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posted by
cmn32480
on Wednesday September 14 2016, @01:07PM
from the interesting-but-not-surprising dept.
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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U.S. Presidential Candidates Answer ScienceDebate 2016 Questions
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Best of all is never to have been born. Second best is to die soon.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday September 30 2016, @07:38PM
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.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Thursday October 13 2016, @09:12PM
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 :)