The myth of global warming

Hey, @Payday12

Straight up, just tell me if your only contribution to this topic (that you started) is going to only be dumping from other sources or if you're ever going to cobble together an independent idea?

I won't be mad if it's yes, just want to set my expectations.

OK here is my independent idea. Global Warming is a hoax. It is all about money and power. Democrats and liberals are so naive they bought into global warming hook, line and sinker.

I think I should have been more specific. I can tell you believe that, I mean *why*.

Right now, it seems like you believe it because you read it on the websites you linked and from the Daily Wire article that formed the totality of your opening post.

So from my perspective, all I have to go on as to *why* you don't believe in global warming is because you read it on these sites (hence, it doesn't seem that it's independent). But let's say I don't find these sites compelling sources, for reasons I laid out in my (probably too long) earlier post.

What's an argument you could provide to compel me to change my mind?

I should say, it's not necessary that you hold only independent ideas (I don't hold only independent ideas, I've certainly read something, bought it at face value and moved on, though I try to check them if they are "core" ideas), I'm just wondering why I should read what you have to say instead of doing a google search for climate change skeptics if you're just going to repeat what they pass around, verbatim?

Right now, it seems like you believe it because you read it on the websites

Let me turn the tables on you. Tell me why you believe in man made global warming other than Democrats and the liberal media telling you what to think about it.

Before I do that:

1) would you do the same in return, and

2) what wouldn't count as either Democrats or liberal media? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that those are preeeeetty broad concepts in your mind.

But here, maybe I already have something you think isn't liberal media, since I actually already did part of the legwork on that, so let's consider this:

1. You took the 43% figure from the Daily Wire article, yes?
2. That 43% figure originates from this blog, yes? (Or, actually even if the Daily Wire wasn't your source, the 43% figure comes from this, right?)
3. That blog uses this survey, yes?
4. So, since you used that figure, which derives from that survey, that means the survey is fair game (i.e. it's not among what counts as Liberal Propaganda), yes?

So, is it safe for me to respond on the basis of that survey? Because you yourself endorsed a figure from it?

I just want to check before I respond.

Not just that survey and the Daily Wire.

https://www.nas.org/articles/Estimat...Global_Warming

Think you might have misunderstood me. I'm asking if you would consider the survey that is the source of your figure as a potential source for me to use?

Essentially, I suspect that if I used other studies on global warming, you'd dismiss some if not all of them as propaganda of some sort or another. You understand that I don't really want to go through a bunch of trouble just to have it rejected on that basis, right?

So, I thought since you used the 43% figure (which it seems like you acknowledge derives from the DW, which derives from the blog, which derives from the survey) you must be cool with that survey as a source, right?

Not to divert from the question above, but just in case I'm mistaken, this is the part of that link you want me to find convincing, right?

Which became the headline:

You can admit that's kinda shady, right?

(Also, I'm noticing I'm using "right?" at the end of sentences a lot. I do that when I'm talking too, particularly when I'm trying to execute a train of logic. Each time I use it, I'm considering the preceding portions as clauses of an argument, so that I can see where along my line of thinking we disagree, if we do disagree)

@Slappydavis
Whether I agree with you or not, I like the way you think and how you translate your thoughts to text. I'm not reading a post so much as I'm hearing a voice. That's neat. Ha. Sorry for the awkward complement, just some things jump out at me and I have to respond. Carry on.

Carry on.

I guess we'll have to disagree. You say there's a caveat? What are you searching for when you try to find numbers on climate change? I prefer to get behind things there's actually numbers for. And actual cited sources .And there's numbers for this, like it or not. I mean, someone actually did a study about all the studies! If you have an issue with the findings you can debate it with the scientist himself through the peer reviewed process that makes up scientific literature. Is it just the number that galls you? Would you be satisfied with "most scientists" agree on climate change? I doubt you'd go for something as nebulous as that, right?

It's interesting. You mention the media and politicians and activists and all that. Those people aren't scientists. Its not a Scientists fault or Science's fault that assh*oles who wanna manipulate people take their data and sell news stories with it. Its our responsibility to figure that out, apparently. Hence the huge divide I reckon.

Oh, I apologize. I thought we'd gone round on this before in another thread. I unintentionally took a little shot at ya.

I still disagree with this. What did he say that was true? I saw you mentioned something about cooking the books? Can you source that for me? Let's get to the bottom of this.


Sigh... do you have any actual data? I guess you get kudos for coming back, but now I sorta wish you hadn't. Because now I sorta think you're just being paid to do this. This sort of stuff is all over the web these days. If not and you really believe this stuff? Wow. Do you even know what science is?

__________________
We are both the source of the problem and the solution, yet we do not see ourselves in this light...

This thread...

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Eek. Not sure what's scarier - that or this



What's the trick to defrosting windscreens, northies? Warm or cold water?

The whole point of citing sources is to allow people to see what the sources actually say. And in this case, the source doesn't really say "97% of scientists believe in anthropogenic climate change."

I don't think I'd have to, because I'm not disputing those findings; I'm pointing out what they actually are. And while I hate to guess as to his reaction, if I had to I'd say he probably doesn't love the way his work is being stripped of methodology and nuance to make for splashier headlines.

It's the belief that this can be reduced to any number that galls me. The paper we're talking about doesn't even try to do that: it breaks things down according to percentages and probabilities and levels of confidence, so it's pretty antithetical to all that research to reduce it to a sound bite.

Totally agree: it's our responsibility to figure that out. But discussions like this are one of the ways we do it! And since so few people are willing to seek out contradictions to their beliefs, unfortunately, these sorts of rhetorical hand grenades are often the only way they'll get any push back.

No worries; we've discussed climate change before, but only in really broad strokes. I don't think this particular claim came up.

That the claim that 97% of scientists believe in man-made climate change is either false, or highly misleading. Slappy kinda went into detail on this already, albeit mostly in the service of debunking the alternative number he threw out (which I also don't think is right, by the way).

Well, I can't source an interpretation of what he said. If he meant "cook the books" in the sense of "deliberately use fake data to trick people," then I'd say that's false. If he meant it int he sense of "historical climate data is not a straight temperature reading, but routinely normalized and adjusted based on our best guess as to local conditions at the time," then it's true. It's not even under dispute, you can see the NOAA talking about it openly.

I'd link you to critiques of this process, but frankly, they'd be from sites generally skeptical of anthropogenic climate warming and I suspect we'd be back to the "that's fake"/"mine aren't fake" rabbit hole.

It just isn't misleading and frankly, I think you're doing a disservice to science if you keep saying that. I'm pretty sure the main reason behind 'putting a number' to it is because of the over flow of ignorance and the sea of misinformation. I can't speak for all scientists but I can be pretty sure they're not interested in what the number actually is. And the majority of them aren't wasting time talking about the supposed realities of man made climate change. It's us and only us that is continuing to waste time talking about percentages and this and that.

Man, I've been thinking about this all weekend. The media and people behind the media have brought us here. Are we ever gonna be able to watch news again and just watch it and trust it?

Well...why? Did you look at either of the links I posted to this effect? If so, which parts of their dissection of the number did you find unpersuasive?

And how's that been goin'? Because it seems to me that statistical and rhetorical overreach is exactly what enables the "sea of misinformation" in the first place. In a perfect world, a skeptical person would see an exaggerated or misrepresented claim, correct it, and then address the appropriately nuanced version. In reality, they use exaggerations and misrepresentations to dismiss the entire idea.

I think you fight ignorance by being transparent and rigorous, not by getting sucked into the same spin cycle as the people you're trying to debunk (or even, goodness, persuade).

No: but should we ever do that? As you said (quite wisely), it's up to us to sort this stuff out. The fact that we want to just watch people and trust them is precisely why we can't. We will never be able to safely outsource our skepticism to others.

Well, yeah I did. Actual quote, second paragraph. "The myth of an almost-unanimous climate-change consensus is pervasive."

This is that same manipulative journalism that has got us here. I mean, he quotes stuff from 2004 and the meteorological society which isn't even in the climate science field and I doubt very much that a single member of AMS has ever published a single paper about climate change, but yeah. I can see why you'd want to use that as a basis for an argument I guess. It gets me reading and wasting more time I suppose. I can't access the Forbes one and frankly, I don't want to. I think its pretty clear who's behind the money at that magazine. But I I can't stop you from using it.

EDIT: I was wrong. The AMS does have a pretty extensive climate science paper publishing group now. I'm finding some pretty good stuff about it too. This is also from 2012, but I don't see anything about a consensus, so where did that National Review article get it from?

Right, but that's not because of science. That's the media again. I was just doing some reading about the temperature thing. Its also a peer reviewed process and pretty straightforward. Does this have any bearing on this discussion? It's pretty new though, but I haven't read it all yet.

Who is they? Now I think we're getting to the crux of it. If you think there's a bunch of scientists out there putting all this together then HA! I think you're getting close to seeing just how deeply we've been lied to. Keep digging buddy. I'll say it again. This isn't the scientists making exaggerations and misrepresentations to dismiss the idea it's corporations.

Funny we're talking about the media. I think this piece illustrates what we as regular people are up against when it comes to getting out from under the media.

Sinclair Broadcast Group: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

Damn - geoblocked. I love John Oliver.

Saw this yesterday. Interesting read

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/c...ampaign=buffer

And here's the other side

https://www.technocracy.news/index.p...on-in-history/

so I have no idea other than China now is absolutely filthy with air pollution and was nowhere near as bad when I was there in 1991, so I;m all for cleaning up the crap that comes out of industry chimneys.

Oh. I had no idea

http://media.bom.gov.au/social/blog/...e/?cid=003fb46

Sorry for the delay, unusually busy week:

It says right near the beginning, immediately after the part you quoted:

"Last May, the White House tweeted: 'Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.' A few days later, Secretary of State John Kerry announced, '“'Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists tell us this is urgent.'

That's really misleading, and the article immediately goes on to explain why:

Based on a two-question online survey, Zimmerman and Doran concluded that “the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific bases of long-term climate processes” — even though only 5 percent of respondents, or about 160 scientists, were climate scientists. In fact, the “97 percent” statistic was drawn from an even smaller subset: the 79 respondents who were both self-reported climate scientists and had “published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change.” These 77 scientists agreed that global temperatures had generally risen since 1800, and that human activity is a “significant contributing factor.”

The next paragraph goes on with more of the same. But in a nutshell, he's saying that the claims above aren't accurate because:

1. It's not "scientists," it's self-reported climate scientists who have published a majority of their work on the subject.
2. It's not "we're responsible," it's "we're a significant contributing factor."
3. It's not that the temperature is rising dangerously fast, it's "temperatures have generally risen."
4. It's not published papers, it's published papers that take a position at all, excluding those that don't. Even though scientists refusing to take a position seems highly relevant to any argument about how certain scientists are about a thing.

I don't think anyone who hears "97% of scientists" could glean any of this, let alone the fact that the claim apparently refers to a grand total of 77 people.

I'm really not sure what's supposed to be "manipulative" about any of this, either. To the contrary, the article seems downright responsible: it goes on to say "Has the earth generally warmed since 1800? (An overwhelming majority of scientists assent to this.)" So they're not using these claims as a straw man, but specifically distinguishing between what the papers do say, and the exaggerations and misrepresentations they're responding to. That's exactly the right way to address rhetorical overreach.

I think regarding these arguments as a waste of your time, from the very beginning, is self-fulfilling. If you think everyone at all skeptical of this stuff is either a dupe (me, apparently) or a shill (everything I cite, apparently), I'm not sure what there is to discuss.

I have to object to this on almost every dimension, from factual to philosophical.

Factually, I find the idea that anything from Forbes on this issue can be disregarded to be totally without merit. For one, this is Forbes.com, not Forbes: they're different. I know because I've actually written for Forbes.com a bit (about education), and the idea that anyone who writes for it is subject to some kind of ideological screening simply isn't true.

Second, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing the ominous reference to who's "behind the money" is not based on anything specific, right? Just the general idea that Forbes = money = corporations = the fossil fuel industry = bribes, I guess? Because that's quite a charge, and it's not one consistent with what they actually publish: if you poke around the site a bit, you'll see lots of articles arguing the other side of the issue (that last one, for those who aren't going to click, is called "There's No Science Behind Denying Climate Change").

Philosophically, I object to the idea that some casual reference to funding can be used to dismiss any given claim. We pay lawyers to argue for us, but nobody responds to an argument in court by saying "of course he's defending his client! He's paid to!" We don't say that because the arguments he makes can be evaluated independent of his motives. The only reason to care so much about funding is if you think the facts of the matter are inherently unknowable and you're just trying to decide which person to put your trust in. But since you said earlier that we have to sort this out for ourselves (which I agree with!), that can't be it.

Suspected bias is a fine reason to view something with a skeptical eye, but it is not a reason to dismiss it in and of itself. And if it was, it'd rule out both sides, because there are incentives for championing climate change, too. Plenty of money to be made in renewable energy, after all, and politicians who warn about climate change almost invariably couple their warning with a solution that, surprise surprise, involves the further consolidation of political or economic power. So why not cut through that thicket of tangled incentives by focusing on merit rather than motive?

Yes! That's exactly the kind of thing we should be talking about. The link you've provided is saying pretty much exactly what I just did, though (emphasis added):

Measuring global temperatures in the U.S. no easy task. While we have mostly volunteer-run weather station data from across the country going back to the late 1800s, these weather stations were never set up to consistently monitor long-term changes to the climate. Stations have moved to different locations over the past 150 years, most more than once. They have changed instruments from mercury thermometers to electronic sensors, and have changed the time they take temperature measurements from afternoon to morning. Cities have grown up around stations, and some weather stations are not ideally located.

All of these issues introduce inconsistencies into the temperature record. To detect and deal with these issues, NOAA uses a process called homogenization which compares each station to its neighbors, flags stations that show localized changes in longer-term temperatures not found in nearby stations, and removes these local breakpoints. While the impact of these adjustments on temperature records is relatively small globally, in the U.S. it has a much larger effect due to the frequent changes that have occurred at our volunteer-run historical climatological network. Fixes to inconsistencies in temperature data have effectively doubled the rate of U.S. warming over the past century compared to the raw temperature records.

So now we're really getting down to it: warming trends are not based on raw data. They are not based on a straight temperature comparison. This is obvious, when you think about it: it's kinda hard to measure temperatures over the entire world (or even country) even today, nevermind the 1800s, or earlier. So the historical data requires a lot of "homogenization." We can get into more into what this entails, but it can get pretty elaborate. Like, analyzing the thickness and density of tree rings to determine temperature elaborate.

Now, I don't have any reason to believe the NOAA is faking anything or being actively dishonest. But they are adjusting lots of historical temperature data. I believe they're generally doing it to the best of their ability. I believe they are generally making good faith efforts to try to correct for changing circumstances and conditions. But those decisions are not always empirical or inevitable: they involve assumptions. I'm sure all of these assumptions are at least moderately reasonable, but the more assumptions you introduce, the less precise your output will be.

We face this issue at my work all the time; we do a lot of statistical analysis. There is never a "true" way to sift through the information, or some perfect way to adjust it. There are always tradeoffs and judgment calls, and the less precise the data is, or the more you have of it, the more judgment has to go into how it's interpreted. And that's fine! Sometimes, that's all we have. But it just isn't accurate to think of data normalization as a hard science.

I'm very disheartened by how often these arguments get kneecapped with vague references to shady people funding things, or what "science" or "scientists" say, or how something is "fake." At what point do we just talk frankly about facts and data, as opposed to spending a lot of time trying to paint various people or organizations as either dishonest, or trustworthy? It seems like the whole discussion is about trying to either discredit someone, or else establish them as an authority, at which point we can stop digging, stop looking at methodology, and no longer have to bother with refuting or defending things. But that's exactly how the extreme climate skeptics think! "Oh, so-and-so used a bogus number. Now I can ignore everything they say about the climate." It's not any better coming from the other direction.

Dude, that's my point. Yes, it generally isn't the scientists exaggerating or misrepresenting things. They say much more nuanced, probablistic things. Which is why it's a problem when the White House say something so misleading and simplistic about it, because that nonsense gets retweeted and internalized. A lot of people believe that stuff. A lot of people repeat that stuff. It's clearly worth scrutinizing and (if necessary) refuting.