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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday September 14 2016, @01:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the interesting-but-not-surprising dept.

Three of the four major candidates for United States president have responded to America's Top 20 Presidential Science, Engineering, Technology, Health and Environmental Questions. The nonprofit advocacy group ScienceDebate.org has posted their responses online. Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Jill Stein had all responded as of press time, and the group was awaiting responses from Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson.


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  • (Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Wednesday September 14 2016, @11:59PM

    by Yog-Yogguth (1862) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 14 2016, @11:59PM (#402076) Journal

    You should have a look [soylentnews.org] at it (sorry about the gigayears error).

    XKCD is giving you 22 thousand years out of a 5 million year picture, in other words less than half a percent of the available geologic data and a little less than three percent of the ice core data (800 thousand years).

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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday September 15 2016, @06:28PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 15 2016, @06:28PM (#402401) Journal

    I'm not quite sure what your point is. You could be implying that XKCD censored data that didn't conform to their storyline, but I've assumed that they just compressed a chart that was already too long to be convenient. But you could also be implying that it's more dramatic than they are depicting, because they elided a bunch of material. That seems more probable to me, but the reason seems to be that the chart was too long to be convenient.

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    • (Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Friday September 30 2016, @05:37AM

      by Yog-Yogguth (1862) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 30 2016, @05:37AM (#408258) Journal

      Sorry for such a late reply, this became a longer post than I anticipated and it is probably misleading or wrong of me to say it like this but my main point is that we as humanity do not have a good grasp on our own knowledge, the existing data, and any explanations, and people like the IPCC are acting as if we know things for certain when we plainly don't and when the way forward (no matter what) is to admit to it (and embrace it as science that needs doing and doing well) rather than pretend that there is nothing to discuss (as XKCD also does and most likely on purpose out of conviction) and that "the science is settled" when it so obviously is lacking one way or the other.

      The Milankovitch cycles you mentioned in one of the other comments perfectly illustrates that we must be missing something [wikipedia.org], likely many things, from our basic or intermediate understanding of how the Earth's climate functions. The climate change "story" is riddled with holes, assumptions, and even strange decisions and nothing much is being done about addressing any of it because nearly all the focus and effort goes to a political or politicized effort at defending pseudo-religious dogma, if anything over time there only appears more questions and errors in all related scientific disciplines.

      That's a very bad place to be if we're facing a huge problem, and we might (or we might not but we might in the future so either way).

      The vast majority that pays any attention at all do not seem to utilize hardly any critical, questioning, or investigatory abilities or approaches at all, something which is self-defeating for all no matter what "side" they're on. So that's first and foremost what I would love to contribute to (in anyone) because that's the basis of (possible) learning and understanding. Not that I know all that much, I only know that I almost always end up with unanswered objections or a lack of explanations.

      It's ironic (as well as tragic) but I'm starting to think the good fortune humanity has had in combating Ozone depletion might be why people think that any massive climate change will be or is all about another handful of "nasty chemicals" and that this time it's all about CO2 rather than Halogens and so on. This despite the fact that it ought to be obvious even if one thinks we've got it all figured out and even if one uses the IPCC reports themselves that it's not CO2 that is the problem but H2O because it is H2O vapor/clouds which acts as the glass in greenhouse through climate forcing [wikipedia.org].

      I mean what the fuck? Where is the focus on humidity? Not that I'm advocating doing the mistake all over by just replacing "CO2" with "H2O" or that I think it will be that simplistic in any way but at least they would be listening to themselves that way.

      If we really are facing catastrophic climate change then there's going to be much more to it and if one looks solely on waste heat (all energy ends up as waste heat sooner or later) then even the 11% of total power (2012 [wikipedia.org]) coming from nuclear power would play its part. If we really are facing trouble then we need to approach it all in a much more sensible fashion where criticism is embraced —aka science (and engineering too)— we'll need to engineer a global cooling system/heat sink/radiative pathways and it needs to be something that can be switched on and off as needed as we discover new interactions. In a situation of impeding catastrophe the alternative is 7 billion deaths and that's just stupid, wasteful, and unimaginative.

      Back to the comparison to the Ozone holes and Halogens I have to underline the point and fallacy caused by the problems having very different scope and complexity. Just because we lucked out in one non-laboratory setting doesn't mean we should assume we'll do it again in another much more complex and poorly understood non-laboratory setting where we're nowhere close to accounting for and fully understanding even that which we know about. A statement (on paleoclimatology) like "The exact cause of the variation of the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is not known" [wikipedia.org] illustrates the general problem we face on so many different details; we often simply don't know how and are often merely guessing at why.

      If we're in trouble we could easily be in much bigger trouble than "AGW" but we could also be in much lesser trouble in the first place. What troubles me the most is that as far as I (an outside observer) can gather we're not actually finding out or preparing to do something that would work nor checking our assumptions (those who do are usually thrown to the wolves).

      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday September 30 2016, @07:38PM

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 30 2016, @07:38PM (#408516) Journal

        Water is different, because the surface of the oceans is so huge that you basically have all the water that the air can hold all the time. How much it can hold depends on a lot of things, with temperature being predominate, but also air speed, rate of diffusion over the continents, etc. And the world isn't a smooth ball that's the same temperature everywhere. So basically you don't use water as a determining factor in your models, you use it as an environmental feature.

        Methane is a lot different. It fluctuates wildly depending on how fast it's emitted, and how fast it's converted into CO2 (which is essentially constant), so you say, e.g., that methane it 10 times as significant a greenhouse gas as CO2, but it only lasts 50 years before being converted into CO2. (Those numbers are probably wrong, and the conversion step is a half-life conversion anyway, not an absolute limit, but they're roughly correct.)

        And it's been known for about a century that CO2 is an important greenhouse gas, because it's transparent to visible light, but approximately opaque to infrared.

        You can say that water is an important greenhouse gas also, but for reasons mentioned in the first paragraph you don't treat it that way, instead you use it as a feature of the environment in your model.
        N.B.: This is for a global model. When you deal with more local areas you DO need to treat it as a greenhouse gas, but when modeling local areas the features of adjacent areas are usually more significant than greenhouse gases. It matters more whether warm air or cold air is blowing in from next-door. The larger the area you're considering, the less true this is.

        Yes, there *are* a lot of unknowns. Weather is complex. Weather was the inspiration for chaos theory. And we still can't really handle it, not even with lots of daily measurements.

        I don't even know if I've mentioned the same of the continents, the width of the openings into the Arctic Ocean, or other such important features. These all play into the models, and lots of things I don't know anything about.

        P.S.: I am not a Climatologist. I don't build climate or weather models. I just read a bunch of popularized science. So there's going to be lots of specialized things that are common knowledge in the specialty but which I don't know. People spend their entire lives studying those sciences, and are still periodically surprised by things that other people already know well.

        Sorry, the world is complex, and 100% certainty about anything is an illusion. *ANYTHING* But there are many things that are fairly certain, and if you wait for complete certainty, you'll never do anything. And don't assume the world will hold still while you're waiting to decide, because it won't. Not deciding to act is itself a decision, so you do the best you can, but ignoring the evidence because it's inconvenient or because it isn't 100% certain is likely to lead to disaster.

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        • (Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Thursday October 13 2016, @09:12PM

          by Yog-Yogguth (1862) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 13 2016, @09:12PM (#414080) Journal

          Sorry for yet another late reply ;_;

          This gets a little bit ranty and off topic at the end but none of it is aimed against you or anyone specific; it's general and I don't feel like I can claim some kind of pure conscience either (after all what/how little am I doing myself despite having a tiny carbon footprint?). Worse is that we're having plenty of other big issues that this all ties in to. I don't feel nor think I have a solution to anything/any of it.

          I'll try to explain myself a little better but I agree with a lot that you write and I do adhere to the precautionary principle (although I don't actually like "principles" or anything else that reeks of excuses for dogma; it's what it always ends up as and current climate science displays and illustrates that perhaps better than anything else). I'm also a layman or merely someone interested and I'm certain to be wrong about a lot of things but I do have a somewhat unusual background where I'm comfortable with real epistemology (not the politicized stuff that has appeared the last decade or at any rate pollutes all search results so that I can't find a really good paper I once read on the epistomological aspect of all of this) and theory/philosophy of science (I studied it at university in a "past life"/decades ago). That doesn't mean that I'm any more right or anything like that (would be a fallacy) but it explains the main angle I come at it from.

          The way I see it the problem with our current understanding of the climate in the form professed by "anthropogenic climate change" isn't that it's "not 100%", instead the problem is that it is "almost 0%". Outright 0 as far as the epistemology goes meaning it has no proper scientific value at all i.e. on par or perhaps even below the epistemological value of things such as phrenology or intelligent design, that's how bad it is; none of the climate change models return results one can have any confidence in at all, not even backwards in comparison with past data.

          What does that mean? It means we know we're doing it wrong. It means we know we don't know. It also means that as long as we obfuscate or deny that we don't know we will continue to hinder most or maybe even all efforts at nailing down and learning what we still do not know. It could serve as a general definition of "anti-science".

          Another way to try to express my point is the straightforward mathematical example of multiplication of errors/uncertainties also know as propagation of errors/uncertainties and confidence limits and how it accumulates very fast beyond what most people initially find intuitive. With a high likelihood of multiple hidden variables and/or interactions the confidence is zero; we're not in a laboratory environment/abstract space, we're not dealing with idealized gases, we don't even fully understand hydrodynamics and need physical tests whenever we want to make absolutely sure (wind tunnels, flow tanks etc.) thus we don't really understand mixing all that well (hell try on Brownian motion for size and we think we can predict the global climate?), the interactions between the different layers and temperatures of the atmosphere (tropo, strato, meso, thermo, exo, etc.) is a set of very young and maybe one should say nearly non-existing fields of science no more than roughly fifty or sixty years old, we're dealing with a system complexity of immense size i.e. an immense number of variables all with their own potential errors, we are not a closed system neither "in" and perhaps more importantly "out", and we know that there are many things we don't know (like the "function"/impact of sprites in the mesosphere).

          All together the "sum" remains lesser than it's parts and that's not a basis upon which to start considering the science as settled in any way or form or to base policy upon in the way politicians now almost unanimously do. It's no cause for making everything about carbon dioxide or any other "scapegoat chemicals" because for all we know carbon dioxide might actually be the trigger for the negative feedback loop that starts the cyclic cooling. We don't have a clue! We could be doing precisely the thing that will ensure that which is being attempted to avoid.

          I'm mostly annoyed that climate scientists aren't making these points or arguments similar to them themselves, loudly in internal but public/open scientific debate/discussion/quarrel (it's usually not pretty when scientists argue), because that's what would earn them the standing of being actual scientists :( Instead it's "always" people from other fields who raise the alarm about all kinds of errors, mostly statisticians but also some meteorologists and chemists.

          Very simplified the whole "climate change" thing is it's own nemesis for as long as this continues. Considering how bad and how much worse any potential climate change could be (no matter if it's warming or not) this fact is what really ought to make people worried and not the current speculation presented as "science".

          If that wasn't bad enough there has been a huge opportunity costs from making climate change the top priority and pretty much destroying environmentalism and conservationism (which should have a lot more attention given our technological possibilities; seed banks are good but we really ought to have or work hard towards 99% complete non-proprietary genomic data banks and "conservation banks"). We don't actually have any excuses for losing any biological diversity on account of climate change (and this would be a true application of a precautionary principle). We've pretty much not explored the deeps of the oceans and the life there yet deep sea mining is going ahead, likewise the ecological/biological niches of the Earth's crust, and there probably isn't a single ecosystem we fully understand to every detail and every life form within it (grab a butterfly net or garden tools and a microscope and you're likely to find uncatalogued life in any back yard). But we could and should.

          Anyway thank you for "triggering" me XD I hope I'm not being crass or wildly unpleasant (although I'm likely very dumb and slow, arrogant for sure). These days these topics are so much more pleasant than so many other things that when I finally get around to attempting to keep up with SoylentNews replies it's a plain relief :)