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I invite everybody to watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaiZ5BHaUMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaiZ5BHaUMY A calm, collected, scientific represen

I invite everybody to watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaiZ5BHaUMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaiZ5BHaUMY A calm, collected, scientific representation of both sides.

skosch 8y ago
Please abstain from propagating the "both sides" nonsense. One can admit to degrees of model uncertainty without insinuating that climate change is a matter of opinion.
- randyrand 8y ago
  How can you even say that? Climate science has uncertainty. There are definitely still things being debated.
  - Symmetry 8y ago
    Would you be willing to play Russian Roulette with a revolver with four bullets in the chambers just because there's uncertainty about whether the gun would go off when you pulled the trigger? Yes, there's a chance that climate change is going to no big deal. The most likely future occurrence is that things go the way the sober scientists at the IPCC give in their median prediction - a disaster but an eminently manageable disaster. The bit threat is that uncertainty goes both ways and climate change could very well end up being much worse than our median estimates. That's what keeps me up at night instead of urging more efforts go towards mitigation.
    - vladimirralev 8y ago
      Just watch the video. They talk about all of this. I don't understand why I am getting so many nasty comments especially when those points are addressed in this video. Both guys are serious scientists and respect each other while feeling completely embarrassed by the zealots. You talk about the russian roulette with climate, but the issue is far more complicated. There are bunch of other russian roulettes to consider with policy and society. What if society needs carbon to run the economy and keep the jobs and peace? What if oil-dependent countries collapse and turn to war, terrorism or mass-migration? Those are substantial risks that can kill many people and affect the quality of life for the worse globally too. You see what happened in France when they raised the fuel tax. It's not hard to imagine some worse scenarios.
      - Symmetry 8y ago
        Ok, I finally watched the video and I don't think it was worth my time at all. It was nice that they were polite to each other but really we have understood the basics of how increased C02 causes global warming for about a century. Current detailed climate models are kind of crap, Nate Silver went into why in some detail in his book on modeling, The Signal and the Noise, which I recommend but that doesn't change the anything I said in the above post - climate models are as likely to undershoot the dangers of warming as they are to overshoot them. Christy basically seemed to be arguing that there's uncertainty so he was permitted to believe what he wanted to. That's not a rational way to approach problems, especially given how he exaggerated the nature of the uncertainty.
        vladimirralev 8y ago
        I think you need to watch it again, because your summary sounds just wrong. Both scientists agreed completely that humans caused CO2 raise and it caused warming. All the actual arguments are way way past those basic facts that are agreed upon. Did you listen when they agreed that proposed measures will not stop ocean water levels from rising? Did you listen to the cost-benefit analysis and socio-economic impact? Why are you ignoring this point? You don't think it's important? If climate models are as likely to undershoot then how do you explain that ALL the best models in consideration overshot the last 30 years and not a single model undershot? If it was just as likely shouldn't we be seeing some models undershooting?
        Symmetry 8y ago
        No, obviously ocean waters can't be stopped from rising. The question is all about how much they're going to rise. It really annoys me when people treat global warming as an all or nothing quantitative affair. Yes, every climate model overshot air warming leading up to 2014. But they also all undershot ocean warming. That's because, for some reason nobody understands, from 1998 to 2014 all the extra thermal energy caused by CO2 forcing went into the ocean. But since 2014 air temperatures have shot up very rapily and now we're back on the trend-line predicted by models.[1] But really, you could just as easily have argued that models were undershooting because they all predicted cooler oceans than we got. And Ocean warming is the important part for determining sea levels. Christy was dishonestly cherry picking stats to make it look like errors only go in one direction when really they go in both. If all you know about the global warming debate is what was in that video I can see how you found it convincing but it's actually a very shallow treatment of the whole topic. It's really hard to get into depth in a video, that why so many of us are reluctant to watch them when someone links to one. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/media/File:Global_Temperature_Anomaly.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/med... EDIT: And in the future, can you try summarizing things from a video like this you found persuasive rather than just telling people to watch the video? If you had mentioned the "Overshot for the last 30 years" thing it should have been immediately obvious to people who follow climate science what was happening and how you'd been mislead. Then I wouldn't have had to wade through an hour long video trying to figure out what you found persuasive in it. I'm generally reluctant to watch videos linked off of Hacker News because they usually aren't worth it and after this I think people are going to find it even harder to persuade me to do so without better evidence.
  - Comevius 8y ago
    Climate change has uncertainty, but climate change itself or that it is caused by human activities proved to be very certain. We are quite far beyond that.
  - avmich 8y ago
    Everything has uncertainty, even the reality of the world. We usually don't debate things which are "certain enough".
    - randyrand 8y ago
      Not ever detail of climate change is certain. Some details are still up to speculation. The big picture seems pretty certain tho
Comevius 8y ago
There are literally no 2 sides. There is a ~97% scientific consensus, then there are these people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_who_disagree_with_the_scientific_consensus_on_global_warming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_who_disagre.... John Christy (the other side in your video) represents the ~3%. His research was shown to be wrong over and over again. Most recently in 2017: https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JTECH-D-16-0121.1 https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JTECH-D-16-0121.... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/may/11/more-errors-identified-in-contrarian-climate-scientists-temperature-estimates https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...
- yters 8y ago
  Check out this wikipedia page that casts scientific consensus in a slightly different light: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_scientific_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_scientific_theory
  - Comevius 8y ago
    It's a good thing that theories are superseeded, as they are supposed to be testable and falsifiable. Our understanding of climate change is being superseeded literally on a daily basis. That's what the ~97% represents. It's like Newtonian physics. The people who say that climate change is a hoax either don't follow the scientific method or make predictions that are being falsified over and over by the ~97%. It's not the consensus that matters, it's the testability.
    - yters 8y ago
      It'd be pretty interesting to see a comprehensive view of the falsifiable claims made and what the results are. In fact, a completely open data source and algorithm repository with full documentation on how all data is gathered and processed would certainly help persuade skeptics like myself. A number of years ago when the engineer leaked the internal data dump from the climate researchers, it certainly did not change my view in a favorable direction seeing that material :P
jimjansen1 8y ago
Do you also listen to debates on both sides of the Flat Earth Debate? Or the Moon Landing Debate? The scientific consensus is overwhelming and spending even a second debating or listening to climate change deniers is a dangerous waste of time.
jimjimjim 8y ago
Should people eat broken glass? let's hear from both sides!
- robotrout 8y ago
  There are many scientists that believe solar forcing is responsible for temperature increases on Earth, Mars, Triton, Jupiter, and Pluto. While CO2 promoters point out the fact that solar irradiance changes are relatively small over time, they ignore that those same irradiance changes correspond to changes in solar magnetism, which means changes in cosmic ray incidence on planetary atmospheres. It is well known that cosmic rays effect cloud formation. It's really not as clear cut as you have been taught.
  - Comevius 8y ago
    "There are many scientists that believe solar forcing is responsible" The solar constant in the past 400 years has varied less than 0.2 percent. "It is well known that cosmic rays effect cloud formation." Not well known, because the research is still ongoing. Henrik Svensmark's research in a dust- and impurity-free atmosphere contributed to our understanding of aerosol microphysics, but others agree that the effect in the real, present-day atmosphere is very tiny. "Cosmic particles would be negligible compared with the background aerosol and the aerosol humans are adding by burning things, tilling soil, etc.” "If clouds were affected by cosmic rays, they would have been affected a hundred times more strongly by human air pollution, and the world would have cooled over the past century, rather than warmed." http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6316/1119 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6316/1119
    - robotrout 8y ago
      From your quoted article. This work offers a new understanding of global particle formation as based almost entirely on ternary rather than binary nucleation, with ions playing a major but subdominant role. Our results suggest that about 43% of cloud-forming aerosol particles in the present-day atmosphere originate from nucleation This is a major effect, confirmed by your own article. I'm not certain why you linked it, since you are arguing against cosmic rays effecting cloud formation.
trhway 8y ago
>both sides i'm still to hear the "other side" of CO2 molecules absorption spectrum, specifically in infrared. 200 years and still no such "other side" ... https://history.aip.org/climate/co2.htm https://history.aip.org/climate/co2.htm "Beginning with work by Joseph Fourier in the 1820s, scientists had understood that gases in the atmosphere might trap the heat received from the Sun. "

I invite everybody to watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaiZ5BHaUMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaiZ5BHaUMY A calm, collected, scientific representation of both sides.

skosch 8y ago

Please abstain from propagating the "both sides" nonsense. One can admit to degrees of model uncertainty without insinuating that climate change is a matter of opinion.

randyrand 8y ago
How can you even say that? Climate science has uncertainty. There are definitely still things being debated.
- Symmetry 8y ago
  Would you be willing to play Russian Roulette with a revolver with four bullets in the chambers just because there's uncertainty about whether the gun would go off when you pulled the trigger? Yes, there's a chance that climate change is going to no big deal. The most likely future occurrence is that things go the way the sober scientists at the IPCC give in their median prediction - a disaster but an eminently manageable disaster. The bit threat is that uncertainty goes both ways and climate change could very well end up being much worse than our median estimates. That's what keeps me up at night instead of urging more efforts go towards mitigation.
  - vladimirralev 8y ago
    Just watch the video. They talk about all of this. I don't understand why I am getting so many nasty comments especially when those points are addressed in this video. Both guys are serious scientists and respect each other while feeling completely embarrassed by the zealots. You talk about the russian roulette with climate, but the issue is far more complicated. There are bunch of other russian roulettes to consider with policy and society. What if society needs carbon to run the economy and keep the jobs and peace? What if oil-dependent countries collapse and turn to war, terrorism or mass-migration? Those are substantial risks that can kill many people and affect the quality of life for the worse globally too. You see what happened in France when they raised the fuel tax. It's not hard to imagine some worse scenarios.
    - Symmetry 8y ago
      Ok, I finally watched the video and I don't think it was worth my time at all. It was nice that they were polite to each other but really we have understood the basics of how increased C02 causes global warming for about a century. Current detailed climate models are kind of crap, Nate Silver went into why in some detail in his book on modeling, The Signal and the Noise, which I recommend but that doesn't change the anything I said in the above post - climate models are as likely to undershoot the dangers of warming as they are to overshoot them. Christy basically seemed to be arguing that there's uncertainty so he was permitted to believe what he wanted to. That's not a rational way to approach problems, especially given how he exaggerated the nature of the uncertainty.
      - vladimirralev 8y ago
        I think you need to watch it again, because your summary sounds just wrong. Both scientists agreed completely that humans caused CO2 raise and it caused warming. All the actual arguments are way way past those basic facts that are agreed upon. Did you listen when they agreed that proposed measures will not stop ocean water levels from rising? Did you listen to the cost-benefit analysis and socio-economic impact? Why are you ignoring this point? You don't think it's important? If climate models are as likely to undershoot then how do you explain that ALL the best models in consideration overshot the last 30 years and not a single model undershot? If it was just as likely shouldn't we be seeing some models undershooting?
        Symmetry 8y ago
        No, obviously ocean waters can't be stopped from rising. The question is all about how much they're going to rise. It really annoys me when people treat global warming as an all or nothing quantitative affair. Yes, every climate model overshot air warming leading up to 2014. But they also all undershot ocean warming. That's because, for some reason nobody understands, from 1998 to 2014 all the extra thermal energy caused by CO2 forcing went into the ocean. But since 2014 air temperatures have shot up very rapily and now we're back on the trend-line predicted by models.[1] But really, you could just as easily have argued that models were undershooting because they all predicted cooler oceans than we got. And Ocean warming is the important part for determining sea levels. Christy was dishonestly cherry picking stats to make it look like errors only go in one direction when really they go in both. If all you know about the global warming debate is what was in that video I can see how you found it convincing but it's actually a very shallow treatment of the whole topic. It's really hard to get into depth in a video, that why so many of us are reluctant to watch them when someone links to one. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/media/File:Global_Temperature_Anomaly.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/med... EDIT: And in the future, can you try summarizing things from a video like this you found persuasive rather than just telling people to watch the video? If you had mentioned the "Overshot for the last 30 years" thing it should have been immediately obvious to people who follow climate science what was happening and how you'd been mislead. Then I wouldn't have had to wade through an hour long video trying to figure out what you found persuasive in it. I'm generally reluctant to watch videos linked off of Hacker News because they usually aren't worth it and after this I think people are going to find it even harder to persuade me to do so without better evidence.
- Comevius 8y ago
  Climate change has uncertainty, but climate change itself or that it is caused by human activities proved to be very certain. We are quite far beyond that.
- avmich 8y ago
  Everything has uncertainty, even the reality of the world. We usually don't debate things which are "certain enough".
  - randyrand 8y ago
    Not ever detail of climate change is certain. Some details are still up to speculation. The big picture seems pretty certain tho

Comevius 8y ago

There are literally no 2 sides. There is a ~97% scientific consensus, then there are these people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_who_disagree_with_the_scientific_consensus_on_global_warming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_who_disagre.... John Christy (the other side in your video) represents the ~3%. His research was shown to be wrong over and over again. Most recently in 2017: https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JTECH-D-16-0121.1 https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JTECH-D-16-0121.... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/may/11/more-errors-identified-in-contrarian-climate-scientists-temperature-estimates https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...

yters 8y ago
Check out this wikipedia page that casts scientific consensus in a slightly different light: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_scientific_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_scientific_theory
- Comevius 8y ago
  It's a good thing that theories are superseeded, as they are supposed to be testable and falsifiable. Our understanding of climate change is being superseeded literally on a daily basis. That's what the ~97% represents. It's like Newtonian physics. The people who say that climate change is a hoax either don't follow the scientific method or make predictions that are being falsified over and over by the ~97%. It's not the consensus that matters, it's the testability.
  - yters 8y ago
    It'd be pretty interesting to see a comprehensive view of the falsifiable claims made and what the results are. In fact, a completely open data source and algorithm repository with full documentation on how all data is gathered and processed would certainly help persuade skeptics like myself. A number of years ago when the engineer leaked the internal data dump from the climate researchers, it certainly did not change my view in a favorable direction seeing that material :P

jimjansen1 8y ago

Do you also listen to debates on both sides of the Flat Earth Debate? Or the Moon Landing Debate? The scientific consensus is overwhelming and spending even a second debating or listening to climate change deniers is a dangerous waste of time.

jimjimjim 8y ago

Should people eat broken glass? let's hear from both sides!

robotrout 8y ago
There are many scientists that believe solar forcing is responsible for temperature increases on Earth, Mars, Triton, Jupiter, and Pluto. While CO2 promoters point out the fact that solar irradiance changes are relatively small over time, they ignore that those same irradiance changes correspond to changes in solar magnetism, which means changes in cosmic ray incidence on planetary atmospheres. It is well known that cosmic rays effect cloud formation. It's really not as clear cut as you have been taught.
- Comevius 8y ago
  "There are many scientists that believe solar forcing is responsible" The solar constant in the past 400 years has varied less than 0.2 percent. "It is well known that cosmic rays effect cloud formation." Not well known, because the research is still ongoing. Henrik Svensmark's research in a dust- and impurity-free atmosphere contributed to our understanding of aerosol microphysics, but others agree that the effect in the real, present-day atmosphere is very tiny. "Cosmic particles would be negligible compared with the background aerosol and the aerosol humans are adding by burning things, tilling soil, etc.” "If clouds were affected by cosmic rays, they would have been affected a hundred times more strongly by human air pollution, and the world would have cooled over the past century, rather than warmed." http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6316/1119 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6316/1119
  - robotrout 8y ago
    From your quoted article. This work offers a new understanding of global particle formation as based almost entirely on ternary rather than binary nucleation, with ions playing a major but subdominant role. Our results suggest that about 43% of cloud-forming aerosol particles in the present-day atmosphere originate from nucleation This is a major effect, confirmed by your own article. I'm not certain why you linked it, since you are arguing against cosmic rays effecting cloud formation.

trhway 8y ago

>both sides i'm still to hear the "other side" of CO2 molecules absorption spectrum, specifically in infrared. 200 years and still no such "other side" ... https://history.aip.org/climate/co2.htm https://history.aip.org/climate/co2.htm "Beginning with work by Joseph Fourier in the 1820s, scientists had understood that gases in the atmosphere might trap the heat received from the Sun. "