Fallout From Climategate

[Throckmorton]

I'm reading the guide now and the joke is on you and the misleading Daily Mail article. I fell for the media spin too!

http://royalsociety.org/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=4294972967

Misleading argument 1
The Earth’s climate is always changing and this is nothing to do with
humans. Even before the industrial revolution, when humans began
pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere on a large scale, the
earth experienced warmer periods.


It is true that the world has experienced warmer or colder periods in the
past without any interference from humans. The ice ages are well-known
examples of global changes to the climate. There have also been regional
changes such as periods known as the ‘Medieval Warm Period’, when
less sea ice and larger areas of cultivated land were reported in Iceland.
However, in contrast to these climate phases, the increase of threequarters
of a degree centigrade (0.74°C) in average global temperatures
that we have seen over the last century is larger than can be accounted for
by natural factors alone.

Any increases in the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere mean
that more heat is trapped and global temperatures increase – an effect
known as ‘global warming’. We know from looking at gases found trapped
in cores of polar ice that the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are
now 35 per cent greater than they have been for at least the last 650,000
years.

Read the PDF. You might learn something.

 

[sandorski]

ROFL...you'll have to do better than that!

I have no need to.

 

[woolfe9999]

I guess you failed to read the article?

They admitted the science is far from "settled" on Anthropogenic global warming and that it is far from certain man is having any effect at all. There is "substantial uncertainty."

That right there is reason enough to stop the global carbon tax schemes, as if they ever had any valid reason to try starting them.

No sane person here is denying climate change. But many sane people are making the valid argument that man made climate change is NOT proven, nor is the evidence they have valid reason to start limiting people's energy use.

YOU should read the article more thoroughly, and the Guide that it purports to summarize. "They" admited no such thing. They acknowledged ONLY that there is disagreement over the AMOUNT of future temperature increase, which has always been the case. "They" state that there is a scientific consensus on the fact that there is warming and that it is mostly anthropogenic. Your article is cherry picking.

- wolf

 

[Doc Savage Fan]

Ah, I see, so now you're committing the fallacy of "argument from authority", because they supposedly agree with you.

Wow.

OK...how about this...instead of making these incessant idiotic statements...why don't you actually read their new guidelines and tell me specifically what you think is horseshit. Perhaps then we would have a good basis for discussion worthy of your intellect...no?

 

[Throckmorton]

Wow.

OK...how about this...instead of making these incessant idiotic statements...why don't you actually read their new guidelines and tell me specifically what you think is horseshit. Perhaps then we would have a good basis for discussion worthy of your intellect...no?

I'm reading it now, and I agree fully with what they say. How about you read it and point out the things in YOUR Daily Mail article that are horseshit, that you presented as reality because you're a gullible fool who's willing to believe media spin as long as it supports your ideology?

I'm calling thread backfire.

 

[Doc Savage Fan]

I have no need to.

Of course not...make a bold face lie, fail to back it up, and then run away hoping no one will notice your stupidity. That's pathetic.

 

[Doc Savage Fan]

I'm reading it now, and I agree fully with what they say. How about you read it and point out the things in YOUR Daily Mail article that are horseshit, that you presented as reality because you're a gullible fool who's willing to believe media spin as long as it supports your ideology?

I'm calling thread backfire.

Be specific and I will try to do the same...deal?

 

[sandorski]

Of course not...make a bold face lie, fail to back it up, and then run away hoping no one will notice your stupidity. That's pathetic.

Nope, sorry dude. We've been saying that shit all along. The Strawman Arguments of the Deniers are the only place where you've heard all this shit you seem to assume to be true.

Fail.

 

[Doc Savage Fan]

Nope, sorry dude. We've been saying that shit all along. The Strawman Arguments of the Deniers are the only place where you've heard all this shit you seem to assume to be true.

Fail.

I think I hear your mommy calling...time to run along little boy.

 

[sandorski]

I think I hear your mommy calling...time to run along little boy.

Fail again.

 

[Jaskalas]

"However, in contrast to these climate phases, the increase of threequarters of a degree centigrade (0.74°C) in average global temperatures that we have seen over the last century is larger than can be accounted for by natural factors alone. "

The claim that the warming is 'larger than can be accounted for by natural factors alone' is one of two things. Exaggeration of the warming, or simple ignorance with regards to the historical temperature record.

You have to be smoking hockey sticks to believe otherwise. It's chicken little syndrome. We're in an interglacial, we're coming out of the little ice age, and THE SKY IS FALLING!!!

So called men in authoity discredit themselves when they ignore the roman and medieval warming periods.

 

[sandorski]

The claim that the warming is 'larger than can be accounted for by natural factors alone' is one of two things. Exaggeration of the warming, or simple ignorance with regards to the historical temperature record.

You have to be smoking hockey sticks to believe otherwise. It's chicken little syndrome. We're in an interglacial, we're coming out of the little ice age, and THE SKY IS FALLING!!!

So called men in authoity discredit themselves when they ignore the roman and medieval warming periods.

More Strawman arguments. These things were never "ignored".

 

[Throckmorton]

Hallelujah! It's refreshing to see that science is getting out of the politics game and getting back to the real work of science. Climategate was the best thing that could have happened for those who genuinely support science and is the bane of the goosesteppers blinded by their twisted ideologies.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...limate-change-guide-admits-uncertainties.html
Royal Society issues new climate change guide that admits there are 'uncertainties' about the science

The UK’s leading scientific body has been forced to rewrite its guide on climate change and admit that it is not known how much warmer the Earth will become.

Extremely misleading statement... It can never be known exactly how much warmer the earth will become. That's why predictions are always within a range.
From such simulations, one can derive the characteristics of climate likely to occur in future decades, including mean temperature and temperature extremes.

Unlike weather-forecast models, climate models do not seek to predict the actual weather on a particular day at a particular location.

The Royal Society has updated its guide after 43 of its members complained that the previous version failed to take into account the opinion of climate change sceptics.

Now the new guide, called ‘Climate change: a summary of the science’, admits that there are some ‘uncertainties’ regarding the science behind climate change.

And it says that it impossible to know for sure how the Earth's climate will change in the future nor what the possible effects may be.


The 19-page guide says: ’It is not possible to determine exactly how much the Earth will warm or exactly how the climate will change in the future, but careful estimates of potential changes and associated uncertainties have been made.

‘Scientists continue to work to narrow these areas of uncertainty. Uncertainty can work both ways, since the changes and their impacts may be either smaller or larger than those projected.’

No shit, Dailymail, that's how all statistical predictions work.

And it avoids making any predictions about the possible impacts of climate change and advises caution in making projections about rising sea levels.
It says: 'There is currently insufficient understanding of the enhanced melting and retreat of the ice sheets on Greenland and West Antarctica to predict exactly how much the rate of sea level rise will increase above that observed in the past century for a given temperature increase.

'Similarly, the possibility of large changes in the circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean cannot be assessed with confidence. The latter limits the ability to predict with confidence what changes in climate will occur in Western Europe.

Not forecasting impacts and insufficient understanding of specific phenomena are completely unrelated, but Dailymail is combining them to cast doubt on climate change modeling. The guide specifically states that its purpose is not to predict the impacts of climate change, simply because that's not its purpose.

The new guidance still makes it clear that human activity is one of the likely causes for climate change but now does so in a more considered way.

It states: 'There is very strong evidence to indicate that climate change has occurred on a wide range of different timescales from decades to many millions of years; human activity is a relatively recent addition to the list of potential causes of climate change.'

What Dailymail states and what the quote says are completely different things. Being "relatively recent" doesn't mitigate the dominant role of human activity in current warming.

The working group behind the new book included two Royal Society fellows who were part of the 43-strong rebellion that had called for the original guide to be rewritten.

Professor Anthony Kelly and Sir Alan Rudge are both members of an academic board that advises a climate change sceptic think-tank called the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Professor Kelly said: "It's gone a long way to meeting our concerns.
‘The previous guidance was discouraging debate rather than encouraging it among knowledgeable people. The new guidance is clearer and a very much better document.’

And Benny Peiser, Director of The Global Warming Policy Foundation also welcomed the Royal Society's decision to revise. He said: 'The former publication gave the misleading impression that the 'science is
settled' - the new guide accepts that important questions remain open and uncertainties unresolved.

The scientific debate is completely unrelated to the political debate. Climatologists are debating things like the severity of future warming, not whether manmade changes to atmospheric chemistry are the current driving force in climate change. Dailymail is presenting a conflict that doesn't really exist. See also: Evolution

'The Royal Society now also agrees with the GWPF that the warming trend of the 1980s and 90s has come to a halt in the last 10 years.

LIE!! Here's what the guide really says:

When these surface temperatures are averaged over periods of a decade, to remove some of the year-to-year variability, each decade since the 1970s has been clearly warmer (given known uncertainties) than the one immediately preceding it. The decade 2000-2009 was, globally, around 0.15oC warmer than the decade 1990-1999.

'In their old guide, the Royal Society demanded that governments should take "urgent steps" to cut CO2 emissions "as much and as fast as possible." This political activism has now been replaced by a more sober assessment of the scientific evidence and ongoing climate debates.

'If this voice of moderation had been the Royal Society's position all along, its message to Government would have been more restrained and Britain's unilateral climate policy would not be out of sync with the rest of the world.'

Dailymail is trying to conflate science with politics here. Scientists making activist type statements seems like a big mistake to me, so it's good that the new guide doesn't. But that's not the same as "moderation".

The new book is certainly very different in tone that the original and takes into account some of the problems that have arisen in climate change science over the past year.

The new version sets out its objectives by saying: ‘In view of the ongoing public and political debates about climate change, the aim of this document is to summarise the current scientific evidence on climate change and its drivers.

‘It lays out clearly where the science is well established, where there is wide consensus but continuing debate, and where there remains substantial uncertainty.’

Here is one of the things that IS well established:
Changes in atmospheric composition resulting from human activity have enhanced the natural greenhouse effect, causing a positive climate forcing. Calculations, which are supported by laboratory and atmospheric measurements, indicate that these additional gases have caused a climate forcing during the industrial era of around 2.9 Wm-2, with an uncertainty of about ±0.2 Wm-2.

The Royal Society’s decision comes in the wake of a scathing report into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which called for it to avoid politics and stick instead to predictions based on solid science. The review, which focused on the day-to-day running of the panel, rather than its science, was commissioned after the UN body was accused of making glaring mistakes.

These included the claim that the Himalayan glaciers would vanish within 25 years - and that 55 per cent of the Netherlands was prone to flooding because it was below sea level.


Earlier this year an email scandal involving experts at the University of East Anglia had already fuelled fears that global warming was being exaggerated.

Read the new climate change guide from the Royal Society here

None of those glaring mistakes or sarcastic emails changes the actual results of climatology research.

 

[Throckmorton]

The claim that the warming is 'larger than can be accounted for by natural factors alone' is one of two things. Exaggeration of the warming, or simple ignorance with regards to the historical temperature record.

You have to be smoking hockey sticks to believe otherwise. It's chicken little syndrome. We're in an interglacial, we're coming out of the little ice age, and THE SKY IS FALLING!!!

So called men in authoity discredit themselves when they ignore the roman and medieval warming periods.

My bad, that quote was from the 2007 guide. Here's the current one http://royalsociety.org/climate-change-summary-of-science/


I think you're misunderstanding... There is such a thing as natural climate change. We all know that.

The natural warming we were experiencing after the last ice age was not caused by CO2 but by the Milankovitch cycle.

Humans put a lot of extra greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

The amount of warming caused by humans is the amount caused by that greenhouse gas, which is known and measurable in a lab.

You're basically saying that if you beat your wife and she bleeds, it's impossible to know whether your beating is what made her bleed, because women bleed anyway.

 

[highland145]

Holy crap. 10:10 campaign NSFW
The article.

 

[woolfe9999]

Thank you Throckmorton for actually reading the guide. I said on page 1 that the article was quote mining the guide, but I was ignored.

The Dailymail has a track record of quoting scientists out of context to make it appear that they are acknowledging that there is no consensus of MMGW.

- wolf

 

[woolfe9999]

Holy crap. 10:10 campaign NSFW
The article.

This topic already has its own thread:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2109627

- wolf

 

[highland145]

This topic already has its own thread:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2109627

- wolf

Oops. Didn't search for it but thought it was pertinent.

 

[MooseNSquirrel]

Another thing you left out:

Every solution to Climate Change requires a signficant tax increase to Westerners.

Nope. That's a public policy debate. Completely different issue.

 

[MooseNSquirrel]

Thank you for sharing and making it clear how you "think".

Ah, the irony of quoting the word think. Awesome.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Hallelujah! It's refreshing to see that science is getting out of the politics game and getting back to the real work of science.

What are you talking about? This is politics.

Saying a scientific theory is uncertain is redundant. Science is a posteriori by definition.
Only those with an agenda hoping to trick a reader by specifically emphasizing the qualification and thus implying that the qualification is out of the ordinary would be insistent on specifying it.

It's similar to Fundies putting stickers on the front of science textbooks saying, "Evolution is only a theory." While factually accurate, it's not meant to be. It's meant to set up a disparity between, "theories that have stickers," and, "theories that don't," with the implication that there is something different about the theory with a sticker because, why else would it warrant being singled out for a sticker?

Same here. It's implying a dichotomy where there is none.

Science is always going to be uncertain. That doesn't mean it's not the best tool we have. Neither religious nonsense nor Bubba's impulse to stick his head in the sand are more accurate gauges of reality.

 

[Jaskalas]

More Strawman arguments. These things were never "ignored".

If they weren't ignored then you've absolutely nothing to stand on.

"Warmest decade, year, month, blah" ever don't work when historical record proves otherwise TWICE in a mere 2,000 years. There is a clear precedent for the modern climate.

Chicken little arguments of the sky is falling when the temperature is within perfectly normal parameters are simply absurd.

 

[Jaskalas]

Science is always going to be uncertain. That doesn't mean it's not the best tool we have. Neither religious nonsense nor Bubba's impulse to stick his head in the sand are more accurate gauges of reality.

Tell that to the "science is settled" crowd who wish to use it to drive a political agenda against modern civilization.

 

[Jaskalas]

Humans put a lot of extra greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

The amount of warming caused by humans is the amount caused by that greenhouse gas, which is known and measurable in a lab.

The logical fallacy is to treat the planet as a closed off lab environment.

Our CO2 causing harm has not been proven. The thrust of the argument has been our temperature of the past 30 years. Claiming it is both warmest and unprecedented when neither claim is true.

Bring forth an actual harm before telling us the sky is falling.

 

[Throckmorton]

Tell that to the "science is settled" crowd who wish to use it to drive a political agenda against modern civilization.

The science is settled in that we know that greenhouse gases are responsible for the greenhouse effect, and therefore that increasing concentration of greenhouse gases increases global average temperature, which is exactly what is happening. How can you possibly dispute that, unless you simply don't understand the basic chemistry?