

The Science and Pseudoscience of Global Warming - quoderat
http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/GlobWarm.HTM

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nazgulnarsil
I think the bottom line about global warming is that we are deathly afraid of
dynamics we don't understand. Our civilization is predicated on a very narrow
set of conditions and we don't have the resources to handle major
perturbations of those conditions.

~~~
Retric
It's not a question of how well our civilization can withstand significant
changes just what level of disruption we are willing to withstand without
doing something.

Taken to the extream to make a point, a 100 foot increase in sea level over 20
years would distroy an a silly amount of weath. However, a single 1 inch
increase in sea level over 20 years would be hard to notice. It's not a
question of 1 inch as ~0.1% of that increase = 0.1% of the dammage, rather
it's a question of how much it costs to deal with the problem vs. starting
over in a new area.

PS: Most of the time an inch is meaningless, but a dam that can take 10 feel
might not take 10.08 feet. So, it's better to think of it as an increase in
the number of local problems vs. a meaningless threat or some large scale
doom. Granted, as you scale the increase more areas have larger problems.

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radu_floricica
Damn, that lost 10 minutes of my life. Not that I don't agree with the
article, but I was really reading to get to the part which discusses the
concequences of global warming, as suggested in the introduction. But there
isn't one.

Anyways, it's worth clicking around, he writes some pretty interesting things.

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electromagnetic
Fundamentally there's one problem that plagues global warming research, and
that's that we're grasping at a system so huge and complex that we have
absolutely no understanding of it. Sure people believe they understand the
system, but spend a month in England and watch how weather forecasts pan out.

I don't see how, when some of the biggest computer systems are being used to
predict weather systems and we get it wrong, how scientists expect us to
believe their computer models that follow less variables and use lots less
processing power.

All evidence so far says global warming is real, however I can't help but feel
all the computer models they use are complete bunk. It strikes me as fraud,
it's a computer program and everyone here knows you can get a computer program
to do whatever you want. I see it as highly susceptible of bias, which makes
it very hard to ever believe their predictions.

There's a lot of real science used in global warming research, like using
ancient sediments and ice cores to extrapolate how much CO2 was in the
atmosphere _n_ centuries ago. However, then we get pseudoscience with computer
models of systems infinitely more complex than anything we've ever dealt with;
it's akin to comparing a stick figure and a full anatomical diagram of a human
down to every capillary for modelling the human body. We're at the stick
figure when it comes to the global environment and we're trying to predict
somethings effect like we have the whole picture.

~~~
emmett
You clearly did not read the article you're critiquing, because he spends
screens and screens of text discussing exactly the difference between climate
and weather.

In short, climate is predicting that a candle will make the room warmer.
Weather is predicting the exact swirls and eddies of the flame.

Further, your objections to computer modeling are incorrect. Of course you can
get a computer program to say whatever you want, but you can't make a computer
_model_ say whatever you want. Computer models are a subset of computer
programs constrained to attempt to model reality according to some set of
assumptions. You can make equations say whatever you want too, but that
doesn't make Maxwell's laws incorrect.

~~~
brc
I read the screems and screens of text trying to disconnect climate and
weather: that's where I gave up. I had had enough of the cutesy anecodotes and
attacking straw men with straw men.

It's a nice anecdotal attempt to disconnect climate and weather. but it falls
very flat. Candle flame eddies, swirling winds? What bunkum. Weather is what
you get? So what we get in 50 years, as predicted by climate forecasts, won't
be weather?

The reason people argue that climate predictions are weak because of the
inability of massive amounts of computing power and continually revised models
still fail to predict short term temperature and conditions. This is with a
lot of known inputs. And yet, we are all supposed to believe the outputs of a
100 year climate prediction, when the amount of assumed/fudged/unknown
variables is simply immense? This is the core reason people (including myself)
place no credence whatsoever in climate modelling. I'm happy to change my mind
when someone can prove they know all or enough of the inputs to make the model
highly accurate. What would be the effect of another 10 hurricanes per year?
What about a reversal or diversion of the Gulf stream? How about a permanent
el nina in the Pacific? None of these are black swans and yet they would all
negate current climactic predictions.

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milkmandan
Freemand Dyson has another objection to climate modelling: it does not take
into account the way climate interacts with biomass. Simple calculations show
that even small changes in global biomass absorb huge amounts of atmospheric
CO2.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?_r...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all)

~~~
msie
So, planting trees or preventing massive deforestation would be a good idea.
:D

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prewett
I'm quite willing to believe that greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere, but
I've always wondered how large the effect is compared to the other things that
change the climate. Since the earth has been both hotter and colder than it is
now, before we even existed, it seems possible that the increase of CO2 from
people might not be all that big of a factor. Does anyone have any information
along these lines?

~~~
bena
Why aren't you curing cancer right now?

If we must take everything in order of most important to least important, then
doing anything that doesn't affect this most important thing is a colossal
waste of time.

If we are affecting the temperature of the planet in a way that will make it
uninhabitable to us, it behooves us to do anything and everything we can to
make our impact less. Whether or not it is the biggest contribution to the
problem. Plus, solving the smaller problem may give us insights to the larger
problem.

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jerf
I have a simple question, in the spirit of "What evidence would it take to
prove your beliefs wrong?": How many years of dropping temperatures does it
take before global warming is no longer an acceptable hypothesis?

~~~
emmett
Well, never. It's always an acceptable hypothesis, because maybe you haven't
considered all the evidence yet. What if CO2 causes global warming exactly as
scientists predict, but the Sun is going out?

However, if your question is, would several years of falling temperatures make
it more likely that global warming due to CO2 doesn't exist, then here is the
answer:

It depends. There are several other major factors in play determining the
temperature of the planet beyond CO2. For example, if average sunlight
received dropped for 10 years in a row, a rise in CO2 might not be sufficient
to counteract that. However, if you didn't find anything else in play, it
would be strong evidence that CO2 does not cause warming, at least not on the
time scale you're looking at.

This would be an very surprising result though, since we _know_ that CO2 is a
"greenhouse gas" - it traps heat. If higher concentrations of CO2 in the
atmosphere did not cause increases in temperature, it would be weird and
shocking.

~~~
jerf
Models that predicted a monotonic rise in temperature due to mankind's
influence can not be used to extract mankind's putative signal when it turns
out that they were wrong.

It's important not to let global warming hysteria color your view of the
science. There's a radical difference between "mankind is the dominant force
of global climate change and mankind is causing catastrophic global warming
that we must avoid at all costs" and "mankind is adding a small delta below
the noise level of natural climate", and the range of things in between. If it
does turn out that the sun is getting dimmer and that turns out to have a
major effect on climate (and I have seen climate scientists flat-out deny this
is true), then it bounds the effect man can be having and moves us closer to
the second statement.

Every year that is colder instead of warmer bounds the warming effect we can
be having. Frankly it's already pretty small.

~~~
emmett
That's not true. You could have an arbitrary number of years that were colder
in a row, with rising CO2 levels, and still have a world where CO2 causes a
temperature rise. It would simply require a countervailing force that's
stronger.

The noise level is irrelevant; I'm not sure why you would bring it up. If
there are naturally forces that fluctuate up and down in a random walk, and
CO2 is a much smaller but consistently up force, inevitably we'll wind up with
increasing temperatures over time. You could argue there are larger climatic
signals ( _not_ noise) that we should be concerned about, but what you
actually said is simply wrong.

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brc
you lost me at correlation == causation

