Should you believe in climate change?

[Undertoad]

Not following you. The bottom of every Wikipedia page is a list of non-Wikipedia references.

[Happy Monkey]

The top of these particular wikipedia pages (especially the second one) is mostly a blurb about what you will find in the links at the bottom.

[Undertoad]

Oh now I get it; sorry, being dense;

Who are the scientists? The population of all scientists.

What do they say? They agree with IPCC 2001.

What is overwhelmingly? Implied, because there aren't many of the population of all scientsts on the disagreement page in Wikipedia.

Also, according to Wikipedia, when scientific organizations make statements, they never make a statement against AGW. Okay, would such a statement require a simple majority vote, or... an overwhelming majority vote?

HM, assuming this was any other topic, would you be convinced? I am not convinced.

More specific quibbles:
We're out of sync already... what I was thinking by "AGW" is this:

1) everything we got says it got 0.6 degrees C warmer in the last 134 years
2) mankind's introduction of some gases is definitely responsible for this

(And that's what I "roughly speaking" believe.)

But what the 2001 IPCC statement says is this:

1) everything we got says it got 0.6 degrees C warmer in the last 120 years, and most of that in the last few decades
2) mankind's introduction of CO2 and methane are almost definitely responsible for this
3) between 1990 and 2100, global temp will rise between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees C

I think we can resolve our differences on #1 and 2. What do you think about #3. Shall we just throw it out?

The IPCC did. In 2013 their predictions section, a far cry from the front page already, contains this item:

The global surface temperature increase by the end of the 21st century is likely to exceed 1.5 °C relative to the 1850 to 1900 period

Likely to = 66-90% probability.

You know why they walked back. Let's not say the word.

So, roughly speaking, the 2013 IPCC statement does not agree with the scientific consensus, as stated in the 2001 IPCC statement.

I suppose we could add them to the list of deniers. But in some sense of all this, fuck the IPCC. It's a group of people, chosen in a political manner, by a political organization, and working by committee. They are building political consensus, not scientific consensus.

[Happy Monkey]

HM, assuming this was any other topic, would you be convinced? I am not convinced.

Most other scientific topics don't have major industries trying to sow doubt in them, so it wouldn't come up. But yeah, if every major medical group said vaccines were safe and effective, and even ones funded and populated by anti-vaxxers said "well, maybe", I'd find that pretty convincing.

Actually, a better example might be smoking and lung cancer. When even the studies funded by the tobacco companies had to stop denying the connection, that was an overwhelming consensus.

The IPCC did. In 2013 their predictions section contains this item:

The global surface temperature increase by the end of the 21st century is likely to exceed 1.5 °C relative to the 1850 to 1900 period

You know why they walked back. Let's not say the word.

They raised, but softened the lower prediction, and removed the upper limit. On the whole, that's a bit of a "walk back", but not much. I don't consider it a weakness of science, though, when predictions change in the course of a decade, and the softening of the language probably results in a bigger consensus.

But in some sense of all this, fuck the IPCC. It's a group of people, chosen in a political manner, by a political organization, and working by committee. They are building political consensus, not scientific consensus.

As with evolution and vaccines, politics is where most of the debate (as opposed to research) on the issue is taking place. What you say may be true of the IPCC, but all they did was codify what they thought the consensus was, ask actual scientific organizations if they concurred, and present the results to governments. The second part of that is relevant to the discussion.

[Undertoad]

Politics is where the consensus is really built, and there's where my hate hate comes from. The argument stops being scientific and starts being political.

At that point, the facts collections start to differ, and meta-facts show up. Example.

NASA reports there is a 38% probability 2014 was the warmest year on record.

The orange team takes home: 2014 was the warmest year ever.

The purple team takes home: NASA can't say what the warmest year is.

Both are wrong, but they carry their validating meta-facts back to their hives and add it to their bullshit stew. Everybody's eating it and convinced they are correct and have unlocked the special secret sauce. There is NOTHING in the world as satisfying as being RIGHT.

Sometimes one team even takes a detailed look at the other team's meta-facts and.... guess what, their information is all wrong! More proof our team is right!

But now, a study shows that the orange and purple teams are equally well-informed and scientifically literate. What! Impossible!

The meta-fact from the 2013 literature review is 97% of scientists agree with AGW. That's not what the study says. What the study says is much less convincing, certainly not overwhelming, in my opinion*. But 97%, THAT is impressive... add it to the stew.




*forming your own opinion is left as an exercise for the reader or you could just take a nap because wtf is all this shit anyway

[xoxoxoBruce]

You say Orange and Purple are both wrong. I don't think either are wrong, although they are another brick in the wall. They can elicit anger, like all slogans, bumper stickers, headlines, because they're impossible to counter without more information than most people want to hear.

Any official statement from the IPCC, NASA, AMA, UN, Vatican, Kremlin, et al, is position, not explanation. I think it's safe to assume there is always politics, power struggles, self interest, and dozens of unknowns, behind it. But isn't that what we really need to know, the position of the power players?

I try to keep in mind I'm not a leader, I'm a follower. As much as I try to stay informed, understand what's behind the curtain, and pride myself on being smarter than the average bear, I know it doesn't mean shit because I have no power. I also know if I gather a band of like-thinking merry (wo)men, to fight for truth, justice, and the American way, the people with power will think it's cute. But if we cross in the middle of the block, or against the light, they'll crush us like grapes.

[Undertoad]

BO added "dangerous" to the consensus. Given what we've discussed in this thread, do you believe scientists agree on that? It wasn't included in any of the literature reviews.

Orange team meta-fact

[Happy Monkey]

Of course they agree with that; that's why what they've been telling us has been considered a warning. "Good news everybody, it's gonna get warmer!" wouldn't have provoked such a political backlash; Exxon could have taken credit for saving you cash on your heating bill.

The question of danger is not a scientific question, though, more of a sociopoliticical one. When climate shifts, some previously abundant areas will be less so, and some previously inhospitable ones will become less so. Unfortunately, the currently abundant areas are where the people are, and we've seen what happens when people are displaced en masse. That's where the danger to people comes.

Though, of course, many would consider danger to displaced species as well, but I would guess that' not what the tweet is referring to.

Sure, there's hyperbole on every side of every issue. That doesn't mean that every issue is halfway between the hyperbole of the extremes. So there are issues with the 97% report (did I miss discussion of those issues on the thread?); it's margin of error would have to be pretty big to get out of "overwhelming" territory.

[regular.joe]

Is there any way we can put politics aside and get to the truth of the matter?

For one of my college courses I did a little research just to get to the bottom of the question: is climate change real or not? Just to get to that question. Not whether climate change is man made or not, and we certainly can get to that as well.

One of my observations is that on the internet, and this doesn't matter if I'm using the surface net or digging a bit into the deeper net of academia, business, and government; sources that report that climate change (global warming used interchangeably here) is real are almost always reputable educational, scientific organizations, business, and government sources. Overwhelmingly, sources that refute that climate change is real are private, not affiliated with any educational, scientific, or business other than business in the fossil fuel industry, and not affiliated with government sources. Almost all of the sources that I could find refuting climate change could not be cited on a thesis paper. There certainly are sources that refute climate change is real that can be cited on a thesis, the number is ridiculously small when compared to the number of sources that can be cited that report the reality of climate change.

In the same manner, and this is what my post earlier is getting at, these guys can find about 4,000 papers that explicitly speak about AGW. Of course 66.4% of all papers published between 1991-2011, over 12,000 papers, support that climate change is real but take no explicit position on AGW. Se we are really seeing a 97% snapshot of 4,000 papers of 12,000 published. I also understand after reading a few that most scientific papers published are very narrow and focused on a specific topic, event, or set of observations. It is not a mystery to me that 32% of the 12,000 papers published explicitly talk to AGW. At the end of the day it must be noted that only,about 3% of 4,000, that's 120 to 3,880; the difference between explicit support of AGW and explicit refutation. This is significant, this isn't a 60/40 split.

[Undertoad]

Good post Joe

You were saying it's 97% of the papers. It was really 97% of the abstracts. But hey we can mince words on that.



"97% of the abstracts|papers in climate journals" has morphed right into "97% of scientists". Not scientists who have written papers in climate journals. Not climate scientists, or earth scientists. Just plain, scientists.

[Lamplighter]

Sitting in the waiting room while my Ranger was being diagnosed, I picked up a magazine.
It was the March 2015 issue of National Geographic, and this issue is devoted
to just how people come to believe a thing is true or not.
I wondered whether it was the basis of UT thesis here on AGW, or just coincidence.

In any case, the NG articles start with "flat earth" in earlier times, and go on to:
Did NASA actually land on the moon, Do vaccinations cause autism, Is climate change real, etc....

Basically most of this NG issue is dealing with the question of why people come to believe something, or not,
... even if it is contrary to what "reputable scientists" and/or scientific methods are reporting.

I can't here give all their arguments, but they conclude some of the following:

A) Scientific "facts", by themselves, often do not convince or change the beliefs of people.

B) Scientists that become advocates tend to lose credibility.
So discrediting the "reputation of the scientist" and "who paid for the study" are often used as tactics.

C) Scientists who do become advocates usually can not later on regain their previous credibility.

D) People who don't buy what the science says tend to put their inter-personal relationships at a higher priority.
e.g. "tribal relations" outweigh "factual arguments" to the point that:
If were they to change their belief, they would be at odds with their "tribe"
... even to risking being expelled from their "tribe"

E) "trust" of the message-giver is of great importance. e.g., family members are usually more trusted.
They give one example of a daughter being unable to convince her father
... and she finally says: "If you don't believe in xxxxx, you don't trust me."

F) The issue also includes the recently publicized ideas that people
who are"scientifically informed" tend to be more polarized on climate warming, etc....

------

There are many different tactics used to convince or deny issues based in science.

I see UT's post about Obama using the word "dangerous" in a Tweet, primarily as a tactic. That is, he has found a relatively minor issue in a social medium that, whether true or not, has little to do with the "truth" about global warming, climate change, or AGW. That is, it's a political argument.

In this instance, "dangerous" is a subjective word, to be interpreted based on time, place, and circumstances. For example, sea level rise due to AGW is probably not "dangerous" to a family living on a hill, but for poppulations living on a gradually flooding island or the Lousiana "Swamp People", the impact could well be "dangerous".

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Lamplighter

A) Scientific "facts", by themselves, often do not convince or change the beliefs of people.

Because scientific "facts" by themselves, can not be separated from advertising slogans, or the carny's bark.

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by regular.joe

At the end of the day it must be noted that only,about 3% of 4,000, that's 120 to 3,880; the difference between explicit support of AGW and explicit refutation. This is significant, this isn't a 60/40 split.

Here's one Purple Team player's take on these numbers.

The largest endorsement group was categorized as “implicitly endorses AGW without minimizing it.” They provided this example of an implied endorsement:

…carbon sequestration in soil is important for mitigating global climate change.

That should never be enough to put an abstract into the largest sector of the 97%, the yellow piece above? It implicitly mentions climate change but not anthropomorphic, and is a pretty weak endorsement. This is supposed to be Cook J's example?

I haven't looked into that much further. Of course Mr. Purple is a player and he wants to play the game too.

[Happy Monkey]

…carbon sequestration in soil is important for mitigating global climate change.

Originally Posted by Undertoad

That should never be enough to put an abstract into the largest sector of the 97%, the yellow piece above? It implicitly mentions climate change but not anthropomorphic, and is a pretty weak endorsement.

It implies that it is important to mitigate global climate change.

[Undertoad]

We can argue on that point.

'course if we wind up arguing on that point, it's a pretty weak endorsement.