Global Warming

[stone]

Would true academic freedom come if scientists lived on a citizens' dividend that ALL citizens received irrespective of whatever else they did? Then scientists could say and investigate whatever they wanted.

[MachineGhost]

Would true academic freedom come if scientists lived on a citizens' dividend that ALL citizens received irrespective of whatever else they did? Then scientists could say and investigate whatever they wanted.

I'll bite.  How would a citizen's dividend obliviate the need for millions and billions in research grants to tackle expensive research studies?

Heck, it costs approximately $1 billion and 10 years just to get a single molecule drug approved by the FDA.  How would a citizen's dividend deal with that kind of protectionist overregulation?

MG

[stone]

That cost comes about as an accumulation of many years of wages. The ridiculous scale of the FDA burden is put up because the FDA knows how much money is at stake and so can see that they need to try and keep potential crooks at bay. If drugs cost little to invent (because they were devised by almost volunteer labour), then they could be sold for less. The FDA would need to be less vigilant because there would be no motivation to push drugs that didn't work.
Back to climate studies, in that case again the grants are predominately for wages of the people involved.

Would true academic freedom come if scientists lived on a citizens' dividend that ALL citizens received irrespective of whatever else they did? Then scientists could say and investigate whatever they wanted.

I'll bite.  How would a citizen's dividend obliviate the need for millions and billions in research grants to tackle expensive research studies?

Heck, it costs approximately $1 billion and 10 years just to get a single molecule drug approved by the FDA.  How would a citizen's dividend deal with that kind of protectionist overregulation?

MG

[MachineGhost]

Climate skeptics perform independent analysis, finally convinced Earth is getting warmer

Muller may have been one of the only people to have actually done what anyone skeptical of the climate scientists should do—perform an independent check of their work—but his public spin on his results is completely unrealistic.

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/201 ... warmer.ars

[dualstow]

Really good documentary on the political side of climate change.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... -of-doubt/

[doodle]

MG,

What side of this issue do you fall towards at the moment? The wsj article above contradicts the later Berkeley Earth one. How do you reconcile that scientists receiving funding from Koch brothers are releasing scientific studies that contradict the interests and opinions of their donors?

If the scientific consensus were only 50/50 I would say the issue would merit discussion as a national agenda. The fact that the consensus seems to be 99/1 and this issue is being totally ignored is a bit concerning for me. I can't think of why an issue that has the potential for such wide reaching consequences is presently totally devoid of a risk mitigation strategy. Smart people tend to make a habit of not rushing at full barrel top speed into situations with their eyes closed, yet this is exactly what we are presently doing with regards to climate change. My feeling is that modern man is terrified by the idea that he isn't in control of nature. It is still at her mercy and by her graces that we survive. The notion that our present system and lifestyles that we have worked so hard to achieve could be undermining the long term survival of our species is too much cognitive dissonance for the average person deal with.....and so they choose to ignore the problem entirely and write it off.

[MachineGhost]

What side of this issue do you fall towards at the moment? The wsj article above contradicts the later Berkeley Earth one. How do you reconcile that scientists receiving funding from Koch brothers are releasing scientific studies that contradict the interests and opinions of their donors?

I'm not convinced by the unbiased data that global warming is arthropogenic.  I also think the whole global warming hysteria is overblown.  Humans thrive best in warmer temperatures, not colder.  I've never heard of a mass extinction event occuring akin to a nuclear summer as opposed to a nuclear winter, have you?

I do find it strange certain interests are against both concepts.  I can't understand where the money is in that position.  Maybe it is just anti-watermelon ideaology?  It seems to me it would be far more profitable to be for global warming, whatever the cause, and profit from government funding and grants, carbon credits, thawing of northern Canada to extend railroads, farm fertile farmland, resource extraction, electric cars, etc..  Lots of opportunities to profit.

[dualstow]

If the scientific consensus were only 50/50 I would say the issue would merit discussion as a national agenda. The fact that the consensus seems to be 99/1 and this issue is being totally ignored is a bit concerning for me.

Let's not get carried away here. It's only 97/3.  At least, that is the real statistic given in the pbs film I posted yesterday.

[MachineGhost]

Greenland:

[MachineGhost]

Dire predictions that the Arctic would be devoid of sea ice by September this year have proven to be unfounded after latest satellite images showed there is far more now than in 2012.

Scientists such as Prof Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, and Prof Wieslaw Maslowski, of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, have regularly forecast the loss of ice by 2016, which has been widely reported by the BBC and other media outlets.

Prof Wadhams, a leading expert on Arctic sea ice loss, has recently published a book entitled A Farewell To Ice in which he repeats the assertion that the polar region would free of ice in the middle of this decade.

As late as this summer, he was still predicting an ice-free September.

Yet, when figures were released for the yearly minimum on September 10, they showed that there was still 1.6 million square miles of sea ice (4.14 square kilometres), which was 21 per cent more than the lowest point in 2012.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016 ... ember-201/

[Reub]

I hear that some of the global warming whores were actually very upset that Hurricane Matthew didn't cause more death and destruction. How sick is that?

[WiseOne]

I don't think there's any question that the earth is warming rapidly:

- Global average temperatures have increased over time, with the rate increasing rapidly (e.g. see MG's plot of Greenland's temperature a few posts back).
- The lifecycle of plants in the spring in the northeast is advanced by 1-2 months compared to just a few decades ago. This has broad-ranging impacts beyond just when to plant your garden, e.g. migrating birds aren't finding plants at the time & place they expect them to be.
- Arctic and Antarctic ice melt is increasing. Greenland has had large ice mass losses, and Alaska native villages that have stood in the same place for centuries are sinking into the ground because of loss of permafrost.
- Glaciers are receding in Alaska, California, Montana, etc. My 19 year old niece was born in Alaska in August, and the postcard announcement was a photo that I took of her and her parents standing on a glacier near their home. In that same spot now, there's not a hint of ice to be seen.
- Almost every summer in NYC the past few years has broken heat records. And here we are at the end of October about to break a few more records (it will be in the 80s over the next few days). OK, that's not great evidence but it is awfully hard to ignore!

I thought the argument was whether greenhouse gases are the direct cause. There is a ton of correlative evidence, but it will never be enough for some people because there's no way to prove causation directly. You'd have to set up two identical planets that differ only in their levels of greenhouse gases, see what happens over 100 years, and then repeat that several times to get statistical significance. Since we can't do that, we can only build up multiple lines of correlative evidence, in order to try to disprove the theory. If you can't disprove it, then eventually you have to accept that it's probably true.

Personally, I think developing technology that scrubs greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere is a lot more likely to be fruitful than trying to get everyone to drive a Prius and pay extra fees to "offset" the carbon cost of their airline flights.

[Reub]

WiseOne we had frost warnings here just a few days ago. And two winters ago all my house pipes froze because the weather was so unbearably cold. That had never happened to me before.I was in Alaska not that long ago and saw plenty of ice and glaciers. It was in June and it was never warm. And we know that the global warming whores have been cooking the books on temps for a long time now.

[MachineGhost]

I'm still on the fence, but clearly when you include the temperature record pre-1880, you see that there is nothing abnormal going on from a long-term historical perspective, so it deflates the EnviroNazi argument that global warming is being caused by human intervention and their greenhouse gases. So where does that leave us? Well, it'll only be a true problem if temperatures starting making new all time highs. Just based on randomness alone we are not at that point where temperature increases are statistically significant to say it is anything but a natural cycle.

Now, if people want to head off oh-yet-another fad fabulous disaster that in all likelihood will never happen, that's fine. But don't do it by killing your economy. And don't expect everyone to participate.

[Reub]

Yes, MG. And where is the evidence that mankind can raise global temperatures?

[WiseOne]

And round and round we go. It's a religious argument by now...if you don't believe any facts presented, then there's really nothing to talk about is there?

Doodle - welcome back!!!!!

[Mountaineer]

Yes, MG. And where is the evidence that mankind can raise global temperatures?

Or lower them as was feared in the past (1970s anyone?).

http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/0 ... rmism.html

[Reub]

Since when is asking for proof that mankind can raise global temperatures " religion"?

[MachineGhost]

Yes, MG. And where is the evidence that mankind can raise global temperatures?

There is evidence but it is only logical inference over a very short historical period, not direct proof:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/empiric ... ediate.htm

OTOH, this is an example of how True Believers pooh-pooh out-of-sample data that invalidates their theory:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/1500-ye ... -cycle.htm

So I remain on the fence until functionally objective truth is established. There's too much politicalization of the subject on both sides. First casualty of politics is truth.