8 ms·
With these sorts of articles now I'm never quite sure what to believe. Now before you jump in to mock me, it's just that I don't have time to keep really up-to
by muppetman 15y ago
With these sorts of articles now I'm never quite sure what to believe.
Now before you jump in to mock me, it's just that I don't have time to keep really up-to-date with climate change anymore. Are we really getting warmer? Are we cooling? What's causing it?
For each article I read that tells me one thing, a few days later another comes out and tells me the previous one was wrong and here's why.
I hope that this article's right and being New Scientist I have a lot more faith in it. I just wish I had more time to understand all the factors of climate change for myself.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- muppetman 15y agoAnd that's what it seems like to me. But everyone writes and discusses it so authoritatively that you almost feel silly if you question it. In computer science, no one seems to say "This is a fact" unless they know (or can prove) it is. Doesn't seem to hold true for climate change, which is what frustrates me.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- narag 15y agoIn computer science, no one seems to say "This is a fact" unless they know (or can prove) it is. If you mean theoretical papers and such, you're probably right. But that's not the case for practical work. Take a look to the "ORM is an Antipattern" story, currently in the front page..
- marknutter 15y ago"But everyone writes and discusses it so authoritatively that you almost feel silly if you question it." Funny, that's exactly how I feel about global warming.
- jessedhillon 15y agoGuessing? How so, by whom, and about what? The scientific consensus is that humans have had a significant, adverse impact on the global climate -- this conclusion is presented with scientific certainty. There is a complete lack of significant dissent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change#Statements_by_dissenting_organizations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_c...
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jessedhillon 15y ago> Consensus, although comforting, is irrelevant in hard science. Particularly so when uncertainty is high, as in climate change modelling. When you say "irrelevant," do you mean to say that the attempts of thousands of scientists to use the scientific method to repeat findings which constitute the body of research -- and consequently fail to falsify the theory of anthropogenic global warming -- do you mean to say that this is irrelevant? Consensus is not merely opinion -- it's opinion informed by the results of experimental and observational science. I'm not sure what else you consider to be "hard" science. EDIT: okay, this guy mrvc deleted everything he posted here, which were quite a few comments to the effect that the theory of global warming is comprised of guesses, drastic underestimation of uncertainty in the data, and propaganda.
- guelo 15y agoFUD. That's the point of the decades long propaganda campaign by the energy companies. If they can't convince you outright they at least want to create the confusion and doubt.
- bad_user 15y agoWorking surprisingly well too.
- oelewapperke 15y agoProblem is, of course, that there are serious amounts of lunacy on both sides. The recent tornadoes, for example, are NOT the result of global warming. Neither is Katrina or any other historical event. Unfortunately, it's very obvious that the truth does not lie "in the middle". Also what this article does is so patently stupid it strains credulity. Event A will affect 100 variables and, by itself, cause a temperature drop of 0.3 degrees. Event B will affect the SAME 100 variables and, by itself, cause a temperature increase of 2 degrees. So now let's ignore all those variables and say "that'll give 1.7 degrees". That's NOT how it works, you have to simulate the effects completely, and then make an entirely new prediction of the combined effects. And, frankly, given the success rate of IPCC predictions (they've been making them since 1990 you know) ... I don't know how any scientist can claim with a straight face their predictions are reasonable. (we're outside their 95% confidence interval for their predictions for 1990, 1995 and 2000, and we're very close to leaving the 95% interval for the 2005 report too, given 1 prediction per 5 years and 3 mistakes already ... how exactly is this "95%" thing reasonable ? Each of these reports gave predictions 100 years out, and none of their predictions have happened after a mere 10 years (BTW: in all cases so far, it's cooler than predicted. I'm not saying the climate hasn't warmed)
- Typhon 15y agoDoubt is a very good thing. It's propaganda versus propaganda now. I will never forgive whoever has made global warming a political issue, because it means debating rationally about it has become impossible. Climate is a very complicated thing, especially when studied on a planetary scale. It's a bunch of chaotic parameters, and any prediction about it is likely to be wrong, or imprecise. Much of science works that way, but problems arise when you need to make political decisions about such matters. You can't make large-scale decisions that will affect millions based on flimsy predictions that may turn out to be wrong.
- Joakal 15y agoWell, other people think it's bullshit here so far without any sources. Here's some scientific stuff: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Scientific_op... It's unlikely you can understand all the factors of climate change since there's far more variables of Earth than most scientists can comprehend so they could only study and make scientific theory based understandings. I think it's best to leave it to the academics.
- devijvers 15y agoI would be happy to leave it to academics if they hadn't transformed into a political body. Too late.
- pedalpete 15y agoAs guelo points out, this is part of the propaganda campaigns,but who's propaganda. I say go with your gut and do what's right. We know that burning gasoline and coal releases carbon and are dirty. We know we should be clean. Strip mining, not clean. Recycling, clean. Wind looks cleaner than a smokestack, go wind. Solar, well, if the panels are made from plastics are they really cleaner than gas? I think so, go solar, etc. etc. etc. It gets confusing when you get down to the level of ethanol, but I think for the most part you know in your gut what's right.
- dodo53 15y agoThe problem is that climate change and green energy are so complicated and political, it's hard to tell what is propaganda (and there's strong incentives in many different directions for the results to come out in a given direction). Ethanol used to sound like a good idea; now it sounds like it's mostly a corn/sugar-lobby way of getting money and not practical (although I'm sure it's not that straightforward). For 'wind looks cleaner' - the Register argues that mostly it'll end up making energy more expensive without being much cleaner (in this one case in the UK), due to perverse incentives: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/14/national_grid_2020/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/14/national_grid_2020/ I think 'gut feeling' is exactly what we don't need. Things are not always intuitively obvious.
- david927 15y agoclimate change and green energy are so complicated and political There isn't much complicated about it climate change: the full consensus is that it's happening because we're burning too much oil. The politics? Less than 10 years ago, the world's largest industry was oil when the price was roughly stable at around $20 a barrel. Today a barrel costs $100. For something the world consumes at a thousand barrels a second, that's huge. At the price a couple weeks ago, it was a better investment to buy the world's biggest commodity than Google when it IPO'd. You might want to read that again. Climate change is a force of urgency in the switch away from oil to green energy. You can be sure it will be fought every step of the way with every tool available.
- themal 15y agoThe original article on Hacker News - from The Register - was a bit sensational, that's just their style, a tech tabloid. To be honest, I don't think sun spots were exclusively to blame for Dickens era of cold weather in Europe. Wasn't there some talk about the Atlantic belt faltering as well? Perhaps the jet stream moved too.
- mturmon 15y agoYou are right that it is not known for a fact that the Maunder sunspot minimum was responsible for the Little Ice Age recorded in Europe and elsewhere. It started out as an interesting speculation and has remained there. This was earlier than Dickens' time -- it was mid 1600s. Galileo and others first saw and drew sunspots in 1610 (due to the invention of the telescope). So their disappearance happened very close in time to their first definitive sighting (they had been seen earlier, but only huge ones, and not clearly, so it was not systematic at all, they were confused with planetary transits). The original article in the Register was trash, actually. Utter trash.
- guscost 15y agoMy conclusion has been that the models are not accurate enough to say with any sort of certainty, since the 90's. It's pretty easy to decide when you look at how they're supposed to work from a physical perspective.
- nl 15y agoI've found http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php quite useful. It lists all the skeptic questions, and investigates the science that relates to each one in some depth - at either "Basic" or "Intermediate" levels.
- Produce 15y agoI decided to take some time and read the sections on the climate being a chaotic system and, frankly, I'm still thoroughly unconvinced that it isn't one. The main argument against it being a chaotic system is that the climate is a boundary condition system, determined by it's input and output energy. This does not satisfy me as an explanation because the sun, being the main input, is chaotic in it's energy output, as demonstrated by the unpredictability of the current lull. So if we can't predict the main input, why do we think that we can predict the behavior of something that has a chaotic input? It does not compute. All of these discussion really miss the point though, which is that pollution of our environment is generally a bad idea. In other words, I agree with the sentiment but not the rationale.
- grannyg00se 15y agoI don't think any legitimate study disputes the fact that the planet is getting warmer and polar ice is melting en masse. What is in dispute are the reasons why, and what to do about it, if anything.
- oelewapperke 15y agoImho, what's mainly in dispute is what the effect of different actions will be. An example would be, what would the effect be of stopping CO2 production alltogether ? Because the answer is so very different from what the politicians would want it to be : stopping co2 production will have a tiny effect on global warming, or maybe none at all. Global warming went into a feedback loop over 100 years ago, and while stopping co2 production might slow it down, it will not stop it, nor will it reverse any of it's effects. Those glaciers are gone until the next ice age. Deal with it. It might be a good idea to pray you don't get to see them again in your lifetime, because you won't like what they bring with them.
- nice1 15y agoThe last statement I must disagree with. NS prints utter crap so often that it is safe to ignore it completely.
- lupatus 15y agoSince you don't have time to get mired in this debate, you may just want to dress in layers.
- Tycho 15y agoThe problem I have is the whole approach of the warmists, going beyond the basic question of are carbon emissions changing the climate. It seems to me that nobody can show particularly convincingly that current/historical CO2 emissions are affecting the climate, hence why it's always 'the consensus is that....' rather than 'paper X conclusively showed that...'. But starting from an already shaky premise, we then move on to far shakier territory. Predicting how much the climate will warm, how much we'll have to reduce emissions by to stop the warmth, things which rely on dubious computer models. And then we get to what the effects will actually be, where the basic assumption that rising sea levels will cause more catastrophe than cap&trade etc is the just the beginning. Global warming becomes a sort of bogeyman, in which any and every undesirable environmental affect can be attributed to AGW. It's like someone just looked through a list of possible warming side-effects and wrote down any imaginable connection they could have to environmental trouble. Mooses disappearing in Canada? Warming. Hurricanes in the carribean? Warming. Famine? Disease? Drought? Overpopulation? Third world poverty? Colder weather in Britain? (we'd really love warmer weather) Warming. Throw in the whole climage-gate scandal ('we admit that we no longer have the original data to show') and the usual 'recursive' nature of public-sector activity ('give us money to do research, and we will get results that show you need to give us more money to do research, and we will get results that show...') It stinks. They want us to globally embrace the arbitrary for policy making. Which, AGW aside, is a horrible precedent to set for the future.
- jbooth 15y agoThe "warmists"? There are numerous studies establishing that the globe is warming with > 95% confidence. The greenhouse effect as a phenomenon is also not debated, nor is the amount of CO2 we've put into the atmosphere. None of these thing above are contested, they're all established facts. It's possible that some other mysterious force is causing the warming, but if that's not the case, then greenhouse gasses are the most reasonable conclusion. I'd posit that advocates of a mysterious other force behind warming have the burden of explaining what it is.
- ChuckMcM 15y agoI collect them. You can really only know who is right after the fact, before that its all 'my model is more accurate than your model' bullshit. I always feel like the 'rational' view point is that the climate will change for any number of reasons, some we control and some we don't. We should be prepared. But folks who have bought into the Global Warming religion (which is to say they stepped away from the science and turned it into a political crusade) if this Solar event causes severe freezing across the northern hemisphere for decades it won't be the political zealots who get hung, it will be innocent bystander scientists, and science in general.
- bh42222 15y agoI you collect them and believe Global Warming is a religion, perhaps you can analyze the data yourself and prove it wrong, just like jgc did: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2010/01/new-version-of-crutem3-and-hadcrut3.html http://www.jgc.org/blog/2010/01/new-version-of-crutem3-and-h...
- ChuckMcM 15y agoI liked jgc's response to people trying to recruit him to the 'anti-warming' side: "I've received yet another email indicating that the author thinks I don't believe man is responsible for global warming. This comes about because of an insidious sort of tribalism that has turned conversations about climate change into a 'you're either with us or against us' situation." This has been my experience as well when I try to discuss the science. People want me to come out as either 'pro-Warming' or 'anti-Warming' and I'm not either. I'm interested in the systems problem that global climate represents.
- MaysonL 15y agoI see lots of evidence of global warming: Arctic sea ice melt, permafrost melt, growing season lengthening, earlier bird migration, bird overwintering, animal range changes, etc. etc. etc. What evidence do you see that it isn't happening?
- ChuckMcM 15y ago