
Florida and the Science Who Must Not Be Named - cryptoz
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/florida-science-must-not-named/
======
phkahler
>> It has been nine years since Florida was hit by a proper hurricane. Could
that be a coincidence? Sure. Or it could be because of … something.

Remember when we had that record hurricane season and it was blamed on ...
something. And we were supposed to have a lot more in the future because of
... something.

These people have to stop blaming _everything_ on something. It's warmer, it's
colder, record hurricane season, no hurricane in 9 years, everything is always
blamed on ... something. And then they wonder why there are people who don't
believe them.

~~~
analyst74
Yeah, the best way to stop people from believing ...something (or anything),
is not to ban the word, but attribute everything to it.

~~~
neonhomer
Or change something to something else when the first one doesn't follow actual
data!

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morganvachon
My wife and I visited the Tellus Museum in North Georgia yesterday, and the
planetarium presentation we watched did a great job of calling out climate
change denial for the absurdity that it is. I'd imagine that the moral of the
video flew over the heads of most of the children in attendance, but I'd like
to think that it smacked their parents right in the head.

Anyone with two neurons to rub together can see that the world's atmospheric
and climate patterns are changing rapidly and drastically, and for the worse.
I hear so many deniers claiming that "the Earth is a big place, it was here
long before us and will be long after" and "it is a self-healing organism, we
can't really be harming it!" and I just have to shake my head at their ability
to dismiss something that's right in their faces. As the video we watched
said, human industrialization pours 100 times as much CO2 into the atmosphere
as all the volcanoes on Earth, and the volcano emissions themselves do modify
climate patterns in a measurable way. Basically, we're accelerating this
planet's transition into something resembling Venus.

~~~
refurb
Why is questioning the theory behind climate change met with such hostility?
Climate scientists question it themselves[1,2]. They readily admit that the
current models haven't done a good job at predicting climate change.

[1]
[http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100120/full/463284a.html](http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100120/full/463284a.html)
[2] [http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-forecast-
for-2...](http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-forecast-for-2018-is-
cloudy-with-record-heat-1.13344)

~~~
masklinn
> Why is questioning the theory behind climate change met with such hostility?

Because the vast majority of it (just about all of it outside of actual
climate scientists, really) is but one more round of professional doubt-
sowing, in the long line of tobacco, leaded gas, CFCs or SO2 (and with very
similar people in the roles of professional doubters).

> They readily admit that the current models haven't done a good job at
> predicting climate change.

They readily admit that their models (unsurprisingly) don't do a good job at
predicting the result of climate change, not that it doesn't exist or that
it's going to be a good thing for humanity.

~~~
refurb
_They readily admit that their models (unsurprisingly) don 't do a good job at
predicting the result of climate change, not that it doesn't exist or that
it's going to be a good thing for humanity._

Whoa there. If their models don't do a good job of predicting climate change,
then that has a direct impact on the predicted consequences and the impact on
humanity, no?

~~~
masklinn
Yes and no. Because climate is a chaotic system full of feedback loops and
we're probably still unaware of much of it (either because we don't have the
tools or data points to measure them, or because it comes into play in
circumstances we're not in) it's hard to make precise predictions about the
effects of climate change in specific locales. That's why you see climate
scientists predicting everything and its inverse with respect to hurricanes:
we're not even close to a global or even a superlocal understanding the ocean
or the atmosphere, let alone the complex interplays of both. So at a "local"
level it's almost impossible to make excellent predictions.

At a global level though, we can see the energy being dumped into the system
(making it more chaotic and more violent) and we can see ice covers literally
melting before our eyes, both reducing global albedo and ultimately ending up
swelling the seas. The global ice melt on its own is sufficient for pants-
shitting terror.

Also, we built our civilisation in a specific (climatological and ecological)
set of environments, climate change means these are likely to change fast, and
regardless of an eventual steady state at the end there's absolutely no
guarantee we'll come out ahead (or even at all) at the end of the ride.

That's one of the things which gets my goat about modern conservatives, they
hate conservation.

~~~
refurb
_At a global level though, we can see the energy being dumped into the system_

How do we measure that? From the article I posted above, climate scientists
readily admit that the temperature increase they expected with their models
has not come to fruition (as a global, non-local measure).

And thus, if the temperature models haven't been that accurate, how accurate
are the sea-level models? Even those estimate a _very_ wide range of potential
outcomes (I'll readily admit the minimum is still a significant sea level
rise).

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dlo83
Banning language is doubleplus ungood.

~~~
ptaipale
Well, in many cases banning language or words is considered quite the right
thing to do. Different ends of the political spectrum just want to do away
with different words or phrases.

Just consider how embarrassed Benedict Cumberbatch was when he accidentally
used two words in wrong order ("colored people" is insulting, "people of
color" is okay).

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ryanackley
Coastal Floridian checking in. I don't deny global warming but at the moment
there is no widespread immediate threat to property caused by rising sea
levels where I live. Not to say there won't be in a generation or so.

The more immediate threat is the environment effects of overpopulation and
pollution in the waterways. I remember fishing in the lagoon by my house when
I was a kid and the water being super clear and full of fish. Now, it's been
overfished; you can only catch undesirable bottom feeder type fish. It's also
a constant brown caused by runoff from residential areas.

~~~
jstalin
I don't see any acceleration in sea level increases. It's been happening for a
long time.

[http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.s...](http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=8724580)

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p_eter_p
Climate change denial reminds me of Lysenkoism. The facts must serve the
ideology, and if they don't then it is the facts that are in error. The
obvious solution, then, is to ban talking about the facts.

~~~
zzalpha
I really liked John Oliver's take on this. The term "Climate Change" (edit:
specifically as part of the public discourse on the topic) is an invention of
the American right wing, in an attempt to rename "Global Warming" so as to
make it sound less alarming.

On the one hand it worked. The Senate, this year, happily passed a resolution
that "climate change is real and not a hoax", but of course Republican reps
gleefully pointed out that, of course the climate changes, no one is disputing
that...

But now that "Climate Change" is, to the public, basically just "Global
Warming", Florida is now working to ban the very term their political wing
invented.

The schadenfreude is strong in this one.

~~~
treerock
Except "climate change" was in use in scientific papers back in 1979 and
defined as "a long-term change in the Earth’s climate, or of a region on
Earth", including "global warming" and other changes.

I doubt the American right wing influenced Mr Charney in his naming
conventions.

[http://pmm.nasa.gov/education/articles/whats-name-global-
war...](http://pmm.nasa.gov/education/articles/whats-name-global-warming-vs-
climate-change)

~~~
zzalpha
How language is used in studies, versus how it's used colloquially, are two
different things.

The use of the term "climate change" as part of the public discourse (as
opposed to scientific discourse) is as a result of a right wing PR campaign in
the 1980s.

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adamc
Uprated because the creative workarounds ("If so, this anonymous dreadfulness
would, scientists say...") made me laugh, and point to the absurdity of
banning language.

------
triangleman
>the-gaseous-agent-known-to-store-energy-and-slowly-release-it-over-time

water vapor?

~~~
snowwrestler
Water vapor is a much larger contributor to the greenhouse effect than CO2.
But it also cycles through the atmosphere on the order of weeks. So if we were
to accidentally increase the atmospheric concentration of water vapor, we'd be
out of trouble in a couple of weeks after the excess rained out.

Carbon cycles through the atmosphere on the order of centuries. So if we put
too much CO2 in the atmosphere we have to live with the consequences for what
will seem to us like a long time. That's why people focus on CO2 as the
"climate change gas."

------
rimunroe
Coming from a family of scientists and having a background in science as well,
it's a bit terrifying (but not surprising) how many skeptics of anthropogenic
climate change (or of the extent and severity of its effects) there are here.
There are a few really good posts in here making good points about climate
science, but there are also a bunch of really dishearteningly poorly informed
comments too. It's dismaying to see and then to be reminded that the US
populace in general is even more skeptical of the conclusions of experts,
which pretty much all point at a very bleak picture of the future--a picture
which keeps being adjusted to be more bleak, since so little action is being
taken to rectify the problem.

~~~
vixen99
[https://en.wikipedia.orgwiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the...](https://en.wikipedia.orgwiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming).
‘Dishearteningly poorly informed bunch’, are they?

~~~
adamc
This is misleading (your link is broken, btw -- needs a slash between org and
wiki). Before the listing it says:

"These scientists have said that it is not possible to project global climate
accurately enough to justify the ranges projected for temperature and sea-
level rise over the next century. They may not conclude specifically that the
current IPCC projections are either too high or too low, but that the
projections are likely to be inaccurate due to inadequacies of current global
climate modeling."

So we don't know that they disagree with global warming, just that they think
the projections are too inaccurate.

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daphneokeefe
The science who must not be named is climate change.

~~~
neonhomer
Don't you mean global warming... or is it cooling now?

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venomsnake
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Bugs offered solution
some 60 years ago.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiTM2HQ0g98](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiTM2HQ0g98)

Anyway right now it is global warming or Cthulhu ... the article describes
well both of them

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ianstallings
I say we encourage them, because it is hilarious and I love a good laugh.

