Comment Re:Global warming is the cause (Score 1) 285
The fact that the parent was modded insightful proves the decline of slashdot as an intellectual resource.
I weep
The fact that the parent was modded insightful proves the decline of slashdot as an intellectual resource.
I weep
I was actually hoping they would go for a "fountain-of-youth" or "life force of the planet" angle since they hinted at it. But then they mucked it up with the "corking an evil force" and electromagnetism and time travel and who knows what else.
And why does it create smoke monsters again? To punish people by giving them immense powers that they can use to then destroy the island? What?
I don't think the writers had as clear an idea of what was going on as you are implying they did. The mythology was a mess.
Should I believe the pro-AGW scientists who refuse to share their data,
Where are you getting the impression that a significant number of pro-AGW scientists are "refusing" to share their data? I hope it's not from scattered reports of individual accusations (such as "Climategate" -- where even then, the vast majority of the data in question is available publicly).
Do you have overall statistics of what percentage of published "pro-AGW" studies rely on "hidden data"?
Really, why do you believe this is true? Think hard on this.
or the anti-AGW scientists who remain skeptical of the data that is available?
Did these scientists study global climatology? Or did they study something else (meteorology, atmospheric physics) which doesn't concentrate on analysis of long-term climate processes?
What is the ratio of scientists who are "pro-AGW" to those who are "anti-AGW"?
This is what's seriously wrong with our society today, no one wants to deal with nuance or a deeper story.
It really has nothing to do with nuance or a "deeper" story. It has everything to do with a deliberately misleading story summary someone wrote to try to make a political point (in this case, that nutrition paranoia is getting out of hand or something).
But as your link correctly explains, this had nothing to do with the "low nutritional value" rule.
I'll just mention a few things quickly about the CO2 lagging temperature issue:
1) Basic logic: If you're trying to disprove "A if B" you can't use "A and not B" -- you need to have "B and not A." In other words, temperature rising without CO2 rising first does not disprove that CO2 rising wouldn't cause temperature to rise. But if you saw CO2 rising *without* temperature rising, it would (well, it would be a stronger argument -- it's still a complex system and would need more analysis). AFAIK, that doesn't exist in the record.
2) There are many things that can cause temperature to rise, CO2 concentration being only one of them. This is reflected in the climate models and current theory. In the ancestral record, IIRC, orbital variations trigger the initial rise in temperature. Rising temperatures then cause the oceans to release more CO2, and according to models, that CO2 has a feedback effect making the hot periods longer and hotter than they would be without it.
3) After the industrial revolution, you DO see CO2 rising first, then temperatures following. The whole point is that every climate model ever made cannot account for the recent rise in temperature without using the greenhouse effect from that CO2 rise, even taking natural non-man-made forcings into account. That's the essence of AGW.
If someone could create a complete earth climate model that predicted all observables as well as the AGW models but did not show a large effect from man-made CO2 (ie, take it out of the model and most of the warming is still there), then I'd be interested. As far as I know, this does not yet exist.
Your straw man of AGW is a bit odd in its emphasis:
1) The warming trend in the late 20th century is unprecedented. This can be falsified by any historical record which shows CO2 rises lagging temperature rises;
First off, this isn't a prediction, but rather a question of historical fact. Second, I'm not sure "unprecedented" is a fundamental aspect of the theory of AGW -- popular media presentation notwithstanding. It seems to me that CO2 concentration is unprecedented however. Third, what does the lead/lag of CO2 vs temperature have to do with the magnitude of the warming trend? Finally, I would just mention that the rate of change is probably the important metric here, not the absolute temperature.
2) The warming trend in the late 20th century is caused by man-made CO2 emissions, which create a tipping point with a positive feedback loop. The critical point is 350ppm. Any higher, and we will have constantly increasing temperatures. This can be falsified by either a plateau in the increase of temp or a decrease in temp while we increase CO2 levels, or by showing that any time we had > 350ppm in the fossil record, the temperature ran away into a positive feedback loop and left the earth a burning husk.
Warming-trend-is-created-by-man-made-CO2 is basically a re-statement of AGW itself, not any prediction thereof. And the "critical tipping point" aspect doesn't again seem to be a fundamental part of the theory. Again, it seems more like the kind of thing that's trumped up in the media. I don't recall any scientists claiming that the earth will end in a burning husk.
I'm really wondering where you're getting these ideas from. They seem like a strange mash-up of anti-AGW memes with no organizing principle and no intention of checking your impressions against any facts.
Also I'm wondering why you're not mentioning some of the clearly obvious falsifiable predictions: Like the fact that earth-climate-models are generated using assumptions about how CO2 affects radiation in the atmosphere, and the implications of models can be compared with current climate data?
finding more data that supports your theory does not protect it against even a single bit of data that refutes it
So what's that "single bit of data" that just kills all hope of AGW? I'm intensely curious.
Give me just one. The real kicker. I don't want a spamming of scattered nitpicks. Go ahead and kill AGW for us once and for all.
If there really are as many data sets available as you are claiming, then some climate scientists should start over and do the whole research project again, this time with full transparency.
I'm not sure what you're proposing here. We're talking about temperature data. There are various independent sources of this temperature data, of which CRU produced one. All the various independent sources are in very close agreement. What are you proposing to "start over" on?
There is abundant evidence from satellite data that the surface measurement estimation methodology is horribly out of sync with reality.
Wait.. are you talking about the satellite data that was shown to have huge systemic flaws due to timing anomalies and was corrected years ago? http://www.grist.org/article/the-satellites-show-cooling
The results in question are based on analysis of historical data. In the case of the CRU the data was "massaged" in undocumented ways and summarized prior to release. Exactly how the hell would you propose to replicate (or fail to replicate) their results?
Uh, get the historical data, "massage" it in ways that seem reasonable to you, and publish your own results?
The real question is, if their (or any climate scientist's) publications were so flawed, why hasn't anybody done this?
1. Make all your data available to anybody.
Even before you've gotten a chance to analyze it and publish on it yourself?
Even data that doesn't end up being published?
2. Make all your analysis software available to anybody.
Describing the algorithm isn't sufficient?
What I keep seeing over and over is references to all these examples of methodology problems, bad organization, etc. What I haven't seen is anything linking these problems to actual published works from the group. In fact, I've heard that most of the data they were "refusing to release" was never actually used in any publication.
Evidence showing a disorganized work-in-progress proves nothing to me. Where are the actual flaws in the published literature? And who's working on new publications to correct them?
Interesting that the two examples given in that article were cases where the defendant was eventually found NOT GUILTY.
You forgot to add that this needs either Chrome, or Google Gears.
No, stock firefox supports it.
Make Magazine is fun, and can give some good ideas, but it's far from technical at all.
Hey nuts and volts still exists though.
Perhaps the models were not accurate enough in the long-run in predicting albedo for aerospace engineering purposes, but that doesn't mean they aren't accurate enough in the long run in predicting global temperature mean and other variables important for climate change .
And several times in your post you emphasized that "you were taught" this. Did you independently verify it or did you just accept it as true because that's what you needed to do for your project? Do you know if the climate models in question were up to date with the latest climate science?
Here's a page that shows modeled surface temperature since the 1800s matching pretty well with observed data: http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models.htm
It took me 1 minute to google for that information. It probably took you a lot longer to write your post.
The moon is made of green cheese. -- John Heywood