60 posts tagged “science”

Like a mouse to a trap with cheese, a committed local climate follower sprung the hyperlink on Drudge today.

The article was out of Australia discussing a case study of a patient who was suffering from depression.

The utter irony of the situation is that the global warming deniers are really anti-science and for them to quote a scientific journal as further basis to prove that this other science is junk is too funny.  Especially when the cited study is about psychology.  If there is ever a question of modeling and trying to comprehend the unknown -- it is the study of how the mind works.  How convenient...

It also tells another story -- extrapolating one event to prove a bigger phenomenon.  That of taking a medical case study of a person who is obviously experiencing mental problems and concluding that all people who believe the science of climate change are somehow delusional.  That is the antithesis of science.

But the good news in all of this is if we we are willing to accept one side of the spectrum -- those who abnormally interpret how to act with climate change (as described in the journal article) -- then there logically has to be the other side of the spectrum -- those who are stubbornly, unwilling to recognize the scientific advances made in the understanding of how the climate is warming, partially due to humans, and then try to use the guise of rationality to defend their position.

I laugh when I read those who claim that climate science is "anecdotal" or "unproven."  Or that running models and tests are about getting the results you want to see.  As if the peer-review system would let anyone get away with that! 

The mind numbing arrogance about these sorts of thoughts is that this comes from the same people who see only what they want to see; the only difference is that they didn't run a model or a test.  They only claim to have made an observation:

It was cold yesterday -- so much for that global warming thing. 

Or how about this one:

There was this patient in Australia -- so much for that global warming thing. 

The sad thing is that this (also see this) comes from the same people that don't believe in anthropogenic contributions to planetary warming (even in the face of the evidence).

See... no matter what, whether it is evidence of bacterial evolution or human contribution to our climate, there are those who will not accept it, will not agree with it, and just throw up the kitchen sink to some how try and defend a belief system that doesn't jive with the facts.  And it is more than just "natural skepticism" -- it is just out right, shake your head denial.

On a side note, as a microbiologist, I can always spot the non-biologist who tries to write about microbiology.  In this case, they were seeking to inquire with Lenske about "E. Coli."  Umm...  they're called species.  Where E. coli or Escherichia coli is a species designation whereby the second term is always lowercase and the binominal term is italicized.

To me "E. Coli" is a loud, blinking neon sign that (note sarcasm) extrudes, "I know what I am talking about and I am smarter than you."

Quick.  How do you make a hardcore, Bush-loving, Republican's head explode?

Oh yeah, this way:

Republican John McCain pledged to take the lead in combating global climate change if elected president in a speech that set him apart from the policies of President George W. Bush.

In remarks he prepared to give at a wind technology firm in Portland, Oregon, on Monday, the Arizona senator said he would seek international accords to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and would offer an incentive system to make businesses in the United States cleaner.

"The facts of global warming demand our urgent attention, especially in Washington," McCain said in remarks he planned to give at the Vestas Wind Technology plant.

This is also further proof that evolution exists.

Real Climate had a pretty good article a few weeks ago about Edward Lorenz, who recently died.  The article speaks of Lorenz's butterfly effect, atmospheric modeling, and chaotic systems.

The article is definitely worth reading, but I found the last two paragraphs very insightful:

...how can climate be predictable if weather is chaotic? The trick lies in the statistics. In those same models that demonstrate the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, it turns out that the long term means and other moments are stable. This is equivalent to the 'butterfly' pattern seen in the figure above being statistically independent of how you started the calculation. The lobes and their relative position don't change if you run the model long enough. Climate change then is equivalent seeing how the structure changes, while not being too concerned about the specific trajectory you are on.

Another way of saying it is that for the climate problem, the weather (or the individual trajectory) is the noise. If you are trying to find the common signal that is a signature of a particular forcing then averaging over a number of simulations with different weather works rather well. (There is a long standing quote in science - "one person's noise is another person's signal" which is certainly apropos here. Climate modellers don't average over ensemble members because they think that weather isn't important, they do it because it gives robust estimates of the signal they are usually looking for.)

New Scientist has a great piece on evolution myths and misconceptions.

Looks like one of the interviews in the movie Expelled was made with a person who has made anti-semitic comments in the past.  But don't worry -- you should just look past that in the argument they are making against Darwinism.

One of the big things skeptics like to push out there is why should they believe in "global warming" when in the 1970s scientists supposedly were pushing "global cooling" and an impending ice age?

Here is that argument...  again:

In 1975, the news media informed us that a new Ice Age was imminent. An article in the Chicago Tribune titled “B-r-r-r-r: New Ice Age on way soon?” noted “It’s getting colder.” The Tribune interpreted a number of ordinary weather events “as evidence that a significant shift in climate is taking place — a shift that could be the forerunner of an Ice Age.” The New York Times chimed in, warning their readers that “a major cooling may be ahead.” Famed science reporter Walter Sullivan announced “the world’s climate is changing … a new ice age is on the way.”

Of course, the understanding of the world around us has significantly increased from those times and those who have made those claims are not making those claims now.

But is it true?  Was science really touting the global cooling mantra in the 1970s?  Or was it just a small minority where their claims made it to media outlets that skeptics are more than willing to show as "evidence"?

Well the only way to know for sure is to survey the scientific literature of that time.

...Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.

The study reports, "There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.

"A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales."

So despite the claims of skeptics that the "consensus of science" in the 1970s that an ice age was on the way, scientists were actually predicting global warming amidst a mild cooling trend.  Did you get that?  Scientists were overwhelmingly writing papers of an impending surge in warming when it was actually colder outside.  And guess what?  They were right.

Thus, contrary to the reasoning that scientists cannot be trusted because they were allegedly wrong, scientists were actually predicting global warming when people were going outside and remarking of how cold it was and when media outlets were reporting on this relative cooling -- searching for some reason behind it.  This smacks in the face the logic I read about all of the time of how cold winters are most certainly disproving the overall trend of global warming.

(Funny how we are so willing to not believe major news outlets today, like the New York Times, because of political bias, yet so willing to believe them 30+ years ago when it serves to somehow defend current skeptical views of the global warming)

Here is one of the latest videos of Al Gore on the "climate crisis":

Gore comes across as this salesman that is looking to save the world with his product, but he does so in a manner where he is Achilles looking for his glory to span the ages.  He is looking for his name to live on in history as the savior of the human race.  Although lefties respond to this rhetoric, I don't see everyday citizens responding favorably.  And he may be why solving the "climate crisis" is at the bottom of the list he presents in his talk.

Here is a quote about 1:13 into the presentation:

Optimism is sometimes characterized as a belief, an intellectual posture, whereas Mahatma Gandhi famously said you must become the change you wish to see in the world.  And the outcome about which we wish to be optimistic is not going to be created by the belief alone, except to the extent that the belief brings about new behavior.  But the word behavior is also I think sometimes misunderstood in this context.  I am a big advocate of changing the light bulbs and buying hybrids and Tipper and I put 33 solar panels on our house and dug the geothermal wells and done all of that other stuff, but as important as it is to change the light bulbs, it is more important to change the laws.  And when we change our behavior in our daily lives, we sometimes leave out the citizenship part and the democracy part.  In order to be optimistic about this we have to become incredibly active as citizens in our democracy.  In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis.  And we have one.

This one blurb caught my eye:

...but as important as it is to change the light bulbs, it is more important to change the laws.

While I agree that government has its role in this effort and I agree that the best way we can tackle this problem is with an "Apollo" mission style approach -- industry and government need to work together to solve this issue.  And there needs to be discussion from both sides of the fence.  We didn't get to the moon without private industry -- thus our changes in law, shouldn't all be about slaps on the wrist, but creations of incentives for business if changes in behavior are desired.

It is truly about working hand in hand with those "evil" energy/oil companies, pushing incentives to the average consumer/individual, and setting up realistic transition periods for older energy technologies while setting up realistic phase in periods for newer greener energy technologies.  These are all common sense approaches.  No?

The question I have is if that is the real underlying message of Al Gore?

Looks like there is more scientific evidence that the sun/cosmic ray hypothesis (Svensmark) that skeptics argue is not panning out in data set analysis.

Professor Sloan's team investigated the link by looking for periods in time and for places on the Earth which had documented weak or strong cosmic ray arrivals, and seeing if that affected the cloudiness observed in those locations or at those times.

"For example; sometimes the Sun 'burps' - it throws out a huge burst of charged particles," he explained to BBC News.

"So we looked to see whether cloud cover increased after one of these bursts of rays from the Sun; we saw nothing."