For Those Who Doubt Global Warming...

Neocortx said:

I don't know why people here discuss a topic they're clearly no experts in.

The scientific consensus, literally the most reliable source, is as clear as it could be:

Climate change is real and we are a part of the cause.

Really, it doesn't matter what some of you like or not. Scientific consensus trumps your attempts at making sense of anything.

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You seem to consider science as an ethereal thing, detached from this world, that shines its truth down to the mere mortals. That's religion, not science and huge,bloody struggles have been given to be rid from exactly this view of the world. It is very sad to see people treat "science" as a religion. Actually this is totally unscientific and the irony of it is magnificent. It is amazing how despite all the modern education and information capacity a lot of people are still unable to grasp the basics of epistemology (yes, we have science that studies science itself - aren't we the coolest?).

Here's the newsflash for you - scientists are just humans like you and me, with the same biases the general population has. Where the money &power flows, "scientific" results abound. For a famous historical example, I'll assume you know that the scientific consensus used to be that the earth was flat and the stars where propelled by Angels. Now, I'm sure you think those people were caveman savages and not real scientists, but of course that's not the case. Scientists (Eratosthenes to be exact), had measured the Earth's circumference 2.300 years ago -guess what shape has a circumference... The reality is that the money and power of that age wanted the earth to be flat and the angels to be motor engines, so the science of the time happily complied.

Yes, there were brave exceptions who begged to differ. The minority of the time. You can imagine the spiritual Neocortx ancestor shouting at Galileo - "are you stupid? 99.999% of learned men have clearly considered the Earth flat and the stars revolving around it - now, pray tell, would you like to be crucified heads up, or heads down?"

So the reality is that what doesn't matter is your obsessiveness with the authority fallacy.

The worlds coming to an end just be happy to be alive and enjoy the ride after death its just eternal darkness.

Thing is, nothing's pure and undiluted. No authority is entirely uncorrupted and no corporation acts in a purely philanthropic fashion.

So the argument against it appears to be: Experts? Pfft, what do they know?

Based on this premise, any quotes, statistics and facts are utterly meaningless in proving climate change either does or does not exist.

Similarly, anyone's opinion is then rendered irrelevant, because it's all based on unreliable data.

So our positions on this are based on, what? The thing we WANT to believe? If there is no firm ground on which to stand, no data we can truly trust, then this argument serves no purpose and we're all monkeys scrabbling in the dirt screeching at each other.

Galileo? What the hell did he know? Just wait till the next round of re-adjustments where they find out the earth is actually oblate. Oh, wait.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betrayers_of_the_Truth

http://www.amazon.com/Betrayers-Truth-William-Broad/dp/0671495496

(i have this book, it's interesting to see how much fraud there is in science)

Out of curiosity, how do you decide what "facts" to trust?

Apricot said:

Out of curiosity, how do you decide what "facts" to trust?

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In this case the word "fact" would be better expressed as "statement." Much of what passes as "fact" is actually a mix of fact, personal opinion, pre-existing beliefs, and error.

Don't know about anyone else but personally I always reserve a little doubt for any claim I hear no matter who says it.

An interesting article about "truth"...

We Believe What We Want To Believe
The Miami Herald
Dec. 28, 2004

You've Got Your Truth, I've Got Mine
By Leonard Pitts

A question for my Republican friends:
Would you still love George W. Bush if he were Bill Clinton?

Seriously.

If it were Clinton who had invaded Iraq based on erroneous intelligence, Clinton whose decisions had led to the deaths of more than 1,300 troops, would you be foursquare behind him the way you are Bush?

Would you still support him even as he is vilified by half the country and much of the world?

And for my Democratic friends: Would you have felt the same about Clinton had he been Bush?

Had it been Bush who had an affair with a White House intern, Bush who looked the nation in the eye and lied about it, would you have been so willing to forgive? Would you still have opposed removing him from office?

In other words, are you guilty of double standards and outright bias?

I'll save you the trouble: Yes.

That's not what our self-image says, of course. We like to see ourselves as principled types who sift the facts before forming an opinion. But for most of us, this is pure poppycock. We are perfectly willing to ignore any fact that contradicts what we believe.

Maybe you already knew this intuitively. Now you can know it to a scientific certainty.

For which you can thank Drew Westen. He's a professor of psychology at Emory University, author of a new and still-unpublished study testing whether people make decisions based on bias or fact.

Bias won hands down.

In a key scenario, respondents were led to believe a soldier was accused of torturing people at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The fictional soldier claimed to have been following orders from superiors who told him the Geneva Conventions had been suspended.

He supposedly wanted to subpoena President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to prove his case. Respondents were asked if he should have that right.

Some were presented with strong "evidence" corroborating the soldier's story. Others had only his word to go on. But the strength or weakness of the evidence turned out to be immaterial.

Researchers were able to predict people's opinions over 80% of the time based simply on their opinions of the Bush administration, the GOP, the military and human rights groups.

Those who had less affection for the president sided with the soldier even when the evidence was weak. And fans of the president tended to side with him even when the evidence was overwhelming. We believe what we want, facts be damned.

"The scary thing," says Westen, "is the extent to which you can imagine this influencing jury decisions, boardroom decisions, political decisions..."

I'm reminded of a colleague who says we Americans increasingly seem to embrace separate "truths," reflecting not objective reality, but political orientation. Some of us even get our news exclusively from those sources that affirm our truths. He calls it living in alternate realities.

It's because of that separateness that there often seems to be no moral center or intellectual coherence to much of what passes for public discourse these days.

Our principles are situational, our willingness to marshal critical thought goes off and on like a light switch. We'll believe -- or not believe -- whatever it takes to win the argument.

Winning the argument is all that matters.

Never mind that it's perfectly possible to win the argument and still be wrong.

Westen laughed when I told him I found his study depressing. If there's a silver lining, it's the 15 or so percent of respondents who actually bothered to consider the evidence when forming their opinions.

We'd all be well advised to follow their example.

Forget what you want to believe. Seek the truth and have the courage to believe that.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2004-12-28/news/0412280308_1_bias-or-fact-george-w-bush-soldier

TimB1087 said:

My problem is the god damned politics behind it. On one hand, you have cold hard facts. We have clearly noticeable effects, we have substantial evidence showing that it's been getting worse since the industrial revolution, and we even have 99% of scientists saying yes, it's real and it's us. All of this alone should be enough to convince anybody, but nope, leave it up to the politicians and lobbying for/against it to plant seeds of doubt in Joe Shmoe watching Fox News or listening to NPR, leaving them convinced it's alllll a big hoax. Ffs

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There is a problem with your assumption.

Climate change is measured over time, and one thing we have plenty of since the industrial revolution is time. What we don't have is an abundance of records to the same scientific level as today, which predate the industrial revolution.

So accepting that there has been climate change since the IR does not preclude the curve predating the IR. Therefore the only accurate conclusion is that there has been a noticeable change in climate since that point, not what has caused it or when it started.

One interesting point is that the switch to greener lifestyles has made it more difficult to switch to a greener lifestyle. By that I mean the most productive crop In biofuels production is rapeseed oil. However this plant actually thrived in our polluted environment, we now have to dose it with excess sulphur as there is not enough in the atmosphere.

Now this is not entirely unrelated to the conversation as you do suggest the manmade component being since the industrial revolution. Or more precisely man made pollutants being the cause. If farmers are now seeing the evidence of reverses in environmental pollutants, surely then we should over time start to see reverses in climate change.

Now I'm not answering one way or the other. I'm all for going greener because who wants to breathe that stuff in, but taking an actual cold look at what's going on it is impossible to give any facts about the cause as the measured timescale in relation to the event pattern is too miniscule.

We can say there has been a change in climate but we can't say what the cause is. I live in a temperate northern hemisphere environment. It is however rich in oil gas and coal. If the common belief of how fossil fuels are created is true then this area was once tropical with a much warmer and humid climate, and so could indicate a cyclic event.

Apricot said:

Out of curiosity, how do you decide what "facts" to trust?

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Well people lately are adding the world "fact" in every statement they make and that doesn't make it a fact!

Fact something that is the absolute truth and can't be anything else. like saying apple will always fall down on the ground when you drop it, this is a fact.
A science paper is not a fact, is just selective information put together to make a statement.


I will give you an examples of half facts.

1. Wine test better when it older.
This is a half truth, becouse old wine have more profound taste till certain years after that it tests like shit.

2. Pharmaceutical company makes new medicament and they back it up with science papers on the positive effects on it.
This are what they are called privately funded science researches to be published in reputable science journals.

They will purplish a paper how the medicament will ( for sake of argument ) cure headache 99.5% of the time tested on 100 people. Based on there research and they will probably mention few minor side effects.
But what they will not tell you in the paper that they didn't do any long term side effects tests, that all of the subjects where in a perfect health and probably didn't have a headache at all.

That is why you have lot of people dying from medications, and lot of them are pulled back from the shelf's.

3. This one is what happened to my friend.
He is working on a enzyme, continuing a work of a scientists that have a published paper on that enzyme.
He have stated as a fact that the enzyme is completely stable when frozen and does not lose the activity after being unfrozen. My friend was loosing the activity of the enzyme after being unfrozen for 5 min and completely out of activity ( dead ) after 15 min. He had the talk with he scientist that have published the paper for the enzyme and he said to him, yes its true that the enzyme is stable but for 5 min ( which he "forgot" to mention that in his paper ).


What I am trying to say scientist to often tell the half truth which can be really dangerous.

You can easy manipulate the truth if you only use part of it, don't forget that.

P.S. and also I don't know how science can prove a religion, I am my self a religious man but I can tell you for a fact that science has disprove all of the major religions.

There's been no global warming in 15 yrs (1978-1998). We're now in a period of global cooling.

Ocean acidification is very complicated. The PH of the ocean is 8.1 = alkaline. It's been around 8.2 for the last 300 million years. And naturally will fluctuate as our highly complex climate shifts. By linking global warming to declining alkalinity scientists are largely neglecting a potentially much bigger problem, which is the independent change of ocean biology and what role nature is playing in all this.

'Our harmless emissions of trifling quantities of carbon dioxide cannot possibly acidify the oceans. Paper after paper after learned paper in the peer-reviewed literature makes that quite plain. Idso cites some 150 scientific sources, nearly all of them providing hard evidence, by measurement and experiment, that there is no basis for imagining that we can acidify the oceans to any extent large enough to be measured even by the most sensitive instruments.' (Christopher Monckton)

Almost all of the water in the past 10,000 years was warmer than present. The 1930's were the hottest decade of the century. Nothing about our records of hurricanes are meaningful or alarming. Noone has proved in any way that CO2 leads to any form of climate change.

I think a better title for this thread might be "climate change, lets talk science". Not "for those who doubt" which implies one has to automatically take sides.

Here's a neat little graph:



And a neat video:


If people would like to debate science, I'll debate science. But I will not debate mummies or Bill Nye.

-BB

I don't doubt it at all. It blatantly obvious it is happening. Simply follow the real scientists and not the "bro science".

Apricot said:

Thing is, nothing's pure and undiluted. No authority is entirely uncorrupted and no corporation acts in a purely philanthropic fashion.

So the argument against it appears to be: Experts? Pfft, what do they know?

Based on this premise, any quotes, statistics and facts are utterly meaningless in proving climate change either does or does not exist.

Similarly, anyone's opinion is then rendered irrelevant, because it's all based on unreliable data.

So our positions on this are based on, what?

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Simple: On unbiased data that gets interpreted using strict logic (in the scientific sense, not in the "common logic" sense). In other words, we want to be able to use a robust interpretation framework over a neutral set of data. Just like in physics.

The argument here is that the interpretation logic used is not sound and the data (as it recently looks like) are being tampered with. Now, I personally can't do anything about the data - can't go and verify they're not adulterated from the observation spots or find out which "outliers" have been thrown out of the processing (many ways to cheat). But I can judge the interpretation, because the framework is well known (logic).

The great thing with science is that it is NOT based on authority. Science's nickname is "f*ck authority". The whole idea behind science is verification (deductively or experimentally). Authority is for religion.

jazzc said:

The great thing with science is that it is NOT based on authority. Science's nickname is "f*ck authority". The whole idea behind science is verification (deductively or experimentally). Authority is for religion.

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Jazz- I'm scared. I think we might be agreeing on something!

jazzc said:

The argument here is that the interpretation logic used is not sound and the data (as it recently looks like) are being tampered with. Now, I personally can't do anything about the data - can't go and verify they're not adulterated from the observation spots or find out which "outliers" have been thrown out of the processing (many ways to cheat). But I can judge the interpretation, because the framework is well known (logic).

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Ok, I'm a bit lost here. Are you talking about a framework of general logic? As in, you recognise fallacious arguments and are basing your interpretation on that. Or a knowledge of the scientific framework?

Apricot said:

Ok, I'm a bit lost here. Are you talking about a framework of general logic? As in, you recognise fallacious arguments and are basing your interpretation on that. Or a knowledge of the scientific framework?

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic

Logic (from the Ancient Greek: λογική, logike)[1] is the branch of philosophy concerned with the use and study of valid reasoning

It's a huge sector but the gist of it is the strict definition of the rules and methodology for validating statements based on a limited set of unproved assumptions (for example, A = A is one such)

jazzc said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic

Logic (from the Ancient Greek: λογική, logike)[1] is the branch of philosophy concerned with the use and study of valid reasoning

It's a huge sector but the gist of it is the strict definition of the rules and methodology for validating statements based on a limited set of unproved assumptions (for example, A = A is one such)

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True, but you can't relay on logic as you are gathering the information you have and are making a logic assumption that make sense for you.

What if the person that have presented an A and using your own logic you logically are amusing A=A but in reality the A ( result, paper, etc.) can be an error due to calculations or misleading. So what I am trying to say when someone present an A and you use it a a base for your logic, then your logic is false.


Every logical assumption you make, is mostly influenced by others ( as part of given facts or statements ) as you are not the one making the actual tests, calculations and deciding what is important and what not.

Comparing the climate from a flat and static basis to draw quick and wrong conclusions is just plainly false.

That reasoning can be extended to many so called ecologic persons that are fast to trigger how the humanity is evil and how we must stop everything.

IE : "STOP NUCLEAR RIGHT AWAY because of tchernobyl and fukushima" -> Green Politicians in my country doesn't even bother to learn about the full story of these events and the consequences. If we do so, you can forget your PC and all electrically expensive cumfort you have or work harder in IM to pay for your $$$$ electrical bill.
There are some countries that i won't quote that have "given up" the nuclear energy for Wind based energy (but also they import a shit ton of nuclear electricity) and even restore old fashion dirty power plants to sustain the electrical needs of their country.

Don't get me wrong here, i'm not saying we must keep going eyes closed and i would even say that we are making a lot of progress on a large scale. It is now a concern for many people and that's a bright side. There are much room for progress and we are walking toward it, so no i'm in panic to read about climate change yet. (here again we are dealing with Geological time base and that's not a matter of overnight, nor years)

Now about the Earth becoming 120 degrees because of us, you just need to at the sky and remind yourself how small we are and wait for a zillion years for it to happen.

wizard04 said:

True, but you can't relay on logic as you are gathering the information you have and are making a logic assumption that make sense for you.

What if the person that have presented an A and using your own logic you logically are amusing A=A but in reality the A ( result, paper, etc.) can be an error due to calculations or misleading. So what I am trying to say when someone present an A and you use it a a base for your logic, then your logic is false.

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I don't understand what you are saying. The assumptions that Logic is build upon are really basic - for example "A can not be true and not true", or "not (not A) is A". Did you see me break any such assumption? Did you do it?

Every logical assumption you make, is mostly influenced by others ( as part of given facts or statements ) as you are not the one making the actual tests, calculations and deciding what is important and what not.

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The whole idea is that you take observations, apply the logical framework on them and reach to a conclusion. If the data is wrong, adulterated or whatnot, the result of the process will not be the correct one. That's irrespective of the process. Like, consider the process "eating". It's a straightforward one - you put food into the mount, you break it in small parts and you swallow them. The expected result is that you will not be hungry. If you eat shit instead of avocado, you will not get the expected result. That's not the fault of the process itself, but of what you fed it with. Similarly, if you try to stuff the avocado through a different body cavity instead of the mount, you will again not get the expected result - this time because you didn't apply the process.

HostStage said:

Comparing the climate from a flat and static basis to draw quick and wrong conclusions is just plainly false.

That reasoning can be extended to many so called ecologic persons that are fast to trigger how the humanity is evil and how we must stop everything.

IE : "STOP NUCLEAR RIGHT AWAY because of tchernobyl and fukushima" -> Green Politicians in my country doesn't even bother to learn about the full story of these events and the consequences. If we do so, you can forget your PC and all electrically expensive cumfort you have or work harder in IM to pay for your $$$$ electrical bill.
There are some countries that i won't quote that have "given up" the nuclear energy for Wind based energy (but also they import a shit ton of nuclear electricity) and even restore old fashion dirty power plants to sustain the electrical needs of their country.

Don't get me wrong here, i'm not saying we must keep going eyes closed and i would even say that we are making a lot of progress on a large scale. It is now a concern for many people and that's a bright side. There are much room for progress and we are walking toward it, so no i'm in panic to read about climate change yet. (here again we are dealing with Geological time base and that's not a matter of overnight, nor years)

Now about the Earth becoming 120 degrees because of us, you just need to at the sky and remind yourself how small we are and wait for a zillion years for it to happen.

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Why are you afraid to mention that Denmark gave up nuclear energy and imports power produced by nuclear from other countries?

BreaknBrix said:

There's been no global warming in 15 yrs (1978-1998). We're now in a period of global cooling.

Ocean acidification is very complicated. The PH of the ocean is 8.1 = alkaline. It's been around 8.2 for the last 300 million years. And naturally will fluctuate as our highly complex climate shifts. By linking global warming to declining alkalinity scientists are largely neglecting a potentially much bigger problem, which is the independent change of ocean biology and what role nature is playing in all this.

'Our harmless emissions of trifling quantities of carbon dioxide cannot possibly acidify the oceans. Paper after paper after learned paper in the peer-reviewed literature makes that quite plain. Idso cites some 150 scientific sources, nearly all of them providing hard evidence, by measurement and experiment, that there is no basis for imagining that we can acidify the oceans to any extent large enough to be measured even by the most sensitive instruments.' (Christopher Monckton)

Almost all of the water in the past 10,000 years was warmer than present. The 1930's were the hottest decade of the century. Nothing about our records of hurricanes are meaningful or alarming. Noone has proved in any way that CO2 leads to any form of climate change.

I think a better title for this thread might be "climate change, lets talk science". Not "for those who doubt" which implies one has to automatically take sides.

Here's a neat little graph:

And a neat video:

If people would like to debate science, I'll debate science. But I will not debate mummies or Bill Nye.

-BB

Click to expand...

Exactly. This graph is similar to the one that was show at my college in one of my favorite courses. He shared insight into how people skew the graphs and statistics. If you zoom in on the last 20 years it can look bad, but when you look at the whole picture you realize..this shit happens.