Shermer flips GW stance

Badger said:
So, are you saying I should follow your dogma, even though the evidence hasn't convinced me yet?
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Follow whatever you wish. I see little difference between the 'Global Warming has not been proved to be caused by humans' stance and the Discovery Institute's 'Evolution has not been proved' stance.

- point to old findings later clarified or thrown out as proof.
- point to one or two people that disagree and claim entire movement
- produce no peer reviewed research
- distort findings of others (http://munews.missouri.edu/NewsBureauSingleNews.cfm?newsid=9842)
 
kevin said:
Follow whatever you wish. I see little difference between the 'Global Warming has not been proved to be caused by humans' stance and the Discovery Institute's 'Evolution has not been proved' stance.
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The increasing denialist focus on climate models never being perfect smells very much like the anti-evolutionist focus on transition species and "missing links".
 
a_unique_person said:
It's not a simple heads/tails alternative at all. The modelling of the different responses to warming in the coastal/inner regions is more complex than that.
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The given example was:

- The fact that the interior ice sheet is growing is a predicted consequence of global climate warming.
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That is a coin toss and the type of "proof" that psychics use - counting small numbers of selected hits on binary (or better) events and leaving out the misses.

I think we need to be careful making such easily countered statements of efficacy as that falls into the hands of those who would cast unwarranted doubts on the level of research and understanding in this area. Best leave those types of niaive statements to the skeptics leaving them easily countered.
 
Geckko said:
That is a coin toss and the type of "proof" that psychics use - counting small numbers of selected hits on binary (or better) events and leaving out the misses.
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And you can point to the misses and prove the agreement here is coincidental. So far the models trend temperature and percipitiation correctly. What are the misses?
 
kevin said:
And you can point to the misses and prove the agreement here is coincidental. So far the models trend temperature and percipitiation correctly. What are the misses?
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I'd be interested to see information on the model's recent improvement in accuracy. Got any links? From what I gathered before, the models were pretty inaccurate.
 
kevin said:
And you can point to the misses and prove the agreement here is coincidental. So far the models trend temperature and percipitiation correctly. What are the misses?
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There are misses because they are models. The only model that wouldn't contain any misses would be a model as complete as the system it is attempting to model - i.e. the climate itself.

Try some other logic. There exist a large number of global climate models that model a very large number of variables (temperature, precipitation etc.) covering a great range of scales (from global down to regional grid references). Unless all of these models gave identical results for the common vairables being modelled then some of the output must contain deviations from observed values. Either they all perfectly model all elements of the global climate or there are errors.

The simple fact is these are models. Models are a simplification of a complex system intended to increase our understanding of that system. The worth of those models extends far beyond their cursory "accuracy". And the "accuracy" of such models needs to be judged by more than simply identifying a few areas where they got things correct, or got things wrong.
 
kevin said:
And you can point to the misses and prove the agreement here is coincidental. So far the models trend temperature and percipitiation correctly. What are the misses?
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As a follow up. I have learned a lot on this over the recent past by doing a lot of reading.

To learn about what models do and what they tell us about the global climate read the Third Assessment Report (TAR) of the IPCC. Just google climate models ipcc TAR and it should pop up.

AR4 due out soon should give an update with more recent advances.

ETA

Go here:
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/308.htm

For the IPCC model assessment

Our overall assessment
Coupled models have evolved and improved significantly since the SAR. In general, they provide credible simulations of climate, at least down to sub-continental scales and over temporal scales from seasonal to decadal. The varying sets of strengths and weaknesses that models display lead us to conclude that no single model can be considered “best” and it is important to utilise results from a range of coupled models. We consider coupled models, as a class, to be suitable tools to provide useful projections of future climates.
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Badger said:
So, are you saying I should follow your dogma, even though the evidence hasn't convinced me yet?
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I'm not saying you should do anything. Do what you like. Sack the Vatican, take the veil, whatever. Dogma has nothing to do with my opinion, unless you regard thermodynamics or quantum theory as dogmas.

If it's dogma you're after, you could do worse than check out the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which kevin has referenced and which lies behind you're "quickly googled" cite. They reject AGW on ideological, not scientific, grounds. Their creed is that regulation of the free market is wrong, always, and since AGW cries out for government intervention (by regulation) for the common good it cannot be happening. According to this dogma (which unfairly taints Adam Smith's reputation) externalities are rare and are more than compensated for by the absence of regulation. AGW is too massive an externality for that dogma to cope with, ergo it can't be happening.

The evidence says otherwise, but (from the dogmatist's viewpoint) the evidence must be misleading. They don't know exactly how, but the important point is to persuade people - however mendaciously - that this is so while they work out exactly why it's so. They must prevent action - which, dogmatically, they know would be harmful to the public interest they hold so dear (really, no irony intended) - until the End Of History happens again.
 
Geckko said:
But you know that this given example is a coin toss, right?
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No, since there's an option of the ice-mass staying the same, equivalent to the coin landing on its edge - which is not what the idiom implies.

The pertinent example was kevin's - that the example cite highlights an intention to mislead. Which it does.
 
Geckko said:
The given example was:



That is a coin toss and the type of "proof" that psychics use - counting small numbers of selected hits on binary (or better) events and leaving out the misses.

I think we need to be careful making such easily countered statements of efficacy as that falls into the hands of those who would cast unwarranted doubts on the level of research and understanding in this area. Best leave those types of niaive statements to the skeptics leaving them easily countered.
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No, it was a part of a complex response to global warming. To say that it was like a coin toss is to reduce global warming resonses in a region to a simple yes no. The prediction is for the whole region, that is, more melting at the edges, plus, the non-intuitive increase in precipitation that results in a growth in the interior. That is not a simple yes/no. It also ignores that even more warming is going to melt that increase in the interior in the long run as well.
 
CapelDodger said:
No, since there's an option of the ice-mass staying the same, equivalent to the coin landing on its edge - which is not what the idiom implies.

The pertinent example was kevin's - that the example cite highlights an intention to mislead. Which it does.
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I doubt that any climate scientist would agree with that. For virtually any climatic event you care to mention the two mutually exculsive events - larger/longer/thicker/warmer/etc. versus smaller/shorter/thinner/cooler/etc. measured between any two points in time represent close to 100% of possible outcomes.

Don't take my word for it, go and read the academic evaluations of these models- see my link. To say "look it predicted the ice sheet would get thicker" or "look it didn't predict the ice sheet would get thicker" is extremely niaive.

I thought skeptics would see that quite plainly.
 
epepke said:
...I'm glad Shermer decided that the preponderance of evidence indicates global warming, which has been evident from the preponderance of evidence for quite some time. It's also nice to see a public demonstration of a skeptic's changing his mind.

However, the final statement is troubling.



This does skepticism a great disservice. No, environmental skepticism remains not only tenable but necessary, and the same applies to all sciences. As Richard Feynman wrote "[It] is imperative in science to doubt; it is absolutely necessary, for progress in science, to have uncertainty as a fundamental part of your inner nature.".....
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You are arguing semantics here and distorted semantics at that. Shermer only seems to be talking about global warming and human CO2 emissions. To extrapolate that into "no environmental skepticism" as in none at all is just silly.

And doubt is good but at some point one has to work with overwhelming evidence. You call it preponderance. That's fine for most things and maybe for the details of just about everything. But at some point with some things, preponderance becomes overwhelming. Genetic research put evolution theory into the overwhelming evidence category. I doubt anyone would say there is merely a preponderance of evidence the Earth is spherical in shape. I'd think we've passed the "any doubt" stage on that one.

And just because one has seen enough evidence to act doesn't mean they are tossing further skepticism aside. How could you act effectively if you did that?
 
Geckko said:
Don't take my word for it, go and read the academic evaluations of these models- see my link. To say "look it predicted the ice sheet would get thicker" or "look it didn't predict the ice sheet would get thicker" is extremely niaive.

I thought skeptics would see that quite plainly.
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It has certainly led to a diversion of effort on this thread. :)
 
skeptigirl said:
You are arguing semantics here and distorted semantics at that. Shermer only seems to be talking about global warming and human CO2 emissions. To extrapolate that into "no environmental skepticism" as in none at all is just silly.
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You're missing my point. It is important to be as skeptical of global warming and carbon dioxide emissions whether one believes the preponderance of evidence is for it or against it. That's what skepticism is. Or at least what I think it should be.

And doubt is good but at some point one has to work with overwhelming evidence. You call it preponderance. That's fine for most things and maybe for the details of just about everything. But at some point with some things, preponderance becomes overwhelming.
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Would you call 99% overwhelming? Because that's how well the universe agrees with Galilean/Newtonian mechanics up to about 14% of the speed of light. Far, far more than 99% of our everyday experiences are below that speed.

What we have here is, I think, a fairly fundamental disagreement. I think that skepticism entails always having the ability to doubt, and I like that because I think that without it, science would grind to a halt.

One of the things I dislike about the "skeptical community," though, is that they seem to think that skepticism is only something to apply to things that you have judged are strongly in doubt, that skepticism is a knob that you get to turn up and down because of your judgements, or even a switch that you turn off.

I think this is a major difference in my position versus Shermer's, and probably yours and, it seems to me, the majority of people here. I'm for all practical purposes convinced that global warming is happening and that there is, at least in part, a human origing. However, this does not affect my skepticism one whit, tittle, or jot. The frontiers of science are in that insignificant 1% or 0.1% or whatever it may be.
 
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