In fact the researchers measuring the loss of insect biomass in puerto rico rainforests attributed it primarily to climate change since the other factors do not apply there.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/15/hyperalarm...
Every ecoystem on Earth took 10s of millions of years to find it's equilibrium. Everything living in those ecosystems is a product of millions of years of adaptation and evolution.
If you go and change the temperature, the amount of water & the seasons, then it is a big rug pull under the feet of evolution. Everything can and will collapse.
Look at what is happening in the arctic... now that permafrost is melting, you have massive, uncontrolled methane release.
People think that we can continue to pump CO2. We are very wrong about that.
I just wish it were the pine beetles as the ones dying out.
You’re right, there is no equilibrium. But there is a limit to how rapidly any system can handle changes while remaining recognizable as the same system.
I know nothing of the relevant biochemistry. Are these insecticides well targeted or highly generic in what they kill?
The other thing to note is that "loss of habitat" isn't always disappearing wetlands or stands of trees being cut down and converted to tillage. The widespread use of herbicides has almost eliminated milkweed in areas where it used to be very common, for example. When I was a kid, it was everywhere in the ditches of the Midwest. Now it's rare to see it. Milkweed is essential for monarch butterflies.
EDIT: Allow me to expand.
As to climate, it's an extremely complex system about we have shockingly little information in the grand scheme of things (30 years' worth of satellite data!), lots of models whose predictions have been atrocious, and besides, Earth's climate has a number of negative feedback loops, like the water cycle. We also know that CO2 and temperature in the geological record are linked, with CO2 changes lagging temperature changes, which rules out CO2 as a cause of past temperature changes. Just a very small change in cloud cover along the equator can cool down an overheating Earth, or warm a cooling Earth (depending on the direction of the change). (Readers who are curious about that should read Willis Eschenbach's work over on https://wattsupwiththat.com/.)
But insects? We have a very plausible cause: our use and overuse of chemicals in farming, from fertilizers, to insecticides, to herbicides (which nowadays are used to kill the crops themselves as part of the process of ripening and picking them). We can be fairly certain that land use changes are not the cause: the brunt of land use changes in North America happened many decades ago, but the change in insect population density is very recent.
Could the cause be something else? Yes, absolutely, but climate change is almost certainly not it -- recent climate change is minute even by standards of the past two millennia, let alone the past 18ky. And note that there is absolutely no way to test whether climate change is a cause -- how can we change the climate back in the kind of timescale we need to respond to the insect crisis in??
There aren't very many plausible causes that come to mind besides insecticides and herbicides, really, and those can be ruled in or out pretty trivially: just reduce the use of them in some large region (a few tens of thousands of acres, contiguous, say) and see what happens. The timescale for testing any hypothesis about these chemicals causing insect die-offs is on the order of... one year, maybe two -- maximum five. If insect populations don't rebound we don't need to keep using insecticides anyways, thus saving the industry a fair bit of money.
There's also Occam's razor...
No, pointing the finger at climate change strikes me as begging for a disaster. It's a hypothesis that cannot be tested fast enough. Insisting that we test it before testing any hypothesis that we can test in just a few years (and at a savings to industry!) is irresponsible and irrational.
Science is testing falsifiable hypotheses. Here we have one. So try and falsify it. The insecticide hypothesis is cheap and easy to test, and doesn't require much time.
You might argue that testing those hypotheses that are easy to test is like a drunk person looking for their car keys under the street lamp, and you might be right, but if the only other hypotheses you have are not falsifiable, then the only science you can do is: come up with more falsifiable hypos if you can, and test those you have now and come up with later. Cost is absolutely an issue, naturally, and again, the cost of testing the insecticide hypo is low, but the cost of testing the climate change hypo is simply not even within reach.
You should stop making that argument as it's too much like a well-refuted talking point that climate change denialists use.
We have many different lines of evidence. “Global Warming in an Independent Record of the Past 130 Years“, for example, shows that the temperature changes are consistent across 173 different types of records, from measured temperatures to grape harvest to oxygen isotope ratios.
> "recent climate change is minute even by standards of the past two millennia"
How do you make this claim if you think we don't have good global temperature measurements more than a few decades old?
The only arguments I can easily find in support of this claim are by climate denialists who use one temperature series from Greenland. (There may be more, but that's the one that keeps popping up in my searches.)
While those who use a larger set of temperatures, to give a better sense of global temperature change, show that the recent temperature change is not "minute", like the one https://skepticalscience.com/medieval-warm-period.htm from Moberg et al. (2005) titled "Northern Hemisphere Temperature Reconstruction" for the last 2,000 years.
> Willis Eschenbach
And we should trust his work because .... why?
I don’t buy it. If one idiot on one side of a debate like that causes you to pick the opposite side, it’s because that’s the side you wanted to pick. There are plenty of idiots on either side to support whatever choice you want to make.
It happens that the statements made are not only incorrect, but aligned with common talking points which are predominantly made by climate change denialists.
But you'll note that I carefully did not say that the poster was a CCD. I said the arguments were those used by CCD and which have been well-demonstrated to be invalid, so the poster needs to use better arguments to be convincing.
I think climate change denialists have a brain. I think people with a brain are perfectly capable of making bad arguments.
I think that just because someone is knowledgeable and even an authority in some areas doesn't mean that knowledge or authority extends to other areas, nor even the ability to recognize the limits of one's knowledge.
Climate denialists have a long history of cherry picking data, eg, picking trend lines which appear to indicate a decreasing or stable temperature, but done by picking an anomalously high temperature early on and low temperature later on.
These are the sorts of trickery which require time to figure out. Since I don't have that expertise, nor do have the time to be an expert in all of the topics which affect me, I have to use some sort of trust mechanism. I presume cryptonector does as well.
Why should I trust that Eschenbach isn't one of these sorts of cherry picking climate denalists? What I'm asking the g'parent is, why should I spend any time to research those points - especially since as I demonstrated some of the other points are invalid?
I've dealt enough with Young Earth Creationists who make similar arguments (that is, stating they are open to the evidence, want to be told where they are wrong, etc) but, oddly, no matter what evidence is presented - and the evidence is overwhelming that the world was not created in the last 10,000 years - they still deny it. That's not to say that Eschenbach is in the same category! I bring it up to point out that the description you pointed to can be suspect.
And I've DDG's enough to know that there is a wide spectrum of views about Eschenbach. https://www.skepticalscience.com/eschenbach-and-mcintyres-be... is the most concrete I found in terms of identifying problems in his methods of analysis.
So, what are cryptonector's reasons for trusting Eschenbach enough to bring it up on HN?
Also expecting others to prove to you why you should trust them but offering no reason for anyone to trust you is bizarre.
Which source am I supposed to be evaluating? cryptonector only pointed to https://wattsupwiththat.com/ . Am I supposed to read everything there? Is the phrase "Just a very small change in cloud cover along the equator can cool down an overheating Earth, or warm a cooling Earth" connected to the “Sense and Sensitivity” posting at wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/28/sense-and-sensitivity/ ? Note that it was from 2010, seemingly never otherwise published, and it was criticized by https://www.skepticalscience.com/SensitivitySensibility1.htm... .
Or is it some later source that I'm supposed to read?
What is bizarre about the trust claims of my original post? I stated reasons why I disagreed with cryptonector's interpretation of climate information and gave links to supporting citations from the scientific literature.
Specifically, claim #1: "we have shockingly little information in the grand scheme of things (30 years' worth of satellite data!)". Response: I referenced a 2013 paper describing 173 different lines of evidence for warming across the last 130 years. (BTW, we have 40 years of microwave sounding units and 51 years of sea surface IR data, both from satellites.)
claim #2: "recent climate change is minute even by standards of the past two millennia". Response: I cited a 2005 paper with quite different conclusions. I asked for the source of the claim. I also questioned how cryptonector could be certain of this claim if we have such "shockingly little information".
I can follow up with additional supporting evidence if there are statements I made which you do not agree with. That's usually how this trust relationship works, yes?
So you ask why to trust Willis Eschenbach. For me, I trust him because I've been reading his comments on ClimateAudit.org for well over a decade, and I've never seen him attempt to mislead. He's occasionally wrong, and but readily owns up to his errors. My impression from reading him over many years is that he's a smart guy who believes what he's saying, knows a lot about the field, has no obvious conflicts of interest, and does his best to be accurate.
I don't feel like the SkepticalScience.com post you linked to treats him fairly. Since that post considers him together with McIntyre, the best answer I can provide is that you should read McIntyre's latest post (https://climateaudit.org/2018/10/24/pages2k-north-american-t...) and see if you think their criticisms actually apply. I realize this isn't anything approaching rock-solid logic, but personal testimonial is the best I can offer. As a fervent environmentalist who has been closely reading McIntyre since soon after MBH98 came out, I'm still firmly under his sway, and think his criticisms have still not been adequately addressed.
It's the same sort of propaganda effort which fought against the recognition of the link between cigarettes and lung cancer. It's the same sort of effort which tries to get creationism in its varied forms taught as part of a science education in schools.
The goal of which is to muddy the waters, and cause people to throw up their hands and declare a pox on both their houses.
Is McIntyre going to publish his objections? Or just leave it as a blog post on a site mostly read by sympathetic readers? Since he's 'criticized [this sort of analysis] from [his] beginning in this field', surely he's published his objections, yes? Or someone else has?
Why does he refer to "Climategate" twice ("In the weeks prior to Climategate" and "On this day in 2009, a few weeks before Climategate") when multiple inquiries by US and UK organizations found no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct? Doesn't he realize that that choice of term is politicized, and the use of it likely to be used as a flag to categorize the user in the same box as creationists and tobacco lobbyists?
It's an interesting parallel, and worth noting that it wasn't just a matter of paid shills. R. A. Fisher (about as a big a name as one can find in mainstream statistics) was a true believer (and pipe smoker), and argued to his death that there was no proof that smoking caused cancer. Chapter 5 of Judea Pearl's "Book of Why" is a look at this.
Is McIntyre going to publish his objections?
Unfortunately, probably not. He's blogging more rarely, and quite simply, he's getting old and doesn't feel he has the energy for it. He co-authored some earlier critical papers, and I think found it a really frustrating experience. I think you may underestimate the difficulty of publishing critical papers in the field as an outsider.
Why does he refer to "Climategate" twice ... Doesn't he realize that that choice of term is politicized
I don't think he's particularly aware of which terms are going to cause which reactions in people, and has more of a weakness for snark than I prefer. Since many of the people who would be turned off by the terminology have already written him off as a "denier" (a parallel but opposite signaling term) he might feel he doesn't have much to lose by writing for the audience he has. In this case, I think he refers to it because he and his blog were intimately involved in the scandal (as in, the story came out on his site, and he seems to have corresponded privately with the source), and thus for him it's a major time marker.
The question is, is the criticism justified?
It's always possible to make a serious effort, put the paper together, get the rejections, then once that's failed a few times post the paper and rejections (at least honestly summarized) to a preprint server.
Where do you think the deep politicization that you complained about coming from?
"Scandal" is also a signaling term. There was no scandal.
McIntyre's blog post starts "The PAGES (2017) North American network consists entirely of tree rings.".
The 2017 article "A global multiproxy database for temperature reconstructions of the Common Era" by the PAGES2k Consortium at https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201788 says:
> While the M08 database contains 75% more records than this collection, these records are overwhelmingly land-based, from the Northern Hemisphere, and relatively short. Indeed, the M08 database is disproportionately composed of tree rings from North America, many of which start after 1000 CE, so that fewer than 100 records reach beyond this date. In contrast, the present collection contains 176 records out to 1000 CE, most of which are not tree-based.
I assume "records" is not the same as "series", because the Supplementary Table spreadsheet mostly lists tree ring data for North America. However, it does list 12 lake sediment series and one speleothem series. For example, NAm_065 is "Late Holocene Climate Changes in Eastern North America Estimated from Pollen Data" from https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/quaternary-research/... .
How am I supposed to reconcile McIntyre's statement "entirely of tree rings" with the publication?
If tree rings are to be ignored, wouldn't the right question be, what does the analysis look like using only the non-tree ring data for North America?
I haven't read PAGES 2017 before, but I think the issue is that all the non-tree-ring proxies have been "screened out" from the North American network prior to data analysis. This is detailed (with helpful maps) in the Supplementary Information: https://media.nature.com/original/nature-assets/sdata/2017/s.... As they apply successive layers of screening for factors such as "False Discovery Rate" and correlation with "Mean Annual Temperature", everything except the tree ring proxies drop out from North America (other than a single coral series in the Yucatan).
This is essentially the basis of McIntyre's criticism of the paper. Traditional statistical technique says that you should come up with criteria for a valid proxy in advance, screen without looking at the data, and then use all the data. Once you start screening out sites after peeking at the data that is going to be used for your analysis, it's hard to know if you've biased your results towards a preordained conclusion.
You should pause at this point and ask yourself: Is this really what the paper does? How do they justify that? What do outside statisticians think of this approach? Why isn't this talked about more prominently outside of the "skeptic" blogs?
If tree rings are to be ignored, wouldn't the right question be, what does the analysis look like using only the non-tree ring data for North America?
Yes, this is a fine question, although McIntyre isn't suggesting that all tree series be ignored, only a few problematic "stripbark bristlecone pines". In prior work, the answer is that if you leave out these few trees, the emblematic "hockey stick" graph disappears. It's possible to recover the sharp upward rise without the stripbarks, but only by adding in an "upside down" Finnish lake sediment proxy (upside down in the sense that the principle components analysis inverts the usual correlation of thick and thin layers to hot and cold).
This is what section of the blogpost with the subtitle "Background: Stripbark Bristlecones and Mann’s CENSORED Directory" is about. The "spaghetti graphs" are showing the contributions from the other groups of proxies. Reading the historical links in that section will give you a tour of McIntyre's argument. His argument is not that global warming is not happening, just that much of the proof being offered is statistically very flawed.
(It's worth noting the parallels between the criticism of post-hoc screening above, and the suggestion that the bristlecone pines should be screened out. Why one, and not the other? I don't think there's a clear answer.)
Could that imply that you have a bias error in your understanding of Eschenbach and McIntyre because your understanding is based more on the interpretations presented at ClimateAudit than from the primary literature?
As they apply successive layers of screening for factors such as "False Discovery Rate" and correlation with "Mean Annual Temperature", everything except the tree ring proxies drop out from North America (other than a single coral series in the Yucatan).
And yet the 'hockey stick' remains in all the analyzes. That is, figure 7 shows "Global composites for various binning intervals and screening criteria, as indicated in subplot titles". More specifically, "Screening options comprise: no screening (none), regional temperature screening (regional), or regional screening adjusted for the false discovery rate (regionalFDR)."
Once you start screening out sites after peeking at the data that is going to be used for your analysis, it's hard to know if you've biased your results towards a preordained conclusion.
The 'no screening' analysis is figure 7a, is it not? Which has a hockey stick.
Certainly. I actually started by reading MBH98 (after a friend interviewed Hughes) and I found it statistically very weak. I then discovered McIntyre's pre-ClimateAudit site at the time he was working on his rebuttal. Discovering someone else who was bothered by the same flaws (and was able to discuss them in a more rigorous form than I could) predisposed me to view him in a positive light. I'd like to think my continued positive impression of him has to do with the strength of his arguments since then, but probably at least some part is path dependent bias.
And yet the 'hockey stick' remains in all the analyzes.
The issues with post-hoc screening are separate from his initial criticisms, and are about statistical principles rather than the resulting graphs. McIntyre isn't saying that you only get a hockey stick if you screen out certain proxies. Rather, he thinks the analysis is overly sensitive to a small number of problematic "stripbark" series in the American West. If you include these series (or a small number of alternatives), you get a blade; if you leave them out, you don't. He believes that since most of the other proxies are only weakly tied to temperature, they average out to a mostly flat red noise that forms the historically flat "handle".
I don't feel qualified to make his full argument, though. While I tried to keep up with the primary literature at one point, I haven't been reading much lately, and I've never been as deeply into it as McIntyre himself. My goal was simply to say that I think that both he and Eschenbach have some good points to make, that both are interested in finding the truth rather than spreading misinformation, and that they should be read and considered rather than being rejected out of hand.
MBH98 was 20 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_graph goes into details about the various analyzes of MBH98 and later, including criticisms and counter-criticisms. The Moberg 2005 analysis I referenced above is one of them, which used wavelet transforms instead of PCA. It found similar conclusions as MBH99, the extension of MBH98.
> A 2010 opinion piece by David Frank, Jan Esper, Eduardo Zorita and Rob Wilson (Frank et al. 2010) noted that by then over two dozen large-scale climate reconstructions had been published, showing a broad consensus that there had been exceptional 20th century warming after earlier climatic phases, notably the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age
It then adds that more reconstructions have been done since then, again following the broad consensus.
they should be read and considered rather than being rejected out of hand.
This goes back to my original objection, which is that the g'g' etc. poster didn't point to something to read, other than "Willis Eschenbach's work over on https://wattsupwiththat.com/ ".
I can certainly reject out of hand the undirected suggestion to read hundreds if not thousands of blog posts without having some solid reason to believe it's worthwhile, especially given that several of the poster's other comments on the topic seemed to be wrong, and internally inconsistent.
If they were, they wouldn't be impotent. It makes no sense.
All evidence leads to the strong conclusion that creationism is not a viable way to understand geology, paleontology, biology, and a dozen other fields.
While modern biology does not exist without the concept of evolution to bind things together.
Yet there was/is a large push to teach creationism in some form or other ("intelligent design") as being co-equal with evolution, or a viable and meaningful alternative. The phrase was "teach the controversy", as promoted by the Discovery Institute - a dissenter/outsider organization with respect to science.
But biologists are the outsiders to what it taught in school. While members of a large and powerful subgroup of American Christians believe that creationism must be correct, as a matter of religious faith. These people can use their political power to manufacture the perception of dissent. And get schools to teach creation science and disparage evolution, despite the lack of a scientific basis for either.
It wasn't biologists who passed the Louisiana Science Education Act, which specifically calls for support for those wanting to criticize evolutionary theory ... and global warming.
Similarly, climatologists are the outsiders when it comes to policy decisions related to human-generated wastes, like CO2.
You know how I know? Look how impotent they are.
I'm not sure you're proving the point you think you are. At least I don't understand how you think the dominant ideology which has displaced all others and allows no dissent is the one that is the underdog, and anyone criticizing the dominant ideology is politicizing the issue.
It is a self serving argument that was used to deny most science ever. From gallileo to the ideolization of Newton which stalled physics for generations.
Orthodoxy is anathema to science. Either reality agrees with your argument or it doesn't. No one should have the power or authority to deny access to people based on differing opinions. Otherwise the only solution to the contention is violence.
Instead one should focus on respectful dialogue where you treat the other person with respect. You don't have to agree. You don't have to defend the position. But you have to treat everyone with respect. Otherwise we don't have science, we have a religion.
Note that the Dover school district required the teaching of intelligent design, which is a form of creationism.
I wrote "Yet there was/is a large push to teach creationism in some form or other ("intelligent design") as being co-equal with evolution".
The "was" exists specifically to point to Dover as an example of teaching creationism in schools.
My statement also includes charter schools. (Charter schools are not public schools.) For example, quoting from https://slate.com/technology/2014/01/creationism-in-texas-pu... :
> When public-school students enrolled in Texas’ largest charter program open their biology workbooks, they will read that the fossil record is “sketchy.” That evolution is “dogma” and an “unproved theory” with no experimental basis. They will be told that leading scientists dispute the mechanisms of evolution and the age of the Earth. These are all lies.
My statement more specifically refers to the people doing the pushing, which includes the current US vice president. When he in the House of Representatives he said (quoting https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/2002/7/11/hous... ):
> The truth is [evolution] always was a theory, Mr. Speaker. And now that we have recognized evolution as a theory, I would simply and humbly ask, can we teach it as such and can we also consider teaching other theories of the origin of species?
He has declined to inform us on any changes to his views.
You have not demonstrated that "the dominant ideology .. allows no dissent", etc.
I agree that the "dominant ideology" - a politicized way to say 'the considered opinion by those with the most training on the topic' - says that the views of climate change denialists - a politicized way to say 'those who do not believe there is global warming and/or that human action is a significant driver of that warming - has the strength of evidence behind it.
Just like the views of creationists do not have the strength of evidence behind them.
In other words, they are wrong. If they are wrong, why should they be granted an undeserved platform?
I don't understand the rest of your commentary. Were you treating me with respect by presenting a strawman position of my statement?
Most of your text appears so highly abstract that it's meaningless. Should the 'Smithsonian Barbie' be published in Science magazine as a new paleontological find, or would the orthodoxy prevent that from happening? What violence will result by preventing that path as a way to spread knowledge of 'ravenous man-eating Pliocene clams'?
What you wrote reminds me of a criticism by Martin Luther King:
> I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
Based on your comment, I believe you are more devoted to order and the absence of tension to justice.
That is my criticism of your world view. I did not straw man, you are actively explain how a group of people in society are opressed, but you're OK because it was legal.
I don't believe in using force to gain compliance of the citizenry. We fundamentally disagree on what type of society we live in. I believe in human rights, liberty, and freedom of association. You believe in an administrative state that punishes you for saying blasphemy.
What oppression are you even talking about?
I don't believe in using force to gain compliance of the citizenry
We do not live in that ideologically pure world.
You are the sort of person who let businesses discriminate based on race, because you shy away from having the force of law protect the politically weak?
It is incoherent to say the people who are not allowed to say words are the ones who are oppressing the ones who legislated their ideas as illegal. Sorry.
Which cases of oppression are you referring to?
Where did I define "politically weak" as people I like, etc?
But fundamentally it is your lack of understanding of the past, while being super sure of your position, that I find most interesting. You think that in the past that the bad companies were discriminating based on race, and then the good government came in and fixed it.
This is a completely incoherent reading of history. In fact it was the bad government forcing all companies, good and bad, to discriminate based on race. That's why they were Jim crow _laws_, not Jim Crow _suggestions_. The government was forcing people to discriminate based on race (like you probably do when you support things like affirmative action, etc).
I see history as Plessy V Fergusson. Where the railway didn't want to have discrimination so they challenged the law. Unfortunately people like you, who want to use the force of government to discriminate won.
Now you can object and say you want different discrimination so you're better than those people. Personally, as someone who believes in human rights i don't see a major difference between you and them. Just in who you want to discriminate against, but no ideological difference.
Please indicate where you drew your conclusion.
I didn't even talk about Jim Crow laws. I said:
> You are the sort of person who let businesses discriminate based on race, because you shy away from having the force of law protect the politically weak?
This is the present tense. Not the past.
Your view is that you want the Civil Rights Acts, the ADA, and the like to be abolished, yes?
This sentence might have seemed logically sound to you, but it's extremely fallacious.
What this means is that the geological evidence is not sufficient to say that increasing CO2 concentrations increases temperature. Do we have other evidence? Yes, high school physics knowledge.
Radiative physics tells us how much heat an increase in CO2 concentration adds to our biosphere (an increase in another gas could have resulted in a removal of heat, but obviously this is a greenhouse gas). From that, we can very easily calculate the new equilibrium temperature. Then, climate science predicts about a 3-4x feedback almost entirely from water vapor and ice melting. You can argue about the feedback, but pretty much every person I offer this to just shuts down and goes haywire saying something about a "complex system". Yet these same people seem to know how to use a stove - you increase temperature when you add heat to something. The prediction of global warming really is that simple at its core. It's not complex.
I have some smart friends on the fence about the predicted effects of climate change. I don't have the science background to walk through radiative forcing, but could learn it if pointed in the right direction. I've already checked wikipedia, but finding something on this specific point hasn't been fruitful.
This bugs me, as I think it is:
1. The decisive point
2. Poorly understood by the public
3. Could be easily explained
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/09/richard-lindzen-lectu...