Washington Post: Opinions on shape of earth differ

John,

The first clause of your last either/or is not just a little bit misleading for what do they agree on? They agree that there is a substantial impact of human society on global climate, yes, but they’d disagree mostly on the predictions, let alone the policy trade-offs required.

Not being right-wing and all, I have never liked these bazooka arguments where everybody with a ‘little sense’ agrees on an unspecified X and therefore we need to do very specific and mostly unpleasant things. The right tends to react (and react, in their case means, overreact) for the right reasons to this.

I won’t pronounce on this specific journalistic error (there, I did pronounce), but the consensus you talk about is hugely annoying. The only truth of An Inconvenient Truth was that this needs to be high on the agenda – all the rest of it was science Hollywood-style.

Science is not very good at predicting what’ll happen in 20-50 years certainly not when there is a significant variable down to biology, sociology and psychology.

The worse of it will come when the right realizes that they have a good piece of mass hysteria in their hands and they could use it to the benefit of the established order.

COMBIEN D ARGENT PUBLIC SARKOZY A T IL DETOURNE DEPUIS LE DEBUT DE SON MANDAT POUR SERVIR SON INTERET PERSONNEL ? En ce qui me concerne, lynchage, plagiat…etc En période de crise, voilà une question politique intéressante à débattre, avec du courage et de l’indépendance ?

Neil, Steve,

Ha-ha, exactly my point – what do you have to say except for hysteria disguised as a good joke?

So, big Steve, can you be more specific than ‘Ooh, scary!’ about your reality?

PS: I guess you missed the part where I said it should be high on the agenda, otherwise you are a little bit belittling for no apparent reason which would be little indeed

The heat is getting to you I guess, I did not challenge climate change is an issue. I only believe it is a little bit more complex than you make out.

But I’m even more interested how low you will go just to prove my point of hysteria. Talk of the sacrificing a good joke of somebody else for your own ego ;-(

I only believe it is a little bit more complex than you make out.

Standard denialist bullshit. Yawn.

Covering up for the right-wing war on science is something the WaPo does so that it can continue to treat right-wingers as part of elite opinion.Exactly, and they do it just as energetically with regard to the right’s flat-earth economics.

That’s nice. While you’re waiting you could always use the time to lern to spel, and also to learn that “credence” is a noun.

Because, of course, fossil fuels and nuclear power are the only two alternatives. Science-deniers always love false dichotomies.

No, Steve, because the prediction is so bad that the only measure that can be taken is building more nuclear power plants (whilst we invent new stuff, change our ways & what have you). It’s not my prediction but it’s part of the debate between scientists.

And I draw the line at science-denier; stop making ridiculous name-calling based on what you’re thinking somebody else is thinking without doing an effort of reading it.

You just like to be a bully and you happen to be on one radical side of the debate, no doubt you’ll go all conspiracy-theory on us next; but you could have been just as well on the other, because you’re just in it for the shout. Go work for WaPo!, they love characters like you.

And I draw the line at science-denier; stop making ridiculous name-calling based on what you’re thinking somebody else is thinking without doing an effort of reading it.

So if you aren’t a science-denier, you are an idiot repeating bad faith arguments started by science-deniers. That is so much better.

as a trained biologist I can certainly see plenty of handwriting on the wall of the biosphere

As a trained computer scientist, I know the dangers of relying on computer models that do not produce accurate predictions.

I can rely on actual data to know that current temperatures are still well within historical bounds, not to mention geological ones.

I can rely on what research I have already done into the dangers of nuclear power.

The anthropogenic climate change alarmists think that it is less of a problem than nuclear power. I accept this judgment and calibrate the dangers accordingly.

If the Sierra Club and others begin to forcefully call for more nuclear power, then I will take the time to examine the issue. Till then, there is not much point in worrying about it.

There, fixed that for you

Ah, that bit of dishonesty clears up a lot.

Thanks for exposing yourself.

As a trained computer scientist, I know the dangers of relying on computer models that do not produce accurate predictions.

You might want to reconsider the idea of assumptions that do not produce accurate inferences.

Steve La B.

So from a biological point of view, is the situation that we have evolved some organisms that are science deniers and another set that are science believers and that nature will get to sort out the competition by the number of survivors of each group generations down the road?

Ain’t competition a bitch.

As a trained computer scientist, I know the dangers of relying on computer models that do not produce accurate predictions.

Excellent! You’ll be happy to hear that climate science is based on physics and empirical data, not just computer models. Also that the computer models that are used can postdict real trends quite well.

I can rely on actual data to know that current temperatures are still well within historical bounds, not to mention geological ones.

No, really, you can’t.

RB, so you are a big believer in the computer models that predicted banks were not at risk?

What I think is obvious is that expecting others to glom onto your wonderful solution to X and dismissing them if they don’t has nothing at all to do with the reality of X.

Stuart, which bad faith-argument, please be precise and do not rely on what Steve Shout thinks I said.

The most obvious one would be:

The only truth of An Inconvenient Truth

When talking about science, when someone goes off the rails and starts talking about whether things in a movie was true or false, you can safely assume nothing they say is worth paying attention to.

That link’s going to get stale as soon as Carl updates his blog. Here’s the direct link.

If Gore’s movie had been made after a hundred years of rigorous scientific research that confirmed a particular hypothesis concerning the globe’s climate then one could talk generally about a “near-universal” consensus.

There are several decades of rigorous scientific research on climate change (and a trickle of related work extended back a century), and the consensus is indeed near-universal. You are misinformed.

You said “well within historical bounds”. Current temperatures are not. Yes, there were prehistoric times that were hotter. At any rate, what is unambiguously true is that we are destabilizing a climate that has been remarkably stable (relative to paleoclimate variations) for the last 10000 years.

onoymous,

Yes, I could not quickly find a historical link, but here is one. The Medieval warm period is within historical bounds, and was warmer than today.

Projections rely on computer models that are still much too simple with respect to the phenomenon they model. None of the models predicted the current “hiatus” in global warming.

My main point still stands: Those that make extraordinary claims of coming doom still consider CO2 less of a problem than nuclear energy, so why should I worry?

That your side goes to such lengths to demonize even the most modest of questions, while still not taking their own claims seriously, would indicate something other than science is going on.

This is tiresome beyond belief, but the issue is important so I guess have a duty to attempt a productive contribution.

“Let the debate be resolved by the data” says Colin Farrelly. “That’s already happened” replies Steve Labonne.

So if I say that everyone needs to stop driving cars NOW, or else they are a delayer, which we all know is just another word for denier, can I claim that the science is on my side? What if I demand that everyone stop flying? What if I say we have to bomb China to stop them from building a new coal power station every week? Can science, on its own, tell us what constitutes “dangerous climate change”? Can science tell us whether some one who believes that it may be acceptable to contemplate 550ppm CO2 or 3 degrees warming should be cast out of polite society and ignored as a “denier” (of what exactly)?

Before asking whether “the debate” has been resolved can we please work harder to specifiy which “debate”, exactly, we are referring to. Picking holes in climate skeptic “science” is easy, but by now it has become an excuse for not engaging in what actually needs to happen. It turns out that’s a harder question.

onymous says: “There are several decades of rigorous scientific research on climate change (and a trickle of related work extended back a century)”.

Even if that is so, the key issue is: do the several decades of rigorous scientific research (and work from a century ago) support the *same specific hypothesis* concerning the globe’s climate (as is the case with natural selection in biology)?

Cheers,
Colin

RB-33, I did not ‘present a wonderful solution to X’, I explicitly ackbowledged climate change as a man-made problem so please, before, howling with people that shout: read before applying tar and feathers to join a lynch party!

(my point is on long term predictions: obviously the measures we take now need some level of guidance as to how serious and irreversible this gets by when & there’s plenty of debate in that and an interesting discussion on science’s ability to predict accurately in this)

Stuart-35, Oh come on. I said that to make it clear I granted the main point, you really can’t be serious if that’s a bad faith thing to do. Yes, I dislike Al Gore (think: Tipper) & that has nothing to do with this as is clear from my granting his main point (in this).

On the rest, what JK said.

PS: being not so long here, nor so frequent – is it OK for people to bandy about ‘moron’ and ‘dumb hack’ based on nothing else than their testosterone levels?

The greenhouse effect is called the greenhouse effect because ÇO2 and other gases act like the glass of a greenhouse. Unless you think that the jury is still out on whether you can really grow cucumbers under glass, you really should acknowledge that the physics underlying climate change modeling is rather more trustworthy than the economic assumptions that go into financial models. Let us keep in mind that economics is not the physics of money.

Forecasting climate change is, of course, a fantastically complicated undertaking and one can imagine scenarios in which the heating effects of increasing greenhouse gases have paradoxical consequences or are overwhelmed by countervailing tendencies. In fact, for the last couple of decades the science journals have published hundreds of papers examining just those possibilities. The current “debate” about global warming has very little to do with that conversation. It really is just the latest edition of cigarettes haven’t been proven to cause cancer, evolution is bunk, Obama wasn’t born in America. Which is to say it is a well-financed and utterly cynical PR campaign enlisting the enthusiastic support of a bunch of useful liberal arts idiots.

Whenever I see someone complaining about the complexity of computer models I can’t take them seriously. First, do you honestly think that this hasn’t occurred to the people working in the field? We routinely employ average descriptions of the outcome of numerous random processes – this is called, for example, “temperature” or “pressure”. People explore, quite extensively, the impact of random events, numerical details, and physical assumptions in climate models. You can – arrogantly – dismiss all of this work with a brush of your Olympian mind. No one who knows anything about the topic will be moved.

Second of all there is basic physics. We know that people are changing the composition of the atmosphere (hint: natural sources and fossil fuel burning have distinct isotopic signatures.) We know what the direct response is – the heat gets trapped because it is more difficult for it to escape the Earth (primarily in IR light), while the (mostly visible) light from the Sun is not prevented from entering. Climate change deniers are asserting that somehow there is feedback in the system which prevents this completely predictable consequence. There is no support for this wish, however, in any systematic study.

Finally, we definitely see that the climate is changing and it is changing faster than expected. So you have sound physics, detailed modelling with extensive empiricial testing, and unambiguous physical evidence on the one side. And on the other people who claim that we can’t know anything because it is too complicated – and maybe, just maybe, we should perform a vast experiment on the planet with the hope that everything will turn out OK in the end.

Denialists aren’t worth arguing with (except, as above, for the people at Deltoid, Stoat,RealClimate etc. who specialize in that whether from a deep sense of public service or amusement or masochism or whatever). And the people arguing here are denialists. Ignore them. And no it doesn’t matter that they don’t think they’re denialists; it’s defined by behavior, not by self-image.

The social science involved is really rather interesting. WaPo has no direct coal or oil interests, as far as I know. Nor are they merely going the story as he said/she said; they’re going farther than that. The problem with characterizing the problem with journalism today is being a style of coverage is that the media actively act to preserve their ability to say he said/she said. If no legitimate other side of the story exists, WaPo will act to help create one.

Or, of course, there’s the Occam’s Razor theory which says that WaPo is now simply a right-wing paper.

I find this all so tiresome. I see the deniers all the time on one of the (non political) sites I run and it’s always the same bad arguments, lies and misleading statements. The “bad computer model” thing is fairly new, but it’s even more stupid than the usual blather.

A lot of times I just skip over those threads because I just don’t have the energy, but then I feel bad because this is an important issue and I shouldn’t let the nonsense go unchallenged. I feel the issue more acutely these days due in part to having a new baby in the house.

Can’t someone save me the trouble here? How about a simple, bullet pointed site called whyglobalwarmingisrealyoumoron.com with all the dumb arguments and lies in neat order and a paragraph or two with neat debunking.

The “bad computer model” thing is fairly new, but it’s even more stupid than the usual blather.

Crooked Timber, indeed.

Have a nice self congratulatory time, I’m outta here.

James, Jim,

You may not have noticed but I didn’t start out to gripe about science and I didn’t end up griping about science. The closest I came to science was to say, in effect, something along the lines of:

Forecasting climate change is, of course, a fantastically complicated undertaking and one can imagine scenarios in which the heating effects of increasing greenhouse gases have paradoxical consequences or are overwhelmed by countervailing tendencies. In fact, for the last couple of decades the science journals have published hundreds of papers examining just those possibilities.

It is obviously on topic when discussing what we should do about something to note it is not very easy to get to a detailed understanding of what, quantitatively, will happen. Part of what’s wrong with the media in this is WaPo, another part is Steve because he’s in effect obstructing any debate by resorting to name calling.

So, how bad is it going to be by when? What does that tell us about what we need to do? Do we, as I believe, need to build a huge ring of windmills costing 200BEuro? Or will it be too late for that anyway?

RB-50, so you quote me to get at somebody else & when you realize you compensate by making an off-hand comment that is not linked to what I said? Sneaky, something I would expect from those calling themselves ‘righteous’ ;-)

RB-50, so you quote me to get at somebody else & when you realize you compensate by making an off-hand comment that is not linked to what I said?

JoB, in commenting on this thread I have referred only to newshutz’s stupid argument and my response to it. If you agree with me that he is a fool for proposing that because his solution to X is not embraced by the Sierra Club then X does not exist, please say so and we will both agree that newshutz was out of his depth.

Thanks for the link, Alex R. It’s not quite the “for dummies” thing that I’m looking for, but it’s the most useful aggregation of climate arguments that I’ve see so far.

RealClimate is a great site, but a lot of their posts require a good deal of work to properly understand.

At what point to today’s denialists start shifting gears en masse to Bjørn Lomborg-like “anthropogenic global warming exists, but we shouldn’t do anything about it” arguments?

I think this thread shows the early signs of the shift, with adjectives like “drastic” being thrown around as blanket description of (largely unspecified) solutions to the problem.

Also: I don’t like Tipper Gore either, but she seems even less relevant to an evaluation of An Inconvenient Truth than the size of Al Gore’s house is.

What we need is a troll teleportation device. Troll off-topic comments would be automatically redirected to a site like Deltoid where knowledgeable people enjoy the workout of proving them wrong

Congratulations. You have just re-invented Usenet’s defensive “Followups redirected to talk.origins”.

I disagree with the consensus!

In other words, I see a large body of people devoted to serious scientific research who resemble a group of pushers of silly Internet talking points who are ideologically motivated, financially driven or just plain delusional confronted by another large body of people devoted to serious scientific research who resemble another group of pushers of silly Internet talking points who are ideologically motivated, financially driven or just plain delusional.

In other words, the global-warming crisis people resemble (at a distance) anti-nuclear activists and, to make matters worse, are unwilling to criticize them. At the same time, the global-warming non-crisis people resemble (at a distance) creationists and, to make matters worse, are unwilling to criticize them.

My usual position is to be suspicious of people saying “they say” instead of “it is.” I was inclined to be on the “global warming isn’t a crisis” side until the anti-warming people came up with their own version of “they say.” Clearly we need to take crisis measures. I recommend more nuclear power, burying carbon in landfills, and covering the oceans with reflective plastic.

“Nuclear energy might be one part of a cocktail of solutions; reasonable people can disagree about what role it should play. ”

Ah, you see, there’s the problem: By any rational standard, we know hugely more about nuclear power than we do climate, but somehow there’s no room for reasonable people to disagree about climate, but there is room for reasonable people to disagree about nuclear power.

Yeah, right. Anti-nuclear activists are allies of, where they’re not one and the same as, global warming activists. So at best you’re willing to look the other way, at worst you’d rather see the world roast than resort to a proven technology you disapprove of.

I must agree with the above comment: I’ll take this seriously when the people yelling about it are willing to contemplate solutions they didn’t want anyway. It’s a reasonable heuristic for assessing threats I can’t spend a lifetime getting up to speed on.

Well, who says you can’t learn something from watching people who don’t know what they’re talking about argue with people who do? Here’s what I learned:

1. Even if you’re right, calling your opponents a bunch of names makes you look petty and stupid. On the other hand, remaining civil and letting your opponent slap your hand away for all to see (worst-case scenario) or actually shaking it (best-case) at best makes an ally, at worst makes your opponent look petty and stupid. Well, actually, I learned that from Obama. But still.

2. Deniers have a new reason not to lift a finger to do anything about global warming.

— Global warming isn’t happening.
— Global warming is a hoax.
— Global warming is happening, but it’s not caused by humans, so there’s no point in doing anything about it.
— Global warming is happening, but it’s still not as warm as … (the Middle Ages in Europe, for example), and people did fine then, so there’s no point in doing anything about it.

And now:

— Global warming may be happening, but if it were, the people most worried about it, if they were serious, would support [a policy I’d be supporting even if global warming weren’t happening]; since they aren’t supporting it, they can’t be serious, so I conclude that global warming isn’t happening.

I’ll say this about the new argument: it’s airtight.

Has Brett given up on gathering all world leaders in his living-room to convince them to launch dust into space? If so, why?

Richard Pryor soaked in ether, just about to light that freebase pipe.
Whump!
Shock, distant register of pain, bad smell.
And then right back at it.
The problem isn’t the ether, or the lighter.
Big campaigns in the MSM tv primetime news ads by Exxon GE etc, all based on the unquestionable sanctity of current energy demand.
Demand.
Which is where the flaw is, not in the technologies, flawed and unsustainable and poisonous as they may be.

So the answer becomes either nuclear power or eugenic cull.

Please step away from the Heinlein books.

The whole business about nuclear power in this thread follows from an utterly false premise. Whenever this subject comes up you have people who chip in and assert, without evidence, that all liberals still hate nuclear power and that environmentalists haven’t changed their mind because of climate change. This is, in fact, false; many environmentalists have changed their minds. Or, like me, they never had a problem with nuclear power in the first place. There is a serious discussion in the environmental community about nuclear power now.

It isn’t a panacea. Uranium is rare (especially if you want to scale its use up drastically); building power plants takes time; there is waste to deal with; and of course we have a lot of diffuse emission sources. None of these are fatal but they do have to be dealt with.

But the nuclear advocates just keep on repeating their claim even in the face of contrary evidence – e.g. that the folks on the other side are willing to change their beliefs in the face of new information. This only makes sense if nuclear power is really just being used to mock the hippies. They can’t take yes for an answer because they want an excuse for inaction – not nuclear as one component of a response to climate change.

I see CT software wisely removes multiple exclamation points. Anyway, punctuate after “real”.

RBu-
I for one am happy to see a recalibration of your barbative weaponry displayed, though maybe I’m just generally more tolerant these days, and finding optimistic signs wherever I can.
Mine isn’t the Heinlein line, quite the reverse. But it’s a real, growing, yet virtually invisible mind-set.
I first heard it decades back during an oil crunch spasm thing, when a perfectly sane, generous, intelligent hard-working friend of mine’s response to the diminished supply of fuel, which he depended on for his livelihood far more than the average user, was that if there weren’t so many worthless jerks burning millions of gallons of gas doing nothing productive with their worthless insignificant lives, or words to that effect, then hey there’d be plenty for fine upstanding souls such as himself.
Given the present circumstance is far more intense vis a vis resources, population, and allocation, that attitude’s increasing in popularity.
And understandable nobody in an identifiable public position would be advocating it.
It is not my position. At all.
It is the position of soft genocide, neo-eugenicists, racial supremacists, and my unsupported but sincere claim is that it’s big enough to need cutting down.
Marc-
“Uranium is rare… there is waste to deal with… None of these are fatal”
Uranium’s mined mostly on marginal land, where surprise surprise are to be found marginalized people.
Cancer rates in the American Southwest among Native populations living near uranium tailings are disturbingly above the expected norm.
Sure science that can put robots on Mars could mine uranium without poisoning the neighbors, but I see no awareness of that aspect of the problem as anything but more of the same old “got to break eggs to make an omelette”.
Hard to know what exactly is meant by “fatal” in that context.
Fatal to someone, but as long as it’s nobody I know…?
As to which attitude see the reply preceding.
The waste thing, same same.
We could wrap up something as toxic and nearly immortally dangerous as spent nuke fuel, could potentially make it safely permanently contained until long past its expiration date, but where is the precedent for that level of responsible behavior?
Aside from hippies and organic farmers.
Voluntary simplistics. Indigenous traditionals.
The Amish.
Etc.
Or pretty much the people least responsible for the present dilemma.
None of whom seem likely to seize the reins of power.
By defining the problem as technologic inaccuracy, as mechanical progress that needs only to be redirected, the moral dereliction and willful lack of vision which led to this can be safely ignored. For now.
Which suits the visionless and amoral just fine.
Right living first.
The rest will follow.

Sure science that can put robots on Mars could mine uranium without poisoning the neighbors, but I see no awareness of that aspect of the problem as anything but more of the same old “got to break eggs to make an omelette”.
Hard to know what exactly is meant by “fatal” in that context.
Fatal to someone, but as long as it’s nobody I know…?
…
We could wrap up something as toxic and nearly immortally dangerous as spent nuke fuel, could potentially make it safely permanently contained until long past its expiration date, but where is the precedent for that level of responsible behavior?

Well said, well done. Best, most coherent argument against advocating for nuclear power I’ve seen in a long while. And I’ve memorized the question “Where is the precedent for that level of responsible behavior?” for future use: it’s impeccably classic.

“Has Brett given up on gathering all world leaders in his living-room to convince them to launch dust into space? If so, why?”

The nice thing about launching dust into space is that you DON’T need all world leaders to agree to it. You just do it. The nasty thing about reducing CO2 output is that if this group of people here cut off their CO2 output entirely, and that group double their’s, the first group have just wasted their time.

In general, it’s a good idea to solve problems in ways that don’t require unanimity. Because that way they actually get solved.

The claim that computer models are inaccurate has little to do with your position on global warming, anthropogenic or not, and “what is to be done”. Tim Palmer, a leading author of the IPCC report, at a Physics colloquium in UofT:

http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/lecture-and-seminar-series/colloquium/events/physics-colloquium-oct-23-2008

The point was that the Navier-Stokes equations don’t allow you to “cut off” climate modelling on any scale, and that increasing computational power in order to take smaller “basic” climate cells, given today’s approximation methods, will not yield much in terms of accuracy.

The point was NOT that climate change has not occurred, will not continue, or is not anthropogenic. Certainly even the lower bound on the error predicts a significant warming. What he was looking for is a way to better bound the error. Which is what a lot of Physics is about.

All of which is not to say that certain people are not hacks, or hicks, or that “we” are not tired of the same old pseudo-facts raising their little heads.

(Saying that computer models are not accurate as a blanket statement is silly. Of course they aren’t, but you still use them all the time)

Two can play
that way
I say,
You say: I say,
then some more.

?

Two can play
at that.
A big pat
on one’s own back;
lots of words, no core.

!

Two can play
at poetry:
is ‘myopic’
your bigotry?
poetically judgmental, sour.

;-(

(Encore:
No harm is meant.
I did not intend,
to go and waste
so nice a taste!)