CBC Documentary-Global Warming Doomsday Called Off

[bailewen]

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The medieval warm period is historically attested. Those who try to weasel around this should be called, I suppose, history deniers.

And the scientific community is quite clear on that as well. This point was addressed in the last thread.

science changes it's position daily, especially where climate is concerened.

Yes but in this case, only in the details. A 40 year old study is pretty damn worthless in this case. The fact that they change their position only attests to the fact that, unlike climate change deniers, real scientists are ready to change their opinions when presented with new data. In this case, the changes in opinions have only been about the details and the specific mechanics of the issue. There has been 30-40 years of general consensus on the idea that a. The planet is getting warmer at a historically unprecedented rate and b. it's largely caused by human presence on the planet.

short term scope vs long term scope is at play as well.

Yes. Over the past decade, the planet has cooled a bit. Over the past century, it was warmed at a rated unprecedented in as long as we are able to measure.

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there is no solid anything except the collection of data, which not many understand in big picture terms.

If people who are trained in the sciences and in the business of understanding it, admit they don't fully understand the data, then yes, the rest of us are the sack of hammers you speak of Omar. lol All we have are opinions and each is entitled to his/her own.

Yes again. That is why, rather than trusting the opinions of a bunch of civil libertarians and conspiracy theorists, I take the word of the scientific community. I trust that those actually devoting their lives and their careers to understanding the subject understand it better than I could ever hope too and there is remarkable consensus in that area. Just a basic application of what we were all supposed to have learned in high school about evaluation of sources for objectivity and reliability should make this a closed case but no, the fact that intelligent scientists are prone to change their opinions as new data is presented is spun as some sort of absurd proof that there is really no consensus. There are MASSIVE economic and philosophical issues at stake here which cloud the issue. The so-called "climate gate" was nothing more than the fallout from the fact that a bunch of scientists were aware of the fact that most people are really really stupid and that this is such a political issue that there were lots of people out there who could be easily misled by the fact that they can't follow the logic that intelligent people follow. They sent some emails back and forth worrying about people misunderstanding what they were saying and...voila! People misunderstood.

If the scientific community comes out and say that they were wrong, then I can breath a big sigh of relief on this one but so far it's only been big oil, civil libertarians, neo-cons, radical right wing nutcases and conspiracy theorists who deny what's happening. On the other side there are pantywaisted handwringing liberals who also do not understand what's happening but politicizing the issue only confuses it.

Threads like this one are why I no longer try to convince anyone. I believe the game is over, it's too late already and we are going to solve our planetary population issue the way we always have: Massive war, disease and other natural solutions that come into play when any species population explodes. Locusts or People. All the same. We'll just keep expanding untill we can't anymore and then lots of us will die.

[yeniseri]

Regardless of what we call it, it only matters that the emergency preparedness guidelines are in place and people's survival mode instincts are honed! A fact of life is that most poeple will perish based on a combination of political ideology (e.g. my guru is right because he says global warming is foolish, swine flu isn't real, etc) ignorance, and lack of preparedness.

The time we do not plan or dismiss a thing, is when stuff happens. The time we mentions it will never happen to me and BAM 2 seconds later! What happened? BUT we first have to distinguish between truth, illusion or a combination of both and/or those trying to pull the wool over our nose!

[Steve James]

No one has persuaded me that anything unnatural is occurring at all. After all, we are part of this planet, perhaps this is truly the natural way of things?

Well, my first question would be what you would consider persuasive evidence. There is "evidence", but it is disputed.
As to the question of using "skeptic" as opposed to "denier." There is actually a difference between being "skeptical" of evidence and "denying" it. The former implies that one is open or willing to be convinced. "Deniers" take a negative position that attempts to refute a proposal, theory or statement. Evidence for a denier would be something that contradicts evidence that is accepted by others. So, the medieval warm period is cited to illustrate that the earth's climate can warm without a human induced cause. Of course, it doesn't show what actually caused the medieval warming (nor does it deny that there is warming taking place or offer any prediction for what will happen in the future ... well, except that the climate will change). "Deniers" also question the motivations of those whose theories they deny. That is fine; however, they usually don't accept the same criticism. I.e., they argue that climate scientists have ideological and/or financial motives that are supported/endorsed by the sinister media. The seeming "fact" that the debate can be divided along political lines is what makes me very skeptical of most deniers. Personally, I don't know if climate change predictions are correct or not. I do know that it can't be "natural" for humans to put so much crap into the earth, water and air. I "know" that. If it "costs" me something to prevent it, I think it's worth it. No, I don't trust the tax man or the "gov't." I just don't make decisions based on mistrust. If there was a "good" gov't, it would worry about the future environment of its people.

[DeusTrismegistus]

out of curiosity has anyone watched the vid yet?

[Darthwing Teorist]

No time. What will be, will be.

[klonk]

It would be funny if it weren't so expensive. Government funded science always arrives at the conclusion we need more government.

[Michael]

The medieval warm period is historically attested. Those who try to weasel around this should be called, I suppose, history deniers.
And the scientific community is quite clear on that as well. This point was addressed in the last thread.

Can you remember the name of the thread or a link? The first time I brought up the Maunder Minimum, it was completely ignored.
I wrote: There were previous variations in climactic conditions greater than we are experiencing now, when the population was much lower and industrial capacity was perhaps non-existent compared to today. For example, in relatively recent history, the Maunder Minimum. I already linked to it in this thread and got no response. Have a look.

You replied:My own noodling around on the web seems to indicate that the last time we had anything similar was almost 15 millions years ago and sea levels were something like 50-75 feet higher than today. Well enough to send most of our coastal cities the way of Atlantis.

So far, Deus and I posted the Maunder Minimum in the Americans who don't believe in global warming and Climate Change Fraud threads respectively, but received no responses that specifically address it. Am I overlooking a thread? I'm interested to read about any refutation of the Maunder Minimum argument.

[Michael]

The ghost scientists on the Arctic expedition that never happened
Canadian government pays $156 million for an arctic ship that never left the St. Lawrence River to take 300 scientists onboard with a capacity for only 26. Brilliant! Where do I sign up to be a climate change researcher?


Ship of Fools

[bailewen]

The myth of the medieval warming period is actually easier to uncover than even the old EF thread. Sooner or later I am just going to have to start a thread where I list all the standard denier arguments by number complete with their refutations and links. Then I can just bookmark that thread and refer to the denier arguments by number instead of having to re-explain it each time.

In really simple terms:
http://www.thegaiaproject.ca/science/cl ... rm-period/

Slightly more scientific and from a .gov site:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwa ... ieval.html

As paleoclimatic records have become more numerous, it has become apparent that "Medieval Warm Period" or "Medieval Optimum" temperatures were warmer over the Northern Hemisphere than during the subsequent "Little Ice Age", and also comparable to temperatures during the early 20th century...

...In summary, it appears that the late 20th and early 21st centuries are likely the warmest period the Earth has seen in at least 1200 years. ...

A thing like that really has to be in context with a thing like this:
http://thenonsequitur.com/?tag=climate-change-deniers
The second article is a little harder to follow because rather than explaining climate change, it is explaining the mind of the climate change denier movement.

Today's global-warming-advocates-are-eating-crow provides yet another example of our newly discovered fallacy, argumentum ad imperfectionem–the argument from imperfection. For more on that, see here. Briefly again, the argument from imperfection, operates in the following way. A person finds completely normal relatively minor errors (or inconsistencies, etc.) in a particular view, such as climate change, and alleges that those errors (consistencies, etc.) justify a kind of disproportionate skepticism. So, for instance, the disagreement among scientists (which is what they do!) on the contours of this or that matter do not open the door to global skepticism.

The medieval warming period argument has two problems.
1. Data is not very complete. Just as the fact that there was a big snowstorm last week is irrelevant to GLOBAL climate change, a really warm period in northern Europe says little about the entire planet.
2. Even after more data has been collected and it seems that the entire planet was, in fact, much warmer than it had been in a long time....it was still not as warm as today.

p.s.
Your "ship of fools" article is a classic example of the logical fallacy described in the article I linked above.

[Michael]

Thanks for the quick response, will read the links and come back. For the moment, what's the logical fallacy of the ship of fools? I suppose you mean that by itself it doesn't substantiate an AGW skeptic position because it's just a particular event with no bearing on other science? If so, then sure I agree, I just think it's a pretty humorous article that such a hoax was perpetrated on whoever paid $156 million loonies.

[bailewen]

Yes, that's what I meant.

The pattern I see to those who deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change tend seize upon any inconsistency or factual error that they can find in the scientific communities work on the subject and then go on about how this proves that there is no agreement on the subject or that the science is really bad when the actual situation is simply that a certain amount of disagreement between scientists is what drives the science forward. But a disagreement on how much of the change is anthropogenic is not the same as a disagreement on the very existence of the thing.

The "Ship of Fools" article goes more to the other part of the fallacy. The "bad science" part. Dig up a couple idiots in the field and imply that the field is mostly populated with idiots.

[Michael]

Right, but dayum, takes some balls to come up with a scam like that. The ship only holds a total of about 50 people. Seriously, has there ever been a ship with 300 scientists doing research together? I doubt it.

[Darth Rock&Roll]

Yes, that's what I meant.

The pattern I see to those who deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change tend seize upon any inconsistency or factual error that they can find in the scientific communities work on the subject and then go on about how this proves that there is no agreement on the subject or that the science is really bad when the actual situation is simply that a certain amount of disagreement between scientists is what drives the science forward. But a disagreement on how much of the change is anthropogenic is not the same as a disagreement on the very existence of the thing.

The "Ship of Fools" article goes more to the other part of the fallacy. The "bad science" part. Dig up a couple idiots in the field and imply that the field is mostly populated with idiots.

Omar, are you a climatologist or have you decided to pick a side? lol

because that's all we can really do. I for one don't buy into one side too heavily or the other.
I also believe we produce more pollution than is good for us.

I do not believe we are making the ice caps disappear and I believe that has more to do with circumstances beyond our control and certainly beyond our ability to make an effect.

Also, I do not believe that paying extra taxes will stop the ice caps from melting and I do not believe cap and trade is a viable solution to the problem of pollution. It in effect still allows for all the levels of pollution to occur, but you just have to pay to pollute now.
Interestingly, companies that don't pollute at all will hold onto emissions credits that polluters can buy!

hmmmn, my financial adviser has loads of emission credits that he can sell to industry. How convenient!

[Michael]

In really simple terms:
http://www.thegaiaproject.ca/science/cl ... rm-period/

Interesting and noteworthy, but not persuasive for me. He says that claims for a medieval warm period do not cover the entire globe and says they were just regional, going on to define regional as the "Northern hemisphere". That's quite the large region considering the majority of the earth's land mass is in the northern hemisphere. When you say that previous climate change wasn't global and therefore not comparable to the current situation because the data collected wasn't global, this raises a problem when one of the skeptic's arguments is that the current data is also not global due to: omission (Russia, 25% of land mass ignored by IPCC and CRU), mistakes (Jones' interview that his data is so convoluted it can't be verified and large numbers of temp. measuring stations being misplaced in urban heat zones, next to incinerators, etc.), or fraud (Climategate). Even taking it all on face value, there are three problems:

bailewen wrote: Data is not very complete. Just as the fact that there was a big snowstorm last week is irrelevant to GLOBAL climate change, a really warm period in northern Europe says little about the entire planet.

1) If the skeptics don't have sufficient data of the past to say current climate change is within the normal range of earth's past trends, how is it the AGW argument does have sufficient data of the past to say that current conditions represent a problem compared to previous trends?

2) There's no evidence that the claimed data can be put into accurate and predictive models, meaning there have been no successful predictions that I'm aware of.

3) Still no response to the Maunder Minimum, which focuses on the correlation between solar activity, namely sun spots, and terrestrial climate change.

FYI, I read all the links you posted. Here's one to consider:

In Denial, the meltdown of the climate campaign

[Steve James]

The Maunder Minimum (also known as the prolonged sunspot minimum) is the name used for the period roughly spanning 1645 to 1715 by John A. Eddy in a landmark 1976 paper published in Science titled "The Maunder Minimum",[1] when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time. Astronomers before Eddy had also named the period after the solar astronomer Edward W. Maunder (1851–1928) who studied how sunspot latitudes changed with time.[2]

There ya go. The MM, a 70 year period with very little sunspot activity. Therefore ...