Does the controversy surrounding climate change bother you?

PC getting boring for you? didn' you post something like this not too long ago?

 

If you think that bothers you, try watching Tonight, on Frontline, "Climate of Doubt" | PriusChat (you can watch it online) and seeing how well organized the doubters are...

 

I'll bite. There is no "controversy". The science and the evidence are abundantly clear. Scientists overwhelmingly agree that human activities have, are, and will continue to increase CO2 in the atmosphere with a resultant increase in average global temperature. Anyone who states unequivocally that this is not happening either stands to make a buck until their golden goose is regulated or out-lawed or has a religious objection to the notion of (planetary) evolution. That this should be reported in the media is a time-tested strategy of tobacco, firearms, alcohol, and oil (to name a few) profiteers. What's your agenda?

 

You won't convince stupid or ignorant people of anything. The only cure is education which the far-right will claim to be indoctrination. So there is no cure except to let them die off.

 

Yeah, I bet you're related. The sound of banjos never bothered me. In the zombie apocalypse, always remember that the zombies are mindless zombies. Also remember that your Prius gets better mileage when warmed up, and that RadioLab (Home - Radiolab) podcasts are kickass when driving across the wastelands looking for civilized survivors.

Also, as always, your mileage may vary.

 

Alaska is WANTING warming after years of cooling records.

 

no, controversy is part of life.everyone has an agenda, whether they know it or not.

 

This is simple. Pay attention to the indisputable evidence first. First is the rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere. That is an overpowering fact. All the "controversy" around this involves which denial strategy to use (Ignore it, claim it's bad readings, claim it has nothing to do with the situation at hand or the far future, etc.) Next would be the widespread dying off of many ecosystems. Then there is the rising ocean level. Then there is ice sheet balances. There are a lot more. (It's a rare denialist that acknowledges all these empirical measurement and then claims they have no future effect.)

How many figures to the right of the decimal point matter in ANY measurement will ALWAYS be a point of contention. However, the sign of the measurement is very clear. The ocean is rising, the CO2 is going up, etc. etc.

 

Not a bit; there's no time for it until we get over the plate tectonics controversy, the Big Bang controversy, the quantum mechanics controversy, the relativity controversy, the atom controversy, the evolution controversy, and the Copernican controversy.

 

[Sarcasm]If you do not believe earth is global, it is harder to believe in global warming. So conservatives are just having a bad couple of hundred years. We don't insist the Amish modernize, why insist our congressmen take Science classes after grade school?[/Sarcasm]

 

I read both the wall street journal and forbes frequently, and I have never read an article saying the climate is not changing. I could have missed them. Can you post an example?

Hubris and Ignorance is not a monopoly of the central part of the country. In fact I see most of the misinformation being sent out from the east and west coasts.

 

Uh,, and who would these "Alasakans" be? Caribou Barbie comes to mind! Certainly not those that understnd the slightest thing about methane and CO2 entrained in permafrost! Or who know anything about methane hydrates in cold sea water.

Icarus

 

Its' not so much the climate change that bothers me.

It is definately the largest contributor to the increase of the GHG:

Having kids! Overpopulation has, without any doubt, the largest impact on the GHG.

I have a good laugh at people who harp on the increase in GHG, saying we have to reduce it and soon. I then ask them the question: do you have kids? When they say yes, I say hypocrite and walk away smiling.

They just stand there dumb founded, like they were hit by a giant meteorite and didn't see it coming.

People never cease to amaze me.

DBCassidy

 

Do I get 1/2 points for only having one child?

 

Do I get any for having none?

Icarus

 

I have a simple two-step strategy.
Step 1:

I recommend that you read "Bullspotting". My wife checked a copy out of our local library.
Bullspotting: Finding Facts in the Age of Misinformation: Loren Collins: 9781616146344: Amazon.com: Books

Or any of a dozen other books in that genre. Not as if this isn't a common problem.

Bullspotting is a quick read. The insight there is that a) most nuts actually do think alike, and b) that's for a reason ( if you don't have the facts and the science on your side, you end up resorting to the same bag of tricks.) And so, oddly, the same telltales that are present among (e.g.) people who argue that creationism is science, are present among people who argue that global warming is bunk. Completely different topic, same rhetoric. While that's been noted piecemeal before, it's nice to see that laid out systematically.

So, for example, there's the smoking gun meme. That --- fill in the blank -- this one study, this one datapoint, this one timeseries, this single whatever -- completely invalidates all the science behind global warming. We had one of those just last week, where some clown leaked the draft of part of the next IPCC report, and somehow thought that because they mentioned cosmic rays, that was some earth-shattering somethingorother that totally invalidated blahblahblah and so on. Meanwhile the plain language of the draft chapter said otherwise.

Game-changing. When you see that phrase, it's usually a red flag.

Anyway, bullspotting is a nice read because when you see one of those in print, you can say, oh, there's one. That has all the earmarks of somebody who's slinging bull. Gives you a nice framework.

Step 2: Idiots hang out with idiots: Use that correlation to determine what's INcorrect.

To me, the most interesting aspect of this debate is that errors are not scattered randomly across the material you will find on the internet. Because they aren't honest errors. Instead, they are highly correlated. The nuts all end up in the same spots.

So find a website that has one clearly egregiously wrong article on global warming, and look at what else they posted. What you'll find is that all the stuff on that website is wrong. Or, close enough to be a useful guide for what's not true about climate change.

So, people tend to ignore the idiots and liars, but that's inefficient as long as they are consistently stupid and wrong. Use that consistency as a perfect negative indicator for the truth.

OK, let me work through the cosmic ray example. Here's the posting by Alec Rawls, and, sure enough, it contains "game-changing" at the top of the posting.

Cosmic Rays Replace CO2 as Driver For Climate Change and Global Warming « GeoEngineering Exposed

Now, you can find any number of competent people who will tell you that this guy's take on cosmic rays is wrong, including the main author of the IPCC report chapter that was leaked. So I'll just take it as a given that you can figure out that if the guy who actually wrote the materials says "that's not what it says", then this fellow Rawls is full of it.

The next step is to see where Rawls routinely posts, and who praises his work. That will let you know where the nuts have been gathering.

Sure enough, Google it, and the first hit other than his home page is Watts Up With That. That's pretty much the motherlode for denialist nonsense. (The proprietor there has a bee in his bonnet that observed warming is an artifact of poorly-sited thermometers. He pledged that whatever the BEST project found, in terms of temperature trends, he would accept that as correct science. Until BEST completely validated the existing temperature timeseries, at which point he turned around and repudiated the BEST project. So you figure out whether you want to listen to that guy or not.)

In my experience, this works pretty well. Find something that you can quite sure is wrong, and you'll see the same cast of characters echoing it. Look on their websites, and you'll find spin and disinformation. Once you'd done that with a handful of concepts, you'll get a pretty good idea of who knows the science and who doesn't. And then you can use that cast of characters as your negative indicator -- when a new issue comes up, if they praise it and spin it, it's almost certainly incorrect.

 

Sure, I can address that -

That is clearly labeled editorial. It is not a news article, it is some guy's opinion. You should not confuse the two.

Then the editorial clearly tells you that you re following a bad standard. The op-ed arguse against catastrophic consensus. This is actually true. There is no scientific consensus about catastrophes. There is strong evidence that waters were higher in the last 2 interglacials. If rising sea levels are 100% caused by man, you need to explain why they were higher when man was not burning fossil fuel. Some warming must be natural, and there is not consensus that it will cause catastrophe.

If you want to convince people, you should first understand where they are coming from. Separate the scientific human caused warming from those preaching catastrophe. Even the austhor of that op-ed agrees that their is human caused warming.