RE: Majority of Scientists skeptical of climate crisis

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Hillwilliam -> RE: Majority of Scientists skeptical of climate crisis (9/7/2013 5:48:10 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Phydeaux \You seem unclear on how publishing works as well. When a scientist conducts a study, he will then publish a paper. These papers are offered to journals, which will then cut or edit the paper for length, content etc. That is incorrect. When an article is offered to a journal, it is either published in its entirety, rejected or sent back for corrections. Once the article is in the hands of the editorial staff of the journal to be published, it is not changed from what the researcher sent in in any way, shape, form or fashion. I don't know where you heard that but it is utter BS.

JeffBC -> RE: Majority of Scientists skeptical of climate crisis (9/7/2013 7:09:54 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Hillwilliam That is incorrect. At this point I'm beginning to wonder if Phydeaux got a single thing correct on this entire thread starting right out with the thread title. I'm appreciative for your posts Hill, and the other "science-types" who have stepped in to add factual information. My science is "computer science" which, as we all know, isn't the same thing but even I knew that Phydeaux was getting pretty much the entirety of the scientific method wrong.

Rule -> RE: Majority of Scientists skeptical of climate crisis (9/7/2013 7:35:06 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Hillwilliam That is incorrect. When an article is offered to a journal, it is either published in its entirety, rejected or sent back for corrections. Once the article is in the hands of the editorial staff of the journal to be published, it is not changed from what the researcher sent in in any way, shape, form or fashion. Hillwilliam is right. Though I did once hear a story about someone who was asked to make his article shorter. He complied: he did not change nor delete a letter, but he chose a smaller font and submitted the article again. It got published.

Hillwilliam -> RE: Majority of Scientists skeptical of climate crisis (9/8/2013 5:43:04 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Rule quote: ORIGINAL: Hillwilliam That is incorrect. When an article is offered to a journal, it is either published in its entirety, rejected or sent back for corrections. Once the article is in the hands of the editorial staff of the journal to be published, it is not changed from what the researcher sent in in any way, shape, form or fashion. Hillwilliam is right. Though I did once hear a story about someone who was asked to make his article shorter. He complied: he did not change nor delete a letter, but he chose a smaller font and submitted the article again. It got published. Sending something back for changes or clarity is common but the editorial staff of the journal is not who makes the changes. It is the original author (or his grad students LOL)

PeonForHer -> RE: Majority of Scientists skeptical of climate crisis (9/8/2013 6:58:37 AM)
quote: Sending something back for changes or clarity is common but the editorial staff of the journal is not who makes the changes. It is the original author (or his grad students LOL) True in the UK, too. I don't know . . . maybe Phydeaux is talking about magazine or newspaper editors rather than journal editors. Odd.

leonine -> RE: Majority of Scientists skeptical of climate crisis (9/8/2013 6:59:43 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: DomKen quote: ORIGINAL: JeffBC quote: ORIGINAL: leonine You are mistaken about the history and method of science. And therein is why these conversations go nowhere... which is an interesting commentary on the American education system. I sometimes wonder if the degradation there is deliberate because it's easier to keep the sheep pacified when they are ignorant. Excellent summary. Bad science education in the US has a lot to do with creationists. At the local school level the teacher or system that emphasizes good science education get harassed by the bible thumpers. In many places the school administration is more sympathetic to the creationists than to the dedicated science teacher but even where the administration isn't it is easier to make the science teachers back off from "controversial" subjects, which for creationists is pretty much all of science, than to deal with angry parents all the time. In places where the fundy's don't hold sway there is also the problem that a good science education costs more money than teaching English or the like. So in cash strapped schools chemistry and physics is taught entirely from a book with no student performed experiments which renders fascinating subjects likely to ignite a students interest into yet another exercise in short term memorization. I've seen it in England too, both in classes and in bad popular-science books, so I think it goes deeper than that. A lot of teachers, and virtually all science journalists, don't understand the basic principles themselves: they prefer a simple, flashy model where (as a previous poster described it) physics was in ignorant darkness till Einstein came along and showed them the Truth, and they all said "Yes, of course, it's all so clear now!" And one of the mistakes that comes from this model is the idea that any crank with a wild new idea is going to be the next Einstein, because the model doesn't recognise that part of the landscape of science is a lot of cranks with theories that rewrite the accepted paradigm, and 99.9% of them will be forgotten because their theories don't fit the data. As with evolution, progress comes about by testing the new versions and discarding almost all of them. And one of the consequences is that by the time the public hears about the new versions, they've already been tested exhaustively, or you would't have heard about them Which is why it's just irritating when layfolk come up with things like "But what about sunspot cycles?" as if they thought nobody had ever asked that before.

Yachtie -> RE: Majority of Scientists skeptical of climate crisis (9/8/2013 7:52:56 AM)
FR - A leaked report to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) seen by the Mail on Sunday, has led some scientists to claim that the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century. If correct, it would contradict computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming. The news comes several years after it was predicted that the arctic would be ice-free by 2013. Despite the original forecasts, major climate research centres now accept that there has been a “pause” in global warming since 1997. The original predictions led to billions being invested in green measures to combat the effects of climate change. The extent to which temperatures will rise with carbon dioxide levels, as well as how much of the warming over the past 150 year, a total of 0.8C, is down to human greenhouse gas emissions are key issues. The IPCC says it is “95 per cent confident” that global warming has been caused by humans - up from 90 per cent in 2007 – according to the draft report. However, US climate expert Professor Judith Curry has questioned how this can be true as that rather than increasing in confidence, “uncertainty is getting bigger” within the academic community. Long-term cycles in ocean temperature, she said, suggest the world may be approaching a period similar to that from 1965 to 1975, when there was a clear cooling trend. At the time some scientists forecast an imminent ice age. Professor Anastasios Tsonis, of the University of Wisconsin, said: 'We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped.” The IPCC is said to maintain that their climate change models suggest a pause of 15 years can be expected. Other experts agree that natural cycles cannot explain all of the recorded warming.

Rule -> RE: Majority of Scientists skeptical of climate crisis (9/8/2013 8:14:53 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Yachtie Long-term cycles in ocean temperature, she said, suggest the world may be approaching a period similar to that from 1965 to 1975, when there was a clear cooling trend. At the time some scientists forecast an imminent ice age. I remember those forecasts. lol I suspect that climatology is much like the medical industry, the dental industry, the food industry and the clothing industry: some issues become fashionable now and again. Five years hence the same industries may advance the complete opposite fashions: long dresses instead of short dresses, et cetera.

dcnovice -> RE: Majority of Scientists skeptical of climate crisis (9/8/2013 8:29:15 AM)
FR Reading the Mail story, I was intrigued by a pair of neighboring quotes. Emphases mine. US climate expert Professor Judith Curry said last night: ‘In fact, the uncertainty is getting bigger.' Professor Anastasios Tsonis, of the University of Wisconsin, was one of the first to investigate the ocean cycles. He said: ‘We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped.' www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415191/Global-cooling-Arctic-ice-caps-grows-60-global-warming-predictions.html#ixzz2eJfdahqp

leonine -> RE: Majority of Scientists skeptical of climate crisis (9/8/2013 8:41:02 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Rule quote: ORIGINAL: Yachtie Long-term cycles in ocean temperature, she said, suggest the world may be approaching a period similar to that from 1965 to 1975, when there was a clear cooling trend. At the time some scientists forecast an imminent ice age. I remember those forecasts. lol I suspect that climatology is much like the medical industry, the dental industry, the food industry and the clothing industry: some issues become fashionable now and again. Five years hence the same industries may advance the complete opposite fashions: long dresses instead of short dresses, et cetera. You suspect wrong. The difference is that the first is a science, where facts matter, while the others are commercial concerns where what matters is what you can sell the consumers, and facts are whatever the advertising department says they are. Both the ice age theory and AGW were propounded in the '70s, and at the time both of them had the status of crank theories, because they predicted future trends quite different from those predicted by the then orthodox climatological theories. In the next few decades the data consistently didn't fit the predictions made by the ice age theory, so it was consigned to the dustbin of exploded hypotheses. However, the data also consistently didn't fit the orthodox theory that climate was too solid and stable to vary in any significant way over timescales of less than centuries. What the data fitted was the predictions made by AGW, which is why most experts now accept it as the best description we have of reality. (Which is the closest a real scientist will come to saying "the truth.") Forty years on when the theory became a political issue, it looked to people on the outside as if it had appeared out of nowhere as some sort of crazy fashion among the scientists, and the politicians assumed that if they could just tackle it like any other crazy fashion and PR it out of existence. But what they don't understand is that when a paid sceptic jumps up and down and shouts about a bit of data that doesn't fit, the experts aren't impressed because they have already seen decades of data that does fit.

leonine -> RE: Majority of Scientists skeptical of climate crisis (9/8/2013 8:51:25 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: dcnovice FR Reading the Mail story, I was intrigued by a pair of neighboring quotes. Emphases mine. US climate expert Professor Judith Curry said last night: ‘In fact, the uncertainty is getting bigger.' Professor Anastasios Tsonis, of the University of Wisconsin, was one of the first to investigate the ocean cycles. He said: ‘We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped.' www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415191/Global-cooling-Arctic-ice-caps-grows-60-global-warming-predictions.html#ixzz2eJfdahqp I don't read the Mail, because my sense of humour isn't that strong, but I do check out their front page, and over the last year they've run several huge headlines about some coming extreme weather - freeze, flood, drought - that their readers should expect in the next month. The real weather has done the exact opposite every time. Maybe one of these "experts" has been advising them?

JeffBC -> RE: Majority of Scientists skeptical of climate crisis (9/8/2013 8:58:35 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: leonine I don't read the Mail, because my sense of humour isn't that strong, but I do check out their front page, and over the last year they've run several huge headlines about some coming extreme weather - freeze, flood, drought - that their readers should expect in the next month. The real weather has done the exact opposite every time. Maybe one of these "experts" has been advising them? Actually, for just this once, the expert in question "Judith Curry" really is an expert. What I do not understand is how that changes anything exactly as you have already posted. Yes, scientists are questioning the theory. THat's what scientists DO. But in the absence of a better theory we are reduced to ouija boards and spirit worship.

leonine -> RE: Majority of Scientists skeptical of climate crisis (9/8/2013 3:30:20 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: JeffBC What I do not understand is how that changes anything exactly as you have already posted. Yes, scientists are questioning the theory. THat's what scientists DO. But in the absence of a better theory we are reduced to ouija boards and spirit worship. And this is where we hit the failure of understanding between politicians and scientists. Any political party whose members are constantly questioning and arguing about its basic beliefs is in trouble. So when they see a scientific community doing the same, whether it's evolutionists or climatologists, they take it as a sign that it's about to break apart. They can't understand that this is a condition of health in science.

JeffBC -> RE: Majority of Scientists skeptical of climate crisis (9/8/2013 5:12:26 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: leonine Any political party whose members are constantly questioning and arguing about its basic beliefs is in trouble. So when they see a scientific community doing the same, whether it's evolutionists or climatologists, they take it as a sign that it's about to break apart. They can't understand that this is a condition of health in science. chuckles Whereas scientists question the very nature of reality and time. Stephen Hawkings comes up with some pretty interesting musings now and again. Amazingly, despite questioning the very fabric of reality I can still type this message and you can still read it using the tools that science has given us. I think science works pretty well when it is left to do that. Money & politics are what muck up the works. On a side note, aren't we all glad the LHC didn't form a black hole and swallow the earth?

epiphiny43 -> RE: Majority of Scientists skeptical of climate crisis (9/8/2013 6:05:17 PM)
The quotes by the 'news' article of the experts are largely disingenuous. The increasing uncertainty is that new data has shown unanticipated and frightening warming in the ocean and ice sheets. The 'pause' has been a slowing (NOT ceasing) of warming in only the atmosphere. The uncertainty is how the heat storage and movement occurs in the many interacting systems, not IF it's occurring. Past predictions of ocean level rise are probably now outdated by the observed changes in the two major ice sheets and mid and upper levels of the now more carefully instrumented Southern Ocean. Increasing understanding of the many feedback mechanisms for carbon storage, fresh water sequestration (Ice sheets) and other previously stable systems is not lowering predictions of climate change, but increasing it. No change is bad everywhere, some areas will benefit from more suitable temps for agriculture and more rain. The bigger problem is the loss of so many places the human population now largely lives. A majority of urban areas face predictable inundation as does a huge amount of current food producing soil. As ecosystems move to higher elevation with temp rise, the total available land keeps shrinking, and usually has far less suitable soil and geography for food production.

popeye1250 -> RE: Majority of Scientists skeptical of climate crisis (9/9/2013 12:34:31 AM)
"Could, May, Might, Possable."

epiphiny43 -> RE: Majority of Scientists skeptical of climate crisis (9/9/2013 1:23:41 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: popeye1250 "Could, May, Might, Possable." Sounds like the Coyote trying to make himself less terrified as he plummets to the desert below. People in geography now disappearing under the ocean (Small countries in Oceania are already experiencing this) or seeing forests tilt and fall as permafrost thaws for the first time since the start of the last Ice Age turns stable slopes to flowing mud (Alaska and BC as we speak) or those near glaciers that provide water all through hot summers which are retreating to nothingness well know the "Could, May, Might, Possible" are meant to define exact levels, there is No question Global Warming is happening and at rates not seen since humans evolved on the planet, if not long before that. Local warming and cooling (Europe as the Gulf Stream/Atlantic Conveyer started and stopped has seen remarkable changes not mirrored elsewhere at the time) has been extreme in documented instances. What is happening now is world wide and unprecedented if we look at only times since a major asteroid strike or mega volcanic flow period (Deccan Traps and Siberia, there may be others.) upset the whole Earth climate and ecology. Some indications are the Northern Hemisphere Ice Cap at the end of the last Ice Age melted in stunningly short time. The causes weren't sudden, the warming was much longer, it appears a case of bi-stable conditions where forces build slowly but the effects move to the other polarity suddenly when a balance is changed. The example of putting small weights on a teeter totter is similar, no movement till the final weight that changes the balance across the pivot point. Global Warming is already melting the base of many ice sheets and glaciers, why their flow rates have accelerated faster than any previous theory predicted. Nice pics from Greenland on the net for any that care to look.

JeffBC -> RE: Majority of Scientists skeptical of climate crisis (9/9/2013 7:49:41 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: epiphiny43 Sounds like the Coyote trying to make himself less terrified as he plummets to the desert below. An interesting point... so now we look at whether or not it is man-made to which I ask, 'Does that matter?" Let's assume a different catastrophe. We detect a largish asteroid 3 years out on a 92% likely collision course with the planet. Do we look at that and say, "But it isn't our fault so we should ignore it?" Or perhaps we imagine there is some secret cabal of astronomers who are being paid to say this for whatever reasons... even as in year 3 we watch the thing becoming larger and larger? Oh wait.. that IS our stance on asteroid impacts LOL

DesideriScuri -> RE: Majority of Scientists skeptical of climate crisis (9/9/2013 8:17:27 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: JeffBC quote: ORIGINAL: epiphiny43 Sounds like the Coyote trying to make himself less terrified as he plummets to the desert below. An interesting point... so now we look at whether or not it is man-made to which I ask, 'Does that matter?" Let's assume a different catastrophe. We detect a largish asteroid 3 years out on a 92% likely collision course with the planet. Do we look at that and say, "But it isn't our fault so we should ignore it?" Or perhaps we imagine there is some secret cabal of astronomers who are being paid to say this for whatever reasons... even as in year 3 we watch the thing becoming larger and larger? Oh wait.. that IS our stance on asteroid impacts LOL Of course, it matters. If it's not man made, then making all sorts of changes to what we are doing isn't going to help anyway. That is, unless you've found a way to legislate ocean currents, ice forming/thawing, etc.? Maybe you want to get a great big A/C unit and put it up in the atmosphere so that we can use the relative cold of space to rid the Earth of heat while cooling it down directly. How do we actually know if global temperatures going up by a couple degrees is actually bad? We assume it is, but, do we actually know? What is really cool about science, though, is that when something doesn't go the way the science thought it would go, you can go back through and try to figure out where the error came into play. Another thing science can do, is get the people or groups in disagreement together (AGW supporters and AGW deniers) and have them work together. Give the deniers the raw data and show exactly what was done to get to where you are today. Having other scientists look over the process could very well turn up errors, change parameters, and could even sway support. A great tragedy was found out when the raw data that EAU used to build the IPCC models turned up lost. That reduces the opportunity to replicate the science. You can't prove that the numbers being used aren't fudged to fit some belief. Had the raw data still existed, the process could be shown, as supportive evidence of non-manipulation.

mnottertail -> RE: Majority of Scientists skeptical of climate crisis (9/9/2013 11:21:46 AM)
Göttingen University had a form rejection letter for the Wolfskuhl prize for solving Fermat's last theorem. Your first error occurs on page____________, line_______________. Wiles solved it in secrecy and alone. There are many reasons not to have quasi-scientists not in the discipline working together (especially when disagreeing in terms they do not understand). So, I dunno.

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