2 ms·

How about this: let's nobody ever say 'the science is settled' about anything. I'm fine with that. What about instead we use confidence interval logic, and sa

How about this: let's nobody ever say 'the science is settled' about anything. I'm fine with that. What about instead we use confidence interval logic, and say things like: 'With extremely high confidence we think that carbon emissions from humans are causing climate change.' You might not agree with that statement either, but it gets us over this non-productive pedantry and into an actionable discussion. Let's try it out: is human nutrition and metabolism settled? Nope. Do you want to feed your child a diet of 100% JIF peanut butter and candy corns until it is? I'm guessing not. We don't need to get to settled. We just need to stop reasoning backward from the conclusion we want to be true. Especially when the consequences for things are as high as they are.

msandford 12y ago
Correct, I'm not sure that I do. There's a lot of research into what CO2 is doing, and a lot of people think it MUST be CO2. Where are all the other papers talking about how it can't be (or might be) refrigerants? I saw one paper saying that refrigerant concentrations and increasing temperatures are correlated and that author got excoriated as a "denier". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_refrigerants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_refrigerants You'll notice on that list that there are numbers for the "Net 100 year GWP" which basically means how much more a particular substance could cause heating versus CO2, which has an index of 1. You'll notice that there are a LOT of compounds on the list and numbers in excess of 100 are common, and in excess of 1000 are too. I've looked up a couple and a couple of them have non-trivial atmospheric concentrations. If something has 1/1000 the concentration of CO2 and a GWP number of 10x CO2 then it would contribute 1% as much. Over a list of about 1000 refrigerants if they all managed to be 1% (this is a stretch I know!) then you could get 10x the warming from refrigerants as from CO2. I might argue that you've already reached the conclusion that you want to (we gotta do something), and are reasoning backwards from there (carbon emissions are the cause) yourself. As another example, a lot of people think this project is funded by oil companies and employs professional climate deniers. http://www.surfacestations.org/ http://www.surfacestations.org/ Why? Because they have the audacity to try and make sure that the temperatures gathered from weather stations aren't accidentally biased. I personally think that's MORE important to the analysis than anything else you could do, because if the raw data's no good your conclusions are also no good. Put a bunch of crap detectors in the LHC and you can find whatever particle you want. But physicists don't do that do they?
- shanusmagnus 12y ago
  Dude, I promise you that the reality I want to be true is not one where we have fucked up the earth's climate. I will only reiterate that if 1000 brain surgeons say X, you should probably believe X unless you have very particular reasons to believe you are way smarter than all of them and know things about brain surgery that they don't know. And of course once in a great while that happens. There was a guy who first said that the earth was not flat, and all the other learned folks thought he was daft and then probably set him on fire or something. However, I have zero evidence to believe this accounts for any of the variance in the current moment in time, with climate, immunization, any of it. A far simpler explanation will do the trick, as mentioned in my original msg.
  - msandford 12y ago
    Yeah I hear you loud and clear. I get it. You believe this to be true, and/or that the confidence interval is very tight. I think the confidence interval is large enough that "warming is caused by CO2 and we gotta stop" is plausible but not proven yet. How on earth do I have the arrogance to say this? 1. I'm trained as an engineer and a scientist. I've read a lot of papers and I've got a good grasp of significance. 2. I've seen experts be wrong before and I understand a lot of psychology to where I understand how they can be both wrong and fervently believe they're not. It took me two days to convince a biology professor (PhD) that he was performing a simple calculation incorrectly and that it was skewing all his results. He was doing log(A)/log(B) instead of log(A/B). It's the first rule: https://www.biogazelle.com/seven-tips-bio-statistical-analysis-gene-expression-data https://www.biogazelle.com/seven-tips-bio-statistical-analys... 3. Big models of big complex systems can have lots of interlinkages that aren't always apparent. If I let you analyze a Honda engine and come up with a model for it, if the engine never revved above I think 3000rpm you'd make a great model and have really high confidence that it was highly predictive. Then when revved to 6k and the engine diverged from the model you'd flip out and not understand what's going on until I told you that the engine has two different camshaft profiles and it can change between them. To you, who has only ever known that an engine has one camshaft profile and that it's fixed, this is madness! I hope this analogy makes it clear that I don't think there's a big conspiracy but rather than a lot of people who are very earnest and very well meaning can get the wrong result through systematic problems that aren't immediately apparent. I also think that some of those people might in their head say "look even if this isn't true, the risk that it COULD be true is so great -- I mean it's the whole planet! -- that we need to solve this problem anyhow" and then go ahead with that. And then they'll get extra impassioned because now they're on a mission to save the world! Can you imagine how motivating that would be? The problem is that it seems like there's no downside: we fix CO2 and everything's great even if we didn't strictly speaking need to. The problem is that there is in fact a downside, a huge burden on everyone on the planet because we don't yet have cheap, reliable alternative energy sources. The first world only developed because of energy and it seems pretty shitty to deny the 3rd world the chance to develop because we don't want Venice to sink. Personally I think that if you gave me the choice, to sink Venice and a few other cities and to bring the whole developing world up to developed world standards, that's a very tough choice. Is our art and investment in buildings more important than their lives? Further the idea that tipping points exist which will catastrophically damage the climate is fair, but nobody's looking at it the other way either. Maybe there's some other linkage which will actually start to make the Earth shed heat faster once the temperature goes up three degrees. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#mediaviewer/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#mediaviewer/... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#mediaviewer/File:EPICA_temperature_plot.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#mediaviewer/... If these are accurate, then the Earth's climate is actually VERY stable and there must be restraining forces as well as tipping points.

msandford 12y ago

Correct, I'm not sure that I do. There's a lot of research into what CO2 is doing, and a lot of people think it MUST be CO2. Where are all the other papers talking about how it can't be (or might be) refrigerants? I saw one paper saying that refrigerant concentrations and increasing temperatures are correlated and that author got excoriated as a "denier". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_refrigerants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_refrigerants You'll notice on that list that there are numbers for the "Net 100 year GWP" which basically means how much more a particular substance could cause heating versus CO2, which has an index of 1. You'll notice that there are a LOT of compounds on the list and numbers in excess of 100 are common, and in excess of 1000 are too. I've looked up a couple and a couple of them have non-trivial atmospheric concentrations. If something has 1/1000 the concentration of CO2 and a GWP number of 10x CO2 then it would contribute 1% as much. Over a list of about 1000 refrigerants if they all managed to be 1% (this is a stretch I know!) then you could get 10x the warming from refrigerants as from CO2. I might argue that you've already reached the conclusion that you want to (we gotta do something), and are reasoning backwards from there (carbon emissions are the cause) yourself. As another example, a lot of people think this project is funded by oil companies and employs professional climate deniers. http://www.surfacestations.org/ http://www.surfacestations.org/ Why? Because they have the audacity to try and make sure that the temperatures gathered from weather stations aren't accidentally biased. I personally think that's MORE important to the analysis than anything else you could do, because if the raw data's no good your conclusions are also no good. Put a bunch of crap detectors in the LHC and you can find whatever particle you want. But physicists don't do that do they?

shanusmagnus 12y ago
Dude, I promise you that the reality I want to be true is not one where we have fucked up the earth's climate. I will only reiterate that if 1000 brain surgeons say X, you should probably believe X unless you have very particular reasons to believe you are way smarter than all of them and know things about brain surgery that they don't know. And of course once in a great while that happens. There was a guy who first said that the earth was not flat, and all the other learned folks thought he was daft and then probably set him on fire or something. However, I have zero evidence to believe this accounts for any of the variance in the current moment in time, with climate, immunization, any of it. A far simpler explanation will do the trick, as mentioned in my original msg.
- msandford 12y ago
  Yeah I hear you loud and clear. I get it. You believe this to be true, and/or that the confidence interval is very tight. I think the confidence interval is large enough that "warming is caused by CO2 and we gotta stop" is plausible but not proven yet. How on earth do I have the arrogance to say this? 1. I'm trained as an engineer and a scientist. I've read a lot of papers and I've got a good grasp of significance. 2. I've seen experts be wrong before and I understand a lot of psychology to where I understand how they can be both wrong and fervently believe they're not. It took me two days to convince a biology professor (PhD) that he was performing a simple calculation incorrectly and that it was skewing all his results. He was doing log(A)/log(B) instead of log(A/B). It's the first rule: https://www.biogazelle.com/seven-tips-bio-statistical-analysis-gene-expression-data https://www.biogazelle.com/seven-tips-bio-statistical-analys... 3. Big models of big complex systems can have lots of interlinkages that aren't always apparent. If I let you analyze a Honda engine and come up with a model for it, if the engine never revved above I think 3000rpm you'd make a great model and have really high confidence that it was highly predictive. Then when revved to 6k and the engine diverged from the model you'd flip out and not understand what's going on until I told you that the engine has two different camshaft profiles and it can change between them. To you, who has only ever known that an engine has one camshaft profile and that it's fixed, this is madness! I hope this analogy makes it clear that I don't think there's a big conspiracy but rather than a lot of people who are very earnest and very well meaning can get the wrong result through systematic problems that aren't immediately apparent. I also think that some of those people might in their head say "look even if this isn't true, the risk that it COULD be true is so great -- I mean it's the whole planet! -- that we need to solve this problem anyhow" and then go ahead with that. And then they'll get extra impassioned because now they're on a mission to save the world! Can you imagine how motivating that would be? The problem is that it seems like there's no downside: we fix CO2 and everything's great even if we didn't strictly speaking need to. The problem is that there is in fact a downside, a huge burden on everyone on the planet because we don't yet have cheap, reliable alternative energy sources. The first world only developed because of energy and it seems pretty shitty to deny the 3rd world the chance to develop because we don't want Venice to sink. Personally I think that if you gave me the choice, to sink Venice and a few other cities and to bring the whole developing world up to developed world standards, that's a very tough choice. Is our art and investment in buildings more important than their lives? Further the idea that tipping points exist which will catastrophically damage the climate is fair, but nobody's looking at it the other way either. Maybe there's some other linkage which will actually start to make the Earth shed heat faster once the temperature goes up three degrees. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#mediaviewer/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#mediaviewer/... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#mediaviewer/File:EPICA_temperature_plot.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#mediaviewer/... If these are accurate, then the Earth's climate is actually VERY stable and there must be restraining forces as well as tipping points.