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posted by martyb on Thursday November 14 2019, @12:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-don't-want-knowledge-I-want-certainty dept.

Jeremy P. Shapiro, a professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University, has an article on The Conversation about one of the main cognitive errors at the root of science denial: dichotomous thinking, where entire spectra of possibilities are turned into dichotomies, and the division is usually highly skewed. Either something is perfect or it is a complete failure, either we have perfect knowledge of something or we know nothing.

Currently, there are three important issues on which there is scientific consensus but controversy among laypeople: climate change, biological evolution and childhood vaccination. On all three issues, prominent members of the Trump administration, including the president, have lined up against the conclusions of research.

This widespread rejection of scientific findings presents a perplexing puzzle to those of us who value an evidence-based approach to knowledge and policy.

Yet many science deniers do cite empirical evidence. The problem is that they do so in invalid, misleading ways. Psychological research illuminates these ways.

[...] In my view, science deniers misapply the concept of “proof.”

Proof exists in mathematics and logic but not in science. Research builds knowledge in progressive increments. As empirical evidence accumulates, there are more and more accurate approximations of ultimate truth but no final end point to the process. Deniers exploit the distinction between proof and compelling evidence by categorizing empirically well-supported ideas as “unproven.” Such statements are technically correct but extremely misleading, because there are no proven ideas in science, and evidence-based ideas are the best guides for action we have.

I have observed deniers use a three-step strategy to mislead the scientifically unsophisticated. First, they cite areas of uncertainty or controversy, no matter how minor, within the body of research that invalidates their desired course of action. Second, they categorize the overall scientific status of that body of research as uncertain and controversial. Finally, deniers advocate proceeding as if the research did not exist.

Dr. David "Orac" Gorski has further commentary on the article. Basically, science denialism works by exploiting the very human need for absolute certainty, which science can never truly provide.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @01:44AM (26 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @01:44AM (#920141)

    I have done enough science to recognize some shitty practices in climate science regardless of whether they can do repeatable experiments:
    Altering the data and deleting the original readings.
    Suppressing disagreements by personal and career attacks.
    Arguments by faith.
    Collusion
    Treating the results of models as real data.

    Not the scientists, but their cheer group:
    Total unwillingness to consider remediation strategies that don't involve giving large sums of money to their in-group.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @07:01AM (19 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @07:01AM (#920234)

    The thing that's caused me to lose any faith in climate science has been the fact that we're still using the same fundamental principles in modeling that continue to show far different results than reality. My go-to example is the 1990 IPCC climate report. [wikipedia.org] That report's self assigned "best" prediction expected a per-decade warming of 0.2 - 0.5 degrees with an expectation of 0.3. Here are the temperature deltas from NASA where you can cross reference what actually happened:

    1990 = baseline (all below temperatures in degrees celsius)
    2000 = -0.04 change
    2010 = +0.3 change
    2018 = +0.1 change

    Expected = +0.9 change, with a minimum of 0.6 and a maximum of 1.5

    Reality = 0.36 change.

    While the models have been refined since the 90s, they're still using the exact same fundamental assumptions and still cannot explain why we're falling so far below expected warming. Yet nobody seems to care about this. I mean in literally any other science where your observation was so far outside your prediction you'd be pretty close to discarding your hypothesis as falsified. Far from it, we want to suddenly radically change our entire species based on the next century of predictions from these models?

    So on your list, I'd add 'handwaving away past failures'. This is not how science works. But apparently it's how climate politics works.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @10:24AM (8 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @10:24AM (#920282)
      More denialist bullshit.

      The IPCC predictions are highly contingent on the level of CO2 emissions. (No surprise, since this is what drives climate change.) The actual emissions after 1990 were lower than the "business as usual" scenario that you picked from the report, partly because of economic collapse associated with the fall of the Soviet Union. Using actual emissions [skepticalscience.com], the 1990 model predicts 0.2°C per decade as its central value.

      The other cheap trick you did was to exploit the noise in year-to-year data, which can be on the order of 0.1°C. it happens that 1990's temperature was a fluctuation above the long-term trend. An honest comparison would average out these fluctuations.
      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @03:41PM (7 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @03:41PM (#920371)

        Can we stick to 'first party' sites instead of blog type stuff? There's a lot of disingenuous discussion on this topic, but moreso that page you linked is not only an eye-sore but actually managed to crash Brave. Never had that happen before. I mean of course feel free to reference the data from blogs, but instead link to the sources they link to. Might also help us avoid any arguments not made in good faith.

        Let's look at the [brief] IPCC report [archive.ipcc.ch]. In responding the first thing I naturally looked for were the IPCC's CO2 emission expectations under a business as usual strategy. Oddly enough, it seems they chose not to include specific real-world predictions there and instead chose to use an imaginary "example" graph. It's on the final page. Nonetheless we can use this graph by seeing the approximate slope of the graph. Their 1985 emissions look to be about 7, with a doubling happening sometime around And the doubling happens sometime around 2040. Please do let me know if you disagree here - I'm eyeballing it but genuinely trying to engage in good faith. Here [ourworldindata.org] is a site that offers a CSV of global CO2 emissions per year. From 1985 to present global emissions increased by 82%. The doubling should easily happen within the next decade.

        So I'm not really seeing the argument that the IPCC assumed greater emissions than we actually have had. I assume this may be incorrect though. Please do correct me if you're seeing something I'm not.

        However, in checking out that site on *shudders* Chrome, I saw they instead focused on the "radiative forcing", dodging the emissions question altogether. That, used in the context on the site, is needlessly obfuscating. They're referencing atmopsheric CO2 concentrations. And this one we can hit on with complete certainty. Check out figure 4 of the IPCC report. In that graph we can see another rather example of how wrong our modeling and predictions are. They thought that maintaining emissions at 1990 levels would result in somewhere around 410ppm today. Emissions since 1990 are up more than 60%, yet our atmospheric CO2 levels are currently at around 407!

        So your site is fundamentally claiming that since the models dramatically overstated the atmospheric impact of our emissions, we should adjust and use a model designed not for lower impact emissions but actually lower emissions. That is not an argument made in good faith! And even then, going to the IPCC low (which does not describe our reality), they are still overstating the expected heating!

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @08:09PM (6 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @08:09PM (#920483)
          OK, here's a peer-reviewed article [nature.com] (PDF [researchgate.net]) assessing the 1990 predictions. Note that the plot shows adjusted curves using a 1990-style model based on both just greenhouse gas forcing and also with added natural forcing. The prediction is really quite decent.

          Rather than try to read the plot, why not look at the full 1990 report, chapter 1 [www.ipcc.ch]. On page 7, they report the current CO2 concentration as 353 ppm with an annual increase of 1.8 ppm. (The scan is surely missing the decimal point.) A unchanged linear trend would result in 389 ppm in 2020.

          Also: a full treatment should consider all greenhouse gases. The article I referenced specifically cited methane emissions as being different from the default 1990 scenario.
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @06:13AM (5 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @06:13AM (#920619)

            Thanks for the data! I think this section from the paper is critical (leaving the white space for legibility) :

            The range of the 1990 prediction represents uncertainty in the
            sensitivity of the climate to CO2 increases, and not the noise
            from year-to-year variability in the realized weather. As natural
            variability was not a part of the 1990 prediction, it is debatable
            whether and how this noise should be incorporated into the 1990
            prediction for the purposes of this study; we choose to add it...

            The observed trend [then still] lies just on the borderline outside the range
            stated by the 1990 scientists. However, adding noise from natural
            year-to-year variability...

            And it doesn't stop there. They also chose to also try to use a similar 'trick' as the site you linked to, to argue for using a reduced emissions model, in spite of the fact that emissions have increased dramatically since 1990! So let's get back to that 'trick.' The graph you mentioned is using not using the same data. The graph I mentioned, table 4 (page XVII/17) in the paper [archive.ipcc.ch], specifically assumes constant emissions, not increasing emissions. It was used to demonstrate their assumptions of how even emissions fixed at 1990 levels would result in an increasing trend of atmospheric CO2 levels. The caption for their graph states:

            The relationship between hypothetical fossil fuel emissions of carbon dioxide and its concentration in the atmosphere is shown in the case where (a) emissions continue at 1990 levels

            The IPCC undoubtedly believed that a certain level of emissions would result in much higher levels of atmospheric CO2 than it actually did in reality.

            Ultimately it's self evident that after extensive "massaging" and arbitrary widening of ranges you can manage to manage to squeeze reality into pretty much any prediction. I'd wrap up here with one interesting thing emphasizing how much that paper distorted the values. After all of their 'modifications', they observe that "if anthropogenic forcings had been held at 1989 levels over the past two decades the resulting [trend would be] 0.10–0.48C". So the bottom end of their trend would be 0.05C/decade. This poses a major red flag. The IPCC paper notes (page XII/12) "mean surface air temperature has increased by 0.3C to 0.6C over the last 100 years". Notably 0.05C/decade results in less than a 0.6C change/century. In other words, the paper "tweaked" the predictions so hard, that fixed 1989 emission levels would predict warming within the range of of the 1800s with their new adjusted model, in spite of a hundred years of sharply increasing emissions in the interim. Doesn't that strike you as dodgy?

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @09:30AM (4 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @09:30AM (#920641)
              Your argument seems to depend entirely on reading one plot. Have you considered that the plot might be wrong or even simply not drawn with enough precision? I already pointed you to the table containing the 1990-estimated CO2 concentration and annual trend, which would lead to 389 ppm in 2020 if unchanged.

              Furthermore, the article I gave you specifically cites methane and not CO2. Have you tried comparing the methane scenarios (page 13/xix of the policymaker's summary) with what actually happened (page 20/232 of this article [springer.com])?

              Note: science is hard. Fully understanding a prediction from 1990 would require understanding everything that goes into it. However, it sometimes takes less than fifteen minutes to verify specific claims. To reiterate, this is the one (from the article assessing the 1990 predictions) I checked:

              The highlighted prediction assumed a business-as-usual scenario of GHG emissions; three other scenarios were considered and in fact Scenario B [...] was closer to the mark as of 2010, especially with respect to methane emissions.

              About the reassessment article: I should emphasize the key points:

              1. The 1990 IPCC predicted +0.55°C for 1990-2010.
              2. The 1990-style EBM model can produce the same trend, given 1990 inputs.
              3. For the reanalysis based on actual emissions:

                If we restrict ourselves to GHG forcing, as the IPCC did in 1990,we get a trend of 0.27°C, still consistent with the observations

              It would be interesting to repeat this analysis up to 2020, but I have neither the time nor the expertise.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @02:40PM (3 children)

                by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @02:40PM (#920693)

                UNIFICATION! :)

                We should definitely make sure to double check each others math. In double checking both graphs (as you reasonably proposed), I just noticed a mistake you made. You stated that,

                "They report the current CO2 concentration as 353 ppm with an annual increase of 1.8 ppm. A unchanged linear trend would result in 389 ppm in 2020."

                The base date was 1990, but you accidentally set it as 2000. The actual atmospheric concentration it would give if we continued at 1990 levels is almost exactly what I ballparked: 353 + (2019-1990) * 1.8 = 405.2ppm!

                So I think this should resolve the 'unification' of our two different graphs! I think it also clarifies beyond doubt that the IPCC was indeed substantially overestimating what increasing emissions would do to the atmospheric concentration of CO2! As we dramatically increased our emissions since 1990, yet our atmospheric CO2 is only about 407ppm. The net result here is that they, now I think without doubt, substantially underestimated our CO2 emissions under the "business as usual" scenario. However, they also simultaneously substantially overestimated the negative impact of increasing CO2 emissions believing that a much smaller amount of CO2 would result in a much higher level of atmospheric CO2. So apparently two wrongs do make a right sometimes!

                So yeah, now to methane. I suppose the question is should we even start? In particular would us having higher/lower methane emissions justify swapping to a more carbon friendly model (than the business as usual one), given the above conclusion (which I think/hope we can now agree on)?

                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @07:01PM (2 children)

                  by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @07:01PM (#920762)
                  Gah! Sorry about the arithmetic error! OK, I agree about the projected linear trend from 1990.

                  But I think you're still making considerable logical leaps, inferring properties of the modelling that could be instead checked. And I think you're assuming that one thing being large implies other things must be large without properly establishing the connection. For instance, suppose we take the crude model that increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations are proportional to total human emissions. This implies that a significant increase in emissions will produce a significant increase in the growth rate of CO2 concentration. But it takes time for this increased growth rate to be visible in the CO2 level itself. One can see curvature in the Keeling curve [wikipedia.org], but the effect over thirty years is not huge. (Of course, the extrapolation can be scary.)
                  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @08:45PM (1 child)

                    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @08:45PM (#920790)

                    It's all good. In the process of this all I feel I've learned a great amount and isn't that what this is all about? Though I have to say I don't think I'm making any meaningfully complex inferences here. Let me bring things down to the most fundamental to see if/where we disagree:

                    1) Our current atmospheric CO2 levels are around 407ppm.
                    2) We have increased atmospheric emissions by around 60% since 1990
                    3) The IPCC offered data predicting what atmospheric CO2 levels would like if CO2 emissions remained permanently at 1990 levels
                    4) This resulted in an atmospheric CO2 level of 405

                    Assertion A) The IPCC substantially overestimated the impact of human emissions on overall atmospheric CO2 levels. That a 60% increase would have nearly no relative difference is only explained by human error.

                    5) The example emissions in the business as usual scenario indicated a doubling in CO2 emissions from ~1985 to ~2040
                    6) Our actual CO2 emissions have already increased more than 82% since 1985
                    7) Our emissions will double (relative to 1985 levels) long before 2040

                    Assertion B) The IPCC underestimated the amount of CO2 we would produce under the business as usual scenario.

                    ---

                    Writing things out like this makes this all so much more clear. Makes one wonder if longform language is really the right way to present research! Formalize it enough and you could even have automated logical validation of papers.

                    Getting back to the point (and longform...), my one and only argument here is that the 1990 IPCC predictions do not match reality. The way we got into the more complex discussion is in discussing whether or not it would be appropriate to change their predictions to make them more closely fit reality. The primary justification given for this suggestion is the claim that actual emission levels were lower than predicted by the IPCC, and so it would be appropriate to use a lower emission scenario. However that claim does not seem to be valid (Assertion B). The other, more refined claim, is that because the result of our emissions had a smaller atmospheric impact than expected, we should use a lower emissions tier. This argument may be more refined but is, in my opinion, even less well supported. That is trying to take advantage of a major error in the predictions (Assertion A) and spin it into a positive. The emissions scenarios were clearly defined in terms of emissions and not atmospheric concentrations in any case.

                    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 17 2019, @06:01PM

                      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 17 2019, @06:01PM (#921274)
                      It is certainly good to circle back to the original claim:

                      While the models have been refined since the 90s, they're still using the exact same fundamental assumptions and still cannot explain why we're falling so far below expected warming. Yet nobody seems to care about this. I mean in literally any other science where your observation was so far outside your prediction you'd be pretty close to discarding your hypothesis as falsified.

                      This concerned a discrepancy between an observed 30-year warming of 0.36°C — which you then accepted would be better represented by the difference of decadal averages (being less affected by year-to-year fluctuations), 0.54°C — and the predicted range of 0.6–1.5°C. I agree that this is slightly outside the predicted range, but I pointed you to an article from a few years ago where a researcher did care about this and investigated the reasons for the discrepancy. This was attributed in part to different-than-predicted levels of forcing from greenhouse gases. As the IPCC can't predict things like economic crashes or attempts to control emissions, their predictions about warming surely must be contingent on the level of anthropogenic emissions. In addition, on short timescales there can be significant effects from unpredictable natural events such as the eruption of Mount Pinatubo.

                      Now, if one wants to go rejecting a particular hypothesis, it is usually best to have an alternative. I think the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is holding up much better than the null hypothesis of random temperature fluctuations. Furthermore, science is an iterative process. The IPCC has issued several reports, and a proper analysis of whether they are junk science would test, for instance, whether their predictions are improving (which would happen as a result of better understanding and better data) or not (which could happen if the report were purely politically motivated).

                      Coming back to the issue of emissions: if you accept that measured CO2 concentrations have been below the 1990 business-as-usual scenario, then this supports the explanation that the prediction of warming was too high because it assumed higher atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases than actually occurred. Now, perhaps the predicted relationship between CO2 concentrations and CO2 emissions was off. But it appears this is an area of active research: in particular, ocean uptake of CO2 is a significant effect and and there is a significant effort (e.g. this team [noaa.gov]) to understand it. I think it's a bit hyperbolic to say "nobody seems to care about this". Unfortunately I don't have the time, but it would be interesting to see how the IPCC description of the carbon cycle has evolved since the first report.

                      Finally, I want to emphasize that climate scientists do serious work and it's a bit ugly to poke and prod at their data at a very superficial level. I would never reject an entire field without hearing the response from scientists in that field. And they've had to deal with an enormous level of politicization, thanks to the trillions of dollars' worth of assets whose value is threatened by the notion that using those assets is harmful and should be eliminated. (It's been pointed out [thenation.com] that this could be compared in scale to abolitionists asking the U.S. South to give up its slaves, which led to the U.S. Civil War.) Despite the enormously wealthy interests working against climate scientists, I think mainstream climate science has held up and the critiques seem either obviously wrong or concern relatively minor details. Actually, that's the subject of the article we are supposed to be discussing:

                      I have observed deniers use a three-step strategy to mislead the scientifically unsophisticated. First, they cite areas of uncertainty or controversy, no matter how minor, within the body of research that invalidates their desired course of action. Second, they categorize the overall scientific status of that body of research as uncertain and controversial. Finally, deniers advocate proceeding as if the research did not exist.

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @01:55PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @01:55PM (#920326)

      I should point out, that while there is a single (slight) negative, in the data you point out, the trend is still quite firmly positive.

      So while the quantitative approach might leave something to be desired, you cannot really deny the qualitative result, that of increasing temperature.

      That is, you have fallen squarely into the trap described in the article, where because something was slightly wrong the whole thing should be disregarded.

      Bravo good sir for illustrating the article so perfectly!

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @02:37PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @02:37PM (#920343)

        Imagine I claim to have developed an AI that can predict the stock market. All I really did was look at past gains of the market and adjust them forward in an adjusted linear fashion. Any predictions this model would provide would be completely useless. But, by the standard of "well the market went up" it would almost certainly also be correct. Until it wasn't. So can I now claim any doubt towards the veracity of my model is simple "science denialism" so long as the market goes up? And when it does finally go down... well I hope I've earned enough money peddling my model by then!

        Nobody with even the most basic understanding of our earth's climatic history would deny that we're in a warming phase. Similarly, but more controversially somehow, the Earth would also be warming even if humans did not exist. Of course we are almost certainly exasperating the warming rate, but what matters is precisely to what degree and to precisely what climatic end. The IPCC model was not just a little wrong. We're not saying 'well they missed the bulls-eye' so it must be wrong. It was so far off the mark that the question we're debating is whether it was even in the vicinity of the board itself. You have to adjust the data somewhat substantially to argue that it was.

        Wanting to restructure all of society in a way that would undoubtedly be horrifically damaging to economic progress and development of the world, based on these models, is insane. This may not always be the case and indeed should the models start to prove themselves to be consistently accurate then it would be something to consider. But for now all we have are extremely inaccurate models paired with sensationalism and hyperbole.

        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday November 14 2019, @04:24PM (1 child)

          by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Thursday November 14 2019, @04:24PM (#920391) Journal

          Wanting to restructure all of society in a way that would undoubtedly be horrifically damaging to economic progress and development of the world

          Citation needed. There's no evidence that a green economy is "horrifically damaging" to anything other than the profits of certain fossil fuel companies.

          "Even as some commentators insist that nothing short of a total rethink of free-market economics and corporate structures is required to stave off global catastrophe, the Danish capital’s carbon transformation has happened alongside a 25% growth in its economy over two decades. Copenhagen’s experience will be a model for other world cities."
          https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/oct/11/inside-copenhagens-race-to-be-the-first-carbon-neutral-city [theguardian.com]

          • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @04:56PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @04:56PM (#920404)

            Denmark is a modern, tiny, rich, and extremely well developed nation with favorable geographic features. I completely agree that such nations transitioning to a much smaller, or even 0, footprint is entirely possible (and desirable). Though as the article mentions, many claims are currently still fudged a bit. For instance Copenhagen has chosen not to count the Copenhagen airport in their emission measurements. But the real catch is sitting right in front of you, if you're at your desk. Or in your kitchen or living room. Look at all of your nice little products and niceties. Where were they made? Certainly not Denmark. It's actually quite remarkable how high our (developed world as a whole) carbon footprints are given we've gone very much post-industrial and outsource much if not the majority of our pollution.

            To the point though places like China, East Europe, India, and even Africa are still in their infancy. As these regions develop you're going to see both an increase in industrialization and an increase in a middle class consuming all the things they now disproportionately ship out to us. To say they have to do this while maintaining 0 or near 0 emissions is equally unfair and unrealistic. It's just not going to happen. And similarly these nations are huge relative to the US, let alone when we went through mass-industrialization. And so because of this even low emissions from them has a huge footprint. For instance our CO2 emissions/capita are well over 200% of China's, yet of course China is ends up responsible for well over twice our total emissions - simply because they have 1.4 billion people using energy compared to our 330 million. And over in Africa you're looking at 1.3 billion and then another 1.4 billion in India. And these nations are going to grow, industrialized, consume, and pollute.

            Even a 'green funding' system would never work. Even if we could domestically agree to offer such (which is highly questionable), these developing nations would not accept it (with strict constraints) because it would create a relationship of dependency. And we absolutely would abuse that dependency, sooner or later. Imagine if e.g. China's power industry today was dependent on US handouts.

    • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday November 14 2019, @02:46PM (5 children)

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 14 2019, @02:46PM (#920348) Journal

      So, to everyone who stuck around long enough, this person lied to you. No, not by huge er... degrees, but enough to be called a liar who should shut the fuck up.

      Let's start with the cherrypicking. 1990 was the second hottest year in the 90s look at the ACTUAL average temperature per decade [wikipedia.org] that the kind folks at wikipedia put together for us. Look at those numbers, then look at the steaming mound of shit he left on your front stoop.

      Bearing in mind that the report explicitly makes it clear that temperature anomalies would accelerate and get bigger every decade(as they very clearly fucking have) and that under that scenario you'd expect the beginning of the 21st century to be slower than the end.

      If he read the report, he'd fucking know that so either he's lying about having read it, or lying about the content. Either way, stop listening to fucking liars. For god's sake.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @04:27PM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @04:27PM (#920393)

        Alternatively, you've assumed your own worldwide and just react to anything with overt hostility instead of having any intellectual curiosity whatsoever on what facts substantiate those values and which facts contradict them. In particular I'm certain you've read the IPCC report inside out, but simply forgotten what it said. So as a refresher here is a quote from the paper [archive.ipcc.ch] itself (page XXII/22):

        Under the IPCC Business-as-Usual (Scenario A) emissions of greenhouse gases, the average rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century is estimated to be about 0 3°C per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0 2°C to 0 5°C) This will result in a likely increase in global mean temperature of about 1°C above the present value (about 2°C above that in the pre-industrial period) by 2025

        (2025-1990) / 10 * 0.3 = 1.05 or "about 1C". If you don't understand why I'm dividing by 10 it's because the 0.3/decade prediction is a decadal, per decade, measurement.

        You might notice, that's not accelerating. As you have presumably just briefly forgotten, the fundamental belief in climate science is that there is a linear relationship between emissions and temperature. You don't see exponential gains in temperature without exponential increases in emissions. Also just so you know, on your always authoritative Wiki graph - you should be looking at the right-side table. I'm currently looking to compare and contrast the figures provided their versus the figures NASA provides on their main page. Do you get anything when you click on the source [nasa.gov] Wiki references for those numbers? It's a dead link for me which is quite curious.

        • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @05:18PM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @05:18PM (#920412)

          Okay, I found the NASA GISS data page. Here [nasa.gov] is a link to it. I have no idea where the Wiki page got their numbers from. The dataset I am referencing here is "GISTEMP Seasonal Cycle since 1880" -> "Global Annual Mean Surface Air temperature Change". Results:

          1990: 0.45 (baseline)
          2000: -0.05
          2010: +0.32
          2018: +0.13

          That shows an aggregate +0.4 degree change instead of the other NASA source which showed an increase of 0.36. It's not substantively different.

          If you can find a source on NASA's page with numbers that you think are more relevant please do share. Even better if you can explain why you think they're more relevant. No idea whether you'll believe me, but I genuinely have no preconceptions here. Well I mean I obviously think I'm correct, but I'm more than happy to change my view if you can simply provide meaningful and clear evidence. Indeed 2 decades ago I was just as vehement, except on the other side of the fence. The thing that really changed my view was the repeated failure of prediction and arguments I found to be quite disingenuous (as the above poster I engaged with) on why this was.

          And as one little aside. I assume you feel strongly about this topic. Should you ever hope to persuade anybody of anything on this topic (rather than just preaching to a choir) it's probably not a hot idea to run straight out of the gate with slurs and various personal attacks. I tend to be abnormally thick skinned, so I'm happy to carry on. But in general you end up persuading nobody of anything. Same reason I'm engaging with you like a human instead of calling you whatever nastiness I can think up.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @09:22PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @09:22PM (#920506)
            These are noisy data! If you pick certain years haphazardly, you can get significant random fluctuations that can be as large as 0.2°C. If you look at the plot on the NASA page, you can see that the 1990 temperature is a fluctuation above the trend and the 2018 number is a fluctuation downward. Cherry-picking, if I take the 30-year interval from 1986 to 2016, I can get a much larger temperature increase of 0.83°C, or 0.28°C per decade.

            Averaging over a few years will reduce the influence of random fluctuations. This is what the Wikipedia page does by taking decadal averages; you should be able to see that the trend is much steadier, with the last three decades showing increases of 0.137, 0.200, and 0.265°C. This means that the incomplete decade from 2010-2019 was 0.557 or 0.602°C warmer than the decade from 1980-1989. (There's a discrepancy between the value and the delta for the latest decade on the Wikipedia page. My guess is that one of the numbers includes some kind of extrapolation to account for the incomplete data for this decade.) Doing the same averaging exercise with NASA GISS yields a difference of 0.540°C.
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @06:55AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 15 2019, @06:55AM (#920624)

              Very fair point! Yeah, I think the argument for using averages is certainly logical with such a small sample of decade points. I just downloaded the CSV for the aforementioned data set here [nasa.gov].

              I created 4 sets of averages:

              1980-1989 = 0.246
              1990-1999 = 0.385
              2000-2009 = 0.59
              2010-2018 = 0.785

              For your convenience if you'd like to double check my work the cell codes I used were:
              =AVERAGE(B103:B112)
              =AVERAGE(B113:B122)
              =AVERAGE(B123:B132)
              =AVERAGE(B133:B141)

              And so we get:

              2000 = +.139
              2010 = +.205
              2018 = +.195

              Total = 0.539

              And that definitely is a much bigger number. The problem is that it again falls *far* outside the prediction expectation (0.9) and even outside their entire range (0.6 - 1.5). So we still end up having to get back into the 'adjustment' arguments as per above.

              And yeah no idea what's going on with Wiki's 2010-2019 range. It's extremely wrong. Kind of expect as much from that site though. Just checked the history. Looks like IP 50.66.163.181 randomly changed the table back February, and nobody bothered to verify it. Thanks, Canada. Wikipedia: the idea that doesn't work in theory only in practice. Until the internet gets stupid. And then it simply becomes the idea that doesn't work.

      • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday November 15 2019, @02:57AM

        by Reziac (2489) on Friday November 15 2019, @02:57AM (#920599) Homepage

        The problem with using "anomaly" rather than "data" is that what's anomalous depends on your baseline.

        Using data, you would see 1936 as a drastic high temperature spike, rather than as a dot on the curve.

        --
        And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Unixnut on Thursday November 14 2019, @11:41AM (3 children)

    by Unixnut (5779) on Thursday November 14 2019, @11:41AM (#920292)

    One big problem I have is that from what I can see, "climate science" is more like "economic science" than what you would consider proper scientists. Its a game of statistics and probability, with divination thrown in. They try to develop models of complex systems (be it the economy or the climate) in order to predict the future.

    However at their core it is just a wild guess based on a horribly incomplete data set, and should be treated as such. Especially as the problem with these "statistics based sciences" is that statistics are easy to manipulate to say you want. This makes the field really easy to corrupt.

    You see, scientists are not gods, they are humans, and like most humans they can be corrupted. They have to consider their careers and family. They desire funding, they chase patrons, they write papers for money/grants, or to please someone who has the influence they need, etc...

    There is a lot of money sloshing around in "climate science", because there is a lot of vested interests on both sides who stand to gain a lot by things going their way. It is a highly politicised field, where saying the wrong thing can get you fired, or your grants not renewed, or being taken off prestigious projects that could help your career. What the "wrong thing" is depends on who your benefactor is, so many will not rock the boat for fear of their financial well being.

    The bigger problem to me at least, is not the field of climate science, but the environmentalists. They are the ones who have elevated climate science to a religion. My arguments for calling it a religion are as follows:

    * It is faith based. Very rarely do environmentalists appeal to logic, they mostly appeal to emotions and melodramatic exaggerations. Also, the use of terms of "climate believer" and "climate denier" have religious overtones, similar to the "believers" and "deniers" of god used by other religions.

    * They have their clergy: That would be climate scientists, and even then, usually only the climate scientists that reinforce their beliefs. Those that go against the prevailing narrative, or are not supportive enough of it, get pilloried as "deniers" or "paid shills", and ostracized. Its a self reinforcing echo chamber, as scientists don't want their careers ruined by being ostracized, they are more likely to support the narrative out of a desire of their own self preservation.

    * They change the narrative to fit the prevailing situation. Originally it was to be global ice age, then it was to be global warming, then cooling again, then when it was warming, after they decided to just change it to "climate change" because it was becoming clear they had no idea what will actually happen, except that there will be change.

    * Preaching the "end of times"/apocalypse: Quite common in all religions. "Do as I say or the world will end in $x years". It seems the "climate doomsday" is almost as old as the second industrial revolution. There being reports of the world ending "in 20 years" since the 1900s. None of the predictions came true, but it doesn't stop them just saying they got the timing wrong, adjusting the model, and trying again.

    * They seem to have their symbol/representative to rally around now, in the form of Greta.

    * The concept of indulgences for eco sins (e.g. in the form of paying for carbon credits to offset your existence)

    * Likewise the concept of penance, and public shaming those who do not repent.

    * They preach a lot to the unconverted, spreading their gospel. They get increasingly aggressive and irate towards those who "do not see the light", or who challenge them, or who quite frankly are not interested in their religion. As a result, a lot of people will agree to be "believers", but only in the superficial sense (mostly to get the preachers off their back). They believe in climate change insofar as it does not affect the way they live or demands any sacrifices from them. If it does, then you start to see protests and objections.

    * They have their own opinions on how others should live, how many kids to have, what to eat, and how the world should be ruled and run. Concepts of population control, control of free movement, control of available food, etc... like most religions, generally a very strong authoritarian mindset.

    * Once they gain power, they use it to force others to conform to their beliefs against their will, "for the greater good".

    Interestingly a lot of the rules above don't seem to apply to those at the top, who are known for jetting in private planes to climate conferences. Greta at least tries to sail to them, but that ignores the emissions required to build and maintain the $1,000,000+ yacht in the first place. I guess this is the idea behind the "indulgences" in the form of climate credits. The rich can carry on enjoying modern life, while the rest of us have to return to the days of feudal peasants.

    It seems to me that a lot of humans have a deep seated psychological need for religion, and with the old religions withering away in the western world due to secularism/atheism, new ones are springing up, religions in all but name in my opinion. Environmentalism is one such example.
    I would go as far to say as "techno fetisists" is another (the belief that computers/technology/AI will solve all of mankinds problems and usher in some post-singularity immortality for the faithful) is another, but they are not today's topic.

    Problem with religions is, eventually they get subverted by those who crave power. Who will then form political structures to enforce their power (under the banner of the religion), and then try spread the religion far and wide in order to gain more power. It usually doesn't end well for the masses.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @02:44PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @02:44PM (#920347)

      Greta did sail to the conference but... https://apnews.com/be12be49011743daaa3646edb0de0b61/ [apnews.com]

      They had to fly a crew over to bring their multi-million dollar yacht back.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @05:04PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @05:04PM (#920408)

      The future is indeed hard to predict. However, the trend of the actual (now and past) CO2 increase and temperature increase strongly suggests the future will stay pretty much on that course.

      It's not rational to not do anything about it UNLESS we have 100% proof first. The rational thing is to assume the trend is likely to continue at roughly the same rate since the forces causing it are not going away.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @05:45PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @05:45PM (#920433)

      Jefferson in his famous, 'Notes on the State of Virginia' [wikipedia.org] also referenced climate change:

      "A change in our climate however is taking place very sensibly. Both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory even of the middle-aged. Snows are less frequent and less deep. They do not often lie, below the mountains, more than one, two, or three days, and very rarely a week. They are remembered to have been formerly frequent, deep, and of long continuance. The elderly inform me the earth used to be covered with snow about three months in every year. The rivers, which then seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do so now. This change has produced an unfortunate fluctuation between heat and cold, in the spring of the year, which is very fatal to fruits. From the year 1741 to 1769, an interval of twenty-eight years, there was no instance of fruit killed by the frost in the neighbourhood of Monticello. An intense cold, produced by constant snows, kept the buds locked up till the sun could obtain, in the spring of the year, so fixed an ascendency as to dissolve those snows, and protect the buds, during their developement, from every danger of returning cold. The accumulated snows of the winter remaining to be dissolved all together in the spring, produced those overflowings of our rivers, so frequent then, and so rare now."

      The changes Jefferson mentioned mostly predated the industrial revolution, yet were quite rapid and severe in presentation. And there's 0 reason to doubt the accuracy of what he said. Yet were a person of the 'climate religion' to observe such changes today they would immediately begin to become frantic fearing it's finally happening with Virginia on track to become a desolate desert in but a matter of decades. No doubt the media would be certain to repeat such a message 24/7.

      I find it difficult to imagine it's only a coincidence that as we've abandoned our religions of the past, so many new views and values have emerged that are very much taking the exact same form as religions. It's probably something inherent in humans to want to worship an unquestionable ideology. Perhaps it works as a cornerstone from which one can find comfort and sanctity, even if (like religions of the past) it's busy telling you you were going to go the metaphorical hell if you didn't spend every waking moment freaking out in the name of said ideology.

  • (Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday November 14 2019, @02:38PM (1 child)

    by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Thursday November 14 2019, @02:38PM (#920344) Journal

    Are you still spouting nonsense from the so-called "climategate"?

    You've been duped. Here: https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2019/nov/09/climategate-10-years-on-what-lessons-have-we-learned [theguardian.com]

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 18 2019, @04:03PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 18 2019, @04:03PM (#921550) Journal
      For a different take [spectator.co.uk]. From your link, I think this quote is worthy of comment:

      The Mike in question was Michael Mann, professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, who had worked with Jones for years. His “trick” was no more than a simple technique to combine the records of temperatures measured directly by thermometer with estimates made from tree rings (which roughly reflect temperature variations). “In fact, the email was an entirely innocent and appropriate conversation between scientists,” Mann states in this week’s BBC Four documentary, Climategate: Science of a Scandal. He and Jones were merely trying to find appropriate ways of illustrating a graph of global temperature changes.

      This view was not shared by Sarah Palin: the former US vice-presidential candidate wrote a Washington Post op-ed article that claimed the emails “reveal that leading climate ‘experts’ … manipulated data to hide the decline in global temperatures”.

      Subsequent investigations by journalists showed these claims were unsupportable, however. Guardian writer Fred Pearce studied the leaked emails and produced a book, The Climate Files, from his research. “Have the Climategate revelations undermined the case that we are experiencing made-made climate change? Absolutely not,” says Pearce. “Nothing uncovered in the emails destroys the argument that humans are warming the planet.”

      Notice the game played here. For a reason that has yet to be explained, tree ring data goes off the rails around 1960. So Mann "hid the decline" by simply not using tree ring data after 1960. This has led incidentally to some clever burying [justfacts.com] of the tree ring curve under other curves that conveniently hide that it stops at 1960. While it is true that reality isn't going to care what sort of shenanigans scientists do, the rest of us, who are trying to interpret reality through this filter do need to care.