The Carbon Thread

[droid]

Don't have a lot to add to the serious debate, except that I saw this yesterday in the Times: "World may not be warming, say [some] scientists" (of course, they didn't put in the "some"... :slanted. One of the comments was priceless - some genius claiming that anthropogenic climate change is a con perpetuated by the NWO in order to bring about mass depopulation of the world to the tune of billions of people. The mind fucking boggles.

This is a pretty common one actually. Along with theories that its all a con to tax us more/personally enrich climate scientists/keep developing nations down...

There was some absolutely appalling stuff in the media during Copenhagen. Monbiot is right, the 'skeptics' are winning.

 

[Mr. Tea]

There was some absolutely appalling stuff in the media during Copenhagen. Monbiot is right, the 'skeptics' are winning.

Between this and 'intelligent design' it's enough to make me say "R.I.P. Science, 16XX to 19XX". We'll be back to burning witches before this decade's out, you watch.

 

[Mr. Tea]

'No malpractice' by climate unit

There was no scientific malpractice at the research unit at the centre of the "Climategate" affair, an independent panel has concluded.

 

[nomadthethird]

Between this and 'intelligent design' it's enough to make me say "R.I.P. Science, 16XX to 19XX". We'll be back to burning witches before this decade's out, you watch.

They never really stopped that one...

But yeah I'm afraid for humanity. Humans are dumb.

 

[Leo]

They never really stopped that one...

But yeah I'm afraid for humanity. Humans are dumb.

sad to say so much of this stupidity comes from the states. i'd like to personally apologize to the world for all the unhinged, over-the-top partisan rhetoric. and for sarah palin.

 

[nomadthethird]

sad to say so much of this stupidity comes from the states. i'd like to personally apologize to the world for all the unhinged, over-the-top partisan rhetoric. and for sarah palin.

Yeah, but don't forget about the BNP in the U.K. There are ridiculous over-the-top partisans everywhere I think...

It's just that ours think Jesus rode a dinosaur and shit...

 

[scottdisco]

Yeah, but don't forget about the BNP in the U.K. There are ridiculous over-the-top partisans everywhere I think...

It's just that ours think Jesus rode a dinosaur and shit...

the UK Independence Party - a group who want us to pull entirely out of the European Union and think in very simplistic ways about immigration and British identity - have recently started to come hard on the denialist bandwagon. kind of significant, i think, as their new chief is an ex-Tory party man, and a lord of the realm to boot. they should do relatively well at the upcoming British national election, although not anywhere near 'reins of power' well or anything, but they (and the BNP) are forcing the tone of the national conversation on some issues, in ways that mean Labour and the Tories (the two biggest parties) are saying some very regrettable things on the stump (in certain parts of the country whilst out campaigning, anyway).

sorry if the above reads really simplistic to any UK politics watchers (plus it's a bit OT), but just responding to Nomad, who i figure has got a great many better things to do than follow the ins and outs of smaller British parties, especially when she is thousands of miles away.

and agreed re partisans everywhere.

 

[slowtrain]

I thought that there was now pretty damning evidence that the damage done is now irreversible? Some prominent scientist was saying that if the USA wants to send people to Mars, they should go to live or not go at all in New Scientist the other week (apologies for the terrible memory)


All seriousness aside for a moment, is anyone actually excited to be living a proto-apocalyptic anarcho junk world when climate change really kicks in?

I think it'd be pretty fun for a while

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

All seriousness aside for a moment, is anyone actually excited to be living a proto-apocalyptic anarcho junk world when climate change really kicks in?

not in the least, not even in a joking fashion. aside from the fact that there is no magic moment when climate change suddenly "kicks in", there's not much to get whimsically excited about in the prospect of human suffering on a massive scale.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Agree with padraig totally. It's not like we're going to wake up one day and everything'll look like Mad Max, it's a gradual (though deceptively rapid) process. And in some parts of the world it's already kicking in in a big way - thing is, these are generally parts of the world that are hot already (and, for the most part, developing/poor) or very cold. OK, so it's not the end of the world if a few wealthy people find the skiing season's getting shorter, but there's some pretty worrying stuff happening to ice sheets and sea ice coverage. Anything that affects the oceans is big news in climate terms, I mean water drives pretty much every process in the biosphere.

 

[Dr Awesome]

Yemen is already suffering from chronic water shortages causing a breakdown in government, however central government was never strong there to begin with, being a mostly tribal society.
I doubt they'll (d)evolve into a Mad Max-esq dystopia though, I just can't see ethnic Arabs wearing leathers, sporting sawn off shotguns and cruising round Ford Falcons...

 

[nomadthethird]

Agree with padraig totally. It's not like we're going to wake up one day and everything'll look like Mad Max, it's a gradual (though deceptively rapid) process. And in some parts of the world it's already kicking in in a big way - thing is, these are generally parts of the world that are hot already (and, for the most part, developing/poor) or very cold. OK, so it's not the end of the world if a few wealthy people find the skiing season's getting shorter, but there's some pretty worrying stuff happening to ice sheets and sea ice coverage. Anything that affects the oceans is big news in climate terms, I mean water drives pretty much every process in the biosphere.

I've heard people say that the acidity of the oceans now is a huge and intractable problem in and of itself that no one has any clue how to approach.

Just think of what will happen when the marine species-- which make up a huge percentage of all known species-- start dying off.

Famine, basically.

 

[slowtrain]

Well, of course it's not going to be like that really... It's just an exciting imaginitive theory.... (Hence the 'all seriousness aside')

Plus there is the fact that if the ice caps do melt hugely, it stops the ocean conveyer, effectively making the ocean stagnant, which did happen once before (which has been the source of skeptics 'it's happened before so it's not man made' argument a few times from memory) but when that happened, 95% of all Earth's life died off.....

(Apologies for poor writing abilities)

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

It's just an exciting imaginitive theory....

no, it's not. it feels redundant to have to actually point this out, but there are big chunks of the world that are already "post-apocalyptic". in some of them climate & environmental change is - regardless of cause - a significant factor (i.e. desertification), in some it is not. in either case, those places are mostly terrible for the people stuck living there. yes, you're kidding. not to generalize in re: persons I don't know on the Internet, but joking about/fetishizing post-apocalyptic scenarios is some middle-class exotification business if ever there twas. who would dream of misery but people who'd never experienced it? perhaps I'm a killjoy, but I just got sick to death of hearing this stuff - including from my own mouth - from green anarcho/primitivist* types when I was younger & more enamored of that scene.

*NB that I still think there's a lot to be said for those types, or more so their critique. the literal interpretation of primitivism taken to excess can get quite silly but I still believe learning primitive skills, & generally becoming more self-sufficient in anticipation of a future w/scarcer resources, is a good idea. & as big a fan as I am of science, there's something to be said for a concerted intellectual challenge to "progress" as the end all/be all, at the very least as a tool for reflection. I just think it's a matter to be taken rather seriously, as opposed to a Mad Max pirates in the wasteland lark.

 

[vimothy]

Been reading about climate change recently. I have been struck by how flimsy the evidence in support of it is. Not the individual pieces of evidence, either, but the whole thing. Am I missing something obvious? Hopefully so. Since, I assume, almost everyone else here disagrees with this, let me ask some questions:

Do you think it is possible to model the economy accurately?

If so, what the fuck have we been doing for the last few years?

If not, what makes you think that modelling the climate is any easier?

 

[grizzleb]

I've often wondered about the ostensible accuracy of climate models. Seems pretty impossible to model to me. I've not had a hard look at it though and I wouldn't know where to start really... Obviously EVERYONE agrees that climate change is happening blah de blah de blah but I've not seen anything that convinces me how or to what extent or anything really. It's one of those positions where everything seems a bit vague and unless you just roll with the consensus/accepted body of wisdom from superiors people look at you askance.

 

[vimothy]

Exactly.

Thing is, I don't think those models are accurate in the slightest. Why would they be? What's interesting is that people are very good at being skeptical within a strictly limited domain, namely, the domain of claims made by their political enemies. Conservatives are skeptical about climate science and leftists are skeptical about economic science (of course, I'm generalising for effect). But the two are basically equivalent, i.e. if you don't think it's possible to economic science, then you shouldn't think it's possible to do climate science. And vice versa.

 

[vimothy]

The other interesting thing is the status of science. Anyone who doubts global warming is a climate change denialist. As in, they are disagreeing with results that are hardcore science and are in effect claiming that the sun goes round the earth. Denying the established facts. Science makes it authoritative, the consensus makes it a fait accompli. But still (proximate) historical data and intensely unreliable models will only get you so far: not very far at all.

Consider the famous hockey stick. Obviously, the latter part is now somewhat controversial. But imagine that it is not. Does the trend tell us anything about causality? No. It just tells us about the trend: that a rise in CO2 coincided with a rise in the global mean temperature.

Continuing the economics analogy, have a look at this graph, which shows the correlation between "economic freedom" and PC GDP:

Does this mean that the solution to everyone's problems is just to cut government spending and regulations? No, because correlation is not causation. Mistaking the two is the essence of cargo-cult science. If it were this simple, the Washington Consensus would have been a rip-roaring success and the problems of world poverty would be history. Just clear a run way, put on your wooden headset and wait for the planes to land.

If you listen to the rational expectations / DSGE types, they will tell you the same things. What we do is science. Your criticism is common sense, not science. Therefore you are an idiot. And we are still right, even though we are sitting in the ruins that the failure of our models has created.

 

[droid]

I look forward to your thread explaining how the theory of evolution is false.

 

[vimothy]

I look forward to your thread explaining how the theory of evolution is false.

Note that I never said that climate change is false. (How could I?) But I think these analogies are useful and worth pursuing.

Evolution is an established scientific theory, about which reasonable people do not disagree. At least to my knowledge. Climate change is an established scientific fact, about which reasonable people do not disagree. The NAIRU (non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment) is a scientific fact, about which reasonable people do not disagree.

Are these statements equivalent? The first statement is undoubtedly true. And the evidentiary status of the NAIRU and climate change is equivalent, consisting of an empirical regularity (the hockey stick; the ‘70s), and model output (GCM; DSGE). But look—reasonable people do disagree about these in ways that they do not disagree about evolution. Why is this? Because neither climate science nor economic science can establish these “facts” as facts using these tools.

The reasons why are very simple and available to everyone. Even if paleoclimatology was totally unproblematic, it would still need to establish causality. Even if the models were better, computers would have to be far more powerful to properly capture the dynamic complexities of the planet’s climate.

Do you believe in the NAIRU?