Climate change cover-up? You better believe it
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
I'm a huge proponent of nuclear power - I think it's one of the cleaner and safer ways to provide energy, and I think nuclear fission combined with fossil fuels is probably enough to last until we develop fusion or hydrogen based power.
Anyway, the reason there's been no nuclear plants built without government action is because it's illegal to build a nuclear plant without government action, since processed uranium can be used to make nuclear weapons. I imagine you'd see more nuclear plants if the restrictions were lessened, and I reckon there'd be plenty of private investors to do it, though I'm not sure it's altogether a good idea in this case.
That said, nuclear power restricted to government-only is the reason it hasn't been built privately, and it's too bad it's forbidden from some areas. Nuclear power would be a godsend to a number of areas on the planet where the local ecosystem is particularly sensitive to pollution and the terrain isn't suitable for wind, solar, or hydroelectric.
It might be a good idea in civilized countries; not in Brazil, Russia, Iran, India, China, etc.
There are many safeguarded reactor designs (like the CANDU) that mean using them to produce plutonium for weaponization very difficult, in fact it's generally much easier to just build generally-unsafeguarded research reactors and harvest it from there (exactly what India did). The safeguarded reactors can be used to harvest tritium, which India did use to make a boosted fission weapon (fusion bomb). However tritium is regularly produced for medical reasons, and major demands are going to be required for the ITER and any commercial fusion plants.
Presently due to the lack of unsafeguarded reactors in western countries, there is a major shortage of medical isotopes due to the closure of one reactor. This brings up other questions in the nuclear debate that many environmentalists don't want to touch, which is: Without nuclear reactors, how will the 20 million people annually who require radioactive isotopes (generally only producible in reactors that can produce plutonium) for medical diagnosis be diagnosed and treated (many times with radioactive isotopes again, either from the same reactors or using tritium produced from safeguarded reactors)?
The simple suggestion to eradicate nuclear energy is absurd. We need better safeguards and controls, but any countries willing to 'play by the rules' should at least have access to safeguarded reactors. In fact, any environmentalist worth their weight should be petitioning their own government to help provide grants for China to produce safeguarded nuclear reactors. If coal mining no longer becomes economically profitable inside China, then a huge swathe of the worlds fossil fuel emissions will be removed.
Incidentally a single coal plant can easily emit more radioactive material than every nuclear reactor in operation today. So ironically increasing our use of radioactive fuels, will drastically decrease the emissions of radioactive materials, specifically in some of the poorest and most vulnerable countries.
Problem is there isn't enough usable uranium on the planet to make increasing the number of active nuclear plants viable for more than a couple of decades.
That, and a lot of what there is, is in places that make Saudi Arabia seem enlightened (Niger).
"Anyway, the reason there's been no nuclear plants built without government action is because it's illegal to build a nuclear plant without government action"
I think you will find that in most parts of the world, building power plants in general, not just nuclear plants, is done by the government, not by the free market.
However, from your link:
"no-one has yet demonstrated uranium-extraction from seawater on an industrial scale."
(sigh)Each issue gets worse and worse -- the magazine has moved from science to advocacy, and in a huge way.
Sadly, this commentary just continues the trend. Right now the signal-to-noise ratio is about 1-10. If it continues to drop I'll have to go somewhere else for scientific-oriented news.
Come on, guys. You can do better than this!
Now, why don't you enlighten us with exactly what you find wrong with the opinion or analysis in this piece, and provide a little more signal yourself. Science is cited in the opinion piece. Do you have an argument with the science cited? Or with the opinion?
Because the opposition here is not grounded in any robust scientific theory...but a hysterical reaction to the possibly of what? One-world government? The return of communism?
...those working in the fossil fuel extraction and/or burning business.
There is, in fact, a climate conspiracy...launched by the fossil fuel industry
...same flaks and hacks who brought you "smoking isn't dangerous."
In the paragraphs that were not ad-hominem attacks, there was one grounding paragraph (mentioning hacked emails), and another paragraph which (falsely) claims the most damaging email is a complaint about funding. Only one paragraph provides a few links to climate-related science, and that paragraph is more or less tangential to the main article.
The main opinion expressed here: climate skeptics are right wing conspiracy theorists working for the oil and tobacco companies.
Not sure why this is hacker news, or even relevant to the issue.
In the early 1980s, Scientific American did exactly the same sorts of things to "prove" that the Soviet technology program was unstoppable, and therefore that we could either retreat or commit planetary suicide. They had a consensus or prominent scientists and engineers showing, with hard numbers and slick charts, that it was provably impossible to do anything about ballistic missiles. Learned professors lectured us on the untenable accuracy limits of missile interceptors; rocket scientists lectured on the ease with which missiles could be spun to keep lasers from burning through. They had a social science consensus that saying "no" provokes aggression.
One business cycle later the Soviet technology program went bankrupt and took the political system with it.
Edit: And let us not forget the "nuclear winter" scenarios. Doesn't AGW simply reduce to a previously solved problem? ;-)
(And don't get me started about the Judean People's Front....)
"Apparent slowness"? Bullshit. The emails show a very active ongoing effort to suppress release of information and to "hide the decline", irreproducible results, appalling sloppiness in model construction. And now this apologia for anti-scientific behavior from a True Believer.
Politics and game-playing is only an ethical violation. Tampering with ANY data is a violation of the very nature of being a scientist, and any 'scientist' willing to violate the core principles of the art cannot and should not be recognized as a scientist in any way, shape or form and neither should anything they produced be recognized in anyway as being scientific without complete validation from an impartial independent party.
Can someone explain what exactly is going on in plain English?
1) Climate science has gotten very emotional -- both for those who think the planet's climate is in danger of spinning out of control and for those who do not.
2) For years the critics/deniers/skeptics have argued that the scientists in the field of climatology have not been working on the up and up. In other words, that there was a conspiracy to prevent the truth from getting out. These people were laughed at.
3) Somebody illegally broke into one place that does climate research and stole a bunch of emails
4) These emails show frustrated scientists who are trying to stack the deck in web forums, trying to prevent people with opposing views from being published, deleting critical data, fudging the numbers, lying to the press, and admitting to each other privately that something is very wrong
5) All hell breaks loose. Those on the side of the "end is coming" take to the web and print media with robust defenses of the scientists in question, pointing out how stressed out they are, how emails can be taken out of context, how the skeptics are mostly morons, how there's much more data than just being produced by this unit, etc. Detractors (so far) are mostly just countering by quoting the scientists themselves and demanding that if the research isn't totally open and reproducible, it's not science. Some have also demanded that the scientists in question step down (I count myself as one of these)
That's as unbiased as I can get. As for my own bias, I have no idea what the earth's climate is doing, but I know a rigged game when I see one, and the nature of the debate on climate science has been in the toliet for a long time. It's good to see a little sunshine getting in. I hope it leads to better standards and higher ethical guidelines. If this is as serious as folks make out, it's even more critical that every little piece of research is beyond reproach. We have a long ways to go before we get there, unfortunately.
Like I said, it was the best I could come up with. Prima facie, something is wrong somewhere.
I used the term "prima facie" on purpose, because it's very apt here.
It roughly means "on first glance" or "on the surface". IANAL, but as I understand it, it's a way of saying "just glancing at the evidence here, it certainly looks like X"
The interesting part about this term is that it's all subjective. So as soon as one lawyer uses it, the appropriate response is to say, "but wait a minute! You're taking this out of context, words have more than one meaning, there was nuance involved, you're twisting what was actually said, etc."
I provided #4 the way I would provide it to anybody on any side of the discussion. I understand the appropriate reply is to get into meanings and nuance -- and I don't mean that as a slam. At some point it gets silly, such as in the famous "it depends on what you mean by the word 'is'" but we're nowhere near there yet.
The problem is that the requester asked somebody to explain it to him. As "somebody", I felt it appropriate to explain what I found prima facie and also my bias.
In highly emotional environments I've found that it's impossible to strike the right tone. Apologies if I could have done better.
For point #3 - there is speculation that the emails were leaked (and not "illegally hacked") not only because it would seem a correspondent saw a number of the emails prior to their release to the general public but because it only contained emails that would be gathered as if in preparation to meet a FOIA request. If they were leaked, the person(s) who did so could be protected under whistleblower legislation and would have done so legally.
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/11/24/taking_liberties/ent... "It's not clear how the files were leaked. One theory says that a malicious hacker slipped into East Anglia's network and snatched thousands of documents. Another says that the files had already been assembled in response to a Freedom of Information request and, immediately after it was denied, a whistleblower decided to disclose them. (Lending credence to that theory is the fact that no personal e-mail messages unrelated to climate change appear to have been leaked.)"
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/11/its-news-on-academia-n...
The links from that post are other reasonably unemotional commentaries.
> If you don’t like this state of affairs join me in trying to develop a more reliable consensus mechanism on such topics: prediction markets.
It would be great if people were rewarded or punished based on the eventual utility and correctness of their statements rather than their immediate appeal. In a sense people are using their reputation as a currency in a prediction market of sorts just by recording their thoughts and opinions publicly. In the future this information should be easy to aggregate. You could imagine a public 'credibility score' much like a credit score. In this current debate it seems there will be substantial loss of reputation for those you nail their colours to the wrong mast.
It is natural to expect that the Climate Research Unit would have been performing its major work within a framework of internal controls designed to permit the appointment of a third party to audit the quality of the work. If the auditor was of the opinion that the work was of sufficient quality it could go forward as input to intergovernment treaty making. If not, then governments could look elsewhere for advice or commission further research work from other hands.
The recent leaks have confirmed that the CRU never attempted to institute apropriate internal controls, attempts to replicate past results internally have failed, and there is nothing to audit. You find the sarcasm you encounter to be confusing because it is misdirected.
The basic scientific fact on which every other argument rests is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect greenhouse effect. This alone should end the argument for any sane person.You can replicate the effect in every lab with the same results. The calculation that we are having an effect is simple. The co2 measurements are absolutely clear, co2 is rising and is now on its highest level ever.
I don't understand what your argument is? That correlation doesn't equal causation? You can prove the causation in every lab, just replicate John Tyndalls experiment from the 1850s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tyndall.
I don't care if two models work or don't work, or if some scientist has doctored three numbers, it doesn't change the basic fact. The argument they are having is about the current speed of warming and I don't care about that, because it doesn't matter. It might well be that the planet is warming much slower because of some natural effect, now if this is the case we should all be happy...and start reducing greenhouse gases immediately. All we got is a chance to react, the basic scientific fact didn't go away.
Yes you can still reduce all the arguments we are having to the greenhouse effect. You both didn't answer my post you side stepped the issue. "simplistic models of complex systems are obviously a bad idea" this is not even an argument, it's just a weird theory, masked as common sense. But occams razor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor doesn't ask for the most complex theory does it? why are the simplistic models bad if they work? It is also a common "sceptic" strategy to sidestep the core arguments and go back to talking about process (complex argument, bad emails, sceptics are not heard, global conspiracy...but no arguments none).
So what is your argument against the greenhouse effect? That something will offset it? Or that it doesn't exist? Or that there is no correlation between co2 and global temperature in the long run?
Explain, Argue stop running, if you care about the future of mankind you should at least accept the possibility that you are wrong. In that case you have to engage in a honest debate about the facts.
In that case we should cut NSF funding of long term climate research. If it's so simple, why waste money on supercomputers?
Do you know that the same scientists that propose global warming now have said that there will be global cooling (in 1960s/1970s)? Oh, and BTW, its interesting that now they say it's "climate change" not "global warming", are they preparing to change what they are saying again?
Your Link to the Vostok Ice Core Data should really make you scared just add 100ppmv to the co2 level and try to imagine the temperature.
Global cooling was never a widely accepted scientific theory, in fact the scientific consensus even back then was that global warming was going to happen in the future.
*this is a simplification obviously. lots of models involve not canceling out but other statistical techniques (like linearizing the relationship between two variables), which is part of what the climate debate is all about: are these simplifications valid? the reason "climategate" is a big deal is because it is evidence that no, no they are not.
P.S. Yes, I am paid by Royal Dutch/Shell to post deceptive comments on HackerNew.
There are two hypotheses that might explain this behavior. The first is unprecedented boldness of the enemies of science. The second is one I suspect Dr. Weart is not yet ready to face.
Compare the financial crisis and the climate crisis. The origin of the financial crisis lies in people believing. Believing that house prices never fall, believing that structured financial products reduce risk. Critics do not impugn the motives of the believers. Helping minorities to buy houses, moving financial risk to those who can shoulder it, these are noble aims. Critics complain that those in charge should have been intellectually rigorous but were merely well meaning and enthusiastic and that this was sufficient to cause disaster.
Contrast this with the climate crisis. Climate science is excused its bumbling amateurism on the grounds that ad hoc adjustments to the data are not sinister. The excuse for losing the raw data and the calibration scripts is that, far from attempting a fraud, the researchers are well meaning and enthusiastic.
We want to know whether the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming is true. The allegation against against climate scientists is that they should have been intellectually rigorous but that they stand revealed as, at best, merely well meaning and enthusiastic. This works no better in science than it does in finance.
Spin spin spin Scientific American, at least we know what your true colors are.
Citations please!
Ja, ja... sure...