When you're a skeptic looking for "evidence", you'll find plenty in there.
When you're a scientist looking for an informal discussion about thinking critically about the evidence and data interpretation, you'll also find plenty in there.
When you're a scientist looking for an informal discussion about thinking critically about the evidence and data interpretation, you'll also find plenty in there.
"Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming — and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important."
show me there is still room to discuss and debate the evidence.
Is there a plausible case that we cannot afford to wait?
That is the real problem with the whole debate. It is centered on "humans have cause climate change." If the reality is that the sun is causing climate change or, "Climate change happens in cycles," which it has since the earth formed, then the response and the path forward is very different from the ones currently proposed.
EDIT: You know, in a way, saying climate change is human responsibility is enabling us to avoid doing what we have to do now. For example, if sea levels will continue to rise for 100 years, we should stop all new coastal development. Saying humans can stop the warming and lower the sea levels allows us to keep building on the coasts. Essentially, saying, "In the future, we can stop climate change" allows us to do nothing in the present.
Imagine the difference if we knew it was not caused by humans or in fact, there is nothing we can do, the planet will continue to get hotter for 100 years, then we start building cities underground, moving civilization to the poles of the earth, inventing more heat tolerant crops, better local climate control, etc.
If global warming is "wrong" but the accepted answer, pollution heavy businesses go through some inefficiencies and there's a smaller amount of pollution production.
If global warming is "right", but not accepted as something that requires response, potential existential crises ensue.
It seems like betting on a Jack-high hand with your life on the line.
Looking at the extreme edges with out an idea of probabilities is an easy way to get confused.
You have included problems (with unusual "solutions") with probabilities on hugely different magnitudes on the same list, and presumed that every problem is equally soluble.
Global warming has a reasonable probability distribution and a very feasible solution. Compare that to hostile aliens with the ability to travel from the far reaches of undetectability to Earth- the technology gulf would be impossible to overcome.
If the bible is wrong but the accepted answer, you lose a finite amount of hedonic pleasure in the near term and there are some short term benefits (smaller amount of killing/stealing/coveting).
If the bible is right, but not accepted, you will burn in hell for all eternity.
Every business asks a similar question every day.
"If I decide to do A, I might make $B dollars or lose $C dollars. Is this a wise thing to do?"
We tend to think that Pascal's cost benefit analysis was flawed. That doesn't mean we should drop the principle altogether!
I'm all in favor of the rational cost benefit analysis you hint at. Most environmentalists are not - witness the reaction to Bjorn Lomborg.
I totally beat you to the punch on this one :D
But anyway, that misses the point. The wager isn't cost-benefit analysis where probabilities and expected values are certain; it's decision making in the absence of compelling evidence. What you have essentially done is respond to the multiple claimants problem by saying, "But any form of belief in the Christian God pulls in more or less the same direction." In the uncertainty that the wager confronts, however, "reducing CO2 emissions" and "increasing CO2 emissions" have the same expected value - that is, they are equal claimants. Hence my point that the multiple claimants problem is equally devastating when the wager is applied to global warming.
If global warming is "right" we might have a problem 100 years from now with rising sea levels and different weather.
If you have the luxury to be worrying about rising sea levels 100 years from now, you haven't seen someone trying to scrape together a buck in change to buy a cheeseburger at McDonalds recently. Who do you think businesses will be cutting first when they have to make up for carbon credit costs? Hint - not from the top.
This is what people who are pro-climate change legislation sound like to me, a bunch of whiners completely over exaggerating the consequences of global warming (existential crisis? really?) while completely ignoring the real human suffering their ideas will cause in the short term.
Lets wait until we can really prove global warming is true before we jump to conclusions, because we could very well be inducing even more massive suffering on the lower class in our country who have already been squeezed very badly over the last 10+ years with stagnant wages, lost jobs, and rising healthcare costs. I haven't seen inconclusive proof in a scientific sense (we're programmers, we all know you can put garbage in and get garbage out from a computer "model" if you do it one way or another. and if they aren't showing the data they have (see the whole lost temperature data debacle) and in same cases the code for the models, what are they showing?)
If we have to make sacrifices now to mitigate that risk I'm prepared to do so. I'm also prepared to pay more tax to help the less well off who lose their source of income. We've been doing it in my country for nearly a century.
We already pay more for labor, energy, environmental regulations compliance, and corporate tax in the USA than pretty much anywhere else. When you start making energy even more expensive, the economics are going to shift for the remaining factories and we're going to ship pretty much every one left in this country to somewhere they don't have cap and trade. That is going to cost a lot of blue collar jobs.
Then food will be significantly more expensive because of the increased energy costs - and not to mention they produce a lot of CO2. Who gets hit most by the cost of food? Those at the bottom or those at the top?
Everything about this is really really regressive. You are willing to "make sacrifices now", because frankly you don't have to make any sacrifices. "I'm willing to pay more tax". Wow, what a sacrifice. Might have to pass up on the next iPhone. Taxes take away discretionary income from the upper classes. Big deal. Regressionary laws that destroy blue collar jobs and make the cost of living higher for those at the bottom cause real, true, heartbreaking hardship. Get off Hacker News and go into an area like Detroit that has been hit by these problems and see what I mean. If you can't afford food and can't afford your rent and lost your job and are trying to raise kids, those are more than just little sacrifices. Honestly that is way worse than the alternative. What is going to happen if climate change comes? Sea levels will rise and some houses will be lost in most areas on the coast, and cities will have to have levies built. Is that better or worse than destroying the lives of millions of people today?
Not to mention, if you pass cap and trade you won't actually do a damn thing to help the climate. Every factory that moves offshore will be going somewhere they don't enforce these kind of laws. In fact a lot of countries you offshore to have incentives to reduce automation and increase job supply, so something that might take 1 guy here takes 4 there. Generally that is related to reduced automation and reduced technology. Which is also related to lower efficiency and higher emissions. The power plants in the US are a heck of a lot cleaner than the equivalent in a lot of the countries we are outsourcing to. And then you have the transportation emissions getting it here.
So you are talking about definitely hurting a lot of people today, and hoping that just maybe you might be able to make tomorrow better than it could turn out to be if these computer models are correct, or it might make tomorrow just as bad or worse if compliance isn't 100% globally - which it won't be.
I'm expressing concern about my own future, and the future of others in the possible case the climate change is catastrophic.
The problems of offshoring jobs could be solved by Obama at Copenhagen if he gets China to sign up to a cap on its omissions.
The rest of your argument rests on a lot of mistaken labor-leftist political ideology, but I'm not interested in arguing it right now.
But I am an industrial engineer, so I know a thing or two about factories.
I think you seriously underestimate the change and damage that will occur with climate change. There will be large effects on the natural world, on other species; species we may not be able to live without. To blow it off like oh it's just a few houses isn't very smart.
The burden of proof is on you... and the only evidence we really get is a giant appeal to authority and a billion dollars spent on commercials.
Reducing carbon emissions would mean employing engineers and professionals to upgrade much of our industrial infrastructure. More employment, not less.
Also, if we're waiting for "proof" of the existence of global warming, I image we'll be waiting quite a while. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe it's possible to prove anything in the physical sciences. Newton's theory of gravity was believed to be correct for over two hundred years before scientists began to suspect that it was inaccurate in certain cases.
Personally, I see plenty of reason to proceed with green initiatives regardless of the global climate change issue. Do I want cleaner air in cities? Yes. Legislation to reduce car emissions has already made a very noticeable impact in my own city in just a decade. Do we really want to have air like they have in China?
The same can be true of power generation. We need more power, and nuclear waste is dangerous * independently* of climate change. Coal and gas have negative impact on our air quality. Thus we are left again with green technologies for now.
I don't know if all the proposed changes intended to help climate change have other benefits like the ones I described. That would be an interesting question to have answered.
Have you not noticed how dependent we are on fossil fuels at all?
No, the fact that those greedy capitalists must be forced to do it pretty much shows that it's losing money, relative whatever else they might do with that money.
And what might those alternatives be? Why, investing in new businesses to create jobs, improving infrastructure, etc.
Really, the idea that the government is so much wiser about business and economics than the corporations, so the laws will drag us kicking and screaming into prosperity, are just absurd. The government is incompetent at managing the entire system. And Friedrich Hayek's Nobel-Prize winning work proved that this is necessarily so -- it's absolutely impossible for any centralized authority to integrate all of the distributed data about needs, priorities, resource availability, etc. Only the distributed cloud of the market can do that.
Nobody needs to convince, or legislate for, steel mills to recycle scrap iron. They do it because it's practical and it makes economic sense.
Especially when you consider that the greatest amount of effort needed will be in getting developing countries to avoid massively increasing their Carbon emissions as their economies grow. Personally I think that an affluent, say, Bangladesh capable of dealing with some of the potential negative consequences of global warming is all around a better solution than a Bangladesh which endures yet another century of poverty but avoids emitting much CO2 into the atmosphere. I imagine the Bandladeshis, and the Chinese and the Indians and the Indonesians, etc, etc, feel the same way, and it will be immensely difficult to get them to curb their growth in CO2 production, making anything the G8 does on its own to curb CO2 production completely irrelevant.
OK, in a single sentence you've managed to:
-understate the extent of the climate risk
-play the "what about the poor working class?" card, which is the Rust Belt, recession-era sequel to "but what about the children?"
-intimate, without actually proving, that reducing climate emissions will hurt the poor
-systemically dismiss any and all long-term concerns, implying that there's no point tackling larger problems if someone, somewhere, has trouble affording a cheeseburger.
None of what you've said anywhere else in this thread seems to overcome the essential weaknesses of that argument.
If it isn't caused by humans it's unlikely to be fixable by humans.
Do we even know enough about climate to know what to try and do though? Its not something I've spent a huge amount of time researching.
Also, if anyone in this debate can be counted on to change their mind, it's the scientists: we do it all the time when shown evidence to the contrary of the current belief. I sincerely doubt that your average skeptic walking into this debate is actually willing to change their mind if shown evidence. Their mind is already made up and it won't change.
So yes, plenty of room for debate, but it needs the right mentality.
BTW, I once convinced a very creationist skeptic that evolution just might be correct in like 3 hours. How? He was willing to listen and see that there just might be an alternative explanation to the things he's seeing. He was willing to accept a different point of view and my job was to present my case. Luckily I did OK.
A: It seems like releasing greenhouse gases has detrimental effects on the climate. We should find a way of releasing fewer greenhouse gases.
B: Nothing you say is true, and you're politicizing the debate. It will require massive government intervention to release fewer greenhouse gases!
A: Okay. But if we don't reduce greenhouse gases, these things are going to happen.
B: You're politicizing the debate!
It is critically important that the 1st debate not be influenced by the others, yet today that's not the case at all.
Climatology is an incredibly young science. It is still struggling with problems of collecting data and its theories are still immature. There is no consensus in climate modelling, there is a cacophony of competing climate models, each with their own assumptions and fudge factors, none of which have proven reliable in predicting past climate with any degree of accuracy. But this is fine, this is how science works, theories and models are tested by data, reformulated, and retested until ultimately a theory that can make predictions which prove to be backed up by data wins the day.
And yet, despite this lack of consensus in climate modelling, there is remarkable consensus among the climatology community regarding AGW. Yet neither the quality of the data nor the models backs up such a consensus. And people who express skepticism about AGW (to any degree) are frequently compared to holocaust deniers or anti-evolutionists (those exact comparisons have been made in this very comment thread).
This is what is meant by "politicizing the debate". When one cannot engage in the legitimate scientific debate without being shouted down as an unbeliever who hates the Earth or the human race.
With evolution the "there isn't enough evidence" argument is a side-show by creationists to pretend that the mountain of really very good evidence is somehow less than perfect (hint, no amount of evidence would be enough). With climatology the "there isn't enough evidence" argument is really a very solid scientific critique. We have very little data on historical climate, especially at high CO2 levels. Even the best modern data we have (from satellites and weather stations) covers only a small time frame and still requires a lot of fiddly processing to ensure its accuracy (there are still legitimate debates on what the global average temperature of the Earth was in, say, 1995, for example). The remainder of the data comes via proxy sources and tends to be incomplete or spotty. And the climate models we have today are very immature, all of them contain one or several semi-arbitrary "fudge factors" that must be determined empirically in order for them to have any accuracy. Considering that the input and output data used to calibrate these models and determine these fudge factors is in an entirely different regime than the projected climate for the remainder of the 21st century, criticisms of these models is entirely justified.
When a creationist makes an argument against the validity of evolution (even if it's "there isn't enough evidence") the correct response is "no, there's enough evidence, here's the evidence we have, and here's how it fits the theory, and here's why we have extremely high confidence in this theory". When a "global warming skeptic" says "there isn't enough evidence" the correct response is "there's more than enough evidence, let me show you the evidence and why the evidence backs a particular climate model that predicts AGW".
It is NOT "you don't know what you're talking about, we don't need to show you anything, now shut up and go away" nor is it to compare them to a young-Earth creationist. Those are ways of shutting down honest debate and they are poisonous to science.
You're suggesting that the global warming folks would be willing to avoid politicizing? If it weren't for the policy prescriptions and other political fallout, the skeptics mostly wouldn't even care. I'm sure the vast majority of the skeptics would be willing, even eager, to drop all potential politics from the debate, but the whole reason it's important (from the viewpoint of such a skeptic!) is that it's now more about politics than science.
Are the skeptics listening to this new evidence objectively? All I hear from them is "Ah yes, that may be so, but...".
There was a move from "these are our findings" to "lets try and stop global warming". The second step requires government action. Hence, politics. If the climate change scientists had stayed in the "lets refine our findings" area then it would never be political. As soon as you say "lets get the government to do something about this", it is political.
There will always be people who question why you should expand government. And it is up to the people trying to expand the government to clearly show WHY we need to.
What are you expecting? Some people show up with their computer models and say LOOK, WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING, and no one would object? No one would look at it critically? If the science was so indisputable then the bill would be passed, just like the Clean Air and Clean Water acts were when they showed real science on pollutants.
Because it was perceived as an unassailable reason for more lawmaking and regulation, which is what politicians do, even (hypothetically) politicians with the purest motives.
Are the skeptics listening to this new evidence objectively? All I hear from them is "Ah yes, that may be so, but...".
I think most skeptics have moved from "what global warming?" to the more defensible "there's been global warming, but less than at other times in the historical and (especially) geological past, and starting well before the 20th century CO2 output increases, so the cause is unlikely to be primarily human industry".
This is a position, however, which is hard to generate soundbites for, so they've taken a massive hit in the public perception department, as it's hard to argue their position at less than essay length, and book length is better.
Politics only come in when people don't want the climate to change. Which is another way of saying that science only gets politicized when it discovers something with the potential of requiring political action.
-believe that continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause rising sea levels, displacing hundreds of millions of people, as well as causing less predictable consequences we will be ill-prepared to respond to, but also
-not want to actually do anything to prevent it.
It's a self-contradictory argument. You're better off just convincing people that part 1 isn't true.
And which side accuses the others of being greedy corporate shills while comparing them to creationists and holocaust deniers?
Here's my concession to the skeptic: let's pin a 25% credence on the risk of severe changes in sea level. I'm willing to give the skeptic 3/4 odds that I'm wrong. Now let's look at a map of human population distribution by elevation and calculate the cost of displacing all of those people. And let's look at the other long term costs and benefits from leaving our energy usage unchanged, and build our policies from there.
Incidentally, while it's marginally true that climate researchers have certain incentives and motivations of their own, it's also very, very true that there is a lot of established money which has a lot to lose if we do anything about the climate.
If you read some of the hacked emails, you realize that's exactly what McIntyre (of climate audit) was doing, and that's what the people at the research center were fighting against.
This is in stark contrast to the debate in climatology, where scientists would like data to be publicized so that they may verify the results. The first is Zeno's paradox in evolution ("here's a fossil of an intermediate species between the X and Y species", "that's nice, now show me a fossil intermediate between this one and Y", ad infinitum), the second is just plain science 101 ("we spotted a new supernova in Canopus last night", "oh really, can I see the data?").
We just choose to talk about one goalpost or the other. It's not like people are making up extra requirements of proof simply to make it harder on the other side. The only reason folks talk about each of these goalposts one at a time is just to make the conversation easier on everybody.
So yes, if you get through the "man can change the environment" hoop, which I believe, you have about a dozen other hoops to jump through, some of which I find much less plausible than others, before you get to the "we must do something now!" This is just the structure of the argument -- debating style or political trickery has little to do with it (in my mind)
Also, the quote you've selected is quite obviously not the author saying, "These data can legitimately be used to prove urban warming." He's rather plainly saying that he thinks the data will be misinterpreted and so needs to be placed in its proper context. This is neither nefarious nor even the least bit notable.
NOT trying to start a flame war, but I think there's a parallel here between science and Biblical criticism. In both cases, if you start with the preconception that the data has one simple and obvious message, then you will project your own biases onto it. Real analysis starts when you acknowledge that it's very difficult to tease meaning out of data that has very complex and partly unknowable context, which speaks directly to only a small number of situations, and which must be extrapolated to cover situations that have no direct analog in the data.
Yet popular science, like popular religion, must engage people by offering meaning and understanding that is accessible with much less effort. Popular science is therefore (unavoidably) guilty of encouraging blithe and simplistic interpretations of data, because that's the only way you can encourage people to think.
A lot of the excerpted emails look like this- fairly understandable examples of scorn directed to people who produce "crap criticism". You wouldn't want anyone trying to square the circle to email you to dispute your work, would you?