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Most scientists didn’t think much of the idea of a pause, but skeptics started beating the drum so consistently and loudly after a few years after 2001 that the

Most scientists didn’t think much of the idea of a pause, but skeptics started beating the drum so consistently and loudly after a few years after 2001 that the media began asking the question pretty consistently, and the climate science community had to spend time answering the question. There was never some broadly held idea that warming dynamics had paused.

refurb 7y ago
My link has dozens of papers that claim to explain the pause. It wasn’t we think there is a pause, they are already explaining why there was one. I’d say a full issue Nature dedicated to exploring why there was a pause, suggests it was a broadly held idea. That said, if there was no consensus, why is that? Why do some scientists believe there was a pause, while others disagree? Isn’t figuring out whether warning was happening pretty straightforward?
- moultano 7y ago
  > Isn’t figuring out whether warning was happening pretty straightforward? Not exactly. There are two ways that it can be ambiguous: 1. We don't measure the entire earth to measure its temperature, and combining the sensor readings from various sources to get a calibrated total energy content can be difficult. 2. It is difficult to take a time series, and with a short history, decide whether something is a significant deviation from the trend or just random variation. Humans instinctively underestimate how often a random sequence of coin flips will have consecutive strings of heads of a given length, and the same tendency causes us to see a "pause" as a deviation from the trend, when it's really just random variation causing a bunch of consecutive heads.
thu2111 7y ago
This is exactly the sort of position that manufactures new climate change skeptics. If there can be disagreement over something as basic as "are temperatures actually going up", then that throws all of climatology into doubt. Global temperature is the question that motivates this field, yet you're arguing here that whether it was going up or stable was merely an "idea" rather than a matter of measuring physical reality. It is absurd that such a basic question is actually a matter of dispute at this point: reading thermometers and averaging them just isn't that difficult compared to what other scientific fields routinely accomplish. There's also an interesting social viewpoint on display: you claim the "climate science community" is a completely separate group from "skeptics" and they only "had" to spend time answering the "question" of a pause due to "beating the drum". Are there no climate scientists skeptical of beliefs in their own field, like there are in every other field of science? If not, why not? Why are people asking obvious questions like "why does it seem temperatures stopped rising" seen as nuisance outsiders rather than fellow scientists seeking the truth? From an outsider's perspective this looks a lot like groupthink. There was never some broadly held idea that warming dynamics had paused. This is not true, as refurb already showed. To spell it out, his [2] link starts by saying: "The United Nations panel of climate science experts mentioned it in a 2013 report, scientists have published more than 200 papers analyzing it, and climate deniers said it was proof that climate change didn't exist, but in reality the global warming pause or hiatus never occurred." Over 200 papers published analysing a pause is clear evidence that this was a broadly held idea. There seems to be a problematic tendency in climatology to try and retroactively rewrite history. Prior disputes or false predictions are recast as "scientists didn't actually believe that" or "scientists weren't actually wrong after all" using dubious, Orwellian style practices. Even temperature records themselves are constantly being rewritten: basic questions like "what was the temperature on date X at location Y" had different answers in the past to what they do now. As another example, elsewhere in this thread [1] the author of the paper we're discussing claims he couldn't find any papers that predicted global cooling. Predictions of a new ice age were widely covered in the media and discussed in the literature in the 1970s. There were global conferences and scientific summits held about it. Embarrassingly, some random Hacker News commentator was able to produce a list of six such papers within an hour of that post being made. What is wrong with climatology? Other fields like physics or medicine don't have problems dealing with their past history of wrong experiments, theories or measurements. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21709263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21709263

refurb 7y ago

My link has dozens of papers that claim to explain the pause. It wasn’t we think there is a pause, they are already explaining why there was one. I’d say a full issue Nature dedicated to exploring why there was a pause, suggests it was a broadly held idea. That said, if there was no consensus, why is that? Why do some scientists believe there was a pause, while others disagree? Isn’t figuring out whether warning was happening pretty straightforward?

moultano 7y ago
> Isn’t figuring out whether warning was happening pretty straightforward? Not exactly. There are two ways that it can be ambiguous: 1. We don't measure the entire earth to measure its temperature, and combining the sensor readings from various sources to get a calibrated total energy content can be difficult. 2. It is difficult to take a time series, and with a short history, decide whether something is a significant deviation from the trend or just random variation. Humans instinctively underestimate how often a random sequence of coin flips will have consecutive strings of heads of a given length, and the same tendency causes us to see a "pause" as a deviation from the trend, when it's really just random variation causing a bunch of consecutive heads.

thu2111 7y ago

This is exactly the sort of position that manufactures new climate change skeptics. If there can be disagreement over something as basic as "are temperatures actually going up", then that throws all of climatology into doubt. Global temperature is the question that motivates this field, yet you're arguing here that whether it was going up or stable was merely an "idea" rather than a matter of measuring physical reality. It is absurd that such a basic question is actually a matter of dispute at this point: reading thermometers and averaging them just isn't that difficult compared to what other scientific fields routinely accomplish. There's also an interesting social viewpoint on display: you claim the "climate science community" is a completely separate group from "skeptics" and they only "had" to spend time answering the "question" of a pause due to "beating the drum". Are there no climate scientists skeptical of beliefs in their own field, like there are in every other field of science? If not, why not? Why are people asking obvious questions like "why does it seem temperatures stopped rising" seen as nuisance outsiders rather than fellow scientists seeking the truth? From an outsider's perspective this looks a lot like groupthink. There was never some broadly held idea that warming dynamics had paused. This is not true, as refurb already showed. To spell it out, his [2] link starts by saying: "The United Nations panel of climate science experts mentioned it in a 2013 report, scientists have published more than 200 papers analyzing it, and climate deniers said it was proof that climate change didn't exist, but in reality the global warming pause or hiatus never occurred." Over 200 papers published analysing a pause is clear evidence that this was a broadly held idea. There seems to be a problematic tendency in climatology to try and retroactively rewrite history. Prior disputes or false predictions are recast as "scientists didn't actually believe that" or "scientists weren't actually wrong after all" using dubious, Orwellian style practices. Even temperature records themselves are constantly being rewritten: basic questions like "what was the temperature on date X at location Y" had different answers in the past to what they do now. As another example, elsewhere in this thread [1] the author of the paper we're discussing claims he couldn't find any papers that predicted global cooling. Predictions of a new ice age were widely covered in the media and discussed in the literature in the 1970s. There were global conferences and scientific summits held about it. Embarrassingly, some random Hacker News commentator was able to produce a list of six such papers within an hour of that post being made. What is wrong with climatology? Other fields like physics or medicine don't have problems dealing with their past history of wrong experiments, theories or measurements. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21709263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21709263