The Global Warming Thread

Discussion in 'Politics & Current Events' started by NickyViola, Nov 30, 2009.

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  1. argentine soccer fan

    Staff Member

    Jan 18, 2001
    San Francisco Bay Area
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    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now

    If the above is true, to what factors do scientists attribute the fact that the world's temperature didn't change over the last decade, after increasing over the previous two decades?
     
  2. benztown

    benztown Member+

    Jun 24, 2005
    Club:
    VfB Stuttgart
    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now

    They attribute it to natural cycles, but nobody has a clue what kind of cycles these are...there is no good theory...here's what one of the hacked emails says about it:
    From Kevin Trenberth, a lead author with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to Michael Mann, on Oct 12. 2009. The email, titled "BBC U-turn on climate," laments a BBC article that reversed its long-held position on man-made global warming.
     
  3. bit_pattern

    bit_pattern New Member

    Oct 30, 2009
    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now

    Short answer, El Nino.

    Long answer, no one ever predicted that each year will be warmer than the next - indeed plenty of models suggest warming pauses of a decade or longer, depending on natural variability, ie. when Pinatubo blew it cooled the globe for a couple of years because of the sulfate particulates it sent into the air reflected more heat back into space.

    But, it is disingenuous to say the world has cooled, this decade will rate as the warmest on record. But because of super El Nino event of 1998 which resulted in the highest temperatures on record, the world hasn't actually topped that record. So if you start at 1998 and plot a line through to 2008 you *can* get a minor downward trend, but shift that back or forward a year and the trend changes to an upward slope. Something like 11 of the warmest years on record have occurred in the last 15 years. The last few years have been relatively cool due to the fact we have been in an El Nina cycle, but they have still been pretty high up on the scale of warmest years, as can be seen in the following:

    [​IMG]

    For a more detailed answer:

    http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-in-1998.htm
     
  4. scotch17

    scotch17 Member

    Jun 15, 2008
    Entebbe
    Nat'l Team:
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    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now

    I'd also point out a large core of the argument about these emails seems to be that this one climate group really had it out for some skeptics that didn't agree with them.
    OK, that's reprehensible but it's nothing new either. It's as much of the science landscape as "death panels" and Joe the Plumber are part of politics, and the politicization of the subject is only going to magnify that.
    Exposing backroom politics doesn't mean invalidate everything. I'll wait to see how this fleshes out as time goes by.

    Progress in science is something like climbing a mountain. Only most mountaineers don't set up a new basecamp every ten feet, then leap out and attack anyone who tries to climb past them.

    If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German, and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.


    And since I mentioned Joe the Plumber I'll throw these out as well...
    Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18.

    Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
     
  5. benztown

    benztown Member+

    Jun 24, 2005
    Club:
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    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now

    Well, nobody is saying that there is actual cooling going on. You shouldn't put words in other people's mouth...


    Yeah, that would be impressive if it wasn't for the fact that it's CRU data, data that is proven to be forged.

    At this point, I only trust NASA, because every graph that's not from NASA seems to be based on the CRU data.
    Anyway, here's the NASA data:
    [​IMG]

    You can see that the last decade is clearly the warmest on record (i.e. among the last three decades). Yet, the alarmists around the world predicted an exponential rise which also clearly hasn't happened...and how could it, given that their models are based on the CRU data as well...

    We really need an open process now, where the scientists reconstruct the temperature AGAIN, this time without hiding and subsequently destroying the raw data, so that everybody can follow.
    If we had such an open process, then we would definitely have much less of a debate between alarmists and deniers. This debate can only take place because we don't have reliable data and are hence forced to believe instead of being put in a position where we can know.
     
  6. bit_pattern

    bit_pattern New Member

    Oct 30, 2009
    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now

    No one has ever predicted an exponential rise (do you even know what that means, or what an exponential rise in temperature would look like?!)

    It's funny, just a few months ago the "skeptics" were telling me that NASA data was unreliable because Hansen is a fraud and 2005 couldn't possibly be warmer than 1998, but whatever. I agree that GISS is the superior record, it takes into account Arctic warming and actually shows a stronger warming signal than CRU, but the important thing is that they show the same trends, even if the GISS warming is more pronounced.

    My mistake, but it doesn't change what I was saying.
     
  7. benztown

    benztown Member+

    Jun 24, 2005
    Club:
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    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now


    Something like this?
    [​IMG]


    Well, I'm not that kinda guy. I don't run around claiming global warming to be a fraud against all evidence.

    I'm not an expert and hence I think it is reasonable to trust the experts unless there's a good reason not to.
    In case of the CRU there is extremely good reason not to. Of course this falls back on all climate scientists. That's why they really should make all their data public now, so that everybody can have a look at them.

    To me its obvious that the earth has gotten warmer over the last decades, and I'm willing to accept that CO2 is one reason for that. But I remain unconvinced that it's the only, or even the most important reason, and I'm also not convinced that 1998 was the warmest year in millennia.
    At the same time, I'm not saying that CO2 can't possibly be the major reason for the warming or that 1998 couldn't be the warmest year in millennia, it's just that I reject to take these things on faith. It's supposed to be science, so give me some proof.

    What I certainly don't believe is that a warming earth would cause havoc. I think we could easily deal with a warming earth. But this is a political and economical question rather than a scientific one.
     
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  8. prk166

    prk166 BigSoccer Supporter

    Aug 8, 2000
    Med City
    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now

    You do realize that in his day, Copernicus was a "denier", right?

    More so, whom is funding the study doesn't make the science good or bad; the science itself does that.





    Source?



    The problem with this is that it's hypocritical to first argue that because the majority of science thinks XYZ that it means it's true and then when it comes to economics, to go against what the majority feels is correct. Weitzmann's arguments are interesting but are a large departure from the usual way of conducting cost analysis and by no means been accepted by economists as the proper approach. And that's understandable considering many economist argue that Weitzmann has failed to prove that the standard approach actually doesn't work, let alone that the new one does.
     
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  9. KevTheGooner

    KevTheGooner Help that poor man!

    Dec 10, 1999
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    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now

    I'm a little slow, so please tell me what this has to do with this debate.

    I disagree. When an institute is almost wholly funded by corporate interests..and when unsurprisingly the results wholly support the corporate line, it casts grave aspersions on the quality of the science.


    http://www.gsajournals.org/perlserv...=1052-5173&volume=014&issue=03&page=0004&ct=1

    http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/310/5752/1317/

    That's a couple...I'm travelling now and can get more cites if you're really interested when I get back.



    My point was that Weitzmann is saying that the "long tail" or "improbable" climate event is so disastrous that you can't reasonably construct a proper cost-benefit analysis. Some have inferred from his paper that inaction is an economically risky proposition, and I believe the Stern Report, three years old now, agrees.

    I guess I'd rather believe the huge amount of critically reviewed physical, chemical, and climatological analysis than economists (which has historically been anything close to accurate as a science). If you believe Nicholas Taleb we would be wise to pay close attention to the Long Tails, and economists regularly discount those improbable events, at their peril.
     
  10. bit_pattern

    bit_pattern New Member

    Oct 30, 2009
    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now

    More like this

    [​IMG]
    The graph illustrates how exponential growth (green) surpasses both linear (red) and cubic (blue) growth. Exponential growth Linear growth Cubic growth



    My apologies then for assuming you were, it's just that I have had to argue with too many boneheaded denialists in my time, it's easy to jump to conclusions, especially when you're a n00b not well acquainted with the forum.

    I wouldn't be to quick to judge the CRU on the basis of those emails. As you point out, your not an expert, as I'm sure none of us here are, but a lot of the noise being generated over this by people who are no more experts than you or I has overly sensationalised and taken out of contest what Jones et. al. were talking about.

    I'd recommend reading what Gavin Schmidt of NASA has to say on the subject at Real Climate, he has done an amazingly patient job at addressing concerns raised in the emails in the comments section and tries to explain the issues in the context of the papers and studies they were referring too

    http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/

    http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-context/

    http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/wheres-the-data/

    http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/cru-hack-more-context/

    I think they should be in chronological order. You have to get into the comments section, where most of it has been fleshed out, t's a fair amount of reading, much of it too technical for my taste, but any issue you have converns about you can guarantee Schmidt has made an effort to address it.
    Sure thing.

    On CO2's role

    http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-global-warming.htm

    On the past thousand years

    http://www.skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm

    It's late now where I am, maybe tomorrow I'll find some more on the past 1000 years and the pro's and con's of paleoclimatic data but I will say this - even if it was warmer during the so-called Medieval Warm Period isn't particularly relevant tbh, what is important is what caused the warming. Climate can only change through forcings (I can go into this in more detail tomorrow too if you'd like?) and scientists have a pretty good idea what caused the MWP, it was a period of high solar activity. Likewise, the so-called Little Ice Age that followed was marked by low solar activity and high volcanic activity (dust from volcano's can also be a forcing because it reflects heat back into space, you can see a dip in the temp record in the 90's caused by the Pinatubo explosion for instance) which caused a fall in temps. After about the 1880's as solar activity picked up the planet warmed again, but after 1975 the correlation between solar activity and temps broke down:

    [​IMG]


    So obviously something else had to be driving the warming, and by this stage Co2 levels had risen by nearly 20% on their pre-industrial levels (since then it has reached nearly 40%) so the warming we see in the late 20th century corresponds very well with what we would expect a rise in greenhouse gas of that magnitude should cause.

    I dispute that myself (that it won't cause havoc), at the moment - just for example - sea level rise is tracking at nearly 5mm a year and at that rate we'll see a metre rise by the end of the century - that's enough to put the Bangladesh delta under water and displace over 100 million people. Or if that's to far removed to concern you then consider that it will also put Manhattan under water, among many other coastal areas of America (I'm assuming you're an American here, apologies again if I've made another mistaken assumption ;))

    But, yeah, I'll find some better links regarding past temps tomorrow for you. That Skeptical Science site is an excellent resource if your o the mind to have a look, answers nearly every objection to the science in a concise and easily digestible fashion, while at the same time linking to primary sources (it apparently played no small part in turning Little Green Footballs away from a skeptical position on climat change - http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/35243_Why_I_Parted_Ways_With_The_Right)
     
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  11. bit_pattern

    bit_pattern New Member

    Oct 30, 2009
    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now

    I'd be very interested in discussing this with you further at some point. I'm relatively competent at arguing the scientific case but economics is not my strong suit.
     
  12. Foosinho

    Foosinho New Member

    Jan 11, 1999
    New Albany, OH
    Club:
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    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now

    Woah. That hasn't been proven at all.

    1) It is not at all unusual to "process" data before "analyzing" data. When I worked in active experimentation, we would regularly "smooth" our data to remove outliers, because the smoothed data would then give us better insight into the phenomenon we were studying.

    2) In my experience, data points were not changed with an eye towards results, but with an eye towards removing spurious sensor data, etc. We usually replaced with the grand mean, and the most common method of identifying outliers would be to look for points more than 3 standard deviations from the mean (IOW, that's less than 3% of the data), tho we were running relatively small studies so we would occasionally adjust our definition of "outlier" on a case-by-case basis (ie, we might define something 2 SD away from the mean as an outlier if all the rest of our data was very consistent).

    3) Not saving the unaltered data doesn't mean our processed data is "forged", nor that our conclusions are incorrect. It means the data (and thus conclusions) is unreliable, because it cannot be reliably reviewed. It could very well be completely accurate/correct.

    "Forging" implies a falsification with intent to deceive. What we have here are a few gaps in the data trail, along with some (understandable, when you consider most science "deniers" are crackpots on the level of the "death panels" BS) frustration directed at people perceived to be tilting at the research from a political POV, rather than a scientific one. Yes, it's possible the data has been forged, but there's no actual evidence for that. The possibility means that the data determined to be questionable should be excluded from analysis. That's all.

    All that said, there is a TON of other completely reliable research that is not at all related to CRU that has not been "invalidated" by this incident. The correctness of AGW isn't really at "risk".
     
  13. Foosinho

    Foosinho New Member

    Jan 11, 1999
    New Albany, OH
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    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now

    I found a terrific concise example of "data scrubbing" that shows exactly why people do it. Some slides from a statistics class at Penn State (slides 13 thru 15 below, but the entire set might be useful)...

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    Those two outliers are not representative of "normal" values for what is being studied, and leaving them in the analysis masks what is really going on.

    Of course, this is a very simple example, but it is indicative of why "data scrubbing" occurs, and it's value to understanding what the data actually says. I'm sure the processing for the climate data is much more sophisticated, but the underlying principles are the same - to increase the accuracy and reliability of the analysis that will be performed on the data.
     
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  14. roadkit

    roadkit Greetings from the Fringe of Obscurity

    Jul 2, 2003
    Fornax Cluster
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    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now


    Thanks for your post. It fully supports the theory that increased CO2 is making the planet warmer.
     
  15. benztown

    benztown Member+

    Jun 24, 2005
    Club:
    VfB Stuttgart
    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now

    This is beyond "smoothing" though.

    Actually, changing the data points with an eye towards results is exactly what happened. The method by which the CRU calculated past temperatures lead to a decline in temperature after 1960, which apparently wasn't the case at all.

    Usually, every sane person would conclude that his method is crap. In this case, they ignored this completely, they left the pre 1960 results unaltered and manually adjusted the post 1960 data to fit the records.

    If that's not forging then what is?

    True, but it is mighty fishy. The head of the CRU said in one of those emails that he's happy that the critics didn't know about the freedom of information legislation which gives them the right to review the data and he went on to say that should they find out, he'd rather destroy the data than hand it to them...how convenient that the files got lost then, isn't it? Making it impossible for anyone to review their data. This is clearly not how science is supposed to work.

    A few gaps = no original data whatsoever...

    Also, what's even more interesting than the emails themselves is the program code attached to some mails where the programmers wrote down their frustration in the commentary, like the fact that the data is complete crap...see here:

    Also, I think I remember one mail where they talked about supressing a paper in the peer review process which dealt with all the problems of the CRU temperature curve. They pretty much admitted that it was correct but they did suppress it.

    AFAIK, the big problem is that the temperature curve of the CRU is the basis for almost all climate models, most notably those of the IPCC. But when this curve is forged, then the models cannot possibly be reliable (which they are proving right now, as they didn't predict global warming to stop for ten years and counting.)
     
  16. Foosinho

    Foosinho New Member

    Jan 11, 1999
    New Albany, OH
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    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now

    And finally, some additional information from U of Maryland:

    Dealing with outliers (Both Stata and SPSS)
    • First, check to make sure there are no coding errors. Has an extra zero been added to the outlying case?
    • Make sure missing data coding is correct. For example, if you have a variable whose coding runs from 0 to 7 with an MD code of 99, and you have failed to tell SPSS that 99 is an MD code (or have not recoded 99 to . in Stata), the regression estimates will be way, way off. I’ve seen this produce extremely high correlations, when both the IVs and DVs were not being properly treated as missing.
    • Run the regression both with and without the outlying cases. If the results are substantially different, this should be noted. You should either explain why some cases were deleted, or present both sets of analyses.
    • Large outliers might be accounted for by adding more explanatory variables. Naturally, you prefer to explain the values of cases, rather than just discard them.
    • Remember, though, that outliers may represent important information about the relationship between variables. Don’t throw the outlier away without examining it first. Maybe you will catch a coding error. Perhaps you can explain why this case doesn’t really fall into the population of interest. Or, perhaps you can add IVs which will explain why this case’s values differ so much from the rest.​

    I particularly want to point out the fact that outliers aren't just ignored; any data that is thrown out or adjusted to the grand mean (or any other myriad of ways of dealing with outliers) is looked at closely to understand the nature of the outlier. Again, IME, we would take the raw data, examine it to identify outliers, explain the presence of the outliers (and fix them if it was simply a problem with data entry or data recording), and then have a pow-wow with the boss - the chief scientist for our studies - and determine the correct way to address the outliers. If relevant, outlier discussion would even make it into papers.
     
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  17. benztown

    benztown Member+

    Jun 24, 2005
    Club:
    VfB Stuttgart
    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now

    Which looks an awful lot like the IPCC chart. A little steeper maybe, but I'm sure that there is an exponential function which approximates that green line on the IPCC chart.

    Seriously, what I've read is enough to dismiss any context. And I'm not talking about the "trick" word...concentrating on that is stupid of course. But some mails pretty much admit that their curve was complete crap when they were talking about suppressing a paper which pointed out all the flaws...and the pieces from the program code support that notion as well.

    Add to that the fact that they were actively holding back information, going so far to completely destroy it...I don't care about the context there, they've clearly had something to hide...
    I haven't read it all, but it does of course sound reasonable. As I said, I'm not out there to single handedly disprove CO2 driven global warming. But I think it's very important for the debate to reconstruct past temperatures as accurately as possible.
    If we knew for example that 1000 or 2000 years ago the global temperature was even hotter, then this would prove to us that we don't have much to fear: The Polar Bears would survive, we wouldn't all drown or starve, it would just be a little warmer...

    I would have liked to see how GISS reconstructed the temperature in that graph, but somehow I can't open their web page...I just hope there is no CRU in there, as their data is behind every long term temperature curve I've seen since "Climategate".

    I'm not American either ;)
    Anyway, I know that Bangladesh is the standard example here.
    But this is mostly an economic argument and I thinks it doesn't hold. The amount it would cost us to cut emissions so quickly in order to save Bangladesh (according to the models which I don't trust, but let's assume they're correct for now) would be enormous.
    On the other hand, it only costs a reasonable amount to make the coastal lines flood-proof.

    I've heard a talk by Bjørn Lomborg once where he also talked about Bangladesh. He said that according to the most conservative prognosis by the UNO, by 2100 the average Bangladeshi will be as well situated as a fairly rich Dutch guy today. Now the Netherlands are in large parts beneath the water level, yet they've done a great job over centuries to win back more and more land.
    So should we all put so many resources into a global effort (which draws away resources from other potentially very helpful projects) in order to help some fairly rich Dutch guys?

    Not to mention that it's probably too late for prevention anyways should the alarmists be correct. So if anything, we should look for new technologies to actively cool our planet instead of doing the prevention routine when it's already too late.
    When you get hit on the nose, then you'd like to get medical treatment, not a course on how to prevent getting hit on the nose in the future...although I'm still not convinced why a warmer planet couldn't actually be beneficial to humanity rather than harmful...
     
  18. Foosinho

    Foosinho New Member

    Jan 11, 1999
    New Albany, OH
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    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now

    So, having done scientific programming, I can completely identify with the frustrations of the programmers. Unlike commercial application programming, there usually isn't an engraved-in-stone change control process, code isn't documented well, and usually you spend most of your time trying to figure out what the hell the programmer before you was trying to accomplish in his undocumented, uncommented code (usually with meaningless variable names). That said, snark in comments should not be taken literally, and I have no doubt that there is a ton of context missing there.

    My personal favorite experience is when the PI comes in an hour before the start of scheduled data collection and says "I had a great idea of how to improve the experiment while in the shower this morning". Some of my in-code comments from those episodes would probably make your eyes melt. Comments are usually - especially editorializing - a snapshot in time. Often they document the state of the code before it was "fixed" by the programmer, what problems they saw, and the attempts to resolve those. These kinds of comments are usually left in to serve as reminders the next time you visit that chunk of code, which might be a long time away.

    This, for example, isn't particular damning in my eyes at all. In fact, I very well could have written it myself at one point or another.

    Here, the expected 1990-2003 period is MISSING - so the correlations aren't so hot! Yet the WMO codes and station names /locations are identical (or close). What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah - there is no 'supposed', I can make it up. So I have :)

    The author almost certainly is expressing frustration at coming across an unexpected irregularity of which the responsibility for addressing defaults to him. There likely isn't a documented procedure for addressing the problem, thus "supposed to happen" is meaningless. So he had to come up with a solution/work-around for the problem himself.
     
  19. KevTheGooner

    KevTheGooner Help that poor man!

    Dec 10, 1999
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    Arsenal FC
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    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now

    A couple things...

    Luckily if we curb emissions now, again, 1% a year until 2050, we should be able to get in well under 450ppm. That's not guarantee of success, and most would say 350ppm is the safest target, but that sounds like too much for society to handle.

    Unfortunately, if we procrastinate another 8 years (another Bush legacy...thanks for that) we'll be just about out of time.

    Lastly, there is fairly universal belief that +3C of warming will kick off a chain reaction of carbon release from the arctic that will take us into the >550ppm zone which is a very scary prospect. And it will happen fast, geologically-speaking, in less than 200 years, so society won't have much time to adapt.

    The things we would have to adapt to at that level are beyond knowing with 100% certainty at this point, but we would certainly be looking at several meters of sea level rise, massive ocean acidification (loss of all animals depending on calcium carbonate, etc), desertification, and who knows what else. It will completely up-end civilization as we know it.
     
  20. puttputtfc

    puttputtfc Member+

    Sep 7, 1999
    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now

    More than gay marriage?
     
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  21. Dr. Wankler

    Dr. Wankler Member+

    May 2, 2001
    The Electric City
    Club:
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    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now

    Interesting commetary from the WSJ, of all places

    Climate scientists, knowingly or not, become proxies for political battles. The consequence is that science, as a form of open and critical enquiry, deteriorates while the more appropriate forums for ideological battles are ignored.

    We have also seen how this plays out in public debate. In the wake of climategate.... science ends up being portrayed as a fight between two dogmas: Either the evidence for man-made climate change is all fake, or else we are so sure we know how the planet works that we can claim to have just five or whatever years to save it. When science is invoked to support such dogmatic assertions, the essential character of scientific knowledge is lost—knowledge that results from open, always questioning, enquiry that, at best, can offer varying levels of confidence for pronouncements about how the world is, or may become.

    ...

    The problem then with getting our relationship with science wrong is simple: We expect too much certainty, and hence clarity, about what should be done. Consequently, we fail to engage in honest and robust argument about our competing political visions and ethical values.

    Science never writes closed textbooks. It does not offer us a holy scripture, infallible and complete. This is especially the case with the science of climate, a complex system of enormous scale, at every turn influenced by human contingencies. Yes, science has clearly revealed that humans are influencing global climate and will continue to do so, but we don't know the full scale of the risks involved, nor how rapidly they will evolve, nor indeed—with clear insight—the relative roles of all the forcing agents involved at different scales.

    Similarly, we endow analyses about the economics of climate change with too much scientific authority. Yes, we know there is a cascade of costs involved in mitigating, adapting to or ignoring climate change, but many of these costs are heavily influenced by ethical judgements about how we value things, now and in the future. These are judgments that science cannot prescribe.

    The central battlegrounds on which we need to fight out the policy implications of climate change concern matters of risk management, of valuation, and political ideology. We must move the locus of public argumentation here not because the science has somehow been "done" or "is settled"; science will never be either of these things, although it can offer powerful forms of knowledge not available in other ways. It is a false hope to expect science to dispel the fog of uncertainty so that it finally becomes clear exactly what the future holds and what role humans have in causing it.

    . . .

    If climategate leads to greater openness and transparency in climate science, and makes it less partisan, it will have done a good thing. It will enable science to function in the effective way it must in public policy deliberations: Not as the place where we import all of our legitimate disagreements, but one powerful way of offering insight about how the world works and the potential consequences of different policy choices. The important arguments about political beliefs and ethical values can then take place in open and free democracies, in those public spaces we have created for political argumentation.


    Good work by Dr. Mike Hulme.
     
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  22. benztown

    benztown Member+

    Jun 24, 2005
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  23. Foosinho

    Foosinho New Member

    Jan 11, 1999
    New Albany, OH
    Club:
    Columbus Crew
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now

    Very good. IMO, much of the "denial" camp is driven by politics and policy, not by science. They attack the science for two reasons - the first, if the science is right, there is no way you can make a case for the status quo, and the status quo is what drives next quarter's profits. Second, it's pretty easy to cultivate an army of "disbelievers" with the generally low science aptitude of The People. After all, evolution is about as proven as gravity, and yet...
     
  24. KevTheGooner

    KevTheGooner Help that poor man!

    Dec 10, 1999
    THOF
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    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now

    Yes. It's science's dirty little secret.
     
  25. Adiaga Two

    Adiaga Two Member+

    Oct 4, 2008
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Re: Climategate: it's all unravelling now

    The global warming "debate" is a sad example of how little people think anymore and how easily manipulated they are.

    I read someone refer to the "global warming big business" earlier in the thread. Are these people serious? (Answer: No. As seen earlier, they think it's a game). If the scientific community is perpetrating some big conspiracy for the "elite", they're doing a piss poor job because no serious climate change policy has ever been enacted, at least in this country.

    If this is some big conspiracy cooked up by evil scientists.......what exactly do they stand to gain from it? What, was scientific research going to cease to exist, so they came up with a fake problem to keep themselves employed?

    It's also funny how these people find a few e-mails by some isolated unscrupulous scientists, and it means the whole theory is debunked. As if there haven't been hundreds of examples of energy companies (and the last Presidential administration) doctoring data and suppressing proven science.
     

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