And so it begins . . .

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DalaiLama wrote:

So, now we have Wikipedia caught with their pants down. So, using that logic, they must be obfuscating and sophists, and we can't ever rely on them either?

Ehhhm...if you look at the text at the side of that link:

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Julie Brigham-Grette; et al. (September 2006). "Petroleum Geologists' Award to Novelist Crichton Is Inappropriate". Eos (PDF) 87 (36): 364. Bibcode:2006EOSTr..87..364B. doi:10.1029/2006EO360008. The AAPG stands alone among scientific societies in its denial of human-induced effects on global warming.

So the right info is...at the bottom. They probably forgot to edit or something in the first paragraph (good news! you can totally do it if you are into wikipedia). Or maybe they wanted to hide it, but in that situation they suck extremely hard at it.

Also, Petroleum Geologists...well, there is a conflict of interest to say the least. Actually, a lot of them could be from US, so it wouldn't be inconsistent with what we know. I know, it's not enough. It would be nice to see their reasons.

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DalaiLama wrote:

Spoiler

Scientific consensus was that black holes were impossible for a long time as well. The data didn't change, but the people did and eventually they came around to the current view.

Then there are those deniers at CERN and Nature that respectable AGW scientists have to put up with.....

"A new discovery about how clouds form may scale back some of the more dire predictions about temperature increases caused by man-made global warming. "

From the synopsis here:

http://phys.org/news/2016-05-cloud-formation-discovery-lessen.html

from the full article here:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v533/n7604/full/nature18271.html

Even reading this carefully tells you that the people involved are too close to the forest to see the trees:

"The new work shows that a combination of cosmic rays from space and gases emitted by trees also creates particles, and then clouds, without man-made pollution. :

Imagine that, clouds can form without man-made pollution? That's good to know, because otherwise all the rain/snow that caused the Grand Canyon millions of years ago somehow happened without automobile smog. Unless the dinosaurs were somehow industrialized.

Why are the scientists even questioning whether clouds can be made without pollution, when it is obvious they have been for at least millions of year on a regular basis?

There's a little bit of insight here:

Study helps narrow down one reason why clouds are hard to model
http://phys.org/news/2016-03-narrow-clouds-hard.html#nRlv

and the full article here:

http://www.pnas.org/content/113/21/5804.full

You are way overhyping that. For example, you have:

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Kirby said it's too soon to tell how much less warming the new study implies. Other recent studies found flaws in climate forecasts because of uncertainty about clouds that would increase, not decrease, possible warming in the future.

Uncertainty is used in a statistic way (that means, how bounded are the results), and it's not like climate scientists were silent about that uncertainty in first place (IPCC publishes that data actually in their reports). One of the papers is about uncertainty propagation. It's pretty much standard procedure to refine results. Hell, I made some measurement work in the past, and you can assign a number to it. I'll bet it will be minor adjustments at best. Thing with science is that when you have a big body of research, it gets harder and harder to refute it, except in very special circumstances (like with quantum mechanics).

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DalaiLama wrote:

There needs to be less "modeling" and more data gathering.

Remember that guy paid by the Koch brothers to make actual measurements that I wrote about?

Well, he actually went and made measurements to adress many skeptics concerns (he was one).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth

Climate change deniers hyped him until he corrobored experimentally all those things, then he was disowned.

There is a lot of data out there about what currently happens, I'm not sure of why people keep insisting in that point, but you still need models to make predictions about the future, so it's a false dichotomy in my opinion. You cannot measure what will happen in 2100, only estimate.

lol Google

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

I don't think anyone's doubting that information, Poutsos; I certainly don't. However, the presence of lie-spreading climate change deniers does not imply the absence of lie-spreading climate change doomsayers, who have repeatedly exaggerated the severity of the situation, sometimes even under the guise of academic legitimacy.

It seems obvious to me that there is a climate change denial lobby trying to manipulate opinion for their own, rather transparent interests. But it also appears to me that there is a climate change exaggeration lobby, and what bothers me is that I cannot quite discern whom their lies benefit.

Erring on the side of caution maybe?

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dickhole_mcghee wrote:

Erring on the side of caution maybe?

That's the massively cynical explanation. "I don't trust the US Congress and/or their consistency to act on a well-reasoned argument for gradual change, so I'm going to exaggerate the hell out of these claims in order to prompt action within my lifetime." Kinda makes sense, so by Occam's Razor I'm assuming so.

Would tell you something about Al Gore's mindset, though.

I think Hanlon's razor applies more to enviromentalists. Emotion before reason, ignorance, stupidity and all that.

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NeroNoah wrote:

Ehhhm...if you look at the text at the side of that link:

The text to the side of the link could say the moon is made of green cheese. As a citation, I should be able to check the original source to see if the source says what the wiki is saying. (I realize much is behind a pay wall, and there may be a work around if I was willing to dig for 20min+) which is why I commented as I did.

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Julie Brigham-Grette; et al. (September 2006). "Petroleum Geologists' Award to Novelist Crichton Is Inappropriate". Eos (PDF) 87 (36): 364. Bibcode:2006EOSTr..87..364B. doi:10.1029/2006EO360008. The AAPG stands alone among scientific societies in its denial of human-induced effects on global warming.

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NeroNoah wrote:

So the right info is...at the bottom. They probably forgot to edit or something in the first paragraph (good news! you can totally do it if you are into wikipedia). Or maybe they wanted to hide it, but in that situation they suck extremely hard at it.

I don't think it was intentional. I think it was more of a matter of interpretation. When you have to boil down several pages into a sentence or two, something is bound to get lost in the translation. My point in pointing out that error was showing that even with good intentions and data, sites are not infallible, and people's viewpoints will affect their perception of what certain technical info is telling them. Even the scientists who discover the information take a fair amount of time deciding what if anything the data they uncovered represents.

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NeroNoah wrote:

Also, Petroleum Geologists...well, there is a conflict of interest to say the least. Actually, a lot of them could be from US, so it wouldn't be inconsistent with what we know. I know, it's not enough. It would be nice to see their reasons.

No more a conflict of interest than a climatologist who is being paid to research how dire the effects of global warming are. Furthermore, the geologists were doing this sort of work long before Petroleum was big, and even when it became big, they were doing the science long before any kind of climate change was even on the radar. Even further, IIRC, they are the largest body of specialized scientists, and from all over the world.

Now consider that the annual US spending on climate change is far more than the discretionary budget of the energy companies. If Exxon (the largest of them) earned 32 billion, they certainly couldn't afford to lay out 22 billion on false flag climate change information.

The US government did spend ~22 billion on climate change evangelism that year.

The ROI (return on investment) on climate change false flag advertising simply isn't there to be able to spend anywhere near that much. To remain profitable, Exxon would have to receive around 185-205 billion in total revenue that year just to break even on spending that much.

People tend to think giant companies just get to keep the bulk of the money they take in. While they may make mountains of money, the percentage that is actually profit after all the bills are paid tends to get less as companies become gigantic. Now, if they can take out most of the competition, then they can become very profitable - if they don't destroy their market by being too greedy.

What those giant companies do offer - is a more consistent high level of profit - paid out either through steady dividends, or stock price growth.

The TL/DR version of understanding for anyone following the thread is this:
Take whatever total income you get on your paycheck. Now subtract 97%. The rest is yours to keep. That's the avg company. If you get 5% your company is making good decisions and doing well. If you are doing 10%+ on a consistent basis... either you are creating your own new market (new technology etc) are having a phenomenal year and reaping the benefit of very wise investing... or you are cooking the books.

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NeroNoah wrote:

You are way overhyping that.

If anything, I underhyped it. I merely mentioned it as a point of honest uncertainty. Considering that the primary issue of global warming is radiative forcing, and one of the key factors in how much radiation the Earth receives is how much is reflected vs absorbed, and clouds play a major part in that....

The idea that they really don't have the fundamentals down about how clouds form is like saying a mathematician has been doing base 12 calculations with only 0-9 as digits.

The effect of cloud reflection is a HUGE issue. Noctilucent clouds are perhaps even more important, and their formation is even less well understood.

They don't know how clouds form without man made pollution, and clouds formed for billions of years without man made pollution.

That would be like future generations a thousand years from now saying that computers were formed as the condensation of accumulating memes and just dripped out of the airwaves and crystallized. The future Global Meme Change scientists couldn't find any computers that weren't full of memes, so although they were sure of their idea, there was some uncertainty.

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DalaiLama wrote:

There needs to be less "modeling" and more data gathering.

Remember that guy paid by the Koch brothers to make actual measurements that I wrote about?

Well, he actually went and made measurements to adress many skeptics concerns (he was one).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Earth[/quote]

1) this was a reanalysis of old data - no actual measurements made (see the Initial Results paragraph)

2)It *seems* they haven't released the raw data, which means their primary function - of doing transparent research has failed.

3)There's a question on whether the journal they eventually got published in qualifies as peer reviewed. (the journal didn't exist until 2012, and the study released their results in 2011. The article was published in Vol 1, Issue 1. While I can't say that this is a sock puppet journal - that's what the critics seem to say, and Wikipedia has it listed as a predatory journal.


4)Peer reviewed science typically gets the results peer reviewed before releasing the results. Otherwise, it's just cold fusion and perpetual motion machines and cure cancer with this one easy trick articles.

Could that study be genuine and correct? Could be, maybe not. If Astronomers played the same game of hide the data, they would get kicked off the telescope and not be allowed any more observation time.

When I have more time (next month, likely) I'll try to dig in and see what I can find on the real validity of that study. No, I don't take anyone's word on it. That is the whole point of science. Otherwise, we might as well have Britney Spears telling us what science is valid or not.

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NeroNoah wrote:

Climate change deniers hyped him until he corrobored experimentally all those things, then he was disowned.

I have yet (only a brief dig, for reasons of time)to see where he delivered on his mission. Transparent and Peer reviewed might have been accomplished, but the brief look I took looked like they aren't.

OK... well, a lot of stuff to look into. [REDACTED]

This may be more than climate change evangelism. It may be criminal deception, like the anti vaccine fiasco. As I said, I haven't had a chance to dig in and look at numbers and raw stuff myself.

Hmmm, if I find (probably will be able to look in July and December for reasons of travel) what I think I might find, I might be able to purchase a couple dozen Ruler of Wraeclast type packs from the excess money from speaking fees.

I'd love to spill the beans, but there's nothing like being the first person on the planet to discover something. If it turns out to be bogus, then I'll certainly point it out as well. I'm hoping it's a bogus idea, because if it is true we are all far worse off.

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NeroNoah wrote:

There is a lot of data out there about what currently happens, I'm not sure of why people keep insisting in that point, but you still need models to make predictions about the future, so it's a false dichotomy in my opinion. You cannot measure what will happen in 2100, only estimate.

The point of modeling is to test an idea before you go to the effort and expense of doing an experiment to actually test the idea for real. There are some things that can't be tested given the data we have and the way we understand it, so modeling is the only option.

For instance, we can't test theories on the 1980-2000 solar flare on stars that are 100 light years out because that information hasn't reached us yet. We can model it in a computer program. However, when we can get the information (say in 2180-2200)then that data should be used as the primary factor, and the computer model rated to see how well it performed.

The limits of modeling are well known. The limits of real data haven't even been scratched. Things like the number of a certain bacteris in a given amount of soil are telling us all kinds of stuff that no one had any idea of thirty years ago.

Data is like money, and modeling is like an I.O.U.

In a world where global economy is dominated by fossil industries (from energy to plastic), the side with the most money are only able to buy less than 3% of the opinions.

Or are you going to inform us how the economic muscles of the green(-ish) counterparts outweigh them by 33 to 1? Because that's the reality we'd have to live in if funding bias was as much a factor as you would have it.

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DalaiLama wrote:

My point in pointing out that error was showing that even with good intentions and data, sites are not infallible, and people's viewpoints will affect their perception of what certain technical info is telling them. Even the scientists who discover the information take a fair amount of time deciding what if anything the data they uncovered represents.

Again, I caught that shitty blog too many times doing that on my own, and supposedly is the most important blog about climate change "skepticism". There are entire sites written debunking that place too. It's more of a concern troll/misinformation blog rather than actual analysis. At some point you cannot assume mistakes.

The hard science part of wikipedia tends to be right in my experience, but the main difference is that wikipedia is not used as a primary source by policymakers and think tanks as that blog (neither by anyone serious, by the way).

...

About the rest:

-Conflicts of interest: a climate change scientist can go and do unrelated research, go to private research, and so on. Someone that works with oil fuels is fucked. Also, climate skeptics can get funding, as I've shown. There are not many that would do actual science, though.

-The notion of uncertainty in statistics roughly relates to standard deviation rather than mean for a sample. It doesn't mean uncertainty about the causal relationship.

-Berkeley Earth not having data? How many of those 1.6 billions of temperature points are fake? *shrugs* It was all about searching if other variables correlated with measurements.

Raw data: http://berkeleyearth.org/data/

(by the way, yes, about the peer review process they said this, they are really that shady or not, you decide...their decisions are questionable as it is; also, it results seem to be compatible with other papers in more decent journals like this one from NASA so it's partially reproducible)

Note: this seems a very weird rabbit hole. Not sure of what to think.

Data is not hard to find most of the time. Be temperature or gas emissions (for example: http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/data-viewers/greenhouse-gases-viewer, of course you need the whole world data to make the necessary statistics).

-About modeling: The point of modeling is to explain existing measurements and predict future measurements. Data comes first always to calibrate models, then you use it for more complex stuff. For example, the Ebers Moll model for transistors as it is used in electronics.

Solar flares? Again, the phenomena can already be explained what happens from gas emissions (data + models), so Solar Flares are likely a minor effect. There are other measurements that can be used if it's needed to calibrate for solar flares, so modeling is possible.

Why do I talk with relative certainty about this? Because unless people have gone faking data (good luck finding a proof of that without measuring yourself), it has been shown there is a correlation between greenhouse gases and temperature change, and the relationship can be modeled from actual physics laws so is not like you can go and say "correlation doesn't equal causation" so casually (well, you could, but you would be in the same field that people saying classical gravity doesn't depend on the inverse squared distance). Most criticism you see there is concern trolling/misleading and has probably been adressed at some point.

By the way, have fun with this:

http://www.icr.org/article/new-theory-climate-change/