Search forums

Forums

Export thread

Watch it when you give your money to sceptics, rich people, they might actually be real sceptics

Oct 24, 2011#1

@Li3n

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environmen...by-conservative-group-confirms-global-warming

Climate study, funded in part by conservative group, confirms global warming

The latest global warming results confirm those from earlier, independent studies by scientists at NASA and elsewhere that came under fire from skeptics in an episode known as 'climategate.'

Oct 24, 2011#2

Tress

Reality has a liberal bias.

Oct 24, 2011#3

Necronic

This is a good article. Curious to see how people respond to it.

Oct 24, 2011#4

MindDetective

The footnote of the article that was linked said:
[Editor's note: The original headline was changed to correct an inaccuracy about who funded the new climate study. Moreover, the original headline inferred that the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation may not have funded the research if it had known what the outcome would be, although there is no indication that is the case.]

Oct 24, 2011#5

Necronic

Well, ok the politics part aside (which it pretty much always should be), it's cool that they analyzed the data while accounting for the "heat islands".

Oct 24, 2011#6

GasBandit

The Article said:
The work makes no attempt to attribute the rising temperatures to any particular cause.

As I say every time this comes up... the crux for those who actually debate the issue intelligently has not been "is it getting warmer?" That's acknowledged by anyone who's even done a smattering of casual research. Where the controversy lies is as to whether it is anthropogenic. Whether it's getting warmer as part of a natural cycle, or what if any discernible contribution mankind is making.

Those who are just pointing to the article and yelling "IT'S REAL HA HA YOU STUPID LOSERS" obviously didn't read the article, and are just as intellectually bankrupt as those they're trying to taunt.

Tress said:
Reality has a liberal bias.

Dear god, according to board witticisms, it's 2006! Quick! Sell my stock before the crash!

Oct 24, 2011#7

@Li3n

Yes Gas, we all remember when you stopped saying the warming isn't real and started saying that maybe it's not because of humans...

It's still funny!

And it was done because of the climategate (they really needs to stop with the gate thing already btw) thing...

Oct 24, 2011#8

Tress

You can keep changing your arguments all you want, Gas. It won't make you correct.

Oct 24, 2011#9

GasBandit

@Li3n said:
Yes Gas, we all remember when you stopped saying the warming isn't real and started saying that maybe it's not because of humans...

It's still funny!

And it was done because of the climategate (they really needs to stop with the gate thing already btw) thing...

Tress said:
You can keep changing your arguments all you want, Gas. It won't make you correct.

Does the phrase "Are our SUVs causing global warming on mars too? Because it's getting warmer there as well" sound familiar? Because I'm pretty sure I say it every time this comes up. You guys just attribute every argument you hate to me. You'd think I'd be used to it by now.

And, of course, I can't let this one go by: I, at least, can spell "skeptics."

PS: The "-gate" suffix is irrevocably burned into our culture, unfortunately. I wish it would go away too, but I don't see how. I'm sure that even if, today, there were another scandal involving the Watergate Hotel, it would be called "WatergateGate."

Oct 24, 2011#10

fade

The issue isn't just that it naturally gets warmer and cooler. We have tons of isotropic evidence that it goes back and forth. But the question isn't very simple. It's clearly getting warmer, and it's also clearly getting warmer at a faster rate than history typically shows. It's not that history hasn't shown that rate before, it's just that it's really rare, and it corresponds quite nicely with the time line of industry. That, and predictive models as old as the early 90s based on anthropogenic sources are bearing out nicely. And the arguments that people like Michael Crichton make, such as "It's far too complicated a system to model mathematically", are frankly stupid. You're typing right now on a box that works because we can approximate the highly chaotic movements of electrons with high-level simplifications.

I've said all along anyway that it really doesn't matter if it's anthropogenic in origin or not. There are like a billion other, more obvious reasons to regulate the release of that stuff into the environment, almost making the climate change argument moot.

Oct 24, 2011#11

MindDetective

fade said:
I've said all along anyway that it really doesn't matter if it's anthropogenic in origin or not. There are like a billion other, more obvious reasons to regulate the release of that stuff into the environment, almost making the climate change argument moot.

I want to specifically "like" this comment. The Stop Global Warming message is not something that is going to connect with people because they respond to local interests more immediately than to global ones. It is a method of screaming one message over and over in the hopes that people will be change. The Global Warming advocates have no sense of how to actually change people's behaviors. Show people how their own towns are being polluted in the air and water and they will get more involved.

Oct 24, 2011#12

Chibibar

MindDetective said:
I want to specifically "like" this comment. The Stop Global Warming message is not something that is going to connect with people because they respond to local interests more immediately than to global ones. It is a method of screaming one message over and over in the hopes that people will be change. The Global Warming advocates have no sense of how to actually change people's behaviors. Show people how their own towns are being polluted in the air and water and they will get more involved.

I think that is the only way to really get people moving. Most people only care if it hits their wallet or their own backyard. So people in the country who breath fresh air and such won't believe there is a global warming vs citizen of L.A. breathing in smogs.

Oct 24, 2011#13

GasBandit

fade said:
I've said all along anyway that it really doesn't matter if it's anthropogenic in origin or not. There are like a billion other, more obvious reasons to regulate the release of that stuff into the environment, almost making the climate change argument moot.

What other reasons are there to limit CO2 emissions besides "contributing to the greenhouse effect?"

Oct 24, 2011#14

Chibibar

GasBandit said:
What other reasons are there to limit CO2 emissions besides "contributing to the greenhouse effect?"

Smog? I don't like to breath smog

Oct 24, 2011#15

GasBandit

Chibibar said:
Smog? I don't like to breath smog

Smog is not a direct result of CO2. Smog is a result of other pollutants such as carbon MONoxide, sulphur dioxide, etc.

Oct 24, 2011#16

Chibibar

GasBandit said:
Smog is not a direct result of CO2. Smog is a result of other pollutants such as carbon MONoxide, sulphur dioxide, etc.

yea but people don't usually understand all that. It still come out of the car and factories (granted maybe not as much today but still)

Or maybe not enough trees to convert CO2?

I got nothing.

Oct 24, 2011#17

fade

Short answer

It's not just CO2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_list_of_greenhouse_gases
Also, CO2 is rarely released in isolation.

Oct 24, 2011#18

GasBandit

Chibibar said:
yea but people don't usually understand all that. It still come out of the car and factories (granted maybe not as much today but still)

All the more reason to stop the carbon witch hunt. It's always CO2 that gets the demonization, and the pro-business conservatives who get called out for "wanting dirty air and dirty water" when CO2 has nothing to do with the cleanliness of air or water. I'm all for Carbon Monoxide regulation. Sulphur is bad, too, as is mercury, arsenic, lead, etc etc. Fade said there are "a billion other reasons" to limit carbon dioxide emission other than climate change, and I'm genuinely interested in what these reasons are.

Or maybe not enough trees to convert CO2? I got nothing.

Well, then, wouldn't the answer there be to plant more trees?
Added at: 17:41

fade said:
Short answer

It's not just CO2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_list_of_greenhouse_gases
Also, CO2 is rarely released in isolation.

Then why make the laws, the marketing campaign, and the vilification all about CO2? Why sell "carbon credits" as the indulgences of the new secular national religion?

On that list (and as has come up in previous threads), by far the most prevalent greenhouse gas is methane, which has much more of an impact than CO2 because, even though it is "weaker" in causing the effect, there is vastly, vastly more of it. But nothing is ever made of this? And another: Water Vapor? Is it because CO2 emission is... easier to tax?

Oct 24, 2011#19

fade

I actually never said carbon dioxide.

Oct 24, 2011#20

GasBandit

fade said:
I actually never said carbon dioxide.

Ah, ok, you said "that stuff," and I was assuming you meant CO2... probably because, as I noted, that's what the witch hunt is always about.

So you agree that carbon dioxide, in and of itself alone, isn't harmful outside of contributing to the greenhouse effect?

Oct 24, 2011#21

fade

I don't know the answer to that question.

Oct 24, 2011#22

GasBandit

fade said:
I don't know the answer to that question.

I'll reword it then. Are you AWARE of any ways that CO2 is harmful to the environment outside of greenhouse effect concerns?

Oct 24, 2011#23

Necronic

There are still plenty of people that used the whole "heat island" argument to discredit even the most basic argument of "it's getting warmer".

What's important about this is that it gives us a firmer fundamental data set to work with when we start talking about the second issue: Whether it's humans that are causing the heating, how far it will go, how much damage will this cause, can it be stopped, will I already have died at the ripe age of 105 before anything bad happens.

This gives you the foundation to start looking into the rest of that.

And you're right, CO2 isn't really a significant contributer, particularly due to the log effect it has (more CO2 causes less temperature change). But like Fade said, CO2 never shows up to a party alone, and when it brings its buddies like Methane, you know stuff is about to get real.

Edit: you guys responded while I was writing this. Changes in any atmospheric chemical concentration, particularly one as important as CO2, will have effects beyond global warming. It's impossible to know for sure what they are, but small changes in the equilibriums will have huge effects in the long run. There was one period in the earths history where oxygen was like 2-3% more common than it is now, which lead to crazy stuff, like meter long dragonflies.

Long story short, do your part to keep oxygen levels low enough that the things from my nightmares don't come back.

Oct 24, 2011#24

strawman

fade said:
You're typing right now on a box that works because we can approximate the highly chaotic movements of electrons with high-level simplifications.

I want a deterministic model of the earth's atmospheric conditions that is as predictable as digital electronics, and since you've said it's as trivial as my model of digital computing elements, then you can surely provide such a model to me by Monday, just as I could provide such a model of of your computer to you by then.

Oct 24, 2011#25

fade

~~Ug. Nevermind. I had an answer, but I'm just not going to respond to rudeness.~~
Added at: 03:37
This is why I don't come in this subforum. Never said trivial. Not once in my post. The point was simply that it's been done in other fields, and it obviously works. To imply that it cannot ever be done (as Crichton did) is silly. It was an analogy, not meant to be a perfect one-to-one correlation. Perfectly workable high-level atmospheric models have existed for decades. You don't have to wait until monday, you can see one at 11pm tonight. It works really well.

The point is actually in your comment. You don't have to know what the micropaths are that the individual electrons follow to come up with a general rule like Ohm's Law (which is predictive, but not entirely accurate, hence the noise in your readings). The point is that Crichton and others would have you believe that you could never come up with Ohm's Law based on the motions of electrons. Hey, I'm pretty sure if I lived 200 years ago, I couldn't come up with Maxwell's equations by monday either. But that doesn't mean they weren't possible. If you really wanted a digital analogy, you'd have to break the atmosphere up into circuit pathways, just like you would with the computer. There is no Ax = b for the whole computer, unless you simplify ridiculously.

Oct 24, 2011#26

fade

If I were to respond to the gauntlet slap even more technically, I could invent something fairly roughly predictive on the spot. Screw monday. Let's see, assume a cold, still atmosphere--everything else is a RHS condition. Wind velocity gradient equals the divergence of a scaled (for units) heat diffusion equation with an isotropic diffusivity driven on the right hand side by a scaled insolation field. That's just about as predictive as j = sigma e in some less-than-perfectly conductive body--which incidentally I am intimately familiar with the limits of the predictability of, since it's my job.

Added at: 03:59
(And no, I don't really think it's that simple, because Lord knows I'll get called on it if I don't make it explicitly clear this was an intentionally incomplete, off the cuff equation, not one intended for publication in Climate Change Monthly)

Oct 24, 2011#27

strawman

fade said:
The point was simply that it's been done in other fields, and it obviously works.

I'm not seeing the analogy, nor do I follow your point.

Ohm's law is understood as a good model simply because it is easy to test and simulate and it turns out to describe the results of the related experiments each time. It's easy to set up an experiment where you can control enough of the variables to correctly deduce the outcome prior to starting the experiment.

I would agree with others, however, that global climate change cannot be modeled or tested so simply.

I love it when people say that the models created in the 90's show some resemblance to what is happening. It's great, because there were thousands of models generated, and people can pick and choose the ones that actually followed reality - but always with caveats. That doesn't mean they will predict the next decade.

The simple fact that there are dozens of what many people call "good" models only serves to illustrate that there's no concrete knowledge about the whole system. How many ohm's laws are there?

I'm not defending climate change naysayers, nor trying to attack climate change itself. I'm simply skeptical when people make claims that our climate models are better than our weather forecasting ability. They are useful, and we should keep them in mind when choosing how to decrease our impact on the environment. Let's use them wisely, rather than exploiting them sensationally.

Oct 25, 2011#28

@Li3n

GasBandit said:
Does the phrase "Are our SUVs causing global warming on mars too? Because it's getting warmer there as well" sound familiar? Because I'm pretty sure I say it every time this comes up. You guys just attribute every argument you hate to me. You'd think I'd be used to it by now.

Solar activity has been in decline since 1985, says Professor Lockwood!

'No Sun link' to climate change!

global warming on mars:

Also:

And yes, this was a trap... Now witness the firepower of this fully ARMED and OPERATIONAL battle station!

GasBandit said:
And, of course, I can't let this one go by: I, at least, can spell "skeptics."

I did spell it like that at first, but auto-correct didn't like it... likely because i'm using the UK one...

GasBandit said:
PS: The "-gate" suffix is irrevocably burned into our culture, unfortunately. I wish it would go away too, but I don't see how. I'm sure that even if, today, there were another scandal involving the Watergate Hotel, it would be called "WatergateGate."

Support the Old Meme is Old party... running on a platform of genocide to anyone that keeps using a meme long after it's run it's course...

Oct 25, 2011#29

Krisken

fade said:
This is why I don't come in this subforum. Never said trivial. Not once in my post.

This right here is why I rarely post in here anymore. Nothing like having to reiterate over and over again what you say and having it be ignored time and again in favor of what the other person wants you to have said.

Good luck, sir.

Oct 25, 2011#30

fade

stienman said:
I'm not seeing the analogy, nor do I follow your point.

Ohm's law is understood as a good model simply because it is easy to test and simulate and it turns out to describe the results of the related experiments each time. It's easy to set up an experiment where you can control enough of the variables to correctly deduce the outcome prior to starting the experiment.

I would agree with others, however, that global climate change cannot be modeled or tested so simply.

I love it when people say that the models created in the 90's show some resemblance to what is happening. It's great, because there were thousands of models generated, and people can pick and choose the ones that actually followed reality - but always with caveats. That doesn't mean they will predict the next decade.

The simple fact that there are dozens of what many people call "good" models only serves to illustrate that there's no concrete knowledge about the whole system. How many ohm's laws are there?

I'm not defending climate change naysayers, nor trying to attack climate change itself. I'm simply skeptical when people make claims that our climate models are better than our weather forecasting ability. They are useful, and we should keep them in mind when choosing how to decrease our impact on the environment. Let's use them wisely, rather than exploiting them sensationally.

Well the simple answer to your question is that despite the fact that I brought Ohm's Law up, it's not a direct analogy, nor was it the one I originally intended to make. Were I to make something equivalent for climate it would have to have the tight constraints that the circuit Ohm's Law has. Linear wind velocity in a small tube being pushed from one vector direction. I was actually originally referring to the more general Maxwell's equations. You can conceive of a very complicated, heterogeneous, anisotropic conductor that would require a full Maxwell's equations solution. You could jack the frequency up to gigahertz so that the quasistatic approximation no longer holds. It's now a full waveform system of coupled-vector equations with no simple solution. There. Triviality gone. Not easy to solve, but the model is still there, and believe it or not, it doesn't care one whit about the tiny electron motions even at this point. You're arguing with something I never claimed. It's not easy. The people I was arguing against in my OP were the ones who would make the claim that you MUST take into account these microtransactions, or the model is invalid. You're mistaking my claim that it's doable at a high level for a claim that it's easy.

My basic point was that we're willing to accept this type of modeling everywhere in our lives except for the hotbutton political issues.

As for models, I took part in some of the IPCC stuff as far back as the mid 90s (neither climate modeling nor EM modeling are alien to me). There were 3 primary models even then out of the trials. Those three models are still tracking quite well. As for your question about Ohm's Law, I don't know--I haven't seen the notebooks of Ohm or his predecessors -- I'm guessing he didn't write down the correct law the first time. But again, a better comparison would be to the electric field of a heterogeneous earth due to an impressed 0.25 Hz. To which I can personally point you to at least 100 different models, including my own 3-d finite element model. Yet they successfully find oil. They successfully place a pattern of 1's and zeros on a ferrous platter. I can't believe you're questioning the practice of starting with many predictive models and then whittling down to the ones that stand up to testing. Last I checked, that dubious little practice had a name. "Science".

Oct 25, 2011#31

Chibibar

I can see that CO2 is getting a bad rep. I think it is use more than anything cause the common folk doesn't understand all the other stuff unless they didn't fall asleep in high school chemistry class. Most people know what CO2 is, but it would be interesting to see how many people know about sulfur, methane and CO (well some might know from TV show like Carbon Monoxide poisoning and stuff)

I think the pollution in general should be curb for the welfare of people in general. Too much of anything can't be good for ya especially poisonous chemicals floating in the air, dirtying out water table, and just makes a mess of our city/home (like acid raid and such)

Oct 25, 2011#32

fade

I rest my case, and refuse to get worked up about this. Unsubscribing, and not returning to this thread. This is one of those cases where I could draw out a bit by bit comparison, and it wouldn't matter because it's one of those issues.

No one's claiming the climate models are perfect nor that they don't need work or testing, even if there are some good models out there. But the claim I hear regularly is that they can't possibly work because of these micro-complexities, and I think that's stupid. The OP claim being that we do it all the time in other fields.

Can we put the same error bars on it that we can with, say, an IC chip? No. Do we need to? I don't think so. It's one of those cases of impossible fidelity in testing needed because there's a controversy, despite that low fi would do just fine. We see it all the time in places where politics and science meet.

Oct 25, 2011#33

Chibibar

fade said:
I rest my case, and refuse to get worked up about this. Unsubscribing, and not returning to this thread. This is one of those cases where I could draw out a bit by bit comparison, and it wouldn't matter because it's one of those issues.

No one's claiming the climate models are perfect nor that they don't need work or testing, even if there are some good models out there. But the claim I hear regularly is that they can't possibly work because of these micro-complexities, and I think that's stupid. The OP claim being that we do it all the time in other fields.

Can we put the same error bars on it that we can with, say, an IC chip? No. Do we need to? I don't think so. It's one of those cases of impossible fidelity in testing needed because there's a controversy, despite that low fi would do just fine. We see it all the time in places where politics and science meet.

I think the problem is that a lot of things can be tested in a smaller model/lab/settings. I mean you can setup a particle accelerator and smash atoms together and find out what is inside. You can setup a lab to study chemicals, electricity, product testing and whatever.

The climate model is complicated since there are so many factor that scientist can't control or understand (this is my opinion. I think when we have a full grasp of weather, we can predict weather with 99% accuracy but I don't think it is possible with our current tech/knowledge)

correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the earth was full of high level methane in the past (at least from soil samples and such) the earth manage to correct itself somehow. I think that is the problem that some people (like me) can barely grasp. The earth is trying to counter all the junk we put into the atmosphere, the ground and water. How does this system work? how does the earth do it? I'm sure many of us know the general and how earth does as a whole, but we can't really test something like what if we inject 100 tonne of methane into the air and see what happen

kinda hard to setup that kind of stuff in the lab.

Now I know a lot of y'all are scientist and probably can give me a bunch of scientific laws and theories.

Do I personally think that we are causing global warming? I think the earth is on a natural cycle, we are just pushing that cycle faster than usual.

Oct 25, 2011#34

GasBandit

And of COURSE the thread gets fun right when work pulls me away for 24 hours >_<

Forums