Losing the Public Debate On Global Warming 1181
Hugh Pickens writes "Dr. James Hansen, director of the NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who first made warnings about climate change in the 1980s, says that public skepticism about the threat of man-made climate change has increased despite the growing scientific consensus. He says that without public support, it will be impossible to make the changes he and his colleagues believe need to occur to protect future generations from the effects of climate change. 'The science has become stronger and stronger over the past five years while the public perception is has gone in completely the other direction. That is not an accident,' says Hansen. 'There is a very concerted effort by people who would prefer to see business to continue as usual. They have been winning the public debate with the help of tremendous resources.' Hansen's comments come as recent surveys have revealed that public support for tackling climate change has declined dramatically in recent years. A recent BBC poll found that 25% of British adults did not think global warming is happening and over a third said many claims about environmental threats are 'exaggerated,' compared to 24 per cent in 2000. Dr. Benny Peiser, director of skeptical think tank The Global Warming Policy Foundation, says it's time to stop exaggerating the impact of global warming and accept the uncertainty of predictions about the rate of climate change. 'James Hensen has been making predictions about climate change since the 1980s. When people are comparing what is happening now to those predictions, they can see they fail to match up.'"
Tobacco 2.0 (Score:1, Informative)
Remember the FUD when Tobacco advertising kept claiming that it was safe when we knew it wasn't?
Where are those guys now? Chances are you'll find they (and their apprentices) are hired by oil companies now to promote denial of climate change.
Problem is, they've gotten better at spreading FUD over the years. I have a problem calling anything 'evil', but if anything can be called evil, these guys
and those that hire them are really good prospects.
Global warming is a fact (Score:3, Informative)
In other news... (Score:4, Informative)
'James Hensen has been making predictions about climate change since the 1980s. When people are comparing what is happening now to those predictions, they can see they fail to match up.'
In other news, Hansen's 30-year-old global temperature predictions close to spot-on [theregister.co.uk]
Re:Public concern (Score:4, Informative)
and the promised "hockey stick" increase in temperatures not been seen in the last 15 years...
That's just not true.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A2.gif [nasa.gov]
And note, climate is what happens over periods of at least 30 years. At 15 years you're still in the realm of weather.
But heck, the fact you're not interested in a serious discussion of AGW is underlined by the Muslim outreach comment.
Re:What did we expect? (Score:4, Informative)
It's a problem of definition.
You say it's a child, I say it's an embryo.
When you say I want to allow the killing of children I get defensive. Because that's not what I'm allowing.
Holding on to that is "so important", because being bullied because of someone else's religious beliefs makes people defensive.
Re:It's not the science (Score:5, Informative)
I largely agree but the "progressives" are not for extreme environmentalism - the conservatives greatly exaggerate their attacks to the point where it is hard to use satire to ridicule it. 1st time I saw Glenn Beck I thought he was over the top satire. The conservatives just went too far lately labeling a woman a slut just for wanting access to birth control. They'll often call Obama a Nazi and a Communist in the same rant.
Restraining the extremes of capitalism is not anti-capitalism anymore than Firemen are anti-fire. To an extreme capitalist, any criticism of their religion is blasphemy - and they are at the point of religion just like communists in the USSR. (A god is not required for something to be a religion.)
I agree progressives want to strengthen and expand democratic institutions greatly; not all of them believe centralized power is always the solution.
Re:The problem is chicken little (Score:2, Informative)
What danger is more certain or immanent?
A) Global climate change, derived from models
B) Fukushima reactor 4 spent fuel rods, unmanaged and uncasked, with 85x the cesium-137 of Chernobyl
http://akiomatsumura.com/2012/04/682.html [akiomatsumura.com]
If you are going all chicken-little, do it about something that will actually render 1/3 of the Earth's surface uninhabitable, and the marine ecosystem poisonous.
Re:The problem is chicken little (Score:5, Informative)
But we cannot even talk about risk and risk-management, because as soon as you bring up the topic, "skeptics" accuse you of predicting the end of the world. This is just bullsh*t. Everyone has to feel the are right on whatever issue, even when they have to make up complete bulls*t.
As for AGW being "chicken-little", it is entirely plausible that there will be no ice-caps in 500 years time. It normally takes 10x that long or more for an ice-age to end. In just the next few decades, we will be hit in the wallet by insurance companies, who are already starting to factor in the costs of increased extreme weather events. The effects
Re:How does this make a difference? (Score:4, Informative)
$4 billion is 0.0003% of our national economy.
Re:Hansen Must Go (Score:1, Informative)
Unfortunately your information is very spotty, no doubt as a result of reading popularized accounts of climate history.
For example the idea that it was warmer in the past based on the idea Greenland was green in the past is just nonsense. Read:
http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/envs501/downloads/Jakobsson%20et%20al.%202010.pdf [uidaho.edu]
Miller 2010... Temperature and precipitation history of the Arctic
Alley 2010... History of the Greenland Ice Sheet: paleoclimatic insights
Popularized web accounts published by political organizations are useless.
As far as solar minima, again that's poppycock, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_cycles [wikipedia.org]
Simply not true (Score:4, Informative)
There may be an almost consensus that climate change is happening, but there is far from a consensus that it is caused by man's actions or inactions.
This is simply untrue. We are 90% certain that warming is anthropogenic [wikipedia.org], and furthermore, 97% of climate scientists support that figure [sciencemag.org].
You obviously formed this opinion by reading someones blog, or something like that. Climate change is the most well studied phenomenon in the history of the world. Go read what actual scientists have to say on the issue.
Re:Hansen Must Go (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The problem is chicken little (Score:1, Informative)
The problem is that there are NO accurate "models" of global climate. The models that we have can't predict the present given data from the past, and the results of the models, more and more, fail to match reality. Because Hansen and the Warmists are so firmly intertwined with their models that they refuse to accept the actual experimental data, real SCIENTISTS for whom the data is paramount are refusing to accept apocalyptic prescriptions that are based entirely on the MODELS.
The Earth really is warming - it has been since the 1400's. But before that, the Vikings had dairy farms in Greenland, and the Romans grew vineyards in England. Hansen's "hockey stick" model says that there was no warm period in the 900s, and that the temperature only goes UP, but experimental data and history disagree.
Will the Earth CONTINUE to warm? Or is this just another cycle? The experimental data says "cycle", while Hansen says it will continue. The data so far says "cycle".
And Hansen can cry all he wants about "consensus", but there isn't one. And Al Gore, the Pope of Warmism, can't create one from whole cloth.
Re:The problem is chicken little (Score:1, Informative)
You have no facts to back your statement really. Recent discoveries show that the temperature started jumping BEFORE the massive CO2 uptake caused by industrialization over the last few hundred years.
Almost NO ONE is arguing that nothing is happening. What those of us are arguing is that:
A) As has been posted above, the weatherman can't predict accurately if its going to rain 12 hours from now, what the fuck idiot thinks they are going to predict years into the future. ... but when was the last time you heard about them being addressed? ... mean while there is more ice in the Bearing Sea this year than ever in recorded history. And all of the sudden then it turns into 'well its because the extremes are going to get worse every year!' ... so is the ice melting and raising the ocean or is it freezing more and more every year? ... a year later, NASA comes out and says 'fuck, this new sat data we have tells us we've been completely misreading the data on the caps, it turns out there is actually no decline ... of course, this come out right after an Episode of Deadliest Catch shows on discovery with the ships stuck in an iced over harbor that never gets ice that early in the year.
B) Conflicting evidence. For every thing used to prove humans are causing global warming, someone else can show verifiable fact that the human factors proof is bunk.
C) Science makes stupid fucking statements like 'after 9/11 the lack of aircraft contrails cooled the earth by 2 degrees on average for those days. There is no fucking way that you can prove that statement conclusively, anyone who believes it is just showing themselves to be idiots, and for the rest of us it just makes us recognize more and more that most scientists don't actually live in the same reality as the rest of us. There are about 50 different legitimate reasons that the global temperature could have dropped on average, including the active volcanic eruptions that were going on at the time putting ash into the air on a global scale and far more likely to actually cause a change.
D) Most people trying to raise AGW awareness are fucking religious NUT JOBs worshiping the religion of science. You might as well team up with PETA, you'll likely look less retarded for doing so. You can put verifiable fact in front of most of them proving one of their statements wrong and they'll just ignore you and yell louder, its not about science or facts, its about them being right and everyone else being wrong.
E) Theres pretty much no evidence that warming is 'bad', only that it will cause change. The Earth has been changing since the dawn of time, if it remained in its original state, which we can't even describe accurately or really don't know even what it was, its safe to assume that human life as we now know it wouldn't exist, unless you really think humans would have evolved in a cosmos where the laws of nature and physics as we now know them didn't actually exist yet. Their may be more deserts, and coastlines will change, but considering the number of cities that are already underwater and the number of ancient harbors we've discovered that are 10 meters ABOVE current sea levels than I think its pretty fucking stupid to act like this is new and can't be dealt with.
F) The 16 largest ocean container ships in the world emit more sulfer and contribute more to global warming each year than EVERY CO2 EMITTER COMBINED, natural OR human
G) AGW supporters scream OMG THE ICE CAPS ARE MELTING THE ICE CAPS ARE MELTING
H) Relating to G, scientists use sat data to show the shrinking Arctic ice sheets
The reason the 'public debate' is being lost is because its not a debate. It might have started out that way, but the AGW supporters just make themselves look like asses by continually contradicting themselves, showing evidence that is CLEARLY wrong and not admitting it. Its okay to misunderstand new data, shit happens, but not owning up to it makes it clear yo
Eco fraud (Score:2, Informative)
First, you have to prove it was mankind and is harmful. Let me toss some facts:
Recent melting glaciers in BC contain trees only 7600 years old. This means the ice isn't long time permanent. Be you creationist or evolutionist man survived and multiplied well 7600 years ago with a warmer climate. Most of the antarctic and arctic ice is recent ice as in less than 10,000 years old. Human species evolved when it was warmer.
Mars polar caps, Io ice melts, my SUT did it? Hm, prove it. There is a stellar component and tax-me-more eco freaks ignore the obvious. Ignore sunspots and stellar activities? Come now. Seelctive science is generally junk science.
Hey, I will not even argue warming exists!!! But is it bad to have say NWT turn into farm-able and livable land? Or ferns to grow again on the north slope of Alaska?
Let me ask, why does eco junk science always talk of gloom and doom for tax bucks? Yep, it is about the money for most eco freaks, it isn't about empirical unbiased opens science at all. Just political BSing the outlook for fear taxes today. 99% of what we are fed in the media is political jousting in the ruse of science, about money, taxes and power. Pretty hard to sort it out too.
People are getting sick of the BS and shutting down. Be it right or wrong.
Re:The problem is chicken little (Score:5, Informative)
There hasn't been an increase in the last 10 years primarily because of a particularly strong la nina. Short term cyclical events generally have a greater magnitude than the overall warming trend. If you take ~11 year moving averages to hide the known cyclical variations, the warming trend is very much still there.
"Hide the decline" refers to the fact that temperatures inferred from tree ring sizes in the last couple decades haven't matched actual temperature readings (possibly because of other human influence on tree growth). When presenting tree ring data, they replace very recent data with actual temps, usually using a different color or something to indicate that it has been swapped out.
There are legitimate criticisms of the AGW argument, but you haven't put forth any of them. <ad hominem> This clearly indicates that you don't seek the truth, just the promotion of a personal agenda. That or you're not very smart, and it's usually wrong to attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. </ad hominem>
Re:The problem is chicken little (Score:5, Informative)
It is very revealing that so-called "skeptics" of global warming reject the results of studies carried out by multiple different laboratories, using a wide variety of different analytical methods and many different types of data collected from around the globe, but uncritically accept as fact conclusions based upon 3rd hand accounts of agricultural practices in one small region of Europe. Summary and citations of the actual science can be found here [skepticalscience.com]
It is by the way, absolutely false that there has been "NO" temperature increase in the past 10 years. In fact, analysis of the data shows a clear upward trend over the past 10 years. The question is whether the increase satisfies the technical criterion of "statistical significance" -- which means showing that there is less than a 5% probability that an apparent increase of that magnitude could occur by random statistical variations. This is a particularly stupid argument, because statistical analysis of climate models (as well as weather trends) indicates that 10 years is too short an interval to reliably detect the predicted global warming trend even if it is real. (Although if you correct for known natural sources of climate "noise," it turns out that it is significant after all [wordpress.com]. So while we cannot prove that global warming did not end 10 years -- or 10 seconds -- ago, this is not evidence that it has stopped.
Re:The problem is chicken little (Score:4, Informative)
Completely false. See here [bartonpaullevenson.com] for a list of some of the confirmed falsifiable predictions of climate theory. And that includes the big one: predicting global warming before it was evident in the temperature record. [realclimate.org]
Citation needed. Please provide IPCC report references for the consensus climate science predictions that supposedly have not come true
Re:The problem is chicken little (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, there are hardly any scientists who disagree with AGW, and those few have been discredited. Also, Hadley didn't falsify any data, AFAIK Hansen isn't associated associated with Hadley, Hadley can't release the data because it isn't theirs to release, and Hansen (among others) does support nuclear power.
So, five wrong statements so far. Want to try for six?
Re:The problem is chicken little (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe ... and I'm just venturing a guess here. The answer is in the very first message of this thread.
Once the sky falls enough for a piece to hit you in the head, then it's too late to prevent its complete collapse. So do we want to prevent it from falling, or not?
When meteorite strikes start getting blamed on global warming ... don't you think it may be time to tone it down a notch ?
The conclusions they have come to, as a massive consensus, is that AGW is very much real and significant, and cannot be explained away by natural means.
Even you are talking in hyperbole. Avoid words like "massive", do not use the term AGW after you've expressed doubt that it's anthropogenic.
I do have a question about global warming. Unless I'm massively misreading just about all papers on the subject, global warming is a feedback loop. There's a hundred factors, but by far the biggest one is temp -> more h2o -> more temp -> more h2o and we're essentially screwed until that one runs it's course, which is expected to happen by 2150. This feedback loop started between 1830 and 1890, so I doubt my grandfather knew anyone who had anything to do with it when he was a toddler. This is an effect that explains ~90% of the temperature change, 3 times bigger than the co2 effect, ~80% of which is another ocean-related feedback loop cause by rising temperatures. Now call me insane, but doesn't that mean that if every human dropped dead tonight after carefully shutting down all appliances and power plants, global warming will run >95% of it's course anyway ? So essentially my question is what, exactly, will a small decrease in co2 emissions help when a drop to zero would hardly do anything ?
A second question I have is with how we select theories to believe. IPCC has made 5 reports now, 4 of which predict the temperature variation 100 years out. Aside from the fact that I detest the way they arrive at their conclusions. The first IPCC report predicted a temperature anomaly and a 95% certainty interval. Guess what. We're below that 95% certainty interval. The second, likewise. Third, likewise. The fourth, we're at the very bottom of the confidence interval ... But I said there were 5, didn't I ? Well the 5th ... no longer has a prediction.
Exactly how old does the IPCC think I am ? I realize they're better scientists than me, granted, but that people who pulled the above stunt call themselves scientists ... baffles me. I was taught at university to base my faith in theories on their predictive ability in the past ... well you blew it. Try for another 20 years, get it right this time, and get back to me and I'll be their staunchest defender ... but ... It's really really really hard to defend this.
Furthermore, the way the IPCC arrives at conclusions (and the reason scientists don't care about their track record) is the following : they take ~20 studies (the number of studies dropped with every report though), and average out the mean and standard deviation (you have done enough math, I'm sure, to know the mathematical validity of averaging out standard deviations is, have you not ?) of 20 studies that ran simulations nobody has any reasonable hope of duplicating, even if the source data was available.
The reason scientists don't care, aside from the money argument, is that they base their theories on individual theories that have been refined, and did indeed drop all of the theories that first report was based on. But as I said, the IPCC is no longer including any theories at all ... wtf ?
Furthermore the people defending AGW on the street and in papers are, and you have my sincerest apologies in advance, MORONS. The supporters of AGW are the biggest enemy of rational debate here. They don't know what a derivative equation is yet defend f^100(x) like a taliban defends allah's orders to eradicate all gays.
Re:The problem is chicken little (Score:4, Informative)
The question is whether the increase satisfies the technical criterion of "statistical significance"
You don't think that this sort of remark ... might be part of the reason global warming has such a bad rep. Let's run you through a basic application of statistical science here.
When we make a measurement, you're essentially placing a sensor in a noisy environment. If we make the wrong assumption that the noise is random (this is wrong, but hopefully close enough. Yes, hopefully). So you take many measurements and use a number of techniques to fix this data, including several that are essentially fraud (I can see the guy at this station wasn't taking his medicine these days, let's just drop that data - type of "fixing"). Then you test a hypothesis against that data. This does not result in "a warming trend" or "a cooling trend" it results in 2 numbers : chance that the temperature has risen -> p, chance that the temperature has not risen -> !p (hey sue me, slashdot does not implement latex and I'm not about to look up the correct UTF symbol for not). You might also calculate a value "q", the chance that the temperature has dropped. And this also gives you !q.
What may amaze you is that p > !p AND q > !q. So we're dealing with a guess here. The convention is that unless p > 95%, we don't say temperature has risen. For most data sets, p 50%).
Note that even this 95% is a concession of the scientific world to statistical sciences, and there's a huge problem with statistical sciences [theatlantic.com]. By contrast, the canonical example of an exact science, physics, only considers a measurement reasonable when it passes a significance of six sigma (which is 99.9999998027% certain). That is *NOT* enough to declare something the truth within physics, the only thing that is enough for that is a mathematically consistent theory that passes repeatable experiments (and even then it usually takes 10 years or more).
Read that link. Think about the fact that climate science is in fact much more limited in what it can experiment with than medical science. Experiments are impossible. Today's data is unreliable to the point where ~10% of the data points are flat-out wrong before correction. Data going back thousands of years is used, and nobody really knows it's reliability (and the tree ring issue certainly seems to suggest a lot of factors we don't know are at play here) ...
So can you please understand that if it's not statistically significant, it didn't happen. Credibility is a huge problem already, please don't screw it by being wrong 50% of the time. No, not even if you mean well.
You're not helping.