Who pissod off Penn?

[I Ratant]

Carl Sagan's views were all political bias. He was the one that predicted the new ice age from the Iraq oil fires. Didn't happen. Great man there, but bad data, I'm sorry.

.
Did he?
Was it "if the fires are unchecked, then...."?
There might be a parallel with "If GW isn't checked, then....".

 

[Chaos]

That's a rather broad brush you're sweeping with there.

Don't you mean "the politicians who fund scientists are not apolitical"?

No, I mean "Science is apolitical, scientists are not". That´s why I wrote "Science is apolitical, scientists are not", and not "the politicians who fund scientists are not apolitical".

Every adult has a political opinion, except perhaps for a couple of tribesmen somewhere in the deepest rainforest. Some people are professional enough not to let their opinion influence their work, while others are not professional enough. You cannot simply assume by default, without evidence, that scientists belong to the first group.

 

[CFLarsen]

No, I mean "Science is apolitical, scientists are not". That´s why I wrote "Science is apolitical, scientists are not", and not "the politicians who fund scientists are not apolitical".

Every adult has a political opinion, except perhaps for a couple of tribesmen somewhere in the deepest rainforest. Some people are professional enough not to let their opinion influence their work, while others are not professional enough. You cannot simply assume by default, without evidence, that scientists belong to the first group.

If a scientist lets his opinion influence his work, is he doing science?

 

[varwoche]

You say deniers, I say alarmist.

The difference is I have science on my side and you're just parroting nonsense.

 

[GreyICE]

If a scientist lets his opinion influence his work, is he doing science?

It depends. If a scientist allows his opinion to influence the conclusions he draws from his work, then he is not doing science.

If a scientist accurately reports conclusions, but lets his opinion draw him into areas he chooses to research, he is absolutely doing science.

 

[JEROME DA GNOME]

The difference is I have science on my side and you're just parroting nonsense.

You have NASA in one of those links.

Did not NASA have to adjust their climate data recently because it was faulty?

Did not some internet blogger point out that NASA was presenting faulty data?



Remember all those head-lines about NOW is the HOTTEST time on record?

Turns out that NASA was reporting false data and the 1930's were the hottest time on record.

 

[bob_conklin]

The data that is used to show warming trends has been fudged with. Compensated. You couldn't have put a reporting station up 100 years ago, and then paved a 2 mile concrete runway next to it and then a 5 story parking garage and get meaningful data about tempurature over time. What is worse is that the compensation uses population as the fudge factor, and not thermal mass change and distance from the reporting point. Even that would be poor without considering the change in energy expended next to the reporting point. Say .. jet fuel burning.

There is no scientific data. There is a mass hysteria. What should a skeptic make of that?

I DON'T KNOW

or

Sounds fishy to me.

 

[jimbob]

You say deniers, I say alarmist. I see no data that shows that we change the climate any more so than it changed before people were around. We haven't made an ice age, or warmed to that extent.

I like the environment just as much as then next guy and conserve as I can.

People who speak of imminent doom are religious zealots wherever you find them. Period.

Further to my post immediately above this one,

There is evidence that the climate is changing, and it is warming at an increasing rate. Your claims about global data isn't really valid for the longest running dataset: the Central England temperature series, that is based on measurements since 1690. It shows unequivocally that England is warmer now than it has been in the last three hundred years. It also says that it is getting still warmer.

I started looking at this data because I wanted to make my own mind up, and to see if the data was clear to me. I have used statistical process control techniques in my work, so I thought it would be interesting to analyse this data as if it were a device parameter running on a particular process. The signal is very strong, especially compared to the sort of data that I am used to in work.


Why does it matter if we are changing the climate or of it is natural variation?

Is the climate changing? The cusum says that England is getting warmer. It also says that the rate of change is increasing. The global data also supports this.

Is this bad? Well probably for crops, especially if repeated globally.

Is there a model that explains this? (well yes) but isn't this irrelevant?

Is CO₂ a greenhouse gas? Well it absorbs IR, and atmospheric physicists say it is. They say that increasing CO₂ woulld make the world warmer. Do we care if the warming is natural or artificial, if we can reduce it (or reduce our addition to it) and we accept that its effects would be bad?

If you want to know how to interpret the cusum, it is hidden in the spoiler below:

Cusums are used in certain types of statistical process control systems, and are very good at spotting when (noisy) processes are drifting from their target values. You decide on the target value (sometimes, but not always, the long term average) and then subtract this from each data point. This gives you the difference (or "Delta") above or below the target that each data point is. The cusum is the sum of all the deltas including the current data point. This is an integration and so removes noise from the signal.

To compare the process to the target, you then look at the gradients: horizontal will mean that it is running at target, upwards means above target, and downwards below target. An increase in steepness means that the process is moving further away from target, i.e. the process is still changing:

If the slope is such that there is an increase of 100 units in 100 readings, then the process is running at about 1 unit higher than the target, if it is 200 units lower in 100 readings then it is running at 2 units beow target etc.

Below I have annotated my cusum to show the different situations, and the increases in temperature:

 

[CFLarsen]

It depends. If a scientist allows his opinion to influence the conclusions he draws from his work, then he is not doing science.

If a scientist accurately reports conclusions, but lets his opinion draw him into areas he chooses to research, he is absolutely doing science.

But that isn't influencing his work, but what work he does.

 

[jimbob]

The data that is used to show warming trends has been fudged with. Compensated. You couldn't have put a reporting station up 100 years ago, and then paved a 2 mile concrete runway next to it and then a 5 story parking garage and get meaningful data about tempurature over time. What is worse is that the compensation uses population as the fudge factor, and not thermal mass change and distance from the reporting point. Even that would be poor without considering the change in energy expended next to the reporting point. Say .. jet fuel burning.

There is no scientific data. There is a mass hysteria. What should a skeptic make of that?

I DON'T KNOW

or

Sounds fishy to me.

It isn't just thermometers:

Here is a link to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), and more especially its reporting of the Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis;

I won't hotlink the graphs, but you can see for yourself that there is a definite reduction in June sea-ice extent, which could be explained by arctic warming.

June 2008 compared to past Junes

June sea ice extent is very similar to last year and is now the third lowest on record. It lies very close to the linear trend line for all average June sea ice extents since 1979, which indicates that the Arctic is losing an average of 41,000 square kilometers (15,800 square miles) of ice per year in June. Last year, the rapid melt leading to the record-breaking minimum extent began in July.

I doubt that there are more runways in the arctic ocean than in 1978.

 

[bob_conklin]

The rate of warming does show a significant trend in north amrerica and in parts of europe over the last 25 years when compensated by population data. The trend is the opposite for most of asia and the pacific rim. It's pure speculation, but could it be that when we started cleaning our air, that it got a percent of a degree warmer? Have you ever heard of the asian brown cloud?

 

[GreyICE]

But that isn't influencing his work, but what work he does.

Correct! Most scientists do not spin a roulette wheel to decide which field they will research. They tend to research things that interest them. This, in and of itself, is not an indication of bias.

Climate scientists, for instance, tend to research climate because the climate is interesting to them.

They do not conclude Global warming is occurring because they're interested in researching a mythical phenomena, but because the evidence they discovered researching the climate points them in that direction.

It is utterly spurious to say that someone's conclusions are biased because of their personal likes and dislikes. Objective conclusions can be drawn separate of those.

 

[bob_conklin]

It isn't just thermometers:

Here is a link to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), and more especially its reporting of the Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis;

I won't hotlink the graphs, but you can see for yourself that there is a definite reduction in June sea-ice extent, which could be explained by arctic warming.



I doubt that there are more runways in the arctic ocean than in 1978.

Data miners are always finding a piece of ice that is growing or deminishing to fit their theories. The only constant on this planet is change.

Here is just one source of ice data that contradicts yours.

http://www.globalwarminghoax.com/comment.php?comment.news.76

Here is some data on the cleaner air speculation from above.

http://environment.newscientist.com...rate-of-warming.html?feedId=online-news_rss20

 

[JEROME DA GNOME]

Correct! Most scientists do not spin a roulette wheel to decide which field they will research. They tend to research things that interest them. This, in and of itself, is not an indication of bias.

Of course it is.

You are attempting to deny human nature.

 

[bob_conklin]

What about sea level? Anyone want to come up with some mined sea level data so that I can mine some up that supports the opposing view? Does this sound scientific at all?

Is it worth killing one person in one poor country becuase we feel the need to regulate that countrie's use of it's natural resources?

Absolutely not.

 

[RandFan]

~Meh.

I think Penn has tried to find out. I know I have. Having been a GW skeptic I now accept it and I lean to the idea that humans significantly contribute to GW. Like Penn I'm not a scientist and it is complicated stuff. The whole point of skepticism is not to simply accept anything dogmatically. All truth from a scientific POV is provisional, though to be sure some truths are far more likely to be true than others. It would be perverse, after having seriously studied the available evidence, to be skeptical of evolution, the Holocaust, germ theory, atomic theory, etc.

Is it perverse to "not know" if AGW is a fact? I don't know.

 

[bob_conklin]

.
Did he?
Was it "if the fires are unchecked, then...."?
There might be a parallel with "If GW isn't checked, then....".

Carl Sagan was just trying to come up with a mechanism to explain the Fermi paradox.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox.

His hypothesis was the one where any civilization that was advanced enough to communicate would soon destroy themselves. The logical conclusion on this line of thinking is to err on the side of caution. It is still a valid point.

 

[bob_conklin]

Redwood growth? Polar bear population? Anyone else like to chage the subject from measuring surface tempurature and relating it to the carbon cycle so that it would be inappropriate to be skeptical on the subject?

 

[jimbob]

The rate of warming does show a significant trend in north amrerica and in parts of europe over the last 25 years when compensated by population data. The trend is the opposite for most of asia and the pacific rim. It's pure speculation, but could it be that when we started cleaning our air, that it got a percent of a degree warmer? Have you ever heard of the asian brown cloud?

As I said, the important question is whether it warming is adverse, and whether we can reduce this warming? (Sulphate aerosols are probably not the way forward though...)

I looked at the global warming hoax website, but it doesn't display anything in opera. (So reluctantly used firefox). The New Scientist article could explain some of the warming by cleaner air for England, but that would be when the Clean Air Acts came in in 1956. There was a warming trend in England before then.

I was not looking for "mined" data, just the commonly accepted data.

The speculation by the globalwarminghoax site didn't really seem to be in the same league of competance as the NISDC, who are the scientists taking the measurements. They say that ice shelves in antartica are retreating

Since the late 1980s, a number of Antarctic ice shelves have retreated. This table gives an overview of retreat events as of early 2008. Note that numbers are approximate and some observation periods overlap.

You would expect sea ice to be a better indication of sea temperatures than continental ice, as there should be less confounding with snowfall.

One side shows computer models and their maths, the other uses handwaving arguments, but doesn't actually show predictive models that fit the data.

I don't know either, but what data I can access and analyse in my amaturish fashion agrees with the scientific consensus.

 

[varwoche]

Remember all those head-lines about NOW is the HOTTEST time on record?

Turns out that NASA was reporting false data and the 1930's were the hottest time on record.

You've been duped.

Whatever year it was in the 30's was the hottest year on record in North America. Which means next to nothing.