Climate change / global warming

[jts]

Topazg, you are yourself someone who has an inclination to contradict received consensus by saying "but there's one paper that says..." (I recall you saying that about either homeopathy or vaccines.) But I assume you understand well enough that scientific research is probabilistic; getting weird results in one out of 20 or 1 out of 1000 projects is proof that you're doing science right, not proof that the consensus is wrong. Either (1) knowing the number of contrarian papers and also the total pool of research those papers have appeared in are both useful, or (2) neither is useful and people shouldn't obstinately draw attention to the minority report in the first case.

[topazg]

Topazg, you are yourself someone who has an inclination to contradict received consensus by saying "but there's one paper that says..." (I recall you saying that about either homeopathy or vaccines.)

I contest this strongly, I have not contradicted received consensus in this way. It would be very silly to do this

[Bill Spight]

A quick note on this graph posted by golem7: It is labelled wrong. The 24 papers do not "reject glocal warming", they "reject man-made global warming". The other 13,926 papers all conclude that global warming is man-made. The 24 mostly suggest other causes of warming.

I admit to not knowing all 13,950 papers (in fact, I'm familiar with only a fraction of the total I suspect), but figures like this always give me suspicion. Unless it's a review paper, I struggle to believe that there are that many papers assessing "whether climate change / global warming" is man-made. I would have thought most of the papers would have been looking at a specific aspect in a specific situation based on specific data?

If that is the case, it's really poor science simply to play the numbers games. Quantity of collected data / quality of collected data / quality of the analysis of the collected data all come in to play on every single paper, and on top of that there will be a large number of papers that simply can't be compared against each other piece for piece.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a climate change denialist at all, I just dislike poor science / poorly presented science on either side of any debate.

One more time: Statistics proves nothing.

[ez4u]

Re: References

Your real impact factor phd120808s.gif (24.73 KiB) Viewed 7164 times

[jts]

Topazg, you are yourself someone who has an inclination to contradict received consensus by saying "but there's one paper that says..." (I recall you saying that about either homeopathy or vaccines.)

I contest this strongly, I have not contradicted received consensus in this way. It would be very silly to do this

All right, I apologize. In all of l19's tangled (and sometimes frankly strange) discussions of oddball scientific views, I've conflated your views with those of someone much sillier.

[Bonobo]

[..] I've conflated your views with those of someone much sillier.

Hey, that leaves a LOT of people

[topazg]

Heh, it's no problem, it's easily done.

[ez4u]

This has me worried about the future of this thread.

[burrkitty]

I'll help with that. I can and will talk about this for as long as anybody wants. This is a personal and professional passion for me after all!
New article today from the USGS.
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.as ... s_releases

[jts]

For anyone interested: Stern (of the Stern Report) has officially admitted that the last six years have shown his 2006 report to be over-optimistic.

"Looking back, I underestimated the risks. The planet and the atmosphere seem to be absorbing less carbon than we expected, and emissions are rising pretty strongly. Some of the effects are coming through more quickly than we thought then."

The Stern review, published in 2006, pointed to a 75% chance that global temperatures would rise by between two and three degrees above the long-term average; he now believes we are "on track for something like four ".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... ange-davos

[p2501]

Gave me a good chuckle:

[perceval]

Personnally i am rather in the camp of the believers in man made global warning... BUT unfortunaltly i feel like the whole discussion is moot. I am 95% convinved that global warning is man made; but 99.99% convinved that nothing of impact will be done.
Our politic systems (in the US and Europe, and also in less democratic countries like China)just cannot accept to lose something today to win something when the current leader will not only not be in power, but be dead.

I also noticed a coincidence:

It seems to me that sceptics are more vocal these days/years in the media, and at the same time you can find articles explaining that the US will become the first oil producer during the 21st century, due to tight oil exploitation.
To me, now that there is hope to sever the dependency of the US toward oil producing countries, spending less fuel just lost its appeal for a lot of lobbies and nothing will change. At all. Except maybe the authorization to drill for oil in alaska.

So there is no chance of the US doing anything, China will not endanger its growth either, so who cares what France,Germany or finland do ? its irrelevant (I am not saying that Europe will actually do something, just that even if they do it is pointless).

I had a longer post that was eaten on a Firefow crash so i ll stop here,
but in short, i am not sure of the exact causes, or consequences of the global warning, but to me its happening and its not stoppable.
Currently established systems are geared toward immediate profit and cannot made those painful decisions (and revolutions arent better in my opinion )

on a lighter note,
a flash game that represents my opinion on politics and oil industry: (its rather funny too if maaaybe a tiny bit cynical)
http://www.molleindustria.org/en/oiligarchy/

[Zombie]

Civilization is built like that. It's based on short-term exploitation, industrialization just makes it worse. It won't change until it absolutely has to.

[Bill Spight]

Civilization is built like that. It's based on short-term exploitation, industrialization just makes it worse. It won't change until it absolutely has to.

Civilization was built by people with a long term outlook. Consider Egyptian pyramids and Roman aqueducts. Even today Japanese lacquerware is made to last for centuries. Short term exploitation is modern, and largely Western.

[Zombie]

This short of a term, yes. Surprisingly recent, too, last 100 years or so. But for the most part it's still just acceleration and intesification of the basic urge that drives civilization onwards - growth, conquest, control, destructive use of the landbase.