Interestingly, it does not say that the warming trend is not happening, rather they argue that the evidence is insufficient to say for sure if the warming is caused by human-driven causes or natural ones (e.g. volcanic activity or solar changes). They mention the heat island effect as one of the issues that may complicate the attribution of the contribution of different factors to the warming trend.
To quote from the paper:
“To summarize, by varying ST and/or TSI choice and/or the attribution approach used, it is possible to conclude anything from the long-term warming being "mostly natural" to "mostly anthropogenic" or anything in between. While each of us has our own scientific opinions on which of these choices are most realistic, we are concerned by the wide range of scientifically plausible, yet mutually contradictory, conclusions that can still be drawn from the data.”
okay, and whats your point? The point is "97%" or "99%" of "climate scientists agree" that "anthropogenic causes" are the reason for climate change. But this study questions the foundations (and i mentioned i am only linking one, that i downloaded a few weeks ago to save, there are of course other papers that each chip away at the political and media narrative about the whole field). Please refer to the GP:
> I wonder how much of this same kind of manipulation/distortion is going on when we are told to "trust the science" with regard to climate change?
"climate science" is all models, this paper (among others) implies that the data fed in to the models may be influencing the output of the models in a way that isn't conducive to actually understanding the "climate". How can i make this assertion? I read the IPCC reports. both the pre-release and the official releases. I don't recommend it, unless you feel like being Cassandra.
You're not sufficiently parsing causality versus predictivity. The global warming hypothesis matches the projections. So it's a food enough model. The causal attribution does take time, but recall we can estimate the global greenhouse emissions with reasonable accuracy and can compare to benchmarks in history.
Push all we want against the sun, it continues to shine regardless of our efforts.
global warming hypothesis! Have you seen the temperature graph for earth's history? Judd et al., Science 385, 1316 (2024)
It's actually remarkably cold on earth, colder than it's been in over 450mm years. but if you look at the graph, it's not a diagonal or straight line, it goes up and down over millions of years.
so, with these two facts: Will it get warmer or colder?
Knowing that, why do i have to listen to this claptrap?
The core of the concern about climate change is what it’s going to do to human society. Nobody gives a shit what the climate looked like a million years ago - complex human society reliant on large scale agriculture didn’t exist a million years ago, and that’s all we care about. We worry about droughts because they affect our crops and cause famines, we worry about heat waves because they kill our people and livestock, we worry about sea level rise because it damages our cities, we worry about hurricanes of increasing intensity because they kill people and damage our cities. We don’t give a shit if we’re in a relatively cool period in earth’s history or if the whole thing will shift in a hundred thousand years because that’s totally fucking irrelevant to what’s going to happen in the next hundred years and how we’re going to adapt our cities, crops, and cultures to it, because that’s what actually matters to us, because we’re actual living people in a complex society and we’d like to stay that way on both counts.
Not initially, and indeed that was one of the major early criticisms of his theory. But he learned of Mendel's work after publishing his own - The Gene has a nice history of this.
Edit: I think you're focusing on the gene part too much. What's important is that inheritance is discrete, regardless of what actually carries it, rather than continuous. Mendel proved that part.
Edit edit: scrap that part about Darwin I misremembered
At the gene level it is discrete yes. It isn't at specimen scale, and appears more continuous.
It's very possible ancient Greeks didn't understand the discrete aspect, it doesn't mean they didn't know in some ways more than we know of evolution. I would assume they did given the numerous incredible polyglot thinkers we find traces of.
Traces, it would seem the biggest part of ancient times writings are gone. And why just thinking of the Greeks, so many civilisations have vanished, many which the left over of their produces confuse us. More civilization disappeared than the count of those we know had existed.
The food stocks, cattles and other pets that accompany us today were the result of non natural selections spanning many human generations. To think civilisations that were able to accomplish that didn't have, in a way, a more comprehensive understanding of natural selection is pretty condescending, or naive of our own understandings.
Sure they probably didn't come up with Crisp, they may not have been able to observed the structures of DNA, they may not have even known how bacteria looked like. Given the challenge I'm in admiration for their findings given how blind we assume those people were.
No, Darwin never learned about Mendel's work, even though Mendel sent him a copy (which was well after Darwin had published the Origin). The copy in Darwin's library has its pages uncut -- meaning that Darwin never got around to even opening it. Darwin instead believed in blending inheritance rather than discrete units.
As for Mukherjee, while his Emperor of All Maladies about cancer was brilliant, The Gene (and Mukherjee's New Yorker article that he expanded to make his book) has a lot of issues as many geneticists and molecular biologists such as Walter Gilbert and Tom Maniatis pointed out at the time.
Thanks for the correction, I must have remembered that wrong. In that case Darwin didn't have the full theory yet either I guess. But my point about the ancients stands.
I agree, we should celebrate the ancients for how much they discovered despite the obvious difficulties.
On your point about things being more continuous on a species scale - two things can be true. Natural selection acts on allele ls of each gene, which are discrete things. But it's also true that large numbers of genes acting in cooperation can produce a continuous spectrum of phenotypes.
But I don't think there is anything special on there being oxygen in the cloud of gas that formed the solar system. The distribution of elements following a supernova probably follows some law, and oxygen is low enough on the periodic table that probably quite a bit of it is expected.
Yeah, I remember Tesla's "who needs LIDAR" announcement coming in the middle of a pandemic supply chain crunch, especially from chips needed for those LIDAR arrays.
You remember incorrectly. Tesla have never used LIDAR except for training on specific developer cars. Elon has said from day one LIDAR is an expensive waste because of the compute requirements and latency. They did remove the parking ultrasonic sensors, which at one point were used as a close proximity, low speed auxiliary data source in FSD.
The mandate of FSD has always been that humans get away with driving using only their vision so it must be possible for a computer to do the same. If you have used FSD lately it's largely there.
Humans and AIs both evolve as the result of some iterations dying. In both cases, we tacitly erase the ones who don't make it (by framing the discussion around the successful, alive ones). The difference is that humans have had a broader training set.
Interestingly, it does not say that the warming trend is not happening, rather they argue that the evidence is insufficient to say for sure if the warming is caused by human-driven causes or natural ones (e.g. volcanic activity or solar changes). They mention the heat island effect as one of the issues that may complicate the attribution of the contribution of different factors to the warming trend.
To quote from the paper:
“To summarize, by varying ST and/or TSI choice and/or the attribution approach used, it is possible to conclude anything from the long-term warming being "mostly natural" to "mostly anthropogenic" or anything in between. While each of us has our own scientific opinions on which of these choices are most realistic, we are concerned by the wide range of scientifically plausible, yet mutually contradictory, conclusions that can still be drawn from the data.”
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