentially catastrophic implications.
- southern_cross 8y ago
  Yeah, in my mind it kind of boils down to this. The simpleton's answer to pretty much whatever ails you these days is "climate change". And the simpleton's answer to pretty much anything related to climate change is "CO2". Both of those positions are extraordinarily stupid, IMO, but far too common.
  - scarmig 8y ago
    It's disingenuous to suggest that the simpletons in the climate change debate are those who attribute too much to climate change, when the leading figures of the denialists bring snowballs into the Senate and claim they disprove climate change.
    - sosborn 8y ago
      It is not impossible for both sides to have their share of simpletons.
      - southern_cross 8y ago
        There are plenty of clear-thinking, level-headed folks out there who, while they might have genuine concerns about climate change in general, aren't really buying into the doomsday aspects of it or that it's all caused by man. But those folks usually don't get much of an airing in the press or elsewhere, and if they do they're usually treated with derision. Instead the simpletons steal the show. You know, at this point I don't know what's worse - that so many so-called experts seem to be spewing end-of-the-world nonsense, or that there appear to be so many folks out there who are all too willing to believe this stuff. I seriously question the qualifications and motivations of the former, and the mental health status of the latter.
        kaybe 8y ago
        You would make the whole community overjoyed if you gave us sound arguments for why we don't have a problem. We see it in the data, and do our very best to run simulations to predict the future of this chaotic system (we should have the main influences down), and it looks bad. You can doubt the doomsday aspect of it, since that is determined by society's response and resilience, but more CO2 in the atmosphere increasing radiative forcing and thus temperature as a 0th level effect are very basic physics. The fact that humanity caused a substantial increase on atmospheric CO2 is very obviously true as well. Anything saving us must be a higher level effect. The natural way of CO2 sequestration, rock weathering and subsequent precipitation into ocean sediment, takes at least 10k years to get rid of an increase. Please tell us if there is something big we miss. Everyone could use some good news by now because the current state is pretty depressing.
        southern_cross 8y ago
        > We see it in the data Does that "we" actually include "you"? And if so, how much of that data have you looked at personally, and now closely? I ask because (as I have already referenced elsewhere in this thread) I went to the trouble of doing that some years ago - downloaded thousands of data files making up a particular temperature data set, consisting of hundreds of thousands of data entries. This after having heard some particularly inane and quite clearly wrong statements made about my local climate by the folks at NOAA or wherever. And you know what I found? The "raw" data there showed a definite but modest increase in temperatures in my area over the past 130 years or so. But the "adjusted" data (which was being used as the basis for making those statements) had been so badly mangled as to become completely unreliable, yet this was done in such a way as to make it show a rather dramatic increase in temperatures. It ultimately turned out that the whole data set was mangled, too (I spot checked several other locations), and that I wasn't the only person who had gone to such troubles and found much the same issues. Of course, that was just one data set and that's been almost ten years ago now. But for easily the past 15 years or so, and continuing up to this day, folks outside of the climate research field who have gone to similar troubles to do basic analysis on various climate-related data sets have often come to similar conclusions - everything from "This [apparently very real] data is just too dirty and unreliable to be of much practical use, even after you try to clean it up" to "OMG, it looks like they're just wholesale making stuff up here!" And so on. BTW, whenever someone mentions "the data" I always ask this question, and I almost never get an actual answer back: Is the data that you're referring to raw data, or adjusted data, or proxy data, or modeled data, or infilled data, or what? Apparently most people just assume that the data being referred to is real, live, actual data, but whenever I've followed up on the matter myself this almost always turns out not to be the case. > Please tell us if there is something big we miss. As I believe I have already said elsewhere, I don't think that it's so much that things get missed as it is that they seem to get willfully ignored, or maybe are just under-appreciated in their potential effects. But other folks outside of the climate research field who have noted various troubling things here might disagree with my assessment of the situation. > Everyone could use some good news by now because the current state is pretty depressing. Again, as I have already noted, folks who come along and say "Good news everyone! The situation may not be as dark as it first appeared." often just get beaten down mercilessly. And in the press, for whatever reasons, if a "good news" type article appears it tends to fade out rarely quickly, while the "even more bad news" type articles may get hyped to no end. And even with the good news articles, often the reporter seems to go out of their way trying to track down so-called climate experts who will say "True, perhaps - but this actually changes nothing!", and who may then try to impune the motives of the person making the good news statement - "Probably a fossil-fuel funded climate denier!", or similar. If you want to take a step back and get a breath of fresh air, consider the fact that throughout human history various episodes of doomsday-cult type thinking have come and gone repeatedly, usually with minimal aftereffects. This is very true for recent predictions made by scientists and such, too. For example, recently there was some discussion about how many of at least the most dire predictions being made around the time of the first Earth Day never came to pass. There may be several valid reasons for this, but the simple fact of the matter is that most of those predictions had no real basis in reality to begin with. I expect that at least the most dire predictions currently being made about climate change will turn out much the same way.
  - nerdponx 8y ago
    Simpleton? Or the salmon industry finding a convenient excuse.
    - asfdsfggtfd 8y ago
      Is it a convenient excuse? Climate change would imply that it is not the salmon industry's fault that salmon populations are changing. The industry person suggested overfishing patterns are the cause. This puts the blame firmly on the fishing industry...
      - nerdponx 8y ago
        I should rephrase - I suspect that the study was funded by the industry, whereas the industry insider wasn't speaking on official terms.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
wtvanhest 8y ago
I'm an environmentalist who believes that we should stop carbon polution and that we should dramatically reduce other forms of pollution as quickly as possible. But... I have yet to read a research report that is convincing that climate change is abnormal due to humans. The report most often cited is a meta report, but I'd rather have something with hard numbers that I can show people. Meta analysis is fine, but not convincing. I'm curious what convinced people here that climate change is likely caused by humans rather than just earths cyclical temp changes that have happened for a long time. I say this as someone who wants to understand it.
- lopmotr 8y ago
  I'd love to have an answer to this too! Unfortunately, it seems to be a field that's too difficult for non-specialists to make any conclusions in at all. I'd say almost everyone who believes it was caused by humans does so because of peer/political pressure or trust in authority directly telling them that fact. All explanations I've ever heard don't have the conclusion logically following from the information we know. For example "CO2 contributes to the greenhouse effect so our CO2 actually caused the observed global warming." or "The increase in CO2 is dramatic so that must cause dramatic warming.". I don't understand how even scientists can be so sure of the causality because in a complex system, proving that a one-off event caused another one-off event is supposed to be impossible, isn't it? You can't replicate it. You can't do a controlled experiment. It seems you can only model it and notice that your model shows causation. What if the model is wrong? It's too complicated for laymen to understand. It seems to be even harder than nuclear physics which even school kids can use to make predictions about nuclear reactions.
  - telchar 8y ago
    It's ok to want an answer. You may have to accept though (and it seems you're on your way to this) that the answer isn't simple, can't be broken down to a simple paragraph and can't be digested in a sitting. If you're not content taking the short explanation (e.g. "CO2 contributes to the greenhouse effect so our CO2 actually caused the observed global warming.") then you need to accept that you will have to study the models in depth and try to understand what assumptions/approximations were made, why the scientists consider those valid, what data are used and what biases or errors exist and needed to be corrected for and why those are valid, etc. And that's all ok. As long as a person doesn't reject the science outright because they can't understand the work or don't want to put in the effort. But those who reject the science or insist that nothing be done about it until they personally understand it need to either put in the effort to understand it or lend faith to the scientific consensus which has been developed through great effort.
nostromo 8y ago
Hypothesizing that human fishing patterns may have selected fish that migrate earlier or later than previous generations doesn't exactly fit into your anti-"common sense" rant.
southern_cross 8y ago
Dude, unlike you (I'm pretty sure) back in the day I used to actually _read_ various scientific studies on a regular basis; these were often in top journals, too. And after some years of this I got to where I routinely threw aside those studies, asking myself "How does this kind of crap get published, anyway?" The situation has only gotten worse since then, as far as I can tell. As far as common sense and such goes, I'm getting pretty tired right now of people complaining about plastic pollution in the oceans which "lasts forever", but then in the next breath complaining about the breakdown products of that very plastic being a danger to wildlife. So which is it - "lasts forever" or "breaks down"? It can't be both. Much of this wildlife would probably be far better off if that plastic did indeed last forever; it would be unsightly, of course, but not all that dangerous. Here's something else that stuck in my craw the other day. The author of this article (a "climate scientist") says at one point that "Science isn’t a popularity contest", but earlier had talked about "the consensus" among scientists. But what is such a consensus if not a popularity contest among those scientists? Also, the tone of the article is such that the author might ver well rain down scorn and disdain upon anyone who weighed in here who wasn't a bonafide climate scientist. But they themselves were actually trained in theoretical physics, not climate science. This situation is quite common among climate scientists, BTW - they weren't actually trained in climatology! https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/hot-planet/why-i-wont-debate-science https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/hot-planet/why-i-wont-d... So apparently there's not really that much "common sense" out there at all, from what I gather. At least not on the part of scientists, anyway.
- Retric 8y ago
  Consensus is not a popularity contest. It's a debate, and just because you reach say 51% does not mean something is a consensus. Second, the opinions of the ill-informed don't count but they sure love to talk. PS: Individual papers are about as important as tweets. On their own they say almost nothing.
  - southern_cross 8y ago
    So what is 97% to 99%, then? (The claimed consensus percentage here varies a bit.) BTW, much about the studies which make such claims was laughably amateurish. I've actually read some of them (mostly), but it's been a while now. (There were at least four of them, as I recall.) Have you?
JohnCrane 8y ago
spotted a libturd!
nerdponx 8y ago
I wouldn't be surprised to find that the scientists who ran the salmon study were funded by a company in the fishing industry.
hueving 8y ago
>their "common sense" objections to what those high-falutin' scientists Don't attack strawmen.

dpark 8y ago

Automatically assuming everything negative is caused by climate change is not science. If there is no evidence that salmon are changing spawning due to climate change, then it's just a hypothesis and no more scientific than the hypothesis that fishing is changing spawning. People are as guilty of blindly accepting climate change as the root cause for random things as they are of blindly rejecting it. A thing doesn’t become “scientific” because some group of scientists believes it. I say this as someone who fully believes in man made climate change and its potentially catastrophic implications.

southern_cross 8y ago
Yeah, in my mind it kind of boils down to this. The simpleton's answer to pretty much whatever ails you these days is "climate change". And the simpleton's answer to pretty much anything related to climate change is "CO2". Both of those positions are extraordinarily stupid, IMO, but far too common.
- scarmig 8y ago
  It's disingenuous to suggest that the simpletons in the climate change debate are those who attribute too much to climate change, when the leading figures of the denialists bring snowballs into the Senate and claim they disprove climate change.
  - sosborn 8y ago
    It is not impossible for both sides to have their share of simpletons.
    - southern_cross 8y ago
      There are plenty of clear-thinking, level-headed folks out there who, while they might have genuine concerns about climate change in general, aren't really buying into the doomsday aspects of it or that it's all caused by man. But those folks usually don't get much of an airing in the press or elsewhere, and if they do they're usually treated with derision. Instead the simpletons steal the show. You know, at this point I don't know what's worse - that so many so-called experts seem to be spewing end-of-the-world nonsense, or that there appear to be so many folks out there who are all too willing to believe this stuff. I seriously question the qualifications and motivations of the former, and the mental health status of the latter.
      - kaybe 8y ago
        You would make the whole community overjoyed if you gave us sound arguments for why we don't have a problem. We see it in the data, and do our very best to run simulations to predict the future of this chaotic system (we should have the main influences down), and it looks bad. You can doubt the doomsday aspect of it, since that is determined by society's response and resilience, but more CO2 in the atmosphere increasing radiative forcing and thus temperature as a 0th level effect are very basic physics. The fact that humanity caused a substantial increase on atmospheric CO2 is very obviously true as well. Anything saving us must be a higher level effect. The natural way of CO2 sequestration, rock weathering and subsequent precipitation into ocean sediment, takes at least 10k years to get rid of an increase. Please tell us if there is something big we miss. Everyone could use some good news by now because the current state is pretty depressing.
        southern_cross 8y ago
        > We see it in the data Does that "we" actually include "you"? And if so, how much of that data have you looked at personally, and now closely? I ask because (as I have already referenced elsewhere in this thread) I went to the trouble of doing that some years ago - downloaded thousands of data files making up a particular temperature data set, consisting of hundreds of thousands of data entries. This after having heard some particularly inane and quite clearly wrong statements made about my local climate by the folks at NOAA or wherever. And you know what I found? The "raw" data there showed a definite but modest increase in temperatures in my area over the past 130 years or so. But the "adjusted" data (which was being used as the basis for making those statements) had been so badly mangled as to become completely unreliable, yet this was done in such a way as to make it show a rather dramatic increase in temperatures. It ultimately turned out that the whole data set was mangled, too (I spot checked several other locations), and that I wasn't the only person who had gone to such troubles and found much the same issues. Of course, that was just one data set and that's been almost ten years ago now. But for easily the past 15 years or so, and continuing up to this day, folks outside of the climate research field who have gone to similar troubles to do basic analysis on various climate-related data sets have often come to similar conclusions - everything from "This [apparently very real] data is just too dirty and unreliable to be of much practical use, even after you try to clean it up" to "OMG, it looks like they're just wholesale making stuff up here!" And so on. BTW, whenever someone mentions "the data" I always ask this question, and I almost never get an actual answer back: Is the data that you're referring to raw data, or adjusted data, or proxy data, or modeled data, or infilled data, or what? Apparently most people just assume that the data being referred to is real, live, actual data, but whenever I've followed up on the matter myself this almost always turns out not to be the case. > Please tell us if there is something big we miss. As I believe I have already said elsewhere, I don't think that it's so much that things get missed as it is that they seem to get willfully ignored, or maybe are just under-appreciated in their potential effects. But other folks outside of the climate research field who have noted various troubling things here might disagree with my assessment of the situation. > Everyone could use some good news by now because the current state is pretty depressing. Again, as I have already noted, folks who come along and say "Good news everyone! The situation may not be as dark as it first appeared." often just get beaten down mercilessly. And in the press, for whatever reasons, if a "good news" type article appears it tends to fade out rarely quickly, while the "even more bad news" type articles may get hyped to no end. And even with the good news articles, often the reporter seems to go out of their way trying to track down so-called climate experts who will say "True, perhaps - but this actually changes nothing!", and who may then try to impune the motives of the person making the good news statement - "Probably a fossil-fuel funded climate denier!", or similar. If you want to take a step back and get a breath of fresh air, consider the fact that throughout human history various episodes of doomsday-cult type thinking have come and gone repeatedly, usually with minimal aftereffects. This is very true for recent predictions made by scientists and such, too. For example, recently there was some discussion about how many of at least the most dire predictions being made around the time of the first Earth Day never came to pass. There may be several valid reasons for this, but the simple fact of the matter is that most of those predictions had no real basis in reality to begin with. I expect that at least the most dire predictions currently being made about climate change will turn out much the same way.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  Simpleton? Or the salmon industry finding a convenient excuse.
  - asfdsfggtfd 8y ago
    Is it a convenient excuse? Climate change would imply that it is not the salmon industry's fault that salmon populations are changing. The industry person suggested overfishing patterns are the cause. This puts the blame firmly on the fishing industry...
    - nerdponx 8y ago
      I should rephrase - I suspect that the study was funded by the industry, whereas the industry insider wasn't speaking on official terms.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

wtvanhest 8y ago

I'm an environmentalist who believes that we should stop carbon polution and that we should dramatically reduce other forms of pollution as quickly as possible. But... I have yet to read a research report that is convincing that climate change is abnormal due to humans. The report most often cited is a meta report, but I'd rather have something with hard numbers that I can show people. Meta analysis is fine, but not convincing. I'm curious what convinced people here that climate change is likely caused by humans rather than just earths cyclical temp changes that have happened for a long time. I say this as someone who wants to understand it.

lopmotr 8y ago
I'd love to have an answer to this too! Unfortunately, it seems to be a field that's too difficult for non-specialists to make any conclusions in at all. I'd say almost everyone who believes it was caused by humans does so because of peer/political pressure or trust in authority directly telling them that fact. All explanations I've ever heard don't have the conclusion logically following from the information we know. For example "CO2 contributes to the greenhouse effect so our CO2 actually caused the observed global warming." or "The increase in CO2 is dramatic so that must cause dramatic warming.". I don't understand how even scientists can be so sure of the causality because in a complex system, proving that a one-off event caused another one-off event is supposed to be impossible, isn't it? You can't replicate it. You can't do a controlled experiment. It seems you can only model it and notice that your model shows causation. What if the model is wrong? It's too complicated for laymen to understand. It seems to be even harder than nuclear physics which even school kids can use to make predictions about nuclear reactions.
- telchar 8y ago
  It's ok to want an answer. You may have to accept though (and it seems you're on your way to this) that the answer isn't simple, can't be broken down to a simple paragraph and can't be digested in a sitting. If you're not content taking the short explanation (e.g. "CO2 contributes to the greenhouse effect so our CO2 actually caused the observed global warming.") then you need to accept that you will have to study the models in depth and try to understand what assumptions/approximations were made, why the scientists consider those valid, what data are used and what biases or errors exist and needed to be corrected for and why those are valid, etc. And that's all ok. As long as a person doesn't reject the science outright because they can't understand the work or don't want to put in the effort. But those who reject the science or insist that nothing be done about it until they personally understand it need to either put in the effort to understand it or lend faith to the scientific consensus which has been developed through great effort.

nostromo 8y ago

Hypothesizing that human fishing patterns may have selected fish that migrate earlier or later than previous generations doesn't exactly fit into your anti-"common sense" rant.

southern_cross 8y ago

Dude, unlike you (I'm pretty sure) back in the day I used to actually _read_ various scientific studies on a regular basis; these were often in top journals, too. And after some years of this I got to where I routinely threw aside those studies, asking myself "How does this kind of crap get published, anyway?" The situation has only gotten worse since then, as far as I can tell. As far as common sense and such goes, I'm getting pretty tired right now of people complaining about plastic pollution in the oceans which "lasts forever", but then in the next breath complaining about the breakdown products of that very plastic being a danger to wildlife. So which is it - "lasts forever" or "breaks down"? It can't be both. Much of this wildlife would probably be far better off if that plastic did indeed last forever; it would be unsightly, of course, but not all that dangerous. Here's something else that stuck in my craw the other day. The author of this article (a "climate scientist") says at one point that "Science isn’t a popularity contest", but earlier had talked about "the consensus" among scientists. But what is such a consensus if not a popularity contest among those scientists? Also, the tone of the article is such that the author might ver well rain down scorn and disdain upon anyone who weighed in here who wasn't a bonafide climate scientist. But they themselves were actually trained in theoretical physics, not climate science. This situation is quite common among climate scientists, BTW - they weren't actually trained in climatology! https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/hot-planet/why-i-wont-debate-science https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/hot-planet/why-i-wont-d... So apparently there's not really that much "common sense" out there at all, from what I gather. At least not on the part of scientists, anyway.

Retric 8y ago
Consensus is not a popularity contest. It's a debate, and just because you reach say 51% does not mean something is a consensus. Second, the opinions of the ill-informed don't count but they sure love to talk. PS: Individual papers are about as important as tweets. On their own they say almost nothing.
- southern_cross 8y ago
  So what is 97% to 99%, then? (The claimed consensus percentage here varies a bit.) BTW, much about the studies which make such claims was laughably amateurish. I've actually read some of them (mostly), but it's been a while now. (There were at least four of them, as I recall.) Have you?

JohnCrane 8y ago

spotted a libturd!

nerdponx 8y ago

I wouldn't be surprised to find that the scientists who ran the salmon study were funded by a company in the fishing industry.

hueving 8y ago

>their "common sense" objections to what those high-falutin' scientists Don't attack strawmen.