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posted by
martyb
on Wednesday October 21 2015, @11:12AM
from the Henry-Hudson-was-ahead-of-his-time dept.
from the Henry-Hudson-was-ahead-of-his-time dept.
Beneath the Aurora Borealis an oil tanker glides through the night past the Coast Guard ice breaker Amundsen and vanishes into the maze of shoals and straits of the Northwest Passage, navigating waters that for millennia were frozen over this time of year.
Warming has forced a retreat of the polar ice cap, opening up a sea route through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans for several months of the year.
Commander Alain Lacerte is at the helm as the vessel navigates the Queen Maud Gulf, poring over charts that date from the 1950s and making course corrections with the help of GPS.
[...] Today, taking this route cuts 7,000 kilometers (4,350 miles) off a trip from London to Tokyo, saving time and fuel.
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Warming Opens Famed Northwest Passage to Navigation
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Confess your sins to the Lord and you will be forgiven;
confess them to man and you will be laughed at.
-- Josh Billings
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday October 21 2015, @10:53PM
I'd like to ask deniers a question, a sort of Pascal's Wager on Climate Change. How does it personally benefit you that Climate Change be a big lie, a big liberal scientist conspiracy, and the Earth isn't getting warmer after all? Do you have stock in oil companies? Are you in line for government funding that would otherwise go towards climate research? Do you think problems make your taxes go up? Maybe you feel that the Islamic world is the greater threat to world peace?
Perhaps you believe that God created the world and also made it perfect and unchanging, and somehow admitting that things can change is a threat to your religious views? I'd like to know which Bible quotes say that the Earth never changes, and that God controls the weather. Are you, maybe, just possibly, hoping the end times are near, and you're willing to stand idle and let it happen? The Earth shall end in fire, eh? Who knew that would be Global Warming! But it won't matter whether the Earth is warming if the Rapture is coming soon.
If it's none of those, and you don't have any other reason, then why are you in denial? It isn't doing you any good to deny the existence of this problem. Doing things about it will be a huge job creator. If it turns out to be wrong after all, a lot of good will have been done anyway.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @12:05AM
It's because people presenting themselves as scientists to the public who do not have the proper self-skepticism (climate researchers are far from alone in this btw) are, even if inadvertently, working to destroy a pillar of modern civilization.
Why does the Venus troposphere have the same temp-pressure profile as the Earth once adjusted for distance from the sun?(They claim it is a coincidence) Why do they calculate expected average temperature in the absence of a "greenhouse effect" without first converting irradiance to temperature when Holder's inequality has been known for ~100 years? (They pretend it was never published as more than an algebra lesson) What predictive skill have the models shown? The best prediction out there is Hansen et al. (1988) scenario C, which assumed constant CO2 after 2000 (They claim there is no physical explanation so the model must be wrong).
It just seems like fanatics, political manipulators, and money grubbers trying to pass off sloppy research as science to take advantage of people. Once again, this is not limited to climate research but they are one of the most extreme examples, at least as presented by the media. I say shut down all government funded "science" at this point, nearly every field seems to be getting more corrupt and incompetent every year (particle physics and astronomy are maybe the exceptions).
I am sure there is some effect of humans on the environment, but I doubt anyone knows what it will be or if it would be better/worse than what would happen otherwise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @01:15AM
Same AC. Another thing is that I agree with conservation and limiting pollution, etc (let's start by transitioning away from an economy that punishes saving because it's based on a ponzi scheme). Even the people pure of heart are misguided here. In an effort to manipulate the average joe with pseudoscientific scare tactics they are alienating people who subscribe to the philosophy they claim to represent.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RedGreen on Thursday October 22 2015, @12:25AM
It is you people who are in denial there are fossils of tropical plants in the arctic, them things did not get there with the temperatures/CO2 levels this planet is at now. The Earth and its other species will do just fine, the people living in coastal areas not so much. And the real problem is never discussed the fact that the extra excess billions of people on this planet have to die or be killed off for any hope of a chance with any of these called for reductions of carbon usage to be effective. The only real chance for them to live on is by having a massive investment in solar, wind, tidal and nuclear power but good luck getting that done, these eco wackos that supposedly want to save the planet turn in NIMBY morons as soon as any of that is proposed to be built anywhere near where they live.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @10:23AM
Continents move, moron. Antarctica, for example, used to be attached to the west coast of North America. "There's fossils of tropical plants there!" doesn't mean it was warmer, it means that location used to be a lot further south than it is now. See Gondwana [wikipedia.org] / Laurasia, [wikipedia.org] Rodinia, [wikipedia.org] Pangaea, [wikipedia.org] etc.
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Thursday October 22 2015, @09:29PM
Yet another fool who ignores the higher temperatures/CO2 levels in the past the planet had, as I said the Earth will do fine, people not so much so possibly we will find out in a century or two or at least our descendants will.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @01:00AM
Pascal was stupid for his wager, and so are you.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Saturday October 24 2015, @09:28AM
You're not an idiot and it's okay to disagree but I dare you to comprehend this. You can do it but I'll bet you don't want to.
And this might sound arrogant but it's all true even though you and many others disagree. However it should only sound arrogant if you think I made these arguments. I didn't nor did I have to: science made these arguments, I'm just spelling it out for you and there ought to be many tens or hundreds of milliions who could do the same. If they don't then don't ask me why, maybe they're just fed up with your lot and have much better things to do (although so do I really). It requires no qualifications beyond understanding the basics of science and no one ever got any degrees or diplomas for that.
“Denial” or “belief” does not personally benefit me either way, does “believing” personally benefit you? A lot of people simply have no idea what science is and are not interested in learning what science is because it would make them stop pretending. Science is not about pretending. Not even cluebatting with serious (albeit basic/fundamental) “weaponry” seems to work (likely they don't even recognize the “weapons”) but hey let's give it yet another go :/
What is “climate change”? Has the climate ever been non-dynamic? No.
What is “anthropogenic global warming/climate change”? Does the current climate include no humans? No. Do humans have no possible impact of any kind? No.
Those are meaningless names/nouns as far as science goes. They're 100% political/rhetorical.
Some places are getting warmer, some places are getting colder, maybe the average temperature for the entire system is increasing, maybe it's at a peak, maybe it's going down, it does not seem to be in a valley, trends are not as easy as pointing towards a single decade or even a handful of decades, despite what is “correct” or “accepted” there isn't a real scientific consensus, not even among those who think the overall temperature is increasing.
Instead there's nothing but a never-ending series of ad hoc simulations. Not even ad hoc hypothesis [wikipedia.org] but simulations.
That paragraph and link on its own really ought be enough for rational creatures, too bad we're human right?
However even if there was such a consensus it would hold no scientific value on its own. Never mind that the so-called “scientific” so-called “consensus” has been changed back and forth with each IPCC report or that some of those changes have been quite large: even if those things were not the case it still wouldn't be science. Science requires use of the scientific method, even when one can't duplicate the entire environment one has to manage to show in a falsifiable independently reproducable manner each and every bit of knowledge and understanding that one makes claim to and to do each of those smaller parts experimentally for the conditions one claims they apply to. This would be entirely possible to do if only one had the required knowledge and understanding about all the causal chains but the problem is nobody has that. Worse: none of the simulations even attempt to include all of what little is known but have to focus on what is assumed to be the largest factors at shitty fidelity... which explains why they suck so badly even with supercomputers: they're shit, garbage in and garbage out.
Don't believe me when I say there's stuff we have no idea about how fits into the puzzle? As an extreme (and rather unnecessary) example try sprites [wikipedia.org] on for size. Who knows what if any or how large or small an effect they have on the big picture. Most likely one would think (guess) it would be nothing significant. Always easy to handwave away those things one doesn't have significant knowledge about but the fact remains that we do not have a complete understanding of our atmosphere never mind the climate (which is not just the atmosphere but also sea and landmass). Sprites are an extreme example; there's lots of far more basic stuff that is only understood at a rudimentary level. How can I claim that? Because new knowledge and understanding is constantly being gained about the climate (and none of it from simulations).
Attempted simulations of a system that is poorly understood is not science in itself (however it can be and is math; an entirely different ballgame), such simulations —if returning perfect results forwards and backwards in time— would on their own at best be a black box [wikipedia.org] but none of the simulations have given such results i.e. not only is it not science but it's not even a black box.
It's fucking pathetic is what it is.
All the hard work, all the effort, makes it look even more so. No silver lining.
If you and the other “believers” understood or somehow realized how fundamental and basic this is you would feel ashamed and embarrased about your opinions and stance on the matter. The so-called scientists who share your position are much worse: they should know far better than they do, and if they actually do then they are frauds. Either way and no matter what diplomas they hold they are not actually scientists, as scandalous as the whole mess is it is perhaps even more disgraceful that their institutions have not disowned them.
The simulations are not and can never be (by definition) epistemologically [wikipedia.org] valid (then again wow there's a lot of shit being published claiming to be epistemology, some time during the last five or eight years it seems social sciences hijacked the word). The epistemological details of “climate change/AGW” are identical to the epistemological details of “intelligent design”: they're both equally rubbish and worthless (I've tried to find a specific excellent academic paper I've read about this for you but the search results are swamped with social “sciences” nonsense).
Too little actual science & a staggering amount of ignorance about basic science, the scientific method, actual hard core philosophy of science/actual epistemology, as well as the history of science. Why are people claiming to be scientists ignoring this? Are they too preoccupied with any personal consequences of admitting the truth? Granted the political and academic environments aren't at all welcoming to dissent but fuck them: science is all about dissent and good science is about taking it far enough to dissent against whatever pet theory or hypothesis you're working on.
The biggest critics of “climate change/AGW” should be the proponents. That would be science, that would be scientific. None of them are.
So would any of this change if the sea level rose fifty meters tomorrow? No it wouldn't: there still wouldn't be any science!
I still bet you and many others (perhaps willfully) didn't understand a thing I wrote... but none of this is difficult and none of it ought be anything remotely close to controversial.
What are the motives for ignoring science and the scientific method and the inherent skepticism of science to such an extreme extent? That's irrelevant because the damage is the same; one can't have less science than no science and what we've got as things stand right now is no science and no knowledge about what —if anything— should be done (and by far there tends to be more wrong answers than right answers for any question).
Too tired and angry to even get into the immense opportunity cost of it all.
Humans stink :)