8 ms·

The thing that really bugs when when discussing climate change is that it's one of the clearest examples of confirmation bias I've ever experienced as an adult.

The thing that really bugs when when discussing climate change is that it's one of the clearest examples of confirmation bias I've ever experienced as an adult. Forget geological time, if anything out of the ordinary weather-related occurs then it's because of XYZ climate change reason. The same people telling me the world will spiral out of control in just 12 years are also saying that we shouldn't build any nuclear power plants, or that the root cause of climate change is "institutional racism"[1]. It is really starting to look more like a religion to me than a science, and I don't say that lightly. 1. https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/xwneej/racism-climate-change-crisis-jamie-margolin-zero-hour https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/xwneej/racism-climate-cha...

umvi 7y ago
Not just weather, but almost anything can be attributed to climate change - poverty, depression, suicide, crime, decline in insects, decline in birds, etc.
- mercurysmessage 7y ago
  Who could have possibly predicted that the climate affects a lot of the planet.
- wolco 7y ago
  The horrible last season of GoT, drop in gun crimes, raise in gun crimes. You can use that with anything. When a school shooting happens I always hear how video games and scary goth music push them over the edge.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  Is your point here that it's implausible that rising temperatures could cause any of those things on your list? Because at least two of them have an obvious link to temperatures (especially if you think about what average temperatures and weather do to birds/insects' primary food sources)... We also know that depression (and as an indirect result, suicide) have known links to weather in some territories, so it's not implausible that climate change could impact that too. Though I'd expect higher temperatures to lower depression rates, it's possible suffering through even hotter summers without A/C could exacerbate depression among poor people, since there's nothing you can do to escape it. If back to back heat waves brought on by climate change threaten you (maybe your grandma's sick and can't take the heat), and you can't afford any of the solutions like a nice air conditioner, maybe you get desperate and turn to crime so you can find the money to keep grandma from getting injured by the heat? I wouldn't personally say 'I bet that happens' but I also wouldn't bet money against a study being able to pull it out of the data. We had old people dying in homes not too long ago as a result of a power outage in the American southeast - Florida I think? - and it was a news-level scandal. If hot summers and reduced rainfall kill crops, that's going to boost poverty levels in farming counties...
hos234 7y ago
The underlying architecture of mainstream media and social media that produced Trump and Brexit haven't changed. They provide the conditions for the herd to congregate, accumulate and then stampede. And the herd will. Until the underlying architecture gets fixed. Too much attention is paid to which direction the herd is stampeding in rather than the underlying architecture that enables it.
- jansan 7y ago
  Sorry, but your comment is another very nice example for confirmation bias.
scarejunba 7y ago
Fascinating. With the right idiots available, I can convince people of the falseness of real things by just having the idiots defend reality. This is a useful technique. I think the right idiots are available for practically anything useful. I wonder if it's possible to attempt to get someone to make spurious claims of racism being the reason why we can't have tech unions, and use that to spike unions in tech because people will associate support for tech unions as support for the spurious claims of racism.
throwaway5752 7y ago
I don't actually think that the all people saying the climate will spiral out of control in 12 years are saying what you are attributing to them. Nuclear is not a panacea, but we should build more because this is a global emergency. There is a racist component to the reaction to climate change because of who is being most immediately impacted (equatorial countries and the poor), but intent doesn't matter, because only action matters. The science is bland and harsh, and doesn't care about how people consume it. You can put CO2 in an aquarium, seal it, and easily measure the greenhouse effect from CO2 yourself. You can even work out the basics of the relationship of CO2 concentration to degree of warming. This is happening right now - it's not predictions, it is our reality. It will happen to you regardless of how you feel about the discussion on either side of the issue.
- jansan 7y ago
  Is there an easy setup for the aquarium experiment that can be done, for example, in school?
  - throwaway5752 7y ago
    Yes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwtt51gvaJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwtt51gvaJQ or any other variation.
- Udik 7y ago
  The co2 warming effect is not in discussion, as you say. But there are cascades of events stemming from the warming itself, and those are integral part of our concern with climate change. How much sea rise will there be? How much will the weather patterns change? How, and how much this will impact catastrophic events? Which negative (or positive) impacts there will be on economies? And of which countries' economies? What will be the ecological impacts? What will be the impacts on health, on infectious diseases? What will be the societal impacts? Etc. Some of these effects are two or three or more steps removed from the warming caused by co2, and there is a "cascade of uncertainty" in predicting them. I agree with the GP that being climate (and atmosphere) omnipresent, it is easy and tempting to draw long causal chains from it to the most disparate effects. And that, given the theme is central to our time, and given the number of scientists of all disciplines working to study these effects, in the most rigorous fields a publication bias on the effects found must exist. In the less rigorous, most probably anything goes.
post- 7y ago
That article doesn’t argue for any sort of causal relationship between climate change and racism. Rather, it argues that a similar kind of denialism in the face of facts undermines the notion of shared truth by further entrenching people within their (a priori) belief systems. Put another way, Kendi is pointing out different manifestations of the dangers of equating (dis)belief with knowledge.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
snowwrestler 7y ago
Do people say crazy things about climate change? Yes. Does that mean the science is wrong? No. People say crazy things about quantum mechanics too, but we keep building and programming microprocessors according to the science as we understand it. And they work! Anthropogenic climate change affords itself to a wide variety of crazy statements because it arises from, and affects such a wide variety of human activities. Basically, there is no segment of the human population that will remain unaffected in some way--either directly, by sea level rise or shifts in fresh water, or indirectly, by all the people who are being directly affected. Because it is physically real, it can't be ignored forever. I fear that the longer we go as a society without addressing it, the higher the general level of social anxiety will rise. That could go a bad way: more and more people seize upon conspiracy theories or tune out. I hope instead we find the collective will to face our fears and take action to address them. I hope that like starting a difficult and scary project, once we see signs of progress, it will become easier to conceive of further progress.
- Udik 7y ago
  > People say crazy things about quantum mechanics too, but we keep building and programming microprocessors according to the science as we understand it. But in the case of QM, either the crazy stuff is wrong- repeated experiments falsify it, no gadget can be built on the principle; or it is "not even wrong", i.e., irrelevant. But many of the climate change findings are either predictions with a timespan of several years or decades, or historical explanations (this and this happened because of climate change). The first type can only be put to test years from now, the second type never.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- fooblitzky 7y ago
  I think your last statement is absolutely on point. If we as a species had addressed climate change when it was first raised as an important issue in the 1970's, it would not have required nearly the same level of upheaval that addressing it today will need. The later we leave it, the worse the upheaval becomes. Basically the science says we will transition to a zero-emission society. We can either plan for it and have a managed transition, or we can be forced into it by external forces, essentially a collapse (good luck feeding 10 billion people with widespread crop failures). The earlier we start, the smoother the transition will be. That is basically what all the protests are about, people just want to start the transition already.
sachdevap 7y ago
If that bugging you is the best you can take out of all the climate change discussion, you need to change your mindset on how to read important topics. There will always be sensationalism around something as big as climate change. Of course there are going to be people shouting anything to grab your attention. Focus on the problem, not these fringe philosophical issues.
- dev_dull 7y ago
  There’s a difference between people having sensational opinions, and sensational opinions affecting real-life legislation[1]. 1. https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/109/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolutio...
solarwind 7y ago
Also, the 12-year deadline is a talking point for politicians. However the IPCC said there is not some “magic global mean temperature or total emissions that separate 'fine' from 'catastrophic’” [1] 1. https://www.axios.com/climate-change-scientists-comment-ocasio-cortez-12-year-deadline-c4ba1f99-bc76-42ac-8b93-e4eaa926938d.html https://www.axios.com/climate-change-scientists-comment-ocas... Someone at Reason read the UN/IPCC report, said there is no doomsday in it: https://reason.com/2018/10/11/how-big-of-a-deal-is-half-of-a-degree-of/ https://reason.com/2018/10/11/how-big-of-a-deal-is-half-of-a... There's also a lot of questionable stuff. The NOAA data adjustments and climate scientists openly discussing getting rid of the 1940s warmth: https://realclimatescience.com/61-fake-data/ https://realclimatescience.com/61-fake-data/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T86IIKK9FRg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T86IIKK9FRg Lack of warming trend in the raw data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mWanx8ojmOkcazzRhDaoHMHyDWxR3PqUP0EdtdIUU84 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mWanx8ojmOkcazzRhDao... The new USCRN data showing no significant warming trend in the USA in 12 years: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/11/08/the-uscrn-revisited/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/11/08/the-uscrn-revisited/ The Canadian data purge: https://twitter.com/EcoSenseNow/status/1174909654297538560 https://twitter.com/EcoSenseNow/status/1174909654297538560
- lucb1e 7y ago
  Squabbling over whether we have 12 years or if it's really maybe 14 or 7 until the point of no return doesn't really change what we have to do. I don't think there are many known experts on the topic that would say the number is far off. Edit: so you edited in some more bullshit sources. Let me look at just one. As I mentioned in another comment, we don't have time to go back and forth over every piece of bullshit since nonsense is a lot easier to write than it is to convincingly disprove (since the nonsense doesn't have to make sense). I clicked only one (so it's a random sample), and I chose it because it triggered my interest (it seemed data-based): the USCRN data link. The article helpfully links to the NOAA website where you can make your own plots. I am not a climate scientists, but the first thing that I notice is the timespan: look at the variance in that data that is linked. It jumps from -4°F to +7°F anomaly. No wonder that, over this timespan, you don't see anything. The article even mentions how variable this data is: "0.6 ± 0.9 °C". You can't say anything either way because you don't have enough data (a variance larger than your base value?!). But of course, the article sees it differently: "no statistically significant warming since the start of the record". Sure it's not significant, but neither does this disprove anything. What it definitely does not do is prove that there is no warming. If anything, the 0.6 value should tell you that it is more likely to be warming up (at a rate of 0.6°C per decade) than not (the odds of it being greater than 0.6 are equal to the odds that it is less than 0.6; and the odds that it is greater than zero (and we are indeed warming up every decade) is 83% (0.6±0.9 means it can be between 0.6-0.9 and 0.6+0.9, so between -0.3 and 1.5, so there are (rounded to one decimal) 18 possible values and 15 of them are positive, and 15/18 is around 83%). Again, all of this is uncertain because monthly data since 2004 is not a lot of data with this amount of variance, and I'm estimating uncertainty on uncertainty here, but the takeaway so far should be clear. But that's not the end of it. The author is literally turning a blind eye to the data that we do have. First they go "we have no data, and the data we do have suggests that the earth is warming up, so let me just deny that global warming is real", but then when you click through to the website, you discover that there totally is data. See those checkboxes at the top of the options? They have data going back way beyond 2004. Select any year you like, but be sure to take a long enough range (30 years or so) so you have any sort of reasonable sample size. If it looks like a bunch of random data to you and there is no clear trend, I would agree: the author of your article picked the least clear "Time Scale" option available. I didn't quite understand the difference between the Time Scale options "previous 12 months" and "12-Month" so I downloaded the whole dataset and computed averages per year. They match the option "Time Scale: 12-Month", so that's what that means: the year's average. You can just set that Time Scale option and don't have to go through the trouble of downloading things and validating what you think the option might mean (see what I mean by "disproving bullshit is more work than writing it"?). Now, over 30+ years and with the year's average, please tell me you see a trend there? This new USCRN data is just not active for long enough to draw conclusions, and the high-uncertainty conclusions that can be drawn (referring to the article you linked to, namely the 0.6°C per decade, give or take 0.9) suggest that it is going up rapidly. I wonder if all this work has been for nothing, it took more time than I had hoped... I just hope it makes you rethink what you believe or look at your sources more critically (instead of only looking critically at the generally accepted sources).
refurb 7y ago
We have wild weather patterns all the time. Would love to see someone put there name on a list that says "these weather events were caused by climate change" and "these were not, we expected them".
- SimbaOnSteroids 7y ago
  How about these wild weather patterns are happening a lot with a lot more frequency and severity.
godelski 7y ago
> It is really starting to look more like a religion to me than a science, and I don't say that lightly. One of the biggest things that bugs me about the talk from the public about climate change is that it is all focused around what politicians say. Last week I heard graduate students talking about the major effects of plastic straws. My dad (a Fox news watcher) constantly talks about Al Gore. As a scientists I don't care about those things and those things aren't talked about in the scientific community. We're all confused at the right for not believing in it and we're confused by the left because we have prominent politicians (like Bernie and Warren) saying that nuclear and sequestration are false solutions (but these technologies are highly encouraged by the IPCC and every single climate scientist I know. Only Yang and Booker are pro nuclear?! AFAICT only Yang is pro sequestration?! This is ridiculous. All of them should be! They're all claiming to be listening to the scientists!). So I get your sentiment. Personally I just don't understand why this is happening and what we can do about it. > The same people telling me the world will spiral out of control in just 12 years If it makes you feel better, the scientists are talking about decades. And different events in different time spans. Some of the predictions have already come true, such as more intense storms, more fires, and more droughts. This will only get worse. But the spiral out of control is much further off and is more related to food/water scarcity. That's where the 1.5C-2C warming is a huge danger. As to the racial and economical aspects to climate, there is truth there. But I think the conversation has gotten out of control. Countries like India are already being hit really hard by climate change (a lot more of their land is vulnerable to floods compared to 20 years ago). But the talk here should be really focused about how we can't just ask/expect other countries to not grow their economy for using the same tactics we did (i.e. coal, oil, and natural gas). The US is only 15% of the problem (Europe 10%) and all of us going to 0% isn't solving the problem. We have to go negative and/or ensure that there are cheap enough technologies that developing countries can use that don't pollute. At least I see this as a more humane alternative than shutting down other countries growing economies. IDK about you.
- aeouaoea123123 7y ago
  IPCC is a governmental lobby and scientists (worker unit) don't have the final word on their positions. Article 11: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/09/ipcc-principles.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/09/ipcc-princip...
mnm1 7y ago
So all the thousands of scientific studies out there that constantly validate this conclusion are confirmation bias? This is one of the weakest assertions against climate change I've ever heard. It's not even an argument because it doesn't present any reasoning or evidence. This kind of weak thinking is why we haven't made progress on this issue. Hard to believe this is the top comment here considering the levels of education on this hn.
aeouaoea123123 7y ago
That would also be the opinion of Chief UN Scientist, calling Climate Crisis Narrative “Religious Extremism”: http://co2coalition.org/2019/09/27/chief-un-climate-scientist-calls-the-climate-crisis-narrative-religious-extremism/ http://co2coalition.org/2019/09/27/chief-un-climate-scientis...

umvi 7y ago

Not just weather, but almost anything can be attributed to climate change - poverty, depression, suicide, crime, decline in insects, decline in birds, etc.

mercurysmessage 7y ago
Who could have possibly predicted that the climate affects a lot of the planet.
wolco 7y ago
The horrible last season of GoT, drop in gun crimes, raise in gun crimes. You can use that with anything. When a school shooting happens I always hear how video games and scary goth music push them over the edge.
kevingadd 7y ago
Is your point here that it's implausible that rising temperatures could cause any of those things on your list? Because at least two of them have an obvious link to temperatures (especially if you think about what average temperatures and weather do to birds/insects' primary food sources)... We also know that depression (and as an indirect result, suicide) have known links to weather in some territories, so it's not implausible that climate change could impact that too. Though I'd expect higher temperatures to lower depression rates, it's possible suffering through even hotter summers without A/C could exacerbate depression among poor people, since there's nothing you can do to escape it. If back to back heat waves brought on by climate change threaten you (maybe your grandma's sick and can't take the heat), and you can't afford any of the solutions like a nice air conditioner, maybe you get desperate and turn to crime so you can find the money to keep grandma from getting injured by the heat? I wouldn't personally say 'I bet that happens' but I also wouldn't bet money against a study being able to pull it out of the data. We had old people dying in homes not too long ago as a result of a power outage in the American southeast - Florida I think? - and it was a news-level scandal. If hot summers and reduced rainfall kill crops, that's going to boost poverty levels in farming counties...

hos234 7y ago

The underlying architecture of mainstream media and social media that produced Trump and Brexit haven't changed. They provide the conditions for the herd to congregate, accumulate and then stampede. And the herd will. Until the underlying architecture gets fixed. Too much attention is paid to which direction the herd is stampeding in rather than the underlying architecture that enables it.

jansan 7y ago
Sorry, but your comment is another very nice example for confirmation bias.

scarejunba 7y ago

Fascinating. With the right idiots available, I can convince people of the falseness of real things by just having the idiots defend reality. This is a useful technique. I think the right idiots are available for practically anything useful. I wonder if it's possible to attempt to get someone to make spurious claims of racism being the reason why we can't have tech unions, and use that to spike unions in tech because people will associate support for tech unions as support for the spurious claims of racism.

throwaway5752 7y ago

I don't actually think that the all people saying the climate will spiral out of control in 12 years are saying what you are attributing to them. Nuclear is not a panacea, but we should build more because this is a global emergency. There is a racist component to the reaction to climate change because of who is being most immediately impacted (equatorial countries and the poor), but intent doesn't matter, because only action matters. The science is bland and harsh, and doesn't care about how people consume it. You can put CO2 in an aquarium, seal it, and easily measure the greenhouse effect from CO2 yourself. You can even work out the basics of the relationship of CO2 concentration to degree of warming. This is happening right now - it's not predictions, it is our reality. It will happen to you regardless of how you feel about the discussion on either side of the issue.

jansan 7y ago
Is there an easy setup for the aquarium experiment that can be done, for example, in school?
- throwaway5752 7y ago
  Yes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwtt51gvaJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwtt51gvaJQ or any other variation.
Udik 7y ago
The co2 warming effect is not in discussion, as you say. But there are cascades of events stemming from the warming itself, and those are integral part of our concern with climate change. How much sea rise will there be? How much will the weather patterns change? How, and how much this will impact catastrophic events? Which negative (or positive) impacts there will be on economies? And of which countries' economies? What will be the ecological impacts? What will be the impacts on health, on infectious diseases? What will be the societal impacts? Etc. Some of these effects are two or three or more steps removed from the warming caused by co2, and there is a "cascade of uncertainty" in predicting them. I agree with the GP that being climate (and atmosphere) omnipresent, it is easy and tempting to draw long causal chains from it to the most disparate effects. And that, given the theme is central to our time, and given the number of scientists of all disciplines working to study these effects, in the most rigorous fields a publication bias on the effects found must exist. In the less rigorous, most probably anything goes.

post- 7y ago

That article doesn’t argue for any sort of causal relationship between climate change and racism. Rather, it argues that a similar kind of denialism in the face of facts undermines the notion of shared truth by further entrenching people within their (a priori) belief systems. Put another way, Kendi is pointing out different manifestations of the dangers of equating (dis)belief with knowledge.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

snowwrestler 7y ago

Do people say crazy things about climate change? Yes. Does that mean the science is wrong? No. People say crazy things about quantum mechanics too, but we keep building and programming microprocessors according to the science as we understand it. And they work! Anthropogenic climate change affords itself to a wide variety of crazy statements because it arises from, and affects such a wide variety of human activities. Basically, there is no segment of the human population that will remain unaffected in some way--either directly, by sea level rise or shifts in fresh water, or indirectly, by all the people who are being directly affected. Because it is physically real, it can't be ignored forever. I fear that the longer we go as a society without addressing it, the higher the general level of social anxiety will rise. That could go a bad way: more and more people seize upon conspiracy theories or tune out. I hope instead we find the collective will to face our fears and take action to address them. I hope that like starting a difficult and scary project, once we see signs of progress, it will become easier to conceive of further progress.

Udik 7y ago
> People say crazy things about quantum mechanics too, but we keep building and programming microprocessors according to the science as we understand it. But in the case of QM, either the crazy stuff is wrong- repeated experiments falsify it, no gadget can be built on the principle; or it is "not even wrong", i.e., irrelevant. But many of the climate change findings are either predictions with a timespan of several years or decades, or historical explanations (this and this happened because of climate change). The first type can only be put to test years from now, the second type never.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
fooblitzky 7y ago
I think your last statement is absolutely on point. If we as a species had addressed climate change when it was first raised as an important issue in the 1970's, it would not have required nearly the same level of upheaval that addressing it today will need. The later we leave it, the worse the upheaval becomes. Basically the science says we will transition to a zero-emission society. We can either plan for it and have a managed transition, or we can be forced into it by external forces, essentially a collapse (good luck feeding 10 billion people with widespread crop failures). The earlier we start, the smoother the transition will be. That is basically what all the protests are about, people just want to start the transition already.

sachdevap 7y ago

If that bugging you is the best you can take out of all the climate change discussion, you need to change your mindset on how to read important topics. There will always be sensationalism around something as big as climate change. Of course there are going to be people shouting anything to grab your attention. Focus on the problem, not these fringe philosophical issues.

dev_dull 7y ago
There’s a difference between people having sensational opinions, and sensational opinions affecting real-life legislation[1]. 1. https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/109/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolutio...

solarwind 7y ago

Also, the 12-year deadline is a talking point for politicians. However the IPCC said there is not some “magic global mean temperature or total emissions that separate 'fine' from 'catastrophic’” [1] 1. https://www.axios.com/climate-change-scientists-comment-ocasio-cortez-12-year-deadline-c4ba1f99-bc76-42ac-8b93-e4eaa926938d.html https://www.axios.com/climate-change-scientists-comment-ocas... Someone at Reason read the UN/IPCC report, said there is no doomsday in it: https://reason.com/2018/10/11/how-big-of-a-deal-is-half-of-a-degree-of/ https://reason.com/2018/10/11/how-big-of-a-deal-is-half-of-a... There's also a lot of questionable stuff. The NOAA data adjustments and climate scientists openly discussing getting rid of the 1940s warmth: https://realclimatescience.com/61-fake-data/ https://realclimatescience.com/61-fake-data/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T86IIKK9FRg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T86IIKK9FRg Lack of warming trend in the raw data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mWanx8ojmOkcazzRhDaoHMHyDWxR3PqUP0EdtdIUU84 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mWanx8ojmOkcazzRhDao... The new USCRN data showing no significant warming trend in the USA in 12 years: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/11/08/the-uscrn-revisited/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/11/08/the-uscrn-revisited/ The Canadian data purge: https://twitter.com/EcoSenseNow/status/1174909654297538560 https://twitter.com/EcoSenseNow/status/1174909654297538560

lucb1e 7y ago
Squabbling over whether we have 12 years or if it's really maybe 14 or 7 until the point of no return doesn't really change what we have to do. I don't think there are many known experts on the topic that would say the number is far off. Edit: so you edited in some more bullshit sources. Let me look at just one. As I mentioned in another comment, we don't have time to go back and forth over every piece of bullshit since nonsense is a lot easier to write than it is to convincingly disprove (since the nonsense doesn't have to make sense). I clicked only one (so it's a random sample), and I chose it because it triggered my interest (it seemed data-based): the USCRN data link. The article helpfully links to the NOAA website where you can make your own plots. I am not a climate scientists, but the first thing that I notice is the timespan: look at the variance in that data that is linked. It jumps from -4°F to +7°F anomaly. No wonder that, over this timespan, you don't see anything. The article even mentions how variable this data is: "0.6 ± 0.9 °C". You can't say anything either way because you don't have enough data (a variance larger than your base value?!). But of course, the article sees it differently: "no statistically significant warming since the start of the record". Sure it's not significant, but neither does this disprove anything. What it definitely does not do is prove that there is no warming. If anything, the 0.6 value should tell you that it is more likely to be warming up (at a rate of 0.6°C per decade) than not (the odds of it being greater than 0.6 are equal to the odds that it is less than 0.6; and the odds that it is greater than zero (and we are indeed warming up every decade) is 83% (0.6±0.9 means it can be between 0.6-0.9 and 0.6+0.9, so between -0.3 and 1.5, so there are (rounded to one decimal) 18 possible values and 15 of them are positive, and 15/18 is around 83%). Again, all of this is uncertain because monthly data since 2004 is not a lot of data with this amount of variance, and I'm estimating uncertainty on uncertainty here, but the takeaway so far should be clear. But that's not the end of it. The author is literally turning a blind eye to the data that we do have. First they go "we have no data, and the data we do have suggests that the earth is warming up, so let me just deny that global warming is real", but then when you click through to the website, you discover that there totally is data. See those checkboxes at the top of the options? They have data going back way beyond 2004. Select any year you like, but be sure to take a long enough range (30 years or so) so you have any sort of reasonable sample size. If it looks like a bunch of random data to you and there is no clear trend, I would agree: the author of your article picked the least clear "Time Scale" option available. I didn't quite understand the difference between the Time Scale options "previous 12 months" and "12-Month" so I downloaded the whole dataset and computed averages per year. They match the option "Time Scale: 12-Month", so that's what that means: the year's average. You can just set that Time Scale option and don't have to go through the trouble of downloading things and validating what you think the option might mean (see what I mean by "disproving bullshit is more work than writing it"?). Now, over 30+ years and with the year's average, please tell me you see a trend there? This new USCRN data is just not active for long enough to draw conclusions, and the high-uncertainty conclusions that can be drawn (referring to the article you linked to, namely the 0.6°C per decade, give or take 0.9) suggest that it is going up rapidly. I wonder if all this work has been for nothing, it took more time than I had hoped... I just hope it makes you rethink what you believe or look at your sources more critically (instead of only looking critically at the generally accepted sources).

refurb 7y ago

We have wild weather patterns all the time. Would love to see someone put there name on a list that says "these weather events were caused by climate change" and "these were not, we expected them".

SimbaOnSteroids 7y ago
How about these wild weather patterns are happening a lot with a lot more frequency and severity.

godelski 7y ago

> It is really starting to look more like a religion to me than a science, and I don't say that lightly. One of the biggest things that bugs me about the talk from the public about climate change is that it is all focused around what politicians say. Last week I heard graduate students talking about the major effects of plastic straws. My dad (a Fox news watcher) constantly talks about Al Gore. As a scientists I don't care about those things and those things aren't talked about in the scientific community. We're all confused at the right for not believing in it and we're confused by the left because we have prominent politicians (like Bernie and Warren) saying that nuclear and sequestration are false solutions (but these technologies are highly encouraged by the IPCC and every single climate scientist I know. Only Yang and Booker are pro nuclear?! AFAICT only Yang is pro sequestration?! This is ridiculous. All of them should be! They're all claiming to be listening to the scientists!). So I get your sentiment. Personally I just don't understand why this is happening and what we can do about it. > The same people telling me the world will spiral out of control in just 12 years If it makes you feel better, the scientists are talking about decades. And different events in different time spans. Some of the predictions have already come true, such as more intense storms, more fires, and more droughts. This will only get worse. But the spiral out of control is much further off and is more related to food/water scarcity. That's where the 1.5C-2C warming is a huge danger. As to the racial and economical aspects to climate, there is truth there. But I think the conversation has gotten out of control. Countries like India are already being hit really hard by climate change (a lot more of their land is vulnerable to floods compared to 20 years ago). But the talk here should be really focused about how we can't just ask/expect other countries to not grow their economy for using the same tactics we did (i.e. coal, oil, and natural gas). The US is only 15% of the problem (Europe 10%) and all of us going to 0% isn't solving the problem. We have to go negative and/or ensure that there are cheap enough technologies that developing countries can use that don't pollute. At least I see this as a more humane alternative than shutting down other countries growing economies. IDK about you.

aeouaoea123123 7y ago
IPCC is a governmental lobby and scientists (worker unit) don't have the final word on their positions. Article 11: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/09/ipcc-principles.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/09/ipcc-princip...

mnm1 7y ago

So all the thousands of scientific studies out there that constantly validate this conclusion are confirmation bias? This is one of the weakest assertions against climate change I've ever heard. It's not even an argument because it doesn't present any reasoning or evidence. This kind of weak thinking is why we haven't made progress on this issue. Hard to believe this is the top comment here considering the levels of education on this hn.

aeouaoea123123 7y ago

That would also be the opinion of Chief UN Scientist, calling Climate Crisis Narrative “Religious Extremism”: http://co2coalition.org/2019/09/27/chief-un-climate-scientist-calls-the-climate-crisis-narrative-religious-extremism/ http://co2coalition.org/2019/09/27/chief-un-climate-scientis...