8 ms·

Florida and the Science Who Must Not Be Named

69 points by cryptoz 12y ago

adamc 12y ago
Uprated because the creative workarounds ("If so, this anonymous dreadfulness would, scientists say...") made me laugh, and point to the absurdity of banning language.
phkahler 12y ago
>> It has been nine years since Florida was hit by a proper hurricane. Could that be a coincidence? Sure. Or it could be because of … something. Remember when we had that record hurricane season and it was blamed on ... something. And we were supposed to have a lot more in the future because of ... something. These people have to stop blaming everything on something. It's warmer, it's colder, record hurricane season, no hurricane in 9 years, everything is always blamed on ... something. And then they wonder why there are people who don't believe them.
- analyst74 12y ago
  Yeah, the best way to stop people from believing ...something (or anything), is not to ban the word, but attribute everything to it.
  - neonhomer 12y ago
    Or change something to something else when the first one doesn't follow actual data!
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  Yeah, but even if nobody in a field blames everything on something, as long as many people have a propensity to investigate if something was because of something and publish, then it ends up looking to the uninitiated that the field is blaming everything on something even when it isn't.
ryanackley 12y ago
Coastal Floridian checking in. I don't deny global warming but at the moment there is no widespread immediate threat to property caused by rising sea levels where I live. Not to say there won't be in a generation or so. The more immediate threat is the environment effects of overpopulation and pollution in the waterways. I remember fishing in the lagoon by my house when I was a kid and the water being super clear and full of fish. Now, it's been overfished; you can only catch undesirable bottom feeder type fish. It's also a constant brown caused by runoff from residential areas.
- jstalin 12y ago
  I don't see any acceleration in sea level increases. It's been happening for a long time. http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8724580 http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.s...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - johnpowell 12y ago
    I think it might have been about how you only seem concerned about yourself.
triangleman 12y ago
>the-gaseous-agent-known-to-store-energy-and-slowly-release-it-over-time water vapor?
- bcg1 12y ago
  the sun?
- pdx 12y ago
  We don't talk about water vapor. Ever. OK?
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  Water vapor is a much larger contributor to the greenhouse effect than CO2. But it also cycles through the atmosphere on the order of weeks. So if we were to accidentally increase the atmospheric concentration of water vapor, we'd be out of trouble in a couple of weeks after the excess rained out. Carbon cycles through the atmosphere on the order of centuries. So if we put too much CO2 in the atmosphere we have to live with the consequences for what will seem to us like a long time. That's why people focus on CO2 as the "climate change gas."
daphneokeefe 12y ago
The science who must not be named is climate change.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- neonhomer 12y ago
  Don't you mean global warming... or is it cooling now?
dlo83 12y ago
Banning language is doubleplus ungood.
- GolfyMcG 12y ago
  I get this reference! Just finished 1984 a few weeks ago!
- ptaipale 12y ago
  Well, in many cases banning language or words is considered quite the right thing to do. Different ends of the political spectrum just want to do away with different words or phrases. Just consider how embarrassed Benedict Cumberbatch was when he accidentally used two words in wrong order ("colored people" is insulting, "people of color" is okay).
morganvachon 12y ago
My wife and I visited the Tellus Museum in North Georgia yesterday, and the planetarium presentation we watched did a great job of calling out climate change denial for the absurdity that it is. I'd imagine that the moral of the video flew over the heads of most of the children in attendance, but I'd like to think that it smacked their parents right in the head. Anyone with two neurons to rub together can see that the world's atmospheric and climate patterns are changing rapidly and drastically, and for the worse. I hear so many deniers claiming that "the Earth is a big place, it was here long before us and will be long after" and "it is a self-healing organism, we can't really be harming it!" and I just have to shake my head at their ability to dismiss something that's right in their faces. As the video we watched said, human industrialization pours 100 times as much CO2 into the atmosphere as all the volcanoes on Earth, and the volcano emissions themselves do modify climate patterns in a measurable way. Basically, we're accelerating this planet's transition into something resembling Venus.
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  Climate doom is as silly a dogma as climate denial. Hyperbole has poisoned the debate on both fringes, the center is much more reasonable but not as exciting as indignant outrage.
  - zzalpha 12y ago
    Well, the trouble is, even the "center" positions are pretty scary. Conservative projections of sea level rise leave Florida inundated. So is all life on the planet going to be destroyed as a result of global warming? No, of course not. Life is far too resilient for that. Are humans going to wipe themselves out? Doubtful. We're remarkably adaptable animals. But it's gonna be pretty frickin' miserable for a lot of people, particularly the 40% of people who live within 37 miles of a coastline.
    - happyscrappy 12y ago
      You make my point for me, 40% of the people will suffer, no citation necessary. This is not science.
p_eter_p 12y ago
Climate change denial reminds me of Lysenkoism. The facts must serve the ideology, and if they don't then it is the facts that are in error. The obvious solution, then, is to ban talking about the facts.
- zzalpha 12y ago
  I really liked John Oliver's take on this. The term "Climate Change" (edit: specifically as part of the public discourse on the topic) is an invention of the American right wing, in an attempt to rename "Global Warming" so as to make it sound less alarming. On the one hand it worked. The Senate, this year, happily passed a resolution that "climate change is real and not a hoax", but of course Republican reps gleefully pointed out that, of course the climate changes, no one is disputing that... But now that "Climate Change" is, to the public, basically just "Global Warming", Florida is now working to ban the very term their political wing invented. The schadenfreude is strong in this one.
  - treerock 12y ago
    Except "climate change" was in use in scientific papers back in 1979 and defined as "a long-term change in the Earth’s climate, or of a region on Earth", including "global warming" and other changes. I doubt the American right wing influenced Mr Charney in his naming conventions. http://pmm.nasa.gov/education/articles/whats-name-global-warming-vs-climate-change http://pmm.nasa.gov/education/articles/whats-name-global-war...
    - zzalpha 12y ago
      How language is used in studies, versus how it's used colloquially, are two different things. The use of the term "climate change" as part of the public discourse (as opposed to scientific discourse) is as a result of a right wing PR campaign in the 1980s.
  - CWuestefeld 12y ago
    I don't think it was the Right that changed the terminology. In fact, it's my impression that it was the environmentalists. It was in response to the ironic questions "if it's global warming, then where is this polar vortex coming from?". The new terminology is more accurate.
venomsnake 12y ago
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Bugs offered solution some 60 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiTM2HQ0g98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiTM2HQ0g98 Anyway right now it is global warming or Cthulhu ... the article describes well both of them
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
ianstallings 12y ago
I say we encourage them, because it is hilarious and I love a good laugh.
teekert 12y ago
But if it is so absurd then why have we switched from "global warming" (oops maybe not a good term) to "climate change" (oops climate always changes) to "extreme weather"? And why do we suddenly have superstorms? Because the storms are not sufficiently bad to be called hurricanes? Being in science has made me very sceptical of a lot of science, especially science that is hyped and suddenly has a lot of money to divide among participating scientists. Publish-or-perish is very perverse stimulus. And even here I see things like F-ing republicans. He man, we are supposed to be skeptical, you know, skeptic magazine is for the "in crowd", right!? But not of human induced climate change, noooo... And heaven forbid don't mention that you think things will solve itself with better nuclear reactors, solar power and such, Nooo, we are a bad species, we are a tumor. Even though we solved acidic rain and the hole in the ozon layer. You know that 99% (scientist agree) is actually 97% of the scientists that express an opinion at all (about 33%)! From: http://m.iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article http://m.iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article "We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW (anthropogenic global warming), 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming." ... "Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming." Edit: Yes this post is a bit of an emotional rant but I hate how being a skeptic is bad depending on the subject.
- pyre 12y ago
  > Even though we solved acidic rain and the hole in the ozon layer. You realize that these were situations that we caused, right? Messing things up and then cleaning up our mess doesn't make us some sort of super race of benevolent beings.
  - teekert 12y ago
    The point is that it should be ok to be skeptical but it seems that climate change has become a religious debate with believers and non-believers. the science is not all that black-white. And even if it were I'd still recommend people to be skeptical and wonder "from where the money comes." We know now that many of the published models overestimated the rising temperatures. The governments are changing policies based on these faulty models. There are real and bad consequences from these changed policies. Meanwhile politicians don't understand climate science at all. It is a dangerous situation. I just want to say that there is reason to be optimistic. In the 80s I had kids in class crying in their beds at night over the hole in the ozone layer. Images in my head of skin cancers everywhere... I'd rather put some nicer images in the heads om my children. Sure they should appreciate nature but it is better to work on nuclear fusion than spending energy on the banning of fossil fuels and get that ridiculous situation you have in the US where you waste precious soil on ethanol "bio"fuels. Or this situation in Europe where you can get monstrously large vehicles on the cheap (you pay less taxes) because they can drive some kilometers on a crappy electrical engine before switching to gasoline. Meanwhile I can't be a critic of climate change without getting a retard or f-ing republican stamp on my forehead (I see that that guy deleted his comment by the way).
rimunroe 12y ago
Coming from a family of scientists and having a background in science as well, it's a bit terrifying (but not surprising) how many skeptics of anthropogenic climate change (or of the extent and severity of its effects) there are here. There are a few really good posts in here making good points about climate science, but there are also a bunch of really dishearteningly poorly informed comments too. It's dismaying to see and then to be reminded that the US populace in general is even more skeptical of the conclusions of experts, which pretty much all point at a very bleak picture of the future--a picture which keeps being adjusted to be more bleak, since so little action is being taken to rectify the problem.
- vixen99 12y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.orgwiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming https://en.wikipedia.orgwiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the.... ‘Dishearteningly poorly informed bunch’, are they?
  - rimunroe 12y ago
    Yes, they are. ...But I wasn't referring to that list, I was referring to the people commenting on here. Also, a representative list of scientists who do not oppose the mainstream view of climate change would be far longer (note the chart on the side), and also include far more people who actually study climate change.
  - adamc 12y ago
    This is misleading (your link is broken, btw -- needs a slash between org and wiki). Before the listing it says: "These scientists have said that it is not possible to project global climate accurately enough to justify the ranges projected for temperature and sea-level rise over the next century. They may not conclude specifically that the current IPCC projections are either too high or too low, but that the projections are likely to be inaccurate due to inadequacies of current global climate modeling." So we don't know that they disagree with global warming, just that they think the projections are too inaccurate.

69 points by cryptoz 12y ago

adamc 12y ago

Uprated because the creative workarounds ("If so, this anonymous dreadfulness would, scientists say...") made me laugh, and point to the absurdity of banning language.

phkahler 12y ago

>> It has been nine years since Florida was hit by a proper hurricane. Could that be a coincidence? Sure. Or it could be because of … something. Remember when we had that record hurricane season and it was blamed on ... something. And we were supposed to have a lot more in the future because of ... something. These people have to stop blaming everything on something. It's warmer, it's colder, record hurricane season, no hurricane in 9 years, everything is always blamed on ... something. And then they wonder why there are people who don't believe them.

analyst74 12y ago
Yeah, the best way to stop people from believing ...something (or anything), is not to ban the word, but attribute everything to it.
- neonhomer 12y ago
  Or change something to something else when the first one doesn't follow actual data!
lotsofmangos 12y ago
Yeah, but even if nobody in a field blames everything on something, as long as many people have a propensity to investigate if something was because of something and publish, then it ends up looking to the uninitiated that the field is blaming everything on something even when it isn't.

ryanackley 12y ago

Coastal Floridian checking in. I don't deny global warming but at the moment there is no widespread immediate threat to property caused by rising sea levels where I live. Not to say there won't be in a generation or so. The more immediate threat is the environment effects of overpopulation and pollution in the waterways. I remember fishing in the lagoon by my house when I was a kid and the water being super clear and full of fish. Now, it's been overfished; you can only catch undesirable bottom feeder type fish. It's also a constant brown caused by runoff from residential areas.

jstalin 12y ago
I don't see any acceleration in sea level increases. It's been happening for a long time. http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8724580 http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.s...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- johnpowell 12y ago
  I think it might have been about how you only seem concerned about yourself.

triangleman 12y ago

>the-gaseous-agent-known-to-store-energy-and-slowly-release-it-over-time water vapor?

bcg1 12y ago
the sun?
pdx 12y ago
We don't talk about water vapor. Ever. OK?
snowwrestler 12y ago
Water vapor is a much larger contributor to the greenhouse effect than CO2. But it also cycles through the atmosphere on the order of weeks. So if we were to accidentally increase the atmospheric concentration of water vapor, we'd be out of trouble in a couple of weeks after the excess rained out. Carbon cycles through the atmosphere on the order of centuries. So if we put too much CO2 in the atmosphere we have to live with the consequences for what will seem to us like a long time. That's why people focus on CO2 as the "climate change gas."

daphneokeefe 12y ago

The science who must not be named is climate change.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
neonhomer 12y ago
Don't you mean global warming... or is it cooling now?

dlo83 12y ago

Banning language is doubleplus ungood.

GolfyMcG 12y ago
I get this reference! Just finished 1984 a few weeks ago!
ptaipale 12y ago
Well, in many cases banning language or words is considered quite the right thing to do. Different ends of the political spectrum just want to do away with different words or phrases. Just consider how embarrassed Benedict Cumberbatch was when he accidentally used two words in wrong order ("colored people" is insulting, "people of color" is okay).

morganvachon 12y ago

My wife and I visited the Tellus Museum in North Georgia yesterday, and the planetarium presentation we watched did a great job of calling out climate change denial for the absurdity that it is. I'd imagine that the moral of the video flew over the heads of most of the children in attendance, but I'd like to think that it smacked their parents right in the head. Anyone with two neurons to rub together can see that the world's atmospheric and climate patterns are changing rapidly and drastically, and for the worse. I hear so many deniers claiming that "the Earth is a big place, it was here long before us and will be long after" and "it is a self-healing organism, we can't really be harming it!" and I just have to shake my head at their ability to dismiss something that's right in their faces. As the video we watched said, human industrialization pours 100 times as much CO2 into the atmosphere as all the volcanoes on Earth, and the volcano emissions themselves do modify climate patterns in a measurable way. Basically, we're accelerating this planet's transition into something resembling Venus.

happyscrappy 12y ago
Climate doom is as silly a dogma as climate denial. Hyperbole has poisoned the debate on both fringes, the center is much more reasonable but not as exciting as indignant outrage.
- zzalpha 12y ago
  Well, the trouble is, even the "center" positions are pretty scary. Conservative projections of sea level rise leave Florida inundated. So is all life on the planet going to be destroyed as a result of global warming? No, of course not. Life is far too resilient for that. Are humans going to wipe themselves out? Doubtful. We're remarkably adaptable animals. But it's gonna be pretty frickin' miserable for a lot of people, particularly the 40% of people who live within 37 miles of a coastline.
  - happyscrappy 12y ago
    You make my point for me, 40% of the people will suffer, no citation necessary. This is not science.

p_eter_p 12y ago

Climate change denial reminds me of Lysenkoism. The facts must serve the ideology, and if they don't then it is the facts that are in error. The obvious solution, then, is to ban talking about the facts.

zzalpha 12y ago
I really liked John Oliver's take on this. The term "Climate Change" (edit: specifically as part of the public discourse on the topic) is an invention of the American right wing, in an attempt to rename "Global Warming" so as to make it sound less alarming. On the one hand it worked. The Senate, this year, happily passed a resolution that "climate change is real and not a hoax", but of course Republican reps gleefully pointed out that, of course the climate changes, no one is disputing that... But now that "Climate Change" is, to the public, basically just "Global Warming", Florida is now working to ban the very term their political wing invented. The schadenfreude is strong in this one.
- treerock 12y ago
  Except "climate change" was in use in scientific papers back in 1979 and defined as "a long-term change in the Earth’s climate, or of a region on Earth", including "global warming" and other changes. I doubt the American right wing influenced Mr Charney in his naming conventions. http://pmm.nasa.gov/education/articles/whats-name-global-warming-vs-climate-change http://pmm.nasa.gov/education/articles/whats-name-global-war...
  - zzalpha 12y ago
    How language is used in studies, versus how it's used colloquially, are two different things. The use of the term "climate change" as part of the public discourse (as opposed to scientific discourse) is as a result of a right wing PR campaign in the 1980s.
- CWuestefeld 12y ago
  I don't think it was the Right that changed the terminology. In fact, it's my impression that it was the environmentalists. It was in response to the ironic questions "if it's global warming, then where is this polar vortex coming from?". The new terminology is more accurate.

venomsnake 12y ago

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Bugs offered solution some 60 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiTM2HQ0g98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiTM2HQ0g98 Anyway right now it is global warming or Cthulhu ... the article describes well both of them

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

ianstallings 12y ago

I say we encourage them, because it is hilarious and I love a good laugh.

teekert 12y ago

But if it is so absurd then why have we switched from "global warming" (oops maybe not a good term) to "climate change" (oops climate always changes) to "extreme weather"? And why do we suddenly have superstorms? Because the storms are not sufficiently bad to be called hurricanes? Being in science has made me very sceptical of a lot of science, especially science that is hyped and suddenly has a lot of money to divide among participating scientists. Publish-or-perish is very perverse stimulus. And even here I see things like F-ing republicans. He man, we are supposed to be skeptical, you know, skeptic magazine is for the "in crowd", right!? But not of human induced climate change, noooo... And heaven forbid don't mention that you think things will solve itself with better nuclear reactors, solar power and such, Nooo, we are a bad species, we are a tumor. Even though we solved acidic rain and the hole in the ozon layer. You know that 99% (scientist agree) is actually 97% of the scientists that express an opinion at all (about 33%)! From: http://m.iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article http://m.iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article "We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW (anthropogenic global warming), 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming." ... "Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming." Edit: Yes this post is a bit of an emotional rant but I hate how being a skeptic is bad depending on the subject.

pyre 12y ago
> Even though we solved acidic rain and the hole in the ozon layer. You realize that these were situations that we caused, right? Messing things up and then cleaning up our mess doesn't make us some sort of super race of benevolent beings.
- teekert 12y ago
  The point is that it should be ok to be skeptical but it seems that climate change has become a religious debate with believers and non-believers. the science is not all that black-white. And even if it were I'd still recommend people to be skeptical and wonder "from where the money comes." We know now that many of the published models overestimated the rising temperatures. The governments are changing policies based on these faulty models. There are real and bad consequences from these changed policies. Meanwhile politicians don't understand climate science at all. It is a dangerous situation. I just want to say that there is reason to be optimistic. In the 80s I had kids in class crying in their beds at night over the hole in the ozone layer. Images in my head of skin cancers everywhere... I'd rather put some nicer images in the heads om my children. Sure they should appreciate nature but it is better to work on nuclear fusion than spending energy on the banning of fossil fuels and get that ridiculous situation you have in the US where you waste precious soil on ethanol "bio"fuels. Or this situation in Europe where you can get monstrously large vehicles on the cheap (you pay less taxes) because they can drive some kilometers on a crappy electrical engine before switching to gasoline. Meanwhile I can't be a critic of climate change without getting a retard or f-ing republican stamp on my forehead (I see that that guy deleted his comment by the way).

rimunroe 12y ago

Coming from a family of scientists and having a background in science as well, it's a bit terrifying (but not surprising) how many skeptics of anthropogenic climate change (or of the extent and severity of its effects) there are here. There are a few really good posts in here making good points about climate science, but there are also a bunch of really dishearteningly poorly informed comments too. It's dismaying to see and then to be reminded that the US populace in general is even more skeptical of the conclusions of experts, which pretty much all point at a very bleak picture of the future--a picture which keeps being adjusted to be more bleak, since so little action is being taken to rectify the problem.

vixen99 12y ago
https://en.wikipedia.orgwiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming https://en.wikipedia.orgwiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the.... ‘Dishearteningly poorly informed bunch’, are they?
- rimunroe 12y ago
  Yes, they are. ...But I wasn't referring to that list, I was referring to the people commenting on here. Also, a representative list of scientists who do not oppose the mainstream view of climate change would be far longer (note the chart on the side), and also include far more people who actually study climate change.
- adamc 12y ago
  This is misleading (your link is broken, btw -- needs a slash between org and wiki). Before the listing it says: "These scientists have said that it is not possible to project global climate accurately enough to justify the ranges projected for temperature and sea-level rise over the next century. They may not conclude specifically that the current IPCC projections are either too high or too low, but that the projections are likely to be inaccurate due to inadequacies of current global climate modeling." So we don't know that they disagree with global warming, just that they think the projections are too inaccurate.