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> And I think we can start this today. We need to focus on accuracy above any and everything else. When you want to enact global change you first need to establ

by flukus 8y ago

> And I think we can start this today. We need to focus on accuracy above any and everything else. When you want to enact global change you first need to establish yourself as a reliable authority. Is anyone making more accurate predictions? Most people that disagree with NASA seem to saying anything from it's fake news to blaming other sources. How do you explain the observed warming? > The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown." Hard to tell without units but this line leads me to believe he was talking in degrees Fahrenheit and your comparing it to degrees celcius: > The difference may seem slight, he said, but the planet is only 9 degrees warmer now than during the 8,000-year Ice Age that ended 10,000 years ago.

rjf72 8y ago
No, nobody is making accurate predictions right now and that's the fundamental problem. We want to enact change on future predictions, but the models we're using to predict things have a history that's shown them to be unreliable. Each time a prediction fails to pass it ends up undermining the entire system of climate modeling more and more. We can't expect national bodies to engage in anything other convenient changes based on predictions with a poor track record. This is why you need accuracy above all. As for the temperature increase, I don't picture things in such a polarized fashion. I think there's little doubt that humans are contributing to climate change. But what really confounds this issue is that climate, even absent humanity, is a very unstable system. These [1] are the data from the ice cores over the past 800k years, so literally before humanity existed. And you'll note a regular and often quite extreme shift in temperatures. For instance check out the end of the ice age before our most recent one - about 130k years ago. In an extremely brief period of time the temperatures skyrocketed something like 14 degrees celcius. We then gradually made our way out of that ice age hitting unprecedented lows dropping some 15 degrees celcius before once again starting an extremely rapid rise about 12,000 years ago which we are now in. And we've yet to hit the 'normal' highs of times past. So even if humans did not exist, we would almost certainly be seeing rapid warming. As for his comments referencing temperature, I'm also not entirely sure. His comment was somewhat unusual since the last ice age obviously did not only last 8,000 years. It also didn't end 10,000 years ago (though that's not too far off). And it would also be quite unusual for a UN speaker to use Fahrenheit. In this case, I think we can dodge this issue since 0.68C = 1.2F and that's given not only a failure to reverse carbon emissions but an unprecedented spike in them, so the point holds true in either case. Extreme CO2 increase = bottom or below the bottom of "most conservative scientific estimates" in temperature increases? We can't expect nations to engage in urgent action based on data like this. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/media/File:EPICA_temperature_plot.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/med... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4.2_kiloyear_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4.2_kiloyear_event
- martinpw 8y ago
  I don't understand why you are doubling down on your misunderstandings here. The actual increase that you yourself quoted falls entirely within the error bounds of the IPCC estimates. It doesn't matter that it is towards the bottom of those error bounds - the whole point of an error bound is that it is a range that captures the uncertainty. To argue about where in the range it falls is to fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of an error bound in the first place. And the 'conservative estimate' is again a quote from the same person who made the dubious unverifiable 1-7F claim, so is also not relevant compared to the IPCC data. The IPCC range is their best estimate, so it is not a conservative range according to the IPCC report, which is what matters here. It is sad that you are focusing on the words of one person who was not even directly involved in the study, while ignoring or misunderstanding the published work of hundreds of climate scientists who contributed to the actual numbers which have proved 30 years later to be accurate predictions.
  - rjf72 8y ago
    This is a misunderstanding of ranges. Imagine you flip a coin 100 times and you only get 41 heads. Is this coin fair? 41 heads falls just within the 95% confidence interval for a fair coin over 100 flips, so you can answer yes in that regard. But things are not binary. It's all probabilistic. In other words, it's not like 40 heads = rigged coin, 41 = legit. Your assumed interval is going to be a normal distribution. That means, if your assumption of it being a fair coin is correct, that you'll hit close to the perfect spot (50 in this case) disproportionately more often than you'll hit at the tails ends of your distribution. By contrast, now let's assume the coin was rigged to hit tails about 60% of the time. Now you'd be hitting extremely near that 41 constantly. Climate predictions are annoying because we can only get one sample at a time on a time frame that generally requires years to decades, so it's really really hard to determine whether we're right or wrong. But what you can safely say is that the further you fall away from your expected value - the less probable it becomes that your hypothesis (of said expected value being true) was accurate. In other words hitting 1 on e.g. a range of 1 to 7 with an expected value of 3.5 is a much less likely scenario than hitting 1 on a range of 0.5 to 1.5 with an expected value of 1.

by flukus 8y ago

rjf72 8y ago

No, nobody is making accurate predictions right now and that's the fundamental problem. We want to enact change on future predictions, but the models we're using to predict things have a history that's shown them to be unreliable. Each time a prediction fails to pass it ends up undermining the entire system of climate modeling more and more. We can't expect national bodies to engage in anything other convenient changes based on predictions with a poor track record. This is why you need accuracy above all. As for the temperature increase, I don't picture things in such a polarized fashion. I think there's little doubt that humans are contributing to climate change. But what really confounds this issue is that climate, even absent humanity, is a very unstable system. These [1] are the data from the ice cores over the past 800k years, so literally before humanity existed. And you'll note a regular and often quite extreme shift in temperatures. For instance check out the end of the ice age before our most recent one - about 130k years ago. In an extremely brief period of time the temperatures skyrocketed something like 14 degrees celcius. We then gradually made our way out of that ice age hitting unprecedented lows dropping some 15 degrees celcius before once again starting an extremely rapid rise about 12,000 years ago which we are now in. And we've yet to hit the 'normal' highs of times past. So even if humans did not exist, we would almost certainly be seeing rapid warming. As for his comments referencing temperature, I'm also not entirely sure. His comment was somewhat unusual since the last ice age obviously did not only last 8,000 years. It also didn't end 10,000 years ago (though that's not too far off). And it would also be quite unusual for a UN speaker to use Fahrenheit. In this case, I think we can dodge this issue since 0.68C = 1.2F and that's given not only a failure to reverse carbon emissions but an unprecedented spike in them, so the point holds true in either case. Extreme CO2 increase = bottom or below the bottom of "most conservative scientific estimates" in temperature increases? We can't expect nations to engage in urgent action based on data like this. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/media/File:EPICA_temperature_plot.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/med... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4.2_kiloyear_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4.2_kiloyear_event

martinpw 8y ago
I don't understand why you are doubling down on your misunderstandings here. The actual increase that you yourself quoted falls entirely within the error bounds of the IPCC estimates. It doesn't matter that it is towards the bottom of those error bounds - the whole point of an error bound is that it is a range that captures the uncertainty. To argue about where in the range it falls is to fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of an error bound in the first place. And the 'conservative estimate' is again a quote from the same person who made the dubious unverifiable 1-7F claim, so is also not relevant compared to the IPCC data. The IPCC range is their best estimate, so it is not a conservative range according to the IPCC report, which is what matters here. It is sad that you are focusing on the words of one person who was not even directly involved in the study, while ignoring or misunderstanding the published work of hundreds of climate scientists who contributed to the actual numbers which have proved 30 years later to be accurate predictions.
- rjf72 8y ago
  This is a misunderstanding of ranges. Imagine you flip a coin 100 times and you only get 41 heads. Is this coin fair? 41 heads falls just within the 95% confidence interval for a fair coin over 100 flips, so you can answer yes in that regard. But things are not binary. It's all probabilistic. In other words, it's not like 40 heads = rigged coin, 41 = legit. Your assumed interval is going to be a normal distribution. That means, if your assumption of it being a fair coin is correct, that you'll hit close to the perfect spot (50 in this case) disproportionately more often than you'll hit at the tails ends of your distribution. By contrast, now let's assume the coin was rigged to hit tails about 60% of the time. Now you'd be hitting extremely near that 41 constantly. Climate predictions are annoying because we can only get one sample at a time on a time frame that generally requires years to decades, so it's really really hard to determine whether we're right or wrong. But what you can safely say is that the further you fall away from your expected value - the less probable it becomes that your hypothesis (of said expected value being true) was accurate. In other words hitting 1 on e.g. a range of 1 to 7 with an expected value of 3.5 is a much less likely scenario than hitting 1 on a range of 0.5 to 1.5 with an expected value of 1.