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Polar vortex

Old 11-10-14, 03:05 PM
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Originally Posted by tjspiel
You might want to do a little research on Nasif Nahle before you take the above charts too seriously.
Are you saying the data on temperature and CO2 concentration is incorrect? If so, show conflicting data. If not, you're engaging in ad hominem malarkey.
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Old 11-10-14, 03:06 PM
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Originally Posted by achoo
Nobel Prize-winning scientist Ivar Giaever:

Climatologist and member of the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning IPCC John Christy:

Two scientists. Thousands of others do not agree.

And to respond to the quote "In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?" No, it is not incontrovertible at all. It is however overwhelming at this time. You need really, really good evidence to controvert overwhelming evidence, and at this point, no one has that. There is no harm in scientists following alternative theories that they think might have merit. There is harm in pretending there is some kind of green conspiracy amongst 97% of scientists. Why would they do that? It makes no sense whatsoever.
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Old 11-10-14, 03:09 PM
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Originally Posted by lostarchitect
Two scientists. Thousands of others do not agree.

And to respond to the quote "In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?" No, it is not incontrovertible at all. It is however overwhelming at this time. You need really, really good evidence to controvert overwhelming evidence, and at this point, no one has that. There is no harm in scientists following alternative theories that they think might have merit. There is harm in pretending there is some kind of green conspiracy amongst 97% of scientists. Why would they do that? It makes no sense whatsoever.
You keep saying "97%".

Where do you get that talking point?
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Old 11-10-14, 03:11 PM
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Originally Posted by alan s
Therefore, the general consensus can be wrong.

No one can prove there is global warming, global cooling or climate change taking place right now. Furthermore, even if you could prove it, no one can prove that human activity is the cause of it. Even if you could prove human activity is the cause of climate change, no one can prove that anything meaningful can be done to change it. To conclude, yes, the "chicken little scientists" are more full of bunk than the average person.
This is how science works. Things are not proven, because they cannot be proven. They can be disproven. We go with what the body of knowledge points to, not stuff that has been proven. Your distrust for science appears to be based somewhat on your lack of knowledge of what exactly science is.
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Old 11-10-14, 03:14 PM
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Originally Posted by achoo
You keep saying "97%".

Where do you get that talking point?

NASA. It's not a "talking point," it's a simple fact.

Look, you can believe bizarre propaganda about a conspiracy of scientists, or you can believe the scientists. It's up to you.
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Old 11-10-14, 03:18 PM
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Originally Posted by Corben
It sounds more serious and deadly and I suppose they're right because of the Solar Minimum the sun is going through right now, winters will become more severe and the polar air effects more of the planet. Every eleven yrs the sun goes through these solar minimums.

Not sure if serious... The sun just passed its 11 year solar MAXIMUM. We've got roughly 5-6 years until we reach a minimum again. Admittedly, this cycle has been extremely weak, but that doesn't change the fact that we just passed the maximum.

Not to mention the sunspot we had last month was one of the biggest seen in a while (or something like that.) It was visible to the naked eye (with a filter.) I saw it during the eclipse here in MT.

As for all the climate change talk... The climate IS changing. It would be changing whether humans were here or not. Turns out the earth goes through very very long stages, including ice ages. The amount of CO2 and H2O in the atmosphere is increasing, therefore warming the planet, but it was increasing BEFORE we got here. Sure, we've sped it up a bit, but that doesn't mean we're causing the earth to do something it can't handle and that everything will die yada yada. Arguing that there is NO climate change is stupid, arguing that the climate change that we're currently going through is going to somehow be catastrophic and kill everyone is also stupid. (Exaggerating, but you get my point.)

Many of the articles that I read on climate change put it in a huge negative connotation that attempts to make everyone scared. It's fear mongering and also untrue. The earth will not change enough to make it unsuitable for humans in any reasonable amount of time. We (humans) will probably have been long gone by then. (Whether to space, or dead, I do not know.)

Oh and on topic. Yes, I did ride through the 10F and 4 inches of snow we got last night. How else was I supposed to test my pogies and studded tires?

Last edited by corrado33; 11-10-14 at 03:31 PM.
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Old 11-10-14, 03:18 PM
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What was the original topic of this thread again? Something about riding in the cold maybe?

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Old 11-10-14, 03:24 PM
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Originally Posted by alan s
No one can prove there is global warming, global cooling or climate change taking place right now. Furthermore, even if you could prove it, no one can prove that human activity is the cause of it. Even if you could prove human activity is the cause of climate change, no one can prove that anything meaningful can be done to change it. To conclude, yes, the "chicken little scientists" are more full of bunk than the average person.
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Old 11-10-14, 03:31 PM
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Actually, people knew the earth was round for thousands of years. The disagreement was if anyone could traverse the huge uncharted ocean. Columbus caled the natives indians, because no one in his circle had seen anyone from India at that time. He was an idiot that bumped into the Caribbean, not even the continental landmass.

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Old 11-10-14, 03:33 PM
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Originally Posted by the sci guy
Indeed.

- Andy
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Old 11-10-14, 03:35 PM
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Originally Posted by lostarchitect
NASA. It's not a "talking point," it's a simple fact.

Look, you can believe bizarre propaganda about a conspiracy of scientists, or you can believe the scientists. It's up to you.
So you don't know where that comes from, do you?

Here's the published scientific paper that your "97% of scientists" claim comes from:

Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature

That paper is bull.

Look up what past IPCC member Richard Tol has to say about it:

The claim of a 97% consensus on global warming does not stand up

Cook and co selected some 12,000 papers from the scientific literature to test whether these papers support the hypothesis that humans played a substantial role in the observed warming of the Earth. 12,000 is a strange number. The climate literature is much larger. The number of papers on the detection and attribution of climate change is much, much smaller.

Cook’s sample is not representative. Any conclusion they draw is not about “the literature” but rather about the papers they happened to find.

Most of the papers they studied are not about climate change and its causes, but many were taken as evidence nonetheless. Papers on carbon taxes naturally assume that carbon dioxide emissions cause global warming – but assumptions are not conclusions. Cook’s claim of an increasing consensus over time is entirely due to an increase of the number of irrelevant papers that Cook and co mistook for evidence.

The abstracts of the 12,000 papers were rated, twice, by 24 volunteers. Twelve rapidly dropped out, leaving an enormous task for the rest. This shows. There are patterns in the data that suggest that raters may have fallen asleep with their nose on the keyboard. In July 2013, Mr Cook claimed to have data that showed this is not the case. In May 2014, he claimed that data never existed.

The data is also ridden with error. By Cook’s own calculations, 7% of the ratings are wrong. Spot checks suggest a much larger number of errors, up to one-third.

Cook tried to validate the results by having authors rate their own papers. In almost two out of three cases, the author disagreed with Cook’s team about the message of the paper in question.

Attempts to obtain Cook’s data for independent verification have been in vain. Cook sometimes claims that the raters are interviewees who are entitled to privacy – but the raters were never asked any personal detail. At other times, Cook claims that the raters are not interviewees but interviewers.

The 97% consensus paper rests on yet another claim: the raters are incidental, it is the rated papers that matter. If you measure temperature, you make sure that your thermometers are all properly and consistently calibrated. Unfortunately, although he does have the data, Cook does not test whether the raters judge the same paper in the same way.

Consensus is irrelevant in science. There are plenty of examples in history where everyone agreed and everyone was wrong. Cook’s consensus is also irrelevant in policy. They try to show that climate change is real and human-made. It is does not follow whether and by how much greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced.

The debate on climate policy is polarised, often using discussions about climate science as a proxy. People who want to argue that climate researchers are secretive and incompetent only have to point to the 97% consensus paper.

On 29 May, the Committee on Science, Space and Technology of the US House of Representatives examined the procedures of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Having been active in the IPCC since 1994, serving in various roles in all its three working groups, most recently as a convening lead author for the fifth assessment report of working group II, my testimony to the committee briefly reiterated some of the mistakes made in the fifth assessment report but focused on the structural faults in the IPCC, notably the selection of authors and staff, the weaknesses in the review process, and the competition for attention between chapters. I highlighted that the IPCC is a natural monopoly that is largely unregulated. I recommended that its assessment reports be replaced by an assessment journal.

In an article on 2 June, Nuccitelli ignores the subject matter of the hearing, focusing instead on a brief interaction about the 97% consensus paper co-authored by… Nuccitelli. He unfortunately missed the gist of my criticism of his work.

Successive literature reviews, including the ones by the IPCC, have time and again established that there has been substantial climate change over the last one and a half centuries and that humans caused a large share of that climate change.

There is disagreement, of course, particularly on the extent to which humans contributed to the observed warming. This is part and parcel of a healthy scientific debate. There is widespread agreement, though, that climate change is real and human-made.

I believe Nuccitelli and colleagues are wrong about a number of issues. Mistakenly thinking that agreement on the basic facts of climate change would induce agreement on climate policy, Nuccitelli and colleagues tried to quantify the consensus, and failed.

In his defence, Nuccitelli argues that I do not dispute their main result. Nuccitelli fundamentally misunderstands research. Science is not a set of results. Science is a method. If the method is wrong, the results are worthless.

Nuccitelli’s pieces are two of a series of articles published in the Guardian impugning my character and my work. Nuccitelli falsely accuses me of journal shopping, a despicable practice.

The theologist Michael Rosenberger has described climate protection as a new religion, based on a fear for the apocalypse, with dogmas, heretics and inquisitors like Nuccitelli. I prefer my politics secular and my science sound.
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Old 11-10-14, 03:37 PM
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Originally Posted by noglider
This is how science works. Things are not proven, because they cannot be proven. They can be disproven. We go with what the body of knowledge points to, not stuff that has been proven. Your distrust for science appears to be based somewhat on your lack of knowledge of what exactly science is.
Lots of things can be proven. Unproven things that are undergoing attempts to prove them are theories. Some theories cannot be proven at a root cause level. Some things can be.

When they are hard to prove, then there is a tendency to rely on "scientific consensus" (an oxymoron of sorts) which has a distressingly common characteristic of being unceremoniously tipped on it's head by things like 32 year old patent clerks who come up with the Theory of Relativity and completely change entire scientific fields. The reason we have "breakthroughs" is because it destroys the scientific consensus of the time or context. Every field of science and engineering is filled with many similar examples and it happens every day in small and often in not so small ways.

So actually, this is how science works. It's not a vote and it never was. Skepticism is healthy .... and required.

I don't know if man made global warming is correct or not. I do know that the models based on current theory have some gargantuan holes in them and that the ability to predict what would happen from a given data set to predict actual following data (even when the data is known by history) are not good. That's a pretty good indicator that the science is not "settled" right there (as if there ever was such a thing anyhow - and should not have to be argued).


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Old 11-10-14, 03:42 PM
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Scientific theories cannot be proven but can be disproven. If you don't understand this, your education is incomplete. Read about the scientific process. It's true that skepticism is useful. It's true that scientists have been wrong. There is no such thing as settled science. In fact, it is a contradiction in terms. The peer review system is not perfect, but it beats all other ways of advancing knowledge. I suggest you learn about it. Scientists argue all the time, but that doesn't mean they are categorically full of bunk.

If you are looking for rationally derived knowledge, you look to science. If you eschew the generally accepted views because they are generally accepted, you are acting anti-rationalist.
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Old 11-10-14, 03:50 PM
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Originally Posted by lostarchitect
NASA. It's not a "talking point," it's a simple fact.

Look, you can believe bizarre propaganda about a conspiracy of scientists, or you can believe the scientists. It's up to you.
Bluntly:

That you don't know where "97%" originates and that you believe it's a "simple fact" both belie your ignorance.

You just blindly believed it.

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Old 11-10-14, 03:51 PM
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Can this thread please be moved to the Us vs Them forum.

This is the "Extinction is inevitable, F*** it, let's go ride bikes!" forum, isn't it?
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Old 11-10-14, 03:52 PM
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It is a balmy -13 here today... 8 F for you southerners.
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Old 11-10-14, 03:55 PM
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Originally Posted by achoo
Are you saying the data on temperature and CO2 concentration is incorrect? If so, show conflicting data. If not, you're engaging in ad hominem malarkey.
I'm saying the scale of your graphs conveniently obfuscates the last million years and the statement that the current CO2 levels (about 400 ppm) "which is about as low as its ever been" is very misleading. Actually it's as high as it's been in quite awhile.

"During the last 800,000 years, CO2 fluctuated between about 180 ppm during the ice ages and 280 ppm during the interglacial warm periods" - https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/news/2013/CO2400.html

The fact is that I'm not a climate scientist and I doubt that you are either. I rely on people more knowledgeable in those areas than I am to figure out what is really going on. Of that group of people, it's pretty easy to determine that Nasif Nahle has questionable qualifications and is probably not the best source of information regarding climate.

Last edited by tjspiel; 11-10-14 at 04:10 PM.
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Old 11-10-14, 03:56 PM
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Originally Posted by modernjess
Can this thread please be moved to the Us vs Them forum.

This is the "Extinction is inevitable, F*** it, let's go ride bikes!" forum, isn't it?
Oh, it's just what happens to religious zealots when their church dogma is questioned. When someone as renowned as Freeman Dyson believes this

I simply find that a lot of these claims that experts are making are absurd. Not that I know better, but I know a few things. My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have.
And even past IPCC members say this:

The theologist Michael Rosenberger has described climate protection as a new religion, based on a fear for the apocalypse, with dogmas, heretics and inquisitors
The problem isn't with the skeptics.

It's with the true believers.

After all, science is BASED on skepticism. Not attacking skeptics as "deniers".

Hence all my popcorn-munching. This is fun.

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Old 11-10-14, 03:58 PM
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Originally Posted by TransitBiker
Actually, people knew the earth was round for thousands of years. The disagreement was if anyone could traverse the huge uncharted ocean. Columbus caled the natives indians, because no one in his circle had seen anyone from India at that time. He was an idiot that bumped into the Caribbean, not even the continental landmass.

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Another one of your "facts?"
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Old 11-10-14, 04:00 PM
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Originally Posted by modernjess
Can this thread please be moved to the Us vs Them forum.

This is the "Extinction is inevitable, F*** it, let's go ride bikes!" forum, isn't it?
It's 5:00. Made it through another day at work without dying of boredom. Special shout out to all those who contributed to this enlightening topic.
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Old 11-10-14, 04:02 PM
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Originally Posted by alan s
Another one of your "facts?"
Please read: Christopher Columbus was awful (but this other guy was not) - The Oatmeal
(seriously, please read it)
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Old 11-10-14, 04:07 PM
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Originally Posted by tjspiel
I'm saying the scale of you graphs conveniently obfuscates the last million years and the statement that the current CO2 levels (about 400 ppm) "is about as low as they've every been" is a very misleading statement.
If that were your argument you wouldn't have mentioned Nasif Nahle.

Why is noting that CO2 concentrations have been as high as 7000 ppm compared to today's slightly less than 400 ppm, and that CO2 concentrations have never been significantly lower than 400 ppm while also pointing out that global average temperature doesn't follow CO2 at all, as well as the planet is currently about 13C under it's "normal" average temperature "misleading"?

Because it gores the ox of apocalyptic "the sky is falling" WE-MUST-DO-SOMETHING-NOW climate alarmists?

Sorry, not buying it.
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Old 11-10-14, 04:12 PM
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Originally Posted by alan s
Another one of your "facts?"
Actually, it's true.

Columbus figured that China was about 3,000 miles west of Spain - pretty much the very limit of how far his ships could sail. The reason no one wanted to sail west was because Eratosthenes had established the Earth's circumference at about 25,000 miles/40,000 km almost 2,000 years earlier - and they knew that they couldn't make it to China that way - it was too far.

Ferdinand and Isabella probably gave Columbus his ships just to get rid of him.

Luckily for him, there actually was a continent about 3,000 miles west of Spain.
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Old 11-10-14, 04:17 PM
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Originally Posted by noglider
Scientific theories cannot be proven but can be disproven. If you don't understand this, your education is incomplete. Read about the scientific process. It's true that skepticism is useful. It's true that scientists have been wrong. There is no such thing as settled science. In fact, it is a contradiction in terms. The peer review system is not perfect, but it beats all other ways of advancing knowledge. I suggest you learn about it. Scientists argue all the time, but that doesn't mean they are categorically full of bunk.

If you are looking for rationally derived knowledge, you look to science. If you eschew the generally accepted views because they are generally accepted, you are acting anti-rationalist.
At the risk of turning this into yet another sidebar argument in this long lost thread, I'd just say this:

We're agreeing in general. In my experience in a working lifetime of science and engineering, like others I've had the distressing experience of seeing that which was "proven" to be true found to be anything but. And,yes, I understand the peer review process with all of its benefits and all of its warts and politics. So I don't need the lecture, but thanks anyhow.

In this particular case, there are lots of reasons to be skeptical and it is inappropriate to whack those who are being skeptical just because they have skepticism. As you and I have both noted, skepticism is useful and given the state of the current theory on this particular subject, someone ought to be skeptical because there are some gaping holes in the models and the forecasts that are very worthy of being questioned. Especially more so since there are those who are proposing the expenditure of trillions of dollars to correct problems that may or may not be problems at all.

But as before, this is a discussion that does not belong here. The original topic had something to do with riding in cold weather not to litigate the whole topic of climate change. So this is where I exit this thread. It's too far out of control.

J.
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Old 11-10-14, 04:19 PM
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Originally Posted by achoo
Bluntly:

That you don't know where "97%" originates and that you believe it's a "simple fact" both belie your ignorance.

You just blindly believed it.


You're right, actually! I read it on NASA's website and I believed it, because I trust the scientists at NASA and the JPL, and the many scientific organizations they polled for their research. Here, you can read it yourself. Being a non-scientist who understands some science, I choose to trust the vast majority of scientists and not believe conspiracy theories. I do not conduct my own independent climate research, because I lack the skills to do so properly. Call me crazy.

I assume you do not "blindly trust" anything you read, and instead go out and do your own climate research? I wonder how many times you have been to the Arctic and Antarctic to research your theories? I would really love to see your original, peer-reviewed white paper! Please forward it!

(edit: Also, what is your point about the 97% figure? If it is incorrect and has been revised up or down since the paper you mention was published, can you show the actual number? Is it 96%? 98%? It is still the vast majority of scientists, either way. If your point is that scientists can be incorrect, well, of course! That's part of science.)

(edit 2: NASA does not cite the paper your contrary source takes issue with, FYI.)
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Last edited by lostarchitect; 11-10-14 at 04:36 PM.
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