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posted by mrpg on Thursday August 23 2018, @06:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the smoke-gets-in-your-lungs dept.

GeekWire:

After enduring days of record-setting, eye-watering levels of smoke in the air, the Seattle area is in for relief, thanks to a shift in wind patterns. But the debate over whether this is the "new normal," the old normal or the abnormal is likely to play out for months and years to come.

The National Weather Service is predicting a rise in onshore air flow, sweeping plumes of wildfire smoke toward the east (sorry about that, Wenatchee) and moderating temperatures. Thursday's high temperatures in the Seattle-Olympia area are expected to be 12 to 17 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than today's .

[...] In his latest blog post , University of Washington atmospheric scientist Cliff Mass explains the mechanism behind this week's smoky skies: An express train of lower-atmosphere winds delivered smoke from fires in the North Cascades and southern British Columbia directly into Puget Sound.

[...] Is this a taste of the new normal in an era of global warming? Not necessarily. Mass has argued persuasively that the wildfire trend actually marks a return to the "old normal" after nearly a century of aggressive fire suppression and forest mismanagement.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday August 23 2018, @12:20PM (6 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Thursday August 23 2018, @12:20PM (#725173)

    Argument from authority isn't a fallacy when the people engaged in the argument have no other evidence or expertise to fall back on. More to the point, if you're going to contradict the relevant authorities on a subject, you'd better have something pretty darn compelling evience in order to be credible.

    My form of argument was this:
    1. One of AGW theory's many predictions was increased wildfire activity as a result of increased CO2 concentrations.
    2. An increase in wildfire activity has been observed.
    3. Ergo, AGW's theory's prediction was correct, and at the very least the observation is not evidence against AGW theory and likely evidence for it.

    Your form of argument is:
    1. AGW theory isn't sufficiently precise for your tastes regarding other completely unrelated predictions. (Red Herring Fallacy)
    2. Therefor, the only way AGW theory could possibly be right about the wildfires is if all other possible explanations for the phenomena are proven to be completely false. This is as fallacious as arguing "My magnet hit the floor when I let go of it, but it was attracted to the metal pipes below the floor, so the theory of gravity isn't a relevant part of what happened."
    3. And of course, your implied conclusion and real goal in this discussion is "It's OK for me to continue to believe AGW is completely false, regardless of the evidence in its favor and the overwhelming consensus of experts in the field thinking it's real." Which is straight-up cognitive dissonance theory in action.

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday August 23 2018, @12:42PM (4 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 23 2018, @12:42PM (#725179) Journal

    Argument from authority isn't a fallacy when the people engaged in the argument have no other evidence or expertise to fall back on.

    Not true here. Note how

    Your form of argument is:

    Again, not true. My argument was

    1) Due to the major change over the past few decades in how wildfires are treated, we would see a huge increase in the rate and size of wildfires.

    2) Thus we would expect to see a huge increase in wildfires even if the climatologists were wrong about their prediction. Thus, frequency of wildfires is not a valid way to falsify predictions of global warming.

    Moving on

    3. And of course, your implied conclusion and real goal in this discussion is "It's OK for me to continue to believe AGW is completely false, regardless of the evidence in its favor and the overwhelming consensus of experts in the field thinking it's real." Which is straight-up cognitive dissonance theory in action.

    Then where is this evidence? And let us note that the long term temperature sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 is the most important parameter in climatology. Being very wrong on this one can mean the difference between already being too late to stop climate change from global warming and not having to worry about the serious problems of global warming for a couple of centuries.

    It's also telling that you think this is merely about "It's OK for me to continue to believe AGW is completely false". I believe AGW exists and that it will cause some modest degree of harm to us and our environment. The problem is that big public spending on climate change won't happen unless someone can show near future serious harm from climate change. The attempt to claim wildfires as a climate change casualty is one such game for doing that.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @05:16PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @05:16PM (#725277)

      So by your own line of reason, increases in wildfire frequency isn't evidence that changes in how wildfires are treated have lead to increases in wildfire frequency because there is another theory that also predicts it.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 24 2018, @04:51AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 24 2018, @04:51AM (#725624) Journal

        So by your own line of reason, increases in wildfire frequency isn't evidence that changes in how wildfires are treated have lead to increases in wildfire frequency because there is another theory that also predicts it.

        One has to look at the data in more detail. There was a huge increase [nih.gov] in acreage burned by wildfires after around 1983 and these fires were allowed to burn longer. From the linked report, tables 1 and 2 show substantial increase in the frequency and size of wildfires starting in the early 1980s with a huge jump at the time and moderate increases since. The huge jump coincides with the change in policy.

        And later on, the report had this to say

        Fire seasons in 2003–2012 averaged more than 84 days longer than in 1973–1982, reflecting a positive trend of just over three days per year since the 1970s (figure 3, table 3). While first discovery dates were over two weeks later on average in 2003–2012 compared with 1993–2002, later control dates more than compensated. This reflects the fact that over the last four decades, the average large wildfire burn time grew from nearly six days in 1973–1982, to nearly 20 days in 1983–1992, nearly 37 days in 1993–2002 and over 50 days in 2003–2012 (table 3).

        In other words, instead of ruthlessly suppressing large fires within a week of the fire starting as were done in the 1970s (and part of a policy dating back to roughly the 1920s in the US), they often allowed the fire to burn for just over seven weeks on average. That's roughly an order of magnitude longer!

        Notice how we went from the one basic parameter of wildfire frequency to more useful ones (for distinguishing hypotheses at hand), particularly that of the duration of wildfire burns. It is typical of the climate hysteria approach to seize on some minor bit of data as evidence of the harm of climate change, which upon deeper study turns out to be a bunch of uninformed bullshit.

    • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday August 23 2018, @05:42PM (1 child)

      by DeathMonkey (1380) on Thursday August 23 2018, @05:42PM (#725294) Journal

      Then where is this evidence?

      That you are ignorant of the evidence, and when presented with it you actively ignore it to remain ignorant, is not proof that there is no evidence.

      Try opening an elementary school science textbook as a starting point. Demonstrating the greenhouse effect is a science-fair level undertaking.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 24 2018, @04:45AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 24 2018, @04:45AM (#725619) Journal

        That you are ignorant of the evidence, and when presented with it you actively ignore it to remain ignorant, is not proof that there is no evidence.

        I think it's telling you can't state even a single piece of that evidence. Sounds to me like you're even more ignorant of the evidence than I am.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 24 2018, @04:50AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 24 2018, @04:50AM (#725623) Journal
    I had a goof in my last reply to this paragraph.

    Argument from authority isn't a fallacy when the people engaged in the argument have no other evidence or expertise to fall back on. More to the point, if you're going to contradict the relevant authorities on a subject, you'd better have something pretty darn compelling evience in order to be credible.

    But we have plenty of evidence and expertise to fall back on. I already discussed some of that in my other reply with my point about large uncertainties in critical parameters of climatology. That uncertainty is an accepted part of climatology. But the consequences of it, such as huge uncertainty in the timing of temperature increases by up to centuries, are suspiciously downplayed.