Paper that claimed the Sun caused global warming gets retracted:
A paper published last June was catnip for those who are desperate to explain climate change with anything but human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. It was also apparently wrong enough to be retracted this week by the journal that published it, even though its authors objected.
The paper's headline conclusion was that it described a newly discovered cycle in the motion of the Sun, one that put us 300 years into what would be a thousand-year warming period for the Earth. Nevermind that we've been directly measuring the incoming radiation from the Sun and there has been no increase to explain the observed global warming—or that there is no evidence of a 2,000 year temperature cycle in the paleoclimate record.
Those obvious issues didn't stop some people from taking this study as proof that past warming was natural, and only mild and unavoidable warming lies in our future.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @01:49PM
gonna lick them ALLLLLL UP.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @02:19PM (19 children)
That feels so incredibly ironic that it can't have been an accident.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by HiThere on Saturday March 07 2020, @05:33PM (3 children)
It's not accidental at all. People, all of them, look for evidence to substantiate their theories and are poor at criticizing that evidence, and also tend to over extrapolate what they believe it shows. This is as true of scientists as of anyone else, which is why science is supposed to contain corrective measures...like independent confirmation studies.
In this case they just needed to look at a wider set of data to overthrow the study, but it's often more difficult.
Please note: This is an important part of how science is successful over the long term. In The sort term it means lots of invalid studies will be made and pushed by various people. In the long term it means that firmly believed conventional ideas and theories can be overthrown by something new.
So this paper's existence is an important part of the scientific method...just a part with a lot of noise in it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by dwilson on Saturday March 07 2020, @11:33PM (2 children)
I think his point was that a great many of the (global cooling, then global warming, then) climate change predictions of the past thirty years also haven't really panned out. Which is to be expected of course, since every year we learn more, collect more data, develop better methods, etc and predictions get refined.
..but then, you could use that excuse for anything, really. Even solar-driven warming cycles, apparently.
Whatever. Cut emissions where we can as we can, deploy new tech as it becomes available, and just keep on carrying on. What else are we going to do, realistically?
- D
(Score: 4, Informative) by dry on Sunday March 08 2020, @12:01AM (1 child)
Actually most of the models have been fairly accurate, after plugging in the actual CO2 numbers rather then the original guesses, which were often wrong.
The other problem is the media reporting, scientist predicts a 2 degree raise in temperatures, reporter asks about the extreme possibilities, scientist says there's a 0.01% of a feedback cycle causing 10 degrees of warming and reporter writes article about how temperatures are going to rise by 10 degrees.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 12 2020, @02:23PM
While the media hasn't helped, a lot of the hysteria is driven by the scientists themselves - both by pushing extreme scenarios and by omission, not speaking out when exaggerated claims are made.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @08:54PM (14 children)
Ya, as if the climate has never changed anywhere on earth in 4+billions years until man became industrial. What idiots! Ok maybe not idiots, but definitely misguided blind followers.
MM-CC really has become a religion or even something like Scientology.
-They have immutable beliefs, actually a doctrine, that can never be questioned.
-It has leaders at the top preach to their followers that their truth is the one and truth and it is absolute.
-The followers have become zealots who automatically and blindly agree without question what the leaders push .
-These zealots question anything that disputes that climate change is driven anything other than 100% GHG emissions and label these non-believers as blasphemes.
-No deviation from their accepted mmcc doctrine is allowed.
-The zealots require anyone that that deviates in the slightest way from their mmcc 'doctrine of truth' to be silenced.
-The mmcc zealots demand everyone needs to change their lifestyles to mitigate mmcc, except of course themselves and their leaders still get to jet around the world spewing tons of GHG attending climate change conferences around the world.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Saturday March 07 2020, @09:45PM (13 children)
Blah, blah, blow it out your ass.
1) It's not a belief
2) Science is not immutable
3) The leaders are pointing out that science isn't subject to opinions, or politics, just facts.
Your problem is that there is no scientific basis for contradicting man made climate change. Simply saying these things doesn't mean shit. Perform your own study, gather the data, and then use science to convince us. That last part is real sincere problem for you and the other deniers. When you come up against that barrier, the search for the truth, all you can do is scream at us and say our conclusions are religion and akin to spiritual beliefs. What you're not doing is convincing us with real data and sound logic. Just cherry picked data that fits a predetermined conclusion. Science worked backwards from what you need the truth to be.
If this study was worth anything, and stood up to scientific scrutiny sufficient to change our minds, it would. It got shot down so fast because it was junk science, not that it was giving the scientific community truths inconsistent with alleged doctrine. The "God" or "bible" you claim is our religion, is just a series of scientific studies that have gone through the rigors of science. The more they withstand the rigors of science, more scientists judge their conclusions to correct. That's where we are it, the vast majority of scientists are on the same page.
Either bring some science, that can be peer reviewed, validated, and reproduced, or shut the fuck up :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Sunday March 08 2020, @12:42AM (7 children)
Well, if I'm to believe science and scientists (forgive me if you've read this before) then the little spot on this earth where I was born was covered over with a mile of ice only 20,000 years ago.
Obviously, global warming has been going on for a lot longer than any of us has been around.
How about a deal? I won't pretend that our pollution has nothing to do with global warming and/or climate change. In return, you don't pretend that the alarmists have it all figured out. Can we live with that?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by edIII on Sunday March 08 2020, @03:25AM
Deal. The alarmists are not the scientists though, because the scientists don't claim to have everything figured out. Just some predictions. Not to mention current events keep supporting the predictions, as if, the predictions are becoming our future.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Common Joe on Sunday March 08 2020, @07:15PM (4 children)
One of the best graphs about climate change came from XKCD [xkcd.com]. In this case, he starts at 20000 BC and goes to present day.
Even if you don't stop to read everything in between, be sure to scroll to the very end of the graph at the bottom. You can scroll quickly (it's a large graph), but pay attention to the rate at how fast the Earth warms as you scroll.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2020, @07:46PM
I think one of the problems (besides the lack of desire to apply critical thinking if it challenges what the idiots on TV and radio tell you what you should believe) is that people like him do not understand derivatives, or even more simply put, just simple rates of change. That graphic is an excellent example. The slope almost anywhere on that curve is rather small until the very end.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday March 08 2020, @08:25PM (2 children)
I like that graph. The first time I saw it, I scrolled up and down and up again, because it does kinda help put things into chronological order.
Thing is, I believe that bottom little bit is exaggerated. Old Al Gore and his hockey stick chart? This doesn't look as bad, but it seems to fall into that category or alarmism.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Tuesday March 10 2020, @04:30AM (1 child)
I don't trust very many people or companies because they exaggerate and are alarmist, but I do trust Randall Munroe (creator of XKCD). He's a deep thinker and very insightful. I encourage you to check out the rest of his website. Now, I'll be honest, I haven't double checked his sources, but Randall is obsessively thorough. His sources are listed at the top of the comic on the right, if you decide to explore more deeply.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 12 2020, @02:28PM
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @08:48AM
As a meteorologist, I'll also accept your deal.
Our climate models are extrapolating conditions that we've never directly observed. A lot of the Earth's systems are governed by processes that are somewhat nonlinear. And these systems are coupled together such that changes in the Earth's atmosphere or hydrosphere can have significant effects on other things like the biosphere. If we nudge the state of those systems too far, they may accelerate away from the previous conditions toward a new equilibrium. We don't really know where these tipping points are, but there is evidence from paleontology that such tipping points exist. Despite our best efforts at simulating these systems, extrapolating them is going to be subject to significant errors.
The US invests billions of dollars in military expenditures each year, with the goal that we don't have to use our military might. Our military spends a lot of time on war games, considering lots of scenarios and what we can do to protect the country if those scenarios were to happen. We spend a very significant amount of money on what amounts to largely a preventative measure. I wish we had taken more of that same attitude with respect to pandemic preparedness, having much larger stockpiles of supplies and better plans for surge capacity in our medical system. Maybe such pandemics have a return period of 100 years, but maybe we should spend more on preparedness for when it occurs. And I'll admit the uncertainty in climate projections, while still acknowledging that some scenarios could have severe outcomes. I propose that maybe we should take the same approach to preparedness, that we hope those scenarios are wrong, but we still take reasonable steps to prevent them in case they're not wrong.
Instead of bureaucratic solutions like carbon taxes, I'd prefer technological solutions. DARPA has a significant budget for defense research. We also fund lots of contractors to develop new technology for the military. I'd like to see similar programs with ample funding and strong oversight, to develop technologies that allow us to maintain our standard of living in a way that pollutes a whole lot less. Maybe it'll turn out that we didn't need those investments, and I sure hope that the climate models are dead wrong, but I see this as another form of risk preparedness.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Username on Sunday March 08 2020, @04:20AM (4 children)
>1) It's not a belief
>2) Science is not immutable
>3) The leaders are pointing out that science isn't subject to opinions, or politics, just facts.
Most religious SJWs utilize the postmodernist doctrine, where reality is subjective, and facts are perspective opinions. One of their core sacraments, climate change, is the belief that mans impact on earth is deleterious. The only way to solve climate change is to serve penance through taxation or reception of wokescold, efficacy of which is judged ex opere operantis. Anyone who takes exception shall be anathema. Polarbears going extinct and Gretta's childhood dying for our sins isn't pointing out any kind of scientific fact, just an emotional opinion. The leaders (Al Gore, Gretta Thumberger etc) preach similar gloom and doom for sinners that priest do, they only differ on what constitutes a sin. They both just want some authoritative position over how we live our lives.
(Score: 3, Funny) by edIII on Sunday March 08 2020, @06:23AM
No science. You Fail. Bwahahahahahh!
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2020, @06:25AM (2 children)
Oh my god. There are so many holes in your thinking, they exceed your sentence count. Congrats on knowing a few words of Latin, and for thinking that polar bear populations are somehow independent from science, and on ... yeah I can't even. I'm sorry. Your thought is so poor that it's numbing.
You're calling other persons 'religious' as a derogatory term yet your own statements are feelsies statements. Good for you for feeling how you feel! Nobody cares about your feels though. Enjoy your pitiful meaningless life, as you mindlessly reject science in favour of appeals to emotion and name calling.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2020, @07:52PM (1 child)
It is funny (in a sad way) how when people like him get a horrible disease or sickness, how quickly they become believers in science. Never mind that it is the same methodologies and chemistry that governs both. Very few have the conviction to not switch teams when their end is in sight. It's ok to screw over people several decades out, but when their ass is on the line it is "SAVE ME SCIENCE!!! [gocomics.com]"
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday March 09 2020, @12:30AM
That sounds like the wife of a good friend of mine who converted to Jehovah's Witness sometime after they got married.
When he had a serious motorbike accident she made sure he got the blood transfusions he needed though. Funny how that works.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @02:21PM
that opinions on global warming (true/false/policy) are not correlated to how well informed a person is.
so whatever you think about it, the fact that you have an opinion has no correlation to the relevant information you have on the topic.
in other words everyone is talking out of their ass and not enough is known to justify a position of certainty (especially when it comes to politics that come from your understanding).
anyway the ICCP factors in massive uncertainty (min 40%) in many ways so uncertain seems to be the correct one at this time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @03:41PM (3 children)
If the sun did not shine on the earth billions of years ago, there would not carbon rich plaant life. That life then got "pushed" the bottom of water ways and buried. Then under that pressure converted to oil, coal and natural gas. It stayed there, until a another warm sunny day (thank you sun), it was brought to surface. And humans burned it.
You see the sun energy is being used twice - once from long ago, and current. So it is the sun fault. Sue the sun!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @03:44PM
Then it burns for the third and last time.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Saturday March 07 2020, @03:48PM (1 child)
It's not the energy from burning fossil that's the problem - well, other than the fact that it's the motive for us to do so.
IIRC the extra thermal energy reflected back to Earth by the CO2 from burning fossil fuels, is something like a million times greater than the energy that was released by burning the fuel.
Of course it's still ultimately the sun providing the energy, but it's the increasing CO2 "blankets" that are keeping the heat in and warming things up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @06:08PM
That was the fun’s plan. It looks out and see melting mercury. The cloud covered Venus with it oven heat. Those big gas gaints just short of being suns themselves. The earth is just a cool ball with water moisture. So it thought how to fix that?
Give those “ants” away to stay warm. That then makes a heat holding blanket of carbon. It was a long term plan but it is winning!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @03:55PM (21 children)
Since it got accepted, I guess it was politically wrong enough.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @04:04PM (15 children)
I guess... every paper accepted is correct, right?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @04:17PM (14 children)
You're trolling, but if this was a serious peer reviewed journal, countless man-hours went in to perfecting the paper before submission, followed by the PC poring over them and finally selecting a subset of submissions for publication.
Serious institutions will readily admit and promise to do better if actual problems in their paper are discovered, but they stand by their work as they are objecting to the retraction.
One can only guess at the professional and personal pressure that was brought to bear on the editors.
Global warmingClimate change is too important for too many people to be questioned is what I get from this.Would be nice to know the journal and the author's institution in the summary, as the linked site is refusing service to me.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @04:30PM (7 children)
It was published in Nature's Scientific Reports [nature.com] journal. So yes it probably was political pressure more than scientific pressure.
I wonder how often people who suggested the Earth was *not* the center of the universe were forced to recant. Not to suggest this is the same thing beyond the fact that social pressures have 0 place in science.
(Score: 4, Informative) by PiMuNu on Saturday March 07 2020, @10:46PM
> So yes it probably was political pressure
It's not quite so clear - the author was also a journal editorial board member.
https://www.nature.com/srep/about/editors [nature.com]
Search for Valentina Zharkova, paper lead author.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday March 08 2020, @12:04AM (5 children)
I wonder how often people who suggested the Earth was *not* the center of the universe were forced to recant
Until somebody explains the CMB anisotropies aligned with the ecliptic as something more than a coincidence (the current explanation), "the earth is at the center of the universe and/or the big bang didn't happen" are plausible positions.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday March 08 2020, @12:12AM (4 children)
I thought it was pretty well established that the Earth is at the centre of the Universe, just like everywhere else. It's much like I'm at the centre of the Earths surface and so are you as it is the same distance to the edge of the Earth for everyone.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday March 08 2020, @06:48PM (3 children)
The CMB is either not the echo of the big bang, or subject to an unknown process, or the universe radiates in a way aligned with the earth, by mere coincidence or because it is in a special place. Some equations describe things in a location independent way, but this is quite irrelevant as things do not follow laws, laws describe things, usually until they don't.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday March 08 2020, @10:09PM (2 children)
Do you have a citation for the CMB being aligned to the Earth?
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday March 09 2020, @12:40AM
No, he doesn't because it isn't. It sounds like he's trying to claim that some god made the Earth, making it special.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 09 2020, @02:33AM
Some people are trying to get it called the axis of evil [wikipedia.org]. Hopefully some editor won't put it on a book cover and we'll be stuck with it like the "God particle".
As far as the axis of evil goes, it is unexplained, which means that the models don't explain it, but it also means that it includes more mundane explanations such as that it isn't clear whether it isn't an issue with the way the data are processed.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @04:51PM (4 children)
LOL. I can see you aren't part of academia, and have never published yourself. Nature - which is where this was published - is better than most, but papers get less time and attention than theses, and generally have 1-3 peer reviewers. Those peer reviewers are often field experts but not statistical experts and normally don't get their hands on raw data, just the same summaries in the paper that other readers would get. Do you think every peer reviewer knows about Benford's law, and knows when it does/n't apply? Do you think that the thousands of paper retractions last year - many against the author's wishes, most of which are not on the topic of climate - were all falsely retracted?
You're a fool or a shill or both.
But your professed naivete was so potent that it did, in fact, make me laugh out loud for real.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Saturday March 07 2020, @08:12PM (3 children)
It's a common theme with climate change deniers. Clutch desperately at any offered straw. Scream bloody murder if even the slightest criticism is offered against even the wildest alternative theory, all while pretending that the slightest error on the other side is iron clad proof of a global conspiracy.
I predict two outcomes: In the first, we actually manage to take sufficient action such that not much damage is done. The same deniers will ignore all of that and crow about how they were right, nothing bad happened.
Second scenario, we don't take action and we end up with huge and expensive problems. In that they claim there was no way to know and that it's not really anybody's fault.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @09:02PM
I think a good 50% of deniers are paid shills or disingenuous and fanatic supporters of GASOLINE! They are the tools who would huff spray paint and sacrifice themselves Mad Max Fury Road style.
The goal of such shilling is to KEEP the conversation mired down in bullshit instead of brushing it off and developing serious support for carbon taxes. We really need to have a complete cost analysis for human activities, we are destroying the planet and the sociopathic assholes point to the little bits we haven't trashed as some sort of release of responsibility.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2020, @01:29AM (1 child)
Third scenario, we don't take action, nothing much changes. We both grow older and forget why we ever gave a shit.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday March 08 2020, @02:20AM
That ship has already sailed.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Saturday March 07 2020, @09:49PM
No, NOT trolling. It was a fair question in response to your implied statement that acceptance=correctness.
Would you mind answering my friend's question?
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @05:46PM (4 children)
Andrew Wakefield's paper on the supposed link between vaccines and autism was also accepted. By The Lancet, no less.
And it too was retracted. Was it also for political reasons ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @06:39PM (1 child)
Evidently, "being wrong" is now a political reason. Of course, makes perfect sense, when we have a US administration that has all the best epidemics and a stock market to match!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @07:33PM
Global Warming doom and gloom is what interested people are using to freak out the young, while corona cold virus is for freaking out the oldies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @09:06PM (1 child)
So you believe that nothing is ever done for political reasons?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @09:48PM
Andrew Wakefield's paper on the supposed link between vaccines and autism was also accepted.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @04:44PM (17 children)
Nature : Stop using the worst-case scenario for climate warming as the most likely outcome ! [nature.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by HiThere on Saturday March 07 2020, @05:49PM (16 children)
The scientific community has already been low-balling the severity of climate forecasts. They didn't want to look alarmist. And people ignored those low but still unpleasant estimates because they didn't say anything really bad would happen for 50 years. Or 100 years. Or in some cases they stretched it out to 1,000 years. And people ignored it. Then they started reporting "Whoops, things are happening a lot faster than we predicted." And then people started saying "That can't be right, because you predicted that it wouldn't happen this soon.", except for some that just stopped up their ears and went "la-la-la".
There's a problem because the predictions *do* have a lot of uncertainty. Sorry, but climate science is hard, and we don't have it mastered. So it made a certain amount of sense to not stick their neck out, but it also meant they weren't doing their proper job. (OTOH, if they had reported accurately, people would have misunderstood the uncertainty. Sometimes there's no way to win.) Look at what "The Day After Tomorrow" did with some rather accurate projections. (The great conveyor has been slowing, and there's evidence that Greenland's melting *MAY* shut it down. Which might cause Northern Europe to freeze and perhaps the Northern US. While at the same time the rest of the world gets a lot hotter. *MAYBE* That's not a high probability prediction. And "freeze" doesn't mean anything like what the movie showed. But it may mean, e.g., no more orange trees in California or Florida.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday March 07 2020, @11:25PM (2 children)
Meanwhile, Hollywierd puts out a ton of movies showing instant overnight radical climate change... can't get the truth anywhere.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2020, @06:29AM (1 child)
Can you name a single such film?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 08 2020, @03:29PM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 08 2020, @03:06PM (12 children)
There are two important ways that is wrong. First, the models continue to run hot [rossmckitrick.com] - keep in mind that those predictions are based off of CO2 production not CO2 content. Second, the severity of a given level of climate impact (like a certain amount of sea level rise), is ridiculously exaggerated (for example, the Stern Review [wikipedia.org]).
Like what? I'll note, for example, that there's now predictions of long term warming that's around 4+ C per doubling of CO2 and not at all evident in today's measured warming. Sea level change might be a little higher than predicted, but not significantly so. Or perhaps you speak of the propensity of non-climate researchers to tied everything they can to the climate change bandwagon? Like climate changed induced brain-eating birds [soylentnews.org] (based on the allegation that climate change has caused two bird species to overlap in their nesting).
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday March 08 2020, @03:58PM (11 children)
Like Greenland melting, Antarctica losing ice, glaciers retreating, permafrost melting, etc., etc., etc.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 08 2020, @04:05PM (10 children)
And those "happening faster than predicted" things aren't resulting in much sea level rise which indicates to me that these effects are exaggerated.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday March 09 2020, @12:47AM (9 children)
Go ask someone who lives in the Maldives, or the Marshall Islands, or Tuvalu if the sea level is rising.
Just because you don't hear about it doesn't mean it is not happening.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 09 2020, @01:42PM (8 children)
Because that's relevant how? Did someone claim that there's no sea level rise and that somehow a destimony from someone living on a beach is the only way to change their mind?
I guess we need to remember that there's about 600k people living in those areas. Meanwhile we have somewhere around 7.8 billion people living elsewhere in the world. Until climate change mitigation has positive value, it'll remain better to accept some sea level rise. People and farms can move. The systems that make those 7.8 billion people more prosperous aren't so flexible to mandate.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday March 09 2020, @08:22PM (7 children)
Yes, you did.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 10 2020, @01:09AM (6 children)
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday March 10 2020, @01:16AM (5 children)
Yeah, whatever.
"Not resulting in much" when someone's entire home is disappearing is just your interpretation of "not much".
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 10 2020, @03:06AM (4 children)
So now, you're admitting that your earlier accusation was false in the usual backhanded way.
I bet that there's seven billion other people who might find 3 mm per year [wikipedia.org] to be pretty damn small too.
Climate change mitigation has been a huge mess, often doing the opposite of what was intended. I'm certainly not going to support it merely to protect (or rather give the illusion of protection since most of the carbon emitting world won't slow down) a small number of peoples' lifestyles. If their homes flood permanently, then live somewhere else. The world is a big place. They'll figure it out.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday March 11 2020, @02:46AM (3 children)
I'm pointing out how some people's countries are going to disappear.
Of course, because it doesn't affect you it is of no real consequence.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 11 2020, @03:00AM (2 children)
Same goes for 7.8 billion other people. But the climate mitigation required to protect those few people in those itty bitty countries is going to be of a great harm, a very real consequences to those billions of people.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday March 11 2020, @06:54PM (1 child)
Like what?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 12 2020, @02:02PM
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday March 07 2020, @05:57PM (3 children)
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/02/01/039203 [soylentnews.org]
Not much left to argue against between these two publications. Is it too late to pull Al Gore out of the mothballs?
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @07:19PM (1 child)
That article is intentionally misleading. There are a large number of 'climate models are accurate, honest!' articles. Most laypeople take this to mean 'well what they predicted must have come true.' That is not what these articles say.
One of the most critical factors in climatology is 'forcing'. In particular a trillion dollar question is if human emissions increase by *x* how much does this increase atmospheric concentration of CO2? You'd think this would be one of the easiest questions to answer in climatology. And in fact it, in theory, should be. The reality is we still have no clue what it is. Climate models in the past dramatically overestimated forcing. In other words they thought human emissions were having a much larger impact on CO2 levels than they actually were. And so they predicted that our continuing emissions would, consequently, also have a much larger impact than they have. And we also have increased our emissions dramatically faster than most of any old model ever expected. So old models generally predicted *far* greater heating than we've observed.
So is the paper lying? No, but the headline on the site linking to it is. Look at the final word salad on the abstract:
What that paper is actually measuring is not what the headline, "Claims that climate models overestimate warming are unfounded, study shows" claims it's measuring. It's not measuring whether the models overestimated expected heating. It's measuring whether the expected response to a given forcing was inaccurate. And the answer there is 'kind of'. Even the forcing response is not so accurate, but the models generally give themselves a large enough error range than the observed error can still be attributed to variance/randomness.
When you actually look back at what climate models of the past would expect for *x* emissions vs *y* increase in temperature (what people generally think of when measuring whether or not models overestimate heating), they're all absurdly wrong. Look at any paper that claims the models are accurate and you'll find the retroactively changing the forcing predictions of the old models with varying justifications for it. In this case, they don't need a justification because they're not even claiming to measure whether the temperature predictions were accurate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2020, @04:08AM
Maybe the climate scientists should talk to some botanists. At 180ppm plants stop processing CO2 and starve.
There are plenty of forests where growth was limited by available CO2, increasing the atmospheric concentration means they suddenly eat a lot more of it. Higher concentrations mean they need less water too, so more plant growth is occuring in a lot of areas that were marginal before.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @09:50PM
He's too young to be President these days.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @06:31PM (2 children)
If it weren't for the sun the earth would be very cold right now. See, the sun releases radiation and the radiation heats up the earth.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Saturday March 07 2020, @07:43PM (1 child)
What!? RADIATION!!!? Oh my God we're all going to die and get eaten by giant ants!!!!!!
</sarcasm>
(Score: 2) by Username on Sunday March 08 2020, @04:32AM
RADIATION from an uncontrolled nuclear fission/fusion cascade in OUR solar system!! We HAVE to stop it in the name of Greta's childhood! RESIST ENTROPY!