[Lorric]

No real point in a firestorm. Wheelspin just demonstrated the exact point I made about evolution for a different subject. It's exactly this attitude that makes the anti-vaxxer movement so popular.

But he quoted 8 people who say it's not real.  Surely that trumps the hundreds of other who say it is, and the many, many studies done that confirm it!

Hold on Aesaar.

Right or wrong is not determined through superior numbers. If every person on the planet were to say the sky was orange, that wouldn't make them right. (Don't post a picture of an orange sky. )

Science isn't always right. If no one listened to the detractors when science was proven to be wrong, science would stay wrong forever.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm going to go with the superior numbers of scientists who say global climate change is down to human activity, but it should never be something that cannot be challenged and re-analysed, especially if there are actual scientists doing it.

Wheelspin did not use these quotes to argue that this means therefore the majority is wrong. Merely to express that he is sceptical. Since when did being sceptical rather than blindly accepting things become a bad thing? I'm going with the majority, but climate change hasn't just been a series of smooth, accurate predictions by scientists, and I'm not going to close my mind to the possibility there could be serious issues with the currently held mainstream view even when I believe the mainstream view is likely to be at least broadly correct.

[Aesaar]

You're right.  Greater numbers doesn't necessarily mean correct.  But then again, neither do credentials.  WheelSpin quoted 8 people, and assumed that because they had credentials, what they were saying was true.  Apparently, their explanation for why the science on global warming is wrong doesn't matter enough to be included or linked to in his post.

Karajorma is completely right.  It's the exact same "logic" anti-vaxxers use.  "I don't know **** about the subject matter, but X said this, so it must be true!"

Global warming is pretty intensively scrutinised, but people like WheelSpin have decided that it's less likely to be real than that there's some sort of global conspiracy to keep the truth from the public in order to further some crazy moneymaking scheme.  Again, a lot like anti-vaxxers.

Global conspiracy is apparently more plausible to some people than the science actually being sound.


I'm not well-educated enough on the topic to comment on the specifics of global warming.  I'm just pointing out that his, er, "argument" is complete crap.

[Lorric]

You're right.  Greater numbers doesn't necessarily mean correct.  But then again, neither do credentials.  WheelSpin quoted 8 people, and assumed that because they had credentials, what they were saying was true.  Apparently, their explanation for why the science on global warming is wrong doesn't matter enough to be included or linked to in his post.

Karajorma is completely right.  It's the exact same "logic" anti-vaxxers use.  "I don't know **** about the subject matter, but X said this, so it must be true!"

You might be right. I guess we'll have to wait and see if Wheelspin comes back to know for sure. I also very much agree about credentials alone not being enough to mean correct.

[Meneldil]

Right or wrong is not determined through superior numbers. If every person on the planet were to say the sky was orange, that wouldn't make them right. (Don't post a picture of an orange sky. )

They are, or at least they should be if you're a layperson. If every single scientist on the planet told me the sky is orange, I'd have no other choice but to accept that. Science has a better track record than my eyesight.

Science isn't always right. If no one listened to the detractors when science was proven to be wrong, science would stay wrong forever.

When science is wrong it's usually other scientists who prove it wrong.
If a scientific theory you as a layperson don't believe in is proven wrong by a scientist, I doesn't mean you were right. You were still just as wrong for not believing the best explanation we had.

My point is, if you like to keep yourself informed and have opinions on controversial topics, feel free to do so. Go read a science blog and what physicists A and B say about string theory, and conclude that the "it's a waste of time" camp seems to be the more reasonable one. Just don't take yourself seriously.
If on the other hand you conclude 90% of scientists don't know what they're talking about, then you are simply wrong, and no one can ever prove you right.

[Lorric]

They are, or at least they should be if you're a layperson. If every single scientist on the planet told me the sky is orange, I'd have no other choice but to accept that. Science has a better track record than my eyesight.

And the whole planet would be wrong. The track record of science btw is the reason I trust in science.

When science is wrong it's usually other scientists who prove it wrong.
If a scientific theory you as a layperson don't believe in is proven wrong by a scientist, I doesn't mean you were right. You were still just as wrong for not believing the best explanation we had.

This is what I meant, other scientists. I cannot follow you though to a belief you were wrong not to follow the high number of scientists even if the high number of scientists were proven to be wrong. Yes, the smart money is on the majority of the scientific community to be correct, but you were not wrong.

I'm not sure how relevant this is, but there was once a question on Who Wants to be a Millionaire, one of the easy ones, I think it was the £500 question, either that or the £1000 one. But this question was not easy. I didn't know the answer to the question and neither did the player. They asked the audience, and I would have done too. And got about 80% on one answer and 20% on another. The 80% seemed like the one to guess if you didn't know the answer, because it was something everyone knew what it was, while the other three options were obscure things. So how do 20% go for this obscure thing while no one goes for the other two obscure things? I worked out that with an answer that seemed obvious for a guess, that surely if it was the correct answer it would garner close to 100% of the votes. Despite that, there was this 20% minority on another answer, and the 20% were right. The player went with the 80% and went home with nothing while I'd have gone with the 20% and stayed in the game.

[karajorma]

Regarding the Global Warming debate, I wished people could focus on discussing political actions that could be shared with people who are more skeptical about the stuff for purely pragmatical reasons. Even if some people might disagree that Global Warming is real and dangerous, surely we could avoid the "Toxoplasma Of Rage" theory here and agree in certain actions that converge both towards combating climate change and other values (like pollution, economics, technology, etc.). Raising the standards of gasoline use in cars, for instance, could be argued for both CC and improving the economics of oil imports; investing in smart grids will create better conditions for solar power for individual houses but also waste a lot less energy and improve the economy (solar power for each household has lots of libertarian interest for the possibility of making people more independent of the big government and whatnot).

While that's not a bad idea, I doubt it would be enough to combat the effects of global warming. It's a step in the right direction but it's going to give people the false feeling that they've already done their part to stop global warming and that no further action is required.

Not to mention that if you tried it, you'd have seen the FUD pushed in a different direction. Pushing for more solar instead would have resulted in a huge number of articles about the poisonous materials in solar panels and how they were bad for the environment.

[watsisname]

If every single scientist on the planet told me the sky is orange, I'd have no other choice but to accept that. Science has a better track record than my eyesight.

Funny thing, the true color of the sky isn't actually blue.   It's more of a mixture of blue-indigo-violet, but our eyes are so insensitive to violet wavelengths that it just looks blue.

[Meneldil]

And the whole planet would be wrong.

Yes, that's a risk you're taking when you trust the majority of scientists: if they're wrong, you'll have believed the wrong thing with them.
But considering your ignorance and their track record, that's the least risky option, and therefore the most sensible one. As a layperson, you have no better option than to trust them.

It's like looking left and right before crossing the road. There's nothing guaranteeing you won't get hit by lightning midway, but it's still the best way to do it. Sure as hell better then say, trying to fly over the road by running into it while flapping your arms.

That's why I say that disagreeing with the scientific consensus, even if it's wrong, doesn't make you right. You just arrived to what accidentally turned out to be true by completely wrong reasoning. But surely that doesn't count as "being right": if I ask you what 64/16 is, and you answer "well it's obviously 4, just cancel the sixes!" you are just as wrong as if you were to say 7 or 20 or 721 (and actually more wrong than a kid who got 3.9 by following a correct algorithm and a bit misremembered multiplication table).

Even if your reasons were something like "well 10% of scientists working in this field says the rest is wrong, and their arguments are really good, I'm going to go argue with people on internet forums about it, and base my real-life decisions on their finding" and they turn out to be right, you weren't. The idea that you were better equipped to reason about those arguments than the scientific community is ludicrous.

@watsisname: see, I told you my eyesight sucks!

[WheelSpin]

Wheelspin, why are you using a single local temperature dataset (GISP2) to make a point about global average temperature?

This is a thing I see a lot of people who don't accept scientific consensus on climate change do, and to me it just emphasizes how readily people seem to feel capable of forming opinions about a subject that they don't actually study rigorously.  When temperature is analyzed with a global perspective, one finds that those earlier warm periods are a lot less significant than the warming we are experiencing today.  Which is a good clue that the current warming is also quite fundamentally different in character than those earlier ones.  This one is caused by a change in the thermodynamic properties of the atmosphere, and the physics behind it is remarkably simple compared to some other physics we could be talking about.

I posted 1 chart as an example.  This isn't an exegesis on climate change, nor am I claiming to be an authority on the subject.  None the less, my skepticism of the agenda makes me skeptical of the anthropogenic assertion.  And there is too much political agenda associated with this issue to ignore.

Why are there skeptics within scientific circles?  More specifically, what is the reasoned response to their critique?  I find it more than troubling that skepticism is so derided, to the point of ad hominem (eg.implying association with "anti-vaxxors", etc., etc.).

Arguing in favor of efficiency for its own sake would probably be viewed favorably by the public at large, irregardless of political stance.  Because ultimately, the desired effect is to reduce energy (specifically fossil fuel) consumption - yes?

To be fair, I'll ask, what rigor have you applied to the subject?  Are you a climatologist?

[Luis Dias]

Regarding the Global Warming debate, I wished people could focus on discussing political actions that could be shared with people who are more skeptical about the stuff for purely pragmatical reasons. Even if some people might disagree that Global Warming is real and dangerous, surely we could avoid the "Toxoplasma Of Rage" theory here and agree in certain actions that converge both towards combating climate change and other values (like pollution, economics, technology, etc.). Raising the standards of gasoline use in cars, for instance, could be argued for both CC and improving the economics of oil imports; investing in smart grids will create better conditions for solar power for individual houses but also waste a lot less energy and improve the economy (solar power for each household has lots of libertarian interest for the possibility of making people more independent of the big government and whatnot).

While that's not a bad idea, I doubt it would be enough to combat the effects of global warming. It's a step in the right direction but it's going to give people the false feeling that they've already done their part to stop global warming and that no further action is required.

Not to mention that if you tried it, you'd have seen the FUD pushed in a different direction. Pushing for more solar instead would have resulted in a huge number of articles about the poisonous materials in solar panels and how they were bad for the environment.

I get what you're saying, but is throwing punches to walls really the best alternative? Push for those things where you'll find allies while trying to convince everyone else of your ideas. Calling everyone stupid and "deniers" and so on will only get **** worse. The antivaxx movement is proof of this. Just the other day Bill Maher was throwing a temper tantrum like "I'm not against vaccines in general, but some of them are ya know stupid like these flu shots that only have 28% effectiveness". The best response to this is not to treat these people like holocaust deniers, but to show them in polite terms why they are wrong. Treat them as people, not enemies, and good things can follow. IDK, I've slept very little these past few days, I might be saying piles of **** here.

[Luis Dias]

I posted 1 chart as an example.  This isn't an exegesis on climate change, nor am I claiming to be an authority on the subject.  None the less, my skepticism of the agenda makes me skeptical of the anthropogenic assertion.  And there is too much political agenda associated with this issue to ignore.

Why are there skeptics within scientific circles?  More specifically, what is the reasoned response to their critique?  I find it more than troubling that skepticism is so derided, to the point of ad hominem (eg.implying association with "anti-vaxxors", etc., etc.).

Arguing in favor of efficiency for its own sake would probably be viewed favorably by the public at large, irregardless of political stance.  Because ultimately, the desired effect is to reduce energy (specifically fossil fuel) consumption - yes?

To be fair, I'll ask, what rigor have you applied to the subject?  Are you a climatologist?

This is very self aware, and I sympathize with you a lot here. Read this thing I found in the internets that explains why certain subjects become so controversial, when perhaps they shouldn't be at all (http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/), and you'll probably get a feel of the "meta" issue here. It's as if we just love the controversies, the dramas, the soap operas that are driven. There are lot of actors in all of these situations that behave like absolute assholes because it actually benefits them, and they might use these "causes" as shield of their psychopathic or narcissistic actions as if saying "I know I'm behaving like a complete douchebag and doing all sorts of unethical bull****, but it's for the Good Cause (x), and I have to battle these monstruous beings that came literally from Mordor so you understand".

But I also think it's healthy to separate these issues. Irrespectively of the worth of certain people and certain kinds of political movements, we should nevertheless try to distance ourselves from all the sarcasm, all the soap opera, all the drama and from time to time to look at what the numerous evidences are telling us. Having said this, I think that being on the rebellious skeptical side is not necessarily a bad thing. Society does need a bit of that. Trying to bully everyone into submission because THE CONSENSUS! has not proven effective. Informing the public, interestingly, also didn't. Here's a video of C0nc0rdance that summarizes the unexpected result of knowledge being correlated against profession of "belief" in global warming, showing rather that it divides much more in political and social lines:

[watsisname]

Re:  Wheelspin

My academic focus is in astrophysics, which includes the same foundational physics (spectroscopy and thermodynamics) that is important for understanding what global warming is and how it works.  I have also taken graduate courses on atmospheric science and climate specifically, and I follow journal articles and reports in the field fairly closely, so I do feel that I have a good understanding of the subject.  However, I am still not a practicing climatologist, and therefore when it comes to the more technical details I base my conclusions by the work of those who do practice it for a living.  I think that at this point there is no reasonable doubt that global warming is occurring and that human activities are the primary driver of it right now, and the volume of research supporting this conclusion is hugely impressive.

Are there dissenting views, even among scientists who work in this or related fields?  Certainly.  But if you look closely into published literature, you do not see very much of it.  The general public seems to think that there is a great deal more confusion and debate amongst climate scientists than there actually is, and I think this is largely a consequence of how popular media presents it.  The debate about whether it is real or what is to blame is primarily at a popular level, and much of it is spectacularly full of misconceptions in the same manner as what you will find in debate about evolution or YEC.  You yourself fell victim to such a misconception, when you used GISP2 data with the implied intent of showing that current warming isn't significant relative to earlier ones.  I explained to you why that connection is wrong to make, because of course regional climate changes are more apparent in a local dataset than a global one, yet here we are interested in an effect that is happening on a global scale.  On a global scale, regional climate changes smooth out, but the present warming does not.  Hence the "hockey-stick graph" that I imagine everyone here has seen at least once.  This graph is what you should be using if you want to speak of global climatology.

And that^ is what I would call a reasoned response to a popular-level "critique" of climate science.  Now certainly there are critiques that are not so fundamentally flawed, and these are indeed taken very seriously in academic circles.  Climate scientists are in a constant state of reviewing and critiquing each other's work, and all of this happens through publications and symposiums.  And I should add that there is a lot of uncertainty and unknowns in climate science which is debated here.  But it is not in the sense of whether or not it is real, or what is causing it -- those questions have already been resolved very thoroughly.  Questions now are much more fine focus, involving specific aspects of phenomena that participate in the relationship between global warming and climate change.  What I like to say to explain this is that global warming (the change in planet's radiation balance caused by atmospheric parameters) is very simple, but climate change (the consequences of global warming on local and regional weather, feedback effects, changes in sources and sinks of greenhouse effective gases, etc), is enormously complicated.


Lastly you ask what the desired goal to minimize global warming and its effects.  No, it is not simply to reduce energy usage.  That would be ludicrously contradictory to the goal of a growing world economy.  Furthermore, planetary temperature is not determined by how much energy we use.  What matters is solar insolation, and how much greenhouse gas resides in the atmosphere. So if we want to limit warming, we have to limit how much CO2 is added to the atmosphere, or increase how rapidly it is taken back out of it.  There are thus a great variety of strategies which can help us:

-Improving the efficiency of our energy usage.  (Good strategy, but there exist practical limitations to how much and how rapidly we can do it.)
-Replacing our methods of producing energy to cleaner/renewable sources.  (IMO a very wise course of action for many reasons.)
-Sequestering greenhouse gases. (Generally the more expensive strategy, some also with high potential risks, but many people are working on it.)
-Directly reducing insolation of the Earth (probably harder, more expensive, and risky.)

Ultimately I think the solution is going to end up being some combination of all of these.

[Luis Dias]

t many people are working on it.)
-Directly reducing insolation of the Earth (probably harder, more expensive, and risky.)

IIRC this is not true. It's actually one of the most cheap effective measures that have been proposed (climate engineering). What is so scary about it is precisely how amazingly easy and possible it is to enact it if we so desired. It's a kind of a Pandora Box that could bring in itself enormous dangers (we could just absolutely **** up and create a nightmare for all the planet, it could re-emerge as a kind of a weapon against countries, etc., etc.). It's the kind of overly ambitious proposals that are on the table but that everyone tries to ignore, as if it is a kind of a deal with the devil. And probably for a damn good reason.

[watsisname]

Well it depends how you want to do it of course.  Most of the methods I've found to be remotely reasonable are also very hard to pull off.  But in another sense, we are actually already doing it, unintentionally.  Burning fossil fuels puts aerosols into the atmosphere which have a negative forcing at the surface, thus counterbalancing some of the warming.  That's how easy it is to affect the planet's radiation balance, in either direction, and I agree this is pretty scary.

This aerosol forcing is also somewhat unfortunate because, if we simply cut emissions, the CO2 will remain in the atmosphere for a lot longer than the aerosols, and so for the short term temperatures would actually rise further.

[Lorric]

Even if your reasons were something like "well 10% of scientists working in this field says the rest is wrong, and their arguments are really good, I'm going to go argue with people on internet forums about it, and base my real-life decisions on their finding" and they turn out to be right, you weren't. The idea that you were better equipped to reason about those arguments than the scientific community is ludicrous.

I agree with the rest of your post. But if you were swayed by arguments that turned out to be correct arguments, then weren't you correct? I get what you're saying and I've already agreed the smart money is on the majority of scientists rather than the faction, but if you thought the faction was right and then the faction then turned out to be right, you're right too. If you still don't agree, then I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.

I'd also like to add that I hope people can be nice to Wheelspin, and not load him down with baggage like comparisons to anti-vaxxers and flat out global climate change deniers. It takes guts to go against the grain, but ideally it wouldn't need to in a place where we just talk about things.

[Luis Dias]

That's the thing, that's been the typical behavior until now, and we now know how much absolutely ineffective that was. If you can't behave empathically for purely humane reasons, at least consider how glaringly innefectual this jackass attitude of IM GONNA DEBUNK YOU TO SMITHEREENS NAU has been all these years.

[Lorric]

That's the thing, that's been the typical behavior until now, and we now know how much absolutely ineffective that was. If you can't behave empathically for purely humane reasons, at least consider how glaringly innefectual this jackass attitude of IM GONNA DEBUNK YOU TO SMITHEREENS NAU has been all these years.

Yes.

It puzzles me because in all my time here I've never once seen it be effective in changing someone's view, nor can I see how it would be. Though I bet it does shut some people up as it's not worth the hassle, and if that's your goal it's more understandable. But even then, I don't think it's very successful.

[watsisname]

I imagine that acting like a jackass would be an ineffectual way to engage with someone regardless of what the topic of discussion is.  I'd also like to point out how common it is for people involved in polarized discussions to get heated and start acting like jackasses.  It's hard to avoid.

[Luis Dias]

WHAT ARE YOU TALKING AB

Oh right.

[Rheyah]

Re:  Wheelspin

My academic focus is in astrophysics, which includes the same foundational physics (spectroscopy and thermodynamics) that is important for understanding what global warming is and how it works.  I have also taken graduate courses on atmospheric science and climate specifically, and I follow journal articles and reports in the field fairly closely, so I do feel that I have a good understanding of the subject.  However, I am still not a practicing climatologist, and therefore when it comes to the more technical details I base my conclusions by the work of those who do practice it for a living.  I think that at this point there is no reasonable doubt that global warming is occurring and that human activities are the primary driver of it right now, and the volume of research supporting this conclusion is hugely impressive.

Are there dissenting views, even among scientists who work in this or related fields?  Certainly.  But if you look closely into published literature, you do not see very much of it.  The general public seems to think that there is a great deal more confusion and debate amongst climate scientists than there actually is, and I think this is largely a consequence of how popular media presents it.  The debate about whether it is real or what is to blame is primarily at a popular level, and much of it is spectacularly full of misconceptions in the same manner as what you will find in debate about evolution or YEC.  You yourself fell victim to such a misconception, when you used GISP2 data with the implied intent of showing that current warming isn't significant relative to earlier ones.  I explained to you why that connection is wrong to make, because of course regional climate changes are more apparent in a local dataset than a global one, yet here we are interested in an effect that is happening on a global scale.  On a global scale, regional climate changes smooth out, but the present warming does not.  Hence the "hockey-stick graph" that I imagine everyone here has seen at least once.  This graph is what you should be using if you want to speak of global climatology.

And that^ is what I would call a reasoned response to a popular-level "critique" of climate science.  Now certainly there are critiques that are not so fundamentally flawed, and these are indeed taken very seriously in academic circles.  Climate scientists are in a constant state of reviewing and critiquing each other's work, and all of this happens through publications and symposiums.  And I should add that there is a lot of uncertainty and unknowns in climate science which is debated here.  But it is not in the sense of whether or not it is real, or what is causing it -- those questions have already been resolved very thoroughly.  Questions now are much more fine focus, involving specific aspects of phenomena that participate in the relationship between global warming and climate change.  What I like to say to explain this is that global warming (the change in planet's radiation balance caused by atmospheric parameters) is very simple, but climate change (the consequences of global warming on local and regional weather, feedback effects, changes in sources and sinks of greenhouse effective gases, etc), is enormously complicated.


Lastly you ask what the desired goal to minimize global warming and its effects.  No, it is not simply to reduce energy usage.  That would be ludicrously contradictory to the goal of a growing world economy.  Furthermore, planetary temperature is not determined by how much energy we use.  What matters is solar insolation, and how much greenhouse gas resides in the atmosphere. So if we want to limit warming, we have to limit how much CO2 is added to the atmosphere, or increase how rapidly it is taken back out of it.  There are thus a great variety of strategies which can help us:

-Improving the efficiency of our energy usage.  (Good strategy, but there exist practical limitations to how much and how rapidly we can do it.)
-Replacing our methods of producing energy to cleaner/renewable sources.  (IMO a very wise course of action for many reasons.)
-Sequestering greenhouse gases. (Generally the more expensive strategy, some also with high potential risks, but many people are working on it.)
-Directly reducing insolation of the Earth (probably harder, more expensive, and risky.)

Ultimately I think the solution is going to end up being some combination of all of these.

Hello fellow physicsy person