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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: 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.