Very interesting 80~minute film on the science and politics of climate change. It decidedly puts forward the sceptical case, that global warming is a real phenomenon but has nothing to do with human activity and CO2, that the Sun is actually responsible for it, that there's a ~conspiracy~ to keep developing countries shitty and dependent and all sorts of other exciting things... I am currently watching part 6 of 8.
Youtube Link:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=u6IPHmJWmDk&mode=related&search=
It was shown on (I think) Channel 4 (UK) last week, and is being shown again on More4 at 22:00, tonight.
If someone asks me my opinion on it, I tell them what I said I tell them. I'm not going to go research it in depth and find out for sure because I don't really care. My opinion on the matter isn't influential or important anyway. I disagree that questioning everything is bad practice, and I don't see how you could possibly equate it to claiming truth where there is none. They're practically negations of eachother. I'm not picking and choosing, and everyone is up to the same standards of questioning from my perspective. You're twisting my words and arguing against things I haven't done.
The point of the "questioning everything" bit is that if you question, say, plate tectonics, or the germ theory of disease, or universal gravity, you're pretty much a kook, and not really a healthily skeptical individual. There are people who disagree with all of those, too, but that's certainly no reason to question the scientific consensus on them.
And if you haven't bothered to inform yourself of the issues, wouldn't it be more honest to say that you do not know enough to take any kind of stance?
To give an admittedly overly dramatic example, would you say you have some doubts about the holocaust, because you haven't seen any evidence of it (let's pretend you haven't, even if you have), and that there are both people who deny it and who believe in it?
you're only a kook to people who assume you've been exposed to convincing evidence. i.e. people who assume skeptical questions have already been answered for you. whats the difference between saying "i dont know, i havent seen sufficient evidence to convince me either way" and "i dont know enough to take a stance"? i do have some doubts about the holocaust, even though i believe it did happen, because i've never seen evidence that could completely convince me that it did. like, if i were on a gameshow where i had the option to decline to answer, and the penalty for being wrong was death, and they knew with certainty, i would say i wasn't sure and decline to answer. there are a lot of uncertainties in life that we just assign answers to for various reasons without complete knowledge of. i wouldn't bet my life that humans are causing global warming or that global warming would be catastrophic, but i wouldn't bet my life that it's the opposite either.
> you're only a kook to people who assume you've been exposed to convincing evidence. i.e. people who assume skeptical questions have already been answered for you.
what
It's perfectly reasonable to ask for evidence. What bugs me about so many self-professed skeptics is that they aren't looking for evidence, because they have no intention of changing their mind.
Holocaust denial is one of the big ones in that area -- no amount of photographs, documents, eye-witness accounts, confessions of nazis, etc. will ever convince them. That doesn't mean that I can't reasonably say "I'm not sure" if I've never looked into the matter myself. If I live in North Korea or Iran where I'm not seeing or hearing the evidence, then I should be a skeptic. It isn't consensus that makes truth, and if all I read and hear says "everyone believes X", that means nothing. I should demand evidence.
People often have agendas for "consensus facts", and therefore will try to convince everyone that the cosensus swings their way. Secondhand smoke having a harmful effect is great for those who want to ban cigarettes (Secondhand smoke actually is harmful), and Marijuana being a "gateway drug" is great for those who want to keep marijuana illegal (this one is more debatable). When I hear that everyone agrees, personally my radar goes off, because there's a good possibility (especially if there's an agenda attached) that this "truth" may not be so much "truth" as "truthiness".
> People often have agendas for "consensus facts", and therefore will try to convince everyone that the cosensus swings their way.
You should remember, though, that while a consensus among the general population might not mean much, it's quite a different thing with a scientific consensus. Not that those aren't ever wrong, but they carry a whole lot more weight, and you need some serious evidence if you are going against those.
More serious than the "global warming theorists just don't want to rock the boat" arguments usually brought up, which are just plain silly.
Freeman Dyson (!) says it's probably bullshit:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge219.html#dysonf
I know I'd trust him over any UN stooge.
Freeman Dyson is not a climate scientist. Most scientists are just as clueless outside their field of expertise as any layman.
Why are you putting him up against a "UN stooge", and not against a real climate scientist?
I've read it before. Well, skimmed it, more like. It's full of inaccuracies. Here's just a few of the general ones:
> The best scientists like to arrange things in an experiment to be as unpredictable as possible, and then they do the experiment to see what will happen. You might say that if something is predictable then it is not science. When I make predictions, I am not speaking as a scientist.
This is complete nonsense, and I would have expected better. The entire point of science is to predict. Experiments are set up to be as predictable as possible, and are then used to judge if those predictions were true or not, and thus if the model that created those predictions was useful or not. Science is nothing but predictions.
I really don't know where on earth that idea even came from.
> The science is inextricably mixed up with politics.
Well, no, the science is not. The science is science. The politics follow from the science, and the other politics fight the science, but the science is still science.
> Everyone agrees that the climate is changing, but there are violently diverging opinions about the causes of change, about the consequences of change, and about possible remedies.
There aren't really any violently diverging opinions about the cause of the changes among climate scientists. Everybody knows it is man-made. There are disagreements about the consequences and possible remedies, and those are mostly about whether it is already too late to do anything.
>>The politics follow from the science
Do they? Or is it the other way around, to the extent that there's any science here at all?
Steven Schneider. Confirmation bias.
Let's assume the science follows from the politics. Consider:
I don't think it matters why a scientist pursues an avenue of research (curiosity, they're paid too, politically inclined, et cetera), provided they actually do science. Unless scientists are performing poorly designed experiments or actively trying to subvert the results, you'll still get results.
Science is science.
> Do they?
Yes. You'd need some pretty extraordinary proof if you want to call an entire field of scientists liars.
Why don't we just let global warming hit? It won't be in my lifetime, so I don't care.
>>182
I take it you don't plan to have children.
It probably won't happen in anyone's lifetime ever.
>>181 an entire field of power hungry leftist stooges, you mean.
Aug 17
"Arctic sea ice shrinks to record low"
"There was less sea ice in the Arctic on Friday than ever before on record, and the melting is continuing, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported."
"Several years ago he would have predicted a complete melt of Arctic sea ice in summer would occur by the year 2070 to 2100, Serreze said. But at the rates now occurring, a complete melt could happen by 2030"
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070818/ap_on_sc/low_ice
You have proof of them being that, then? All of them?
>>186
Why would you even bother replying to a dumbass post like that?
HOLY SHIT THERE IS NO CONSENSUS AFTER ALL!
http://www.dailytech.com/Survey+Less+Than+Half+of+all+Published+Scientists+Endorse+Global+Warming+Theory/article8641.htm
Comprehensive survey of published climate research reveals changing viewpoints
In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the "consensus view," defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes' work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.
Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte recently updated this research. Using the same database and search terms as Oreskes, he examined all papers published from 2004 to February 2007. The results have been submitted to the journal Energy and Environment, of which DailyTech has obtained a pre-publication copy. The figures are surprising.
Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers "implicit" endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no "consensus."
The figures are even more shocking when one remembers the watered-down definition of consensus here. Not only does it not require supporting that man is the "primary" cause of warming, but it doesn't require any belief or support for "catastrophic" global warming. In fact of all papers published in this period (2004 to February 2007), only a single one makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.
These changing viewpoints represent the advances in climate science over the past decade. While today we are even more certain the earth is warming, we are less certain about the root causes. More importantly, research has shown us that -- whatever the cause may be -- the amount of warming is unlikely to cause any great calamity for mankind or the planet itself.
Schulte's survey contradicts the United Nation IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (2007), which gave a figure of "90% likely" man was having an impact on world temperatures. But does the IPCC represent a consensus view of world scientists? Despite media claims of "thousands of scientists" involved in the report, the actual text is written by a much smaller number of "lead authors." The introductory "Summary for Policymakers" -- the only portion usually quoted in the media -- is written not by scientists at all, but by politicians, and approved, word-by-word, by political representatives from member nations. By IPCC policy, the individual report chapters -- the only text actually written by scientists -- are edited to "ensure compliance" with the summary, which is typically published months before the actual report itself.
By contrast, the ISI Web of Science database covers 8,700 journals and publications, including every leading scientific journal in the world.
6% of papers refute the current hypothesis, and that is somehow not a consensus? That's beyond weak.
Here's a hint: Every paper about climate science is not going to be saying "oh by the way climate change is true!" Because it'sa consensus, it is assumed to be true and needs not be explictly mentioned!
Please think a little before spouting off nonsense like that.
Oh, so the other 93% (including the 48% of neutral ones) count as supporting it JUST BECAUSE YOU SAY SO?
THAT is beyond weak.
Science is not about assuming things are true you dipshit.
I'm not the one making any claims about what they do and do not support. It's that article that claims that they don't support the consensus view, which is obviously nonsense.
And of course science is about assuming things to be true. Every model is built on explicit and implicit assumptions. Once there is enough evidence that a model seems to be true and useful, it is assumed to be true except when explicitly attacking it.
Once again, please think.
I'm already thinking. I wish you would try the whole thinking thing sometime instead of parroting IPCC bullshit. You might like it.
I followed you all the way up to "which is obviously nonsense" part. You are very clearly too biased in the OMG MAN DESTROYS EARTH direction to read anything objectively. Open your mind and think about this:
Science is not about assuming something is real. Science is about systematically finding out what's real. There is a big, big difference.
A real scientist would not call someone skeptical about his pet doomsday scenario a "global warming denier" and insist on silencing that skeptic. The Priests of Scary Global Climate Change do it all the time. Hell, YOU do it all the time.
A real scientist would freely share the algorithms in his doomsday simulator so that other scientists can test and verify his findings or fix any logic errors that may be found. The Priests of Scary Global Climate Change hide their weather sim code and insist that everyone believe their findings. Clearly, it worked on you.
A real scientist wouldn't shriek about little things that support his doomsday scenario (such as reporting an antarctic ice shelf collapsing), while ignoring or denouncing anything that doesn't fit into his agenda (such as the heavy snowfalls in central Antarctica that more than make up for the ice shelf's mass).
A real climate scientist doesn't sweep the Medieval Warm Period under the cover while doing his math, ignore the facts that the 1930s were hotter than now, and the world (as much of it as they take temperatures of, anyway) was hotter in 1993 than it has been since.
You've been duped.
> Science is not about assuming something is real. Science is about systematically finding out what's real. There is a big, big difference.
To be a pretentious nut: Pigmaei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident.
If what you said was true, scientists would never have advanced beyond being hit on the head by a proverbial apple.
As to the rest, I'll reserve judgement, although I'd be delighted to be pointed at some peer-reviewed articles on the topic.
> I followed you all the way up to "which is obviously nonsense" part. You are very clearly too biased in the OMG MAN DESTROYS EARTH direction to read anything objectively.
What I am is entirely irrelevant, but I'll answer anyway: No, I am not. I am anything but. I have explained this before, but I was ignored then. I support all kinds of technological progress by mankind. The only thing I care about here is the science, and that science is clearly saying that we'll be in trouble if we keep doing what we are doing.
> A real scientist would not call someone skeptical about his pet doomsday scenario a "global warming denier" and insist on silencing that skeptic.
A scientist would call a person who does not believe in plate tectonics a kook. Similarly, he can criticize a person who does not believe in global warming even when presented with proof of it.
> A real scientist would freely share the algorithms in his doomsday simulator so that other scientists can test and verify his findings or fix any logic errors that may be found.
This sounds like some kind of silly thing you have read about on the internet. Let's have some sources on that.
> A real scientist wouldn't shriek about little things that support his doomsday scenario (such as reporting an antarctic ice shelf collapsing), while ignoring or denouncing anything that doesn't fit into his agenda (such as the heavy snowfalls in central Antarctica that more than make up for the ice shelf's mass).
> A real climate scientist doesn't sweep the Medieval Warm Period under the cover while doing his math, ignore the facts that the 1930s were hotter than now, and the world (as much of it as they take temperatures of, anyway) was hotter in 1993 than it has been since.
You're correct about these, though. Real scientists don't do any of that. As such, I don't know why you bring them up, seeing as how nobody does it.
> A scientist would call a person who does not believe in plate tectonics a kook.
Ironically, the guy who came up with plate tectonics was consider a kook for half a century.
Global warming 'is good and is not our fault'
By Sophie Borland
Last Updated: 12:02pm BST 14/09/2007
Global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon and its effects can even be beneficial, according to two leading researchers.
Recent climate change is not caused by man-made pollution, but is instead part of a 1,500-year cycle of warming and cooling that has happened for the last million years, say the authors of a controversial study.
Dennis Avery, an environmental economist, and Professor Fred Singer, a physicist, have looked at the work of more than 500 scientists and concluded that it is very doubtful that man-made global warming exists.
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They also say that temperature increase is actually a good thing as in the past sudden cool periods have killed twice as many people as warm spells.
Mr Avery, a senior research fellow at the Hudson Institute, an independent US think-tank, said: "Not all of these researchers who doubt man-made climate change would describe themselves as global warming sceptics but the evidence in their studies is there for all to see.
"Two thousand years of published human histories say that the warm periods were good for people.
"It was the harsh, unstable Dark Ages and the Little Ice Age that brought bigger storms, untimely frost, widespread famine, plagues and disease."
In contrast, they say there is evidence that wildlife is flourishing in the current warming cycle with corals, trees, birds, mammals and butterflies adapting well.
In addition, sea-levels are not rising dramatically and storms and droughts have actually been less severe and frequent.
The authors claim that the change is not man-made because the most recent period of global warming took place between 1850 and 1940 when there were far less CO2 emissions than today.
They claim to show strong historical evidence of an entirely natural cycle based on data of floods on the Nile going back 5,000 years.
Evidence is citing showing records of Roman wine production in Britain in the first century AD.
Prof Singer, a specialist in atmospheric physics at the University of Virginia, said: "We have a greenhouse theory with no evidence to support it, except a moderate warming turned into a scare by computer models whose results have never been verified with real-world events.
"The models only reflect the warming, not its cause."
They also say that natural temperature change can be caused by fluctuations in the sun.
The authors spent months analysing scientific reports and papers for their book, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years.
Their aim was to undermine claims made by Al Gore, the former US vice-president, in his film An Inconvenient Truth, that shows the extent of man-made global warming.
Stop trying to bring sense into this.
>>196
Dennis Avery = Hudson Institute.
Hudson Institute = "dedicated to thinking about the future from a contrarian point of view", according to its literature.
Funded by Eli Lilly and Company, Monsanto, DuPont, Dow-Elanco, Sandoz, Ciba-Geigy, ConAgra, Cargill, and Procter & Gamble.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_Institute
"Now we here at the DeSmogBlog know that “think-tanks” like the oil-backed Hudson Institute already has many pre-concieved notions about the science behind global warming, but this is blatant misrepresentation of the conclusions of a scientific conclusion."
desmogblog.com/news-alert-hudson-institute-and-dennis-averys-scientific-spin-on-andes-glacier-study
"environmental economist"... well, at least some economists have progressed beyond stating the environment is an externality.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC0706/S00026.htm
World climate predictors right only half the time
Friday, 8 June 2007, 10:25 am
Press Release: New Zealand Climate Science Coalition
Media release (immediate) 7 June 2007
World climate predictors right only half the time
"The open admission by a climate scientist of the New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), Dr Jim Renwick, that his organisation achieves only 50 per cent accuracy in its climate forecasts, and that this is as good as any other forecaster around the world, should be a wake-up call for world political leaders," said Rear Admiral Jack Welch, chairman of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition.
Yesterday the coalition published an analysis of seasonal climate predictions by NIWA over the past five years which found that the overall accuracy of the predictions was just 48 per cent.
Defending the Niwa record, Dr Renwick said his organisation was doing as well as any other weather forecaster around the world. He was quoted by the country's leading newspaper, the New Zealand Herald as saying: "Climate prediction is hard, half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, so we don't expect to do terrifically well." Later on New Zealand radio, Dr Renwick said: "The weather is not predictable beyond a week or two."
Admiral Welch said that these statements warrant immediate attention by governments around the world. "Dr Renwick is no lightweight. He was a lead author on Working Group I of the IPCC 4th Assessment Report, and serves on the World Meteorological Organisation Commission for Climatology Expert Team on Seasonal Forecasting. He is presumed to be au fait with the abilities of the official governmental climate prediction community round the world.
"All round the developed world, governments are being pressured by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to accept the integrity of scenarios of future climate behaviour agreed by their own climate bureaucrats, but these bureaucrats are the very people that Dr Renwick now tells us get it right only half the time. Worse, he tells us they are unable to predict weather beyond a week or two, yet in conjunction with the IPCC they presume to tell us what to expect over the next few decades.
"The link between climate and weather is well known: climate is determined by averaging weather variables over an extended period (usually 30 years) at one place or for a region. How can there be any faith in climate predictions by officials who admit they are unable to forecast the weather beyond a week or two?
"Perhaps now, governments will pay heed to those many independent climate scientists around the world who have been challenging the exaggerated projections by IPCC officials, and those political zealots such as Al Gore who use those predictions to mislead the ordinary public.
"In the light of these revelations and recent strong evidence that the sun not carbon dioxide controls the climate, the new Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki Moon would do the world a great service by creating an opportunity for the world to hear from the independent scientists who disagree with the IPCC's blaming mankind for climate variability that is natural and historic. There is no scientific justification for some of the extremist economic and social penalties that a minority of zealots are trying to impose on the people of the world.
"This is a matter of grave import and urgency for poorer nations who will suffer most from the proposed penal measures, " said Admiral Welch.
The most pervasive greenhouse gas is water vapor, responsible for 95% of the greenhouse effect. CO2 ranks in at a mere 3%. Manmade production of CO2 is a mere 3.5% of the total CO2 in the atmosphere. Evil Capitalism's contribution to the greenhouse effect that will kill us all? About one part in a thousand.
You may stop freaking out now.
>>201
[citation needed]
Those numbers are all pulled from the IPCC report apart from the water vapor number*, although, for some odd reason, the IPCC report seems to discount or ignore water vapor's humongous role in global warming.
Almost as if they had an agenda...
> Almost as if they had an agenda...
Almost as if you're paranoid...
Right, because CO2, good for about 3% of the greenhouse effect, is going to cause grevious harm to the whole world by raising the temperature up 2 to 5 degrees over the next hundred years.
Even though that's never happened before.
Even though previous hot times proved to be really good for life.
Even though we're actually about 2000 years overdue for another ice age.
Even though any given CO2 molecule would be lucky to last five years before being eaten by a plant or sucked up by the ocean.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight...
Easy way to solve the excess CO2 problem. Add a tenth of an inch of fertile topsoil to every farm. That should lock it up good.
>>205
For god's sake you don't know a single thing about gas exchange, economics, the requirements for human life, or the fact that a single species already nearly wiped out most all life on earth eons ago (and that was motherfucking bacteria).
> Even though that's never happened before.
stupid
> Even though previous hot times proved to be really good for life.
abysmally stupid
> Even though we're actually about 2000 years overdue for another ice age.
waste-of-oxygen stupid
> Even though any given CO2 molecule would be lucky to last five years before being eaten by a plant or sucked up by the ocean.
proof-i'm-involved-in-a-turing-test stupid
..
> Easy way to solve the excess CO2 problem. Add a tenth of an inch of fertile topsoil to every farm. That should lock it up good.
Sounds like something Chairman Mao would come up with.
I don't know whether to laugh at you, cry for humanity or just be quietly embarrassed on your behalf.
> Right, because CO2, good for about 3% of the greenhouse effect
Ozone is 3%. CO2 is several times higher.
As for water vapor, that's quite the nasty thing, isn't it? We don't control the amount of water vapor, but we're pulling up carbon from the ground and dumping into the atmosphere, which increases the global mean temperature.
If we raise a global temperature by a few degrees, it means the atmosphere can hold more water, and evaporation increases. More evaporation means more water vapor. More water vapor means higher temperature. And...
Jolly good show, old chap. That's some charming amplification you have there if I do say so myself.
> going to cause grevious harm to the whole world by raising the temperature up 2 to 5 degrees over the next hundred years.
Do you know what happens to a person whose body temperature is five degrees above or below normal? It's a medical emergency. It can even kill them.
Now please consider that a lot of life out there is used to fairly constant temperatures and lack any form of thermoregulation. A deviation of a few degrees will result in mass death and the destruction of entire ecosystems.
> More evaporation means more water vapor. More water vapor means higher temperature. And...
More evaporation means more water vapor. More water vapor means more clouds. More clouds means more sunlight reflected back into space. More clouds means more rain. Turns out water vapor regulates itself pretty effectively. You might not have noticed this if you live somewhere where it doesn't rain much.
> Do you know what happens to a person whose body temperature is five degrees above or below normal? It's a medical emergency. It can even kill them.
Do you know how a greenhouse works? You put plants inside this big room made mostly of glass, and it gets really hot inside. Now what is a greenhouse for? What happens when you raise plants in a greenhouse? Do they die quickly from the higher temperature?
> Now please consider that a lot of life out there is used to fairly constant temperatures and lack any form of thermoregulation. A deviation of a few degrees will result in mass death and the destruction of entire ecosystems.
Fascinating. Good thing the earth isn't a human body.
Gee, it's also a good thing we don't have regular summers and winters every year, or everything would be dead by now from the constant excessive temperature changes every year.
When's the last time the temperature was up a few degrees for a long period? Oh yeah, the Medieval Warm Period. That time of worldwide devastation where people grew crops in Greenland and various northern European countries, and wine grapes grew in Britain, thanks to the horrible retreat of the arctic circle.
Evidence has been found of the Medieval Warm Period affecting Taiwan, China, and Japan as well. Ironically, a lot of that evidence was found in Kyoto.
http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/hockey.htm
It would be a disaster if the Brits started making wine again, given how awful most of their Haute British Cuisine turned out.
>>207 You are exactly the kind of person that Stalin called "useful idiots." Keep your mouth shut. Grownups are talking.
> You are exactly the kind of person that Stalin called "useful idiots." Keep your mouth shut. Grownups are talking.
ideological-blog-comment-spam-repeating-robot stupid
> ideological-blog-comment-spam-repeating-robot stupid
Your eloquent argument has swayed me sir. I have revised my feelings on the matter. Clearly, global warming is real and the world is going to spaz out and wipe out 80% of all life unless we all do what the activists say.
>the world is going to spaz out and wipe out 80% of all life unless we all do what the activists say.
Straw man fallacy.
>>213 Dork.
>>215 global warmer.
So, I still haven't seen any evidence out of you for why you claim that an entire field of science is lying.
Mmmm'kay. Be good and try to read the whole thing before denouncing it, alright?
AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW
9 September, 2007. Supplement page 8.
Global warming sceptics fuel hot debate
Mark Lawson
The ranks of the doubters are legion and speaking up as the climatic change debate rages, writes Mark Lawson.
Despite being scorned, derided and accused of links with oil companies, the climate change sceptics are still out there and, although the greenhouse lobby will never admit it, occasionally scoring major points. They may also be more numerous than the greenhouse lobby or politicians believe.
One example of this scepticism breaking to the surface is a dissenting minority report issued by a group of federal government backbenchers as part of a parliamentary committee investigation into viability of geosequestration (burying carbon produced deep underground).
The report by four MPs - three Liberal and one National - declared that the evidence that humans were altering climate was “not compelling”, but it was largely derided by the media.
A much more serious, if not devastating, attack on greenhouse claims concerning likely future temperature increases was the recent release of a paper entitled Global Warming: Forecasts by Scientists versus Scientific Forecasts.
Written by J. Scott Armstrong, a professor of marketing at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and Kesten Green, a visiting fellow at the business and economics forecasting unit at Monash University in Melbourne, the paper assessed, as forecasts, the temperature projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change earlier this year. It found little to approve.
In the paper prepared for the International Symposium on Forecasting 2007, Armstrong and Green conclude, “the forecasts in the report were not the outcome of scientific procedures. In effect, they present the opinions of scientists transformed by mathematics and obscured by complex writing.”
The paper also points to one of the recognised rules of forecasting, namely that “unaided judgement forecasts by experts have no value. This applies whether the opinions are expressed by words, spreadsheets or mathematical models. It also applies regardless of how much scientific evidence is possessed by the experts.” A group of experts is little better.
Kesten Green told The Australian Financial Review that there were plenty of examples of experts being wrong, both individually and collectively, about their own area of expertise. Albert Einstein, for example, famously declared that atomic power was not possible. Other examples are in the treatment of stomach ulcers and head injuries, where the medical establishment held to treatments which harmed rather than helped for many years.
continued next post...
But in the greenhouse debate it is incorrect to say that there is overwhelming agreement or that there is no doubt about the science behind it, he says. For every aspect of the theory which the greenhouse lobby declares has been settled, it is possible to find eminent scientists who strongly disagree. “It is a case of where a statement is repeated
often enough everyone takes it as fact, and the media has to bear much of the blame for this,” he says.
The Armstrong-Green paper is particularly scathing of one IPCC approach - a cornerstone of its work - of fitting models to match historical results and then claiming the model is accurate enough to make forecasts. They say the approach has been shown not to work in forecasting.
A number of distinguished scientists have spoken publicly against the prevailing orthodoxy that the IPCC forecasts are correct. One of the more vocal local dissidents is Bob Carter, a research professor and former head of the School of Earth Sciences at James Cook University in Townsville. He says that there is no established theory of climate as there is, say, of gravity and planentary motion, which can be used to make predictions.
“We have a hypothesis that increases in carbon dioxide increase temperatures, but that hypothesis fails all tests. Global average temperatures are known to have varied little since 1997 - just moving up and down - but in that same period carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by 15 parts per million or 4 per cent.”
Stewart Franks, an associate professor in hydroclimatogy at the University of Newcastle, says the alarm over climate has grown sharply in the past 10 years, “but in that time temperatures have been stable, so it's a case of never mind the evidence”.
He says the greenhouse effects of the atmosphere's water content (known as humidity at ground level) and of clouds are many times greater than that of carbon dioxide, which still counts as only a small part of the total atmosphere. Yet very little is known about the mechanisms behind variations in humidity or cloud cover.
Despite sceptical voices there is also no doubt that many eminent scientists are on the side of the IPCC. However, a recent paper by David Henderson, formerly head of economics and statistics at the OECD and now visiting professor at the Westminster Business School in London, argues that part of this support is due to those eminent scientists trusting the IPCC to get it right. But he also argues that their trust in the panel is misplaced, as it is taking a very one-sided view of global warming.
His paper states that one major example of that bias is the dispute over the Hockey Stick graph. This was an early piece of research indicating a direct link between industrial emissions and temperatures (its shape was that of a hockey stick), which featured prominently in its reports. However, two Canadian statisticians discovered a major flaw in the statistical analysis which made it valueless. After a great deal of dispute the issue went to two high-level committees of eminent statisticians which both confirmed the flaw. Although the hockey stick has been dropped from the panel's documentation, he says the panel has never admitted any error, made any comment on the committee findings, or announced any review of its processes to prevent such problems from recurring.
Henderson says the panel seems reluctant to admit any error.
Among many other suggestions for reform he recommends thorough audits of the IPCC work and that environmental scientists adopt the best practice of economic journals, of submitting data and computer code along with any papers for publication so that others can reproduce the analysis. This would avoid some of the worst features of the hockey stick debate, Henderson says.
This 21-page PDF goes into greater detail:
http://www.forecastingprinciples.com/Public_Policy/WarmAudit31.pdf
You should read all of these articles too. Pay special attention to the scientists' credentials at the end of each article.
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/environment/story.html?id=4432a41c-7c52-4b74-934e-f0dac3b2bcb8
in other words: INTERNATIONAL JEWISH CONSPIRACY
I honestly don't know who to believe in this highly politicized matter.
I think since this is ultimately about protecting the environment, there are probably more pressing issues we could address since global warming isn't as well understood as we would like it to be.
We should look at how China is terribly polluted, or how other emerging industries an bursting populations will effect our society and prepare for that. We also have a massive fishing crisis that needs to be addressed, land use that is killing our ecosystem, deforestation and massive erosion in the middle east and elsewhere, big issues that could effect us much faster than an excess of Co2. Let's think about our air and water quality. If that means reducing emissions, so be it, but there are other things we should be focusing on than the Co2 content of our emissions.
> More evaporation means more water vapor... More clouds means more rain.
Are you aware of how supersaturation can be achieved? Or why the water content of air in the Arctic is lower than the Namib desert?
The higher the temperature, the more water can be held in the air without precipitation.
> Fascinating. Good thing the earth isn't a human body.
Oh? Which part of "a lot of life out there is used to fairly constant temperatures and lack any form of thermoregulation" did you not catch? You won't be affected directly by a 5C external change, but other things will.
> When's the last time the temperature was up a few degrees for a long period?
With an open carbon cycle, the question is where will it stop? And in the meantime, there's going to be a mass migration of humanity going on while they move to more fertile areas. And if it doesn't stop, we'll really have problems.
I'll pass.
I didn't miss any part of that life is too fragile to adapt to changing conditions argument. I'd just like to see some proof of it. If you can find solid evidence of a plant or animal that can't cope with a few degrees of extra warmth, let me know.
If you consider the last decade's temperatures, it already has. We've added an extra 15 parts per million CO2 into the air, and temps have stayed steady over that time.
The UN, through the IPCC, is advocating strong action on the hypothesis that CO2 causes global warming, and there quite simply is no evidence to validate that hypothesis.
>>224, you should read the other stuff I posted above.
>>225
http://assets.panda.org/downloads/birdsclimatereportfinal.pdf
http://www.amap.no/acia/index.html
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/foci/sebscc/SEBSCC_final_report.pdf
http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/Library/nationalassessment/10Alaska.pdf
http://www.geog.umd.edu/resac/outgoing/GEOG442%20Fall%202005/Lecture%20materials/extinctions%20and%20climate%20change.pdf
http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/content/27230th7l7473773/
> I honestly don't know who to believe in this highly politicized matter.
Believe the scientists. http://realclimate.org/ is very representative of their views.
> If you can find solid evidence of a plant or animal that can't cope with a few degrees of extra warmth, let me know.
You do realize that life will tend to expand until it reaches the limits of its environmental endurance? An organism that is living well within its comfort zone won't be affected by a small change in temperature. One living right on the edge, however, will.
As far as I can tell that's an attack on the IPCC. I asked for some evidence that the entire field of climate science is lying to us, not an attack on a single panel of scientists.
See, the IPCC is not the entirety of climate science. It doesn't matter how many times you try and refute them, because even if you were successful, you'd still have the entire body of scientific results left.
Yeah, the IPCC is more about climate politics.
> I asked for some evidence that the entire field of climate science is lying to us, not an attack on a single panel of scientists.
That's largely impossible to get, seeing as there is no clear consensus on the issue among climate scientists. If you skip the summary and read the whole IPCC report, they practically admit that they don't know enough about how the climate works to predict anything with any certainty. The summary, on the other hand, has been vetted for politicians, contains very little science, and is really about forcing an extreme environmentalist agenda.
> If you can find solid evidence of a plant or animal that can't cope with a few degrees of extra warmth, let me know.
Fishy, fishy in da sea. Not all fishy warm like me.
Of course, not only are fish cold-blooded (and used to a narrow temperature range, ergo not developing multiple energy paths like land-based cold-blooded critters), but their homes don't take well to temperature variation either.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is basic biology. Elementary, even. And the coral die-off, particularly of warm-water coral reefs, isn't news either.
> they practically admit that they don't know enough about how the climate works to predict anything with any certainty.
I fail to see how this is in the least bit damning.
We can't, with any certainty, predict the course of evolution or human behaviour, either.
> The summary, on the other hand...contains very little science
That's why it's called a summary
> is really about forcing an extreme environmentalist agenda.
In other words, you're a political drone and think that everyone who disagrees with your opinion is conspiring to do evil.
Nothing is certain in science (or anything else short of religion). It's all confidence intervals and other statistics.
I dunno, maybe when it really starts getting warm I'll believe them, but so far, when you consider how warm Europe was historically and how cold our recent, modern history has been, there doesn't seem to be anything abnormal about our current temperatures.
This is what I don't understand. How can climate scientists detect a distinct abnormality in temperatures that have been climbing since the 17th Century?
If someone could really explain it to me I'd probably believe them, but it seems that a lot of global warming theories are based on faith more than empiric reason.
>>235
Core samples of quickly forming ice (in greenland, for example) reveal the history of (local/global) temperature and atmospheric composition, for one.
There are a lot of ways these things are measured, and the amount of factors going into this kind of thing make it far more complex than some would have you believe (CO2 is far from being the only thing that affects this).
Seeing as it is unlikely there are any respected climatologists, geologists or atmospheric scientists frequenting this board, you'd best learn from a google search for "climate change"
The ice core samples are not all that reliable:
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=25526754-e53a-4899-84af-5d9089a5dcb6
Quoting the important part:
Ice, the IPCC believes, precisely preserves the ancient air, allowing for a precise reconstruction of the ancient atmosphere. For this to be true, no component of the trapped air can escape from the ice. Neither can the ice ever become liquid. Neither can the various gases within air ever combine or separate.
This perfectly closed system, frozen in time, is a fantasy. "Liquid water is common in polar snow and ice, even at temperatures as low as -72C," Dr. Jaworowski explains, "and we also know that in cold water, CO2 is 70 times more soluble than nitrogen and 30 times more soluble than oxygen, guaranteeing that the proportions of the various gases that remain in the trapped, ancient air will change. Moreover, under the extreme pressure that deep ice is subjected to -- 320 bars, or more than 300 times normal atmospheric pressure -- high levels of CO2 get squeezed out of ancient air."
Because of these various properties in ancient air, one would expect that, over time, ice cores that started off with high levels of CO2 would become depleted of excess CO2, leaving a fairly uniform base level of CO2 behind. In fact, this is exactly what the ice cores show.
"According to the ice-core samples, CO2 levels vary little over time," Dr. Jaworowski sates. "The ice core data from the Taylor Dome in Antarctica shows almost no change in the level of atmospheric CO2 over the last 7,000 to 8,000 years -- it varied between 260 parts per million and 264 parts per million.
Another important part:
Is there an alternative to ice-core samples, which are but proxies from which assumptions about the historical composition of the atmosphere can be made? "Yes, there are several other proxies, and they lead to different findings about CO2," Dr. Jaworowski states. "But we don't need to rely on proxies at all.
"Scientists from numerous disciplines have been examining CO2 since the beginning of the 19th century, and they have left behind a record of tens of thousands of direct, real-time measurements. These measurements tell a far different story about CO2 -- they demonstrate, for example, that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have fluctuated greatly, and that several times in the past 200 years CO2 concentrations have exceeded today's levels.
"The IPCC rejects these direct measurements, some taken by Nobel Prize winners. They prefer the view of CO2 as seen through ice."
National Post? Ugh. My head hurts every time I see than newspaper.
Please, find a source from somewhere else. :(
IPCC report? Ugh. My head hurts every time I see than summary.
Please, find a source from somewhere else :(
Anonymous Scientist? Ugh. My head hurts every time I see than collectivist identity.
Please, find a source from somewhere else :(
>>237
The national post is not all that reliable.
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=6626a0fa-99de-4f1e-aebe-bb91af82abb3
Can you name a paper that is all that reliable? Most of them make mistakes all the time.
However, disparaging the source instead of pointing out exactly how the articles themselves are wrong re/AGW is lame.
Maybe you don't live in Canada, but National Post is pure tripe.
Considering that I am not a climatologist, I have to rely on others. I am not going to rely on National Post, but if someone provides some articles in a respected peer-reviewed journal, I'm all eyes.
Also, to the clown who implicitly compared IPCC to National Post (or any newspaper): you're clueless. The IPCC at least provides references to articles, as opposed to "X says that..."
> National Post is pure tripe.
Is this your scientific opinion?
Why yes. Based on a random sample of 125 National Post papers, we can conclude that it is composed of 95% fecal matter, with a standard error of...
Anyway, respected peer-reviewed journal or it didn't happen.
>>245
Based on it's founding principles of 'balancing' the media with a neo-conservative agenda... It's as close to physical truth as we can get.
The Iranian 'Yellow Badge for Jews' is among the five most irresponsible journalistic errors made in the past five years.
Right up there with Koran-Flushing and the collective US media in the years after 9/11.
So, in other words, there's no point in actually reading the articles linked to, then forming an intelligent response as to why those articles fail to convince you, because you can tar them all based on occasional crappy news coverage of unrelated subjects.
Yeah, I guess that's the easy way out, you lazy fuck.
> on occasional crappy news coverage of unrelated subjects.
Occasional? You're not familiar with National Post.
> Yeah, I guess that's the easy way out, you lazy fuck.
To reply in turn: why are you not giving us references to articles of quality? You're quite adamant over this one National Post article.
So, if you don't mind, I shall reiterate: respected peer-reviewed journal or it didn't happen. I hope you caught it this time.
Did you read them in order to determine their individual shittiness, or are you just avoiding reading something that challenges your UN-sponsored faith in the amazing power of manmade CO2 to destroy the planet by raising temperatures about 2.5 degrees C over the next hundred years saying "that papr sux every1 nos it" as if everything in that paper were written by exactly one person?
Try reading them anyway. See what happens.
I fucking dare you to open your mind a little bit.
> I fucking dare you to open your mind a little bit.
I fucking double-dare to you get a grip on reality.
Already there my man. There's room here for you and your friends if you like.
>>252
Ideology is not reality.
You're full of yourself.
>>253
And reality does not come from the mouths of politicians.
You're a sucker.
Honestly, I want to believe, but the current science hasn't yet offered convincing evidence to back up the IPCC's claims, at least not for me. On the other hand, the skeptics often seem to be political conservatives, or presented by political conservatives who are weary of the environmental movements or any policy that demands government intervention or limitations on corporate activities.
So all there is for me is a big puddle of political mud.
I guess I ask myself, what does the UN get by pushing a climate theory like this out of proportion? That might be the best question, the only answer I can see is a kind of evangelical environmentalism based more on faith and a kind of ethical ideology, or maybe hysteria, than hard science.
The UN itself? Not much. That irritating, lying group of lunatic socialist anti-global anti-corporate activists who hijacked the otherwise valuable environmental movement and turned it from a sensible approach to caring for the earth into a freaky WE HATE PROGRESS party? They get to push everyone in the whole world around, and make a lot of money off of carbon offset bookkeeping while doing it.
> the current science hasn't yet offered convincing evidence to back up the IPCC's claims
The problem with (some definitions of) convincing evidence is that we might not survive it all that well.
> They get to push everyone in the whole world around, and make a lot of money off of carbon offset bookkeeping while doing it.
For some reason I doubt they'd fair too well against multinationals, especially when a select group also owns most of the media.
>>254
And reality does not come from the mouths of lobbyists and PR Firms.
You're a sucker.
> Honestly, I want to believe, but the current science hasn't yet offered convincing evidence to back up the IPCC's claims
How would you know? By the sound of it, you haven't studied any of the science at all, but merely listened to the media circus.
>> I asked for some evidence that the entire field of climate science is lying to us, not an attack on a single panel of scientists.
> That's largely impossible to get,
Then why are you claiming that they are lying?
> seeing as there is no clear consensus on the issue among climate scientists.
That, however, is a lie: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=86
> That irritating, lying group of lunatic socialist anti-global anti-corporate activists who hijacked the otherwise valuable environmental movement and turned it from a sensible approach to caring for the earth into a freaky WE HATE PROGRESS party?
You sure like setting up strawmen and beating them down, don't you? And you also sure like to change your position around however it suits you.
Now tell us: Are the majority of climate scientists "lunatic socialist anti-global anti-corporate activists"?
>>261
Please don't feed the trolls.
So I should trust the heavily biased "realclimate.org" site simply because it has the word "real" in it?
Fascinating site. Every time someone's comments suggest that natural warming may be occurring, there's a polite response that insists that "We know that the current CO2 rise is anthropogenic". He never bothers to link to any studies that prove this one way or the other. He just insists that it's true.
(reading further...)
OMG he still thinks the Mann Hockey Stick graph is valid!!!!
> Now tell us: Are the majority of climate scientists "lunatic socialist anti-global anti-corporate activists"?
Probably not. But the talking heads who front the whole Global Warming - er, I'm sorry, "Climate Change" activism are.
> OMG he still thinks the Mann Hockey Stick graph is valid!!!!
He has elucidated why here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=11
You're free to indicate why that's wrong.
Also, it seems we've deviated wildly from the /science/.
> So I should trust the heavily biased "realclimate.org" site
Proof of bias, please. The fact that somebody disagrees with you is not enough.
>> Now tell us: Are the majority of climate scientists "lunatic socialist anti-global anti-corporate activists"?
> Probably not.
Then why do you keep insisting that they are fucking lying?
It pains me to do so, but I have to back up our local drone's claims of realclimate.org being biased.
Simply run a whois on the domain, and follow the hierarchy.
Not that this matters, all the "proof" relating to climate change is offsite. Relatively unbiased sources follow.
Here, from motherfucking NASA, which has surprisingly not been tainted by Republican politics:
> “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.”
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/GlobalWarmingUpdate/
University of Oxford:
http://www.eo.ucar.edu/basics/index.html
For the absolutely clueless, here's a pretty, interactive slideshow:
http://www.begbroke.ox.ac.uk/climate/interface.html
> Simply run a whois on the domain, and follow the hierarchy.
what
