Climategate

[Wolf]

If we manage to mitigate the effects of climate change in time, then we save millions of people, but we also save capitalism from itself (again) and therefore help to prop up a system that causes enormous suffering and makes life miserable for the majority of Humanity.

Now, I'm not so sure about that. I, for one, would argue that the post-apocalyptic madness brought on by total environmental and social collapse is laissez faire capitalism in its purest form. You wanna see some desperate, unregulated dealmaking? That'll be the place.

[Edric O]

Now, I'm not so sure about that. I, for one, would argue that the post-apocalyptic madness brought on by total environmental and social collapse is laissez faire capitalism in its purest form. You wanna see some desperate, unregulated dealmaking? That'll be the place.

Assuming that we will get "total environmental and social collapse" if we don't do anything about climate change. I think such an assumption is a massive exaggeration. There will be weather changes and higher sea levels. Crops will fail and many people will starve. The world economy will certainly enter a long depression.

But that will be all. Society will not fall apart. There will not be post-apocalyptic madness. It will be more like the Great Depression on steroids.

[Dante]

Edric: I do not believe that humanity can be separated from "the planet," taken as a catch-all term to mean everything from biodiversity to the individual health of every organism in the world. We depend upon it. Saying "it will recover, it can recover from anything" is exactly the kind of 1980's "anything goes" mentality that got us into this mess in the first place. Several messes in fact.

For the record though, if I believed that humanity could be divorced from the planet, and that there was a choice to be made between human prosperity and that all-encompassing term that covers everything from the rarest orchid to the most prolific rats, I would let humanity burn. It's the only possible choice.

As for the matter of honesty. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, "Don't throw stones at your neighbours', if your own windows are glass."

[chatfsh]

I tend to agree with you on this, Edric.  (Don

[Edric O]

Edric: I do not believe that humanity can be separated from "the planet," taken as a catch-all term to mean everything from biodiversity to the individual health of every organism in the world. We depend upon it. Saying "it will recover, it can recover from anything" is exactly the kind of 1980's "anything goes" mentality that got us into this mess in the first place. Several messes in fact.

Humanity can't be separated from the biosphere, but the biosphere certainly can be separated from Humanity! We need the biosphere; it does not need us. It also doesn't need any individual organism in particular, or any individual species for that matter. The biosphere has survived the annihilation of over 90% of all species at the end of the Permian. It has also shrugged off countless hits from giant asteroids (some bigger than others). It can deal just fine with anything the pathetic little humans can throw at it.

Of course, it takes a long time to deal with things, and we might screw up so badly that the biosphere will need a million years to recover. But what's a million years here and there when you've still got another 4.5 billion years ahead of you?

People who care about nature fail to take the proper perspective on things. The proper perspective from the point of view of nature is to treat 1000 years the way humans treat one second. They should regard any problem that will affect nature for only a few thousand years with complete indifference.

I tend to agree with you on this, Edric.  (Don

[chatfsh]

Oh no - quick, I must explain how we don't really agree after all! :P

Well, thank you for straightening out that misunderstanding. Frankly, I was having trouble sleeping, fearing as I did, that you and I agreed upon something. ::)

I never said there was any propaganda or hyperbole about the causes of climate change ("climate change," not "global warming," because many places will get colder even while average temperatures increase). The main cause of climate change is human activity. It is anthropogenic.

*Sigh* Here we go again with the

[Edric O]

*Sigh* Here we go again with the

[Dunenewt]

Truthfully, I believe that we, humanity, have far more to fear from another Little Ice Age than we do from a modest bit of global warming.

You're just using the term Global Warming to further your side of the argument.  Have you not considered, that due to what you're calling Global Warming, certain parts of the world will get a lot colder?

[chatfsh]

Of course. The debate on anthropogenic climate change will never close as long as powerful corporations have a material interest in undermining science.

Undermining science?!  Are you serious?  Oh, you must be talking about the side that is notoriously

- manipulating the facts

- illegally destroying the original source data

- colluding with others to do the same

[Wolf]

Whoa! This produced a lot more interest than I thought.

All I have to say is, to Edric: I intentionally exaggerated the effects of climate change to the end of making a humorous statement on capitalism that, I hoped, would cause you to chortle. (Also kinda ironic given the topic, or is that even the right word? Microcosmic?) I have always been of the position that both the biosphere and the human species are capable of adapting to environmental changes. But! I'd rather that, in the near future, we'd have to cope with less than more and, ideally, none at all!

[Dante]

Strange how nobody seems to recall that science and scientists have been manipulated (in many cases voluntarily) for decades. It's only now that the topic has shifted away from the oil industry, the mining industry, the automobile industry, the tobacco industry et al and onto climate change that people are sitting up and taking notice. So data manipulation that helps big business, that's fine, but data manipulation that works against big business is bad? Interesting.

Of course, bogus science has been around for a very long time. One of my favourite examples is that of lobotomy, a widely practiced surgery that can be summarised as "stick a pointy thing in the brain and wiggle it around a bit." It's a ludicrous practice that some scientists in the 1950's would have sworn by. Likewise many of them prior to 1954 would have sworn that smoking was good for you.

I like to think of a crossword as a good metaphor for scientific progress. Science is a crossword, being solved by millions of people. Each answer depends on several previous answers, and you will occasionally get wrong entries. But the wonderful thing about a crossword is that it is self-regulating. Sooner or later, the wrong answer will stand out. The correct answers around it need it to be something else. And so it is changed.

Now, there are those who might claim that the scientific consensus on climate change is not as solid as the public has been led to believe. They are wrong. In the words of another:

"There is no debate among statured scientists of what is happening," says James McCarthy, who chairs the Advisory Committee on the Environment of the International Committee of Scientific Unions. "The only debate is the rate at which it's happening." Between 1987 and 1993, McCarthy oversaw the work of the leading climate scientists from 60 nations as they developed the IPCC's landmark 1995 report.

There are, of course, areas of considerable outstanding dispute and genuine scientific uncertainty. No one knows how rapid or drastic global warming will turn out to be, or how severely it will affect food production, ocean levels, or the spread of disease. There is also debate over the extent to which global warming has already contributed to droughts, intense hurricanes, and environmental degradation such as coral bleaching. Given these uncertainties, it is difficult to talk of a "worst-case scenario," but the scenarios that are plausible include many that are dire enough.

... For the oil, coal, auto, and manufacturing industries, warnings of the sort involve another kind of high stakes. Any measures to control emissions of greenhouse gases threaten their long-standing habits of doing business.

They view scientists' conclusions about global warming with the same interest-driven hostility that the tobacco industry shows toward scientists who study lung cancer. Like the tobacco industry, they have pumped millions of dollars into efforts to debunk the science they hate. They have found little support, however, among the "statured scientists" to whom McCarthy refers-the people who are actually involved in relevant research and whose work has been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The global warming consensus among these scientists is so strong that the oil and auto industries have been forced far afield in their search for voices willing to join in their denial. What is remarkable, given this fact, is the extent to which industry PR has been successful in creating the illusion that global warming is some kind of controversial, hotly disputed theory.

Well fancy that.

And that's just the thing, a few emails are nothing compared to the decades of work that has gone into this consensus. There is no argument. Not among people who know what they're talking about, anyway.

And finally, what do the hacked emails actually tell us?

http://www.skepticalscience.com/What-do-the-hacked-CRU-emails-tell-us.html

That the dirt is not as dirty as rumoured, and is vastly outweighed by further data. Surprise surprise.

As to anodder rehash uf evolotion, Hy vould not advise it. Dose vho ectually undershtund natural selecshun can't exactly convince odders uf someting dot dey cannot comprehend.

[Wolf]

I think your crossword analogy is spot-on, I've never heard that before and think it is actually quite clever.

As for climate change? I think we've had this discussion before, but I'm pretty sure there's consensus that it's occurring. Whether you want to debate the joint causes of man vs. nature with regard to that change is fair, but it doesn't change the reality that we either have to take steps to halt and, ideally, reverse the negative changes we can while adapting to the ones we can't.

And as for natural selection... I also do not think it would be a good idea. For my part, it wasn't the evolution debate that got me infuriated, it was the senseless debate about religion that immediately followed it. And yes, although it is true that SandChigger and I have been acting with some degree of civility towards each other (some might say too civil), let's let the peace wear itself out for a while longer before we start shouting and swearing again.

[Dante]

To give credit where it's due, the analogy was not my creation. My googling suggests that it originated with one Susan Haack. The link leads to a review of one of her books, which makes for interesting reading in itself.

I'm glad we're in agreement. Yay, hugs!

[SandChigger]

(Why "too" civil?)

I don't know ... as someone trained in a discipline in which, since the late 1950s, the fabrication of convenient data and exclusion of the inconvenient (<i>We will deal with those examples at a later date, wink wink nudge nudge</i>) have been not only the rule but publicly acknowledged (until recently repudiated in another "reality editing" pronouncement), I'm not seeing what all the fuss is about.

As has been pointed out, this doesn't sully all data suggesting that global warming is occurring.

It does not impact upon the validity of the scientific method, only indicates the all too human failings of some of its practitioners.

And despite the melodious screechings of vindication we've been hearing here (I think I recognize the bird, but I forget its exact place in the taxonomy at the moment ... I'm sure it will come to me later), this has absolutely no bearing on the issue of evolution vs creationism (whatever label it lurks beneath).

(It's been fun lurking until now. ;) )

[Wolf]

("The bigger the grin, the bigger the knife." Ferengi Rule of Acquisition... something or other.)

Well, look, as I know we've said before, the scientific method isn't some monolithic ideology that needs to be proselytized and defended... in fact, as ideologies go, it's pretty much simply, "uh, if it's broke, fix it, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it." That there may even be grounds for acrimonious conversation based on the "discrediting" of the "scientific method" because of these "e-mails" astonishes me and reminds me that I really do have better things to do. At least, so I hope. Global warming's happening. We're contributing to it. I don't need a "man of science" to tell me that, because it's December 6, and there's no snow on the ground in the Northeastern US.

[Dragoon Knight]

("The bigger the grin, the bigger the knife." Ferengi Rule of Acquisition... something or other.)

*POOF*

Rule of Acquisition #48: "The bigger the smile, the sharper the knife."

That is all. :)

*POOF*

[chatfsh]

Oh great, apparently NASA has been refusing to release their raw climate data which has served to underpin the anthropogenic climate change theory.  Let me guess, they have uh, accidently lost/deleted it all

[Dante]

Firsht de university, now NASA. Sooner or later hyu're gon to run out uf inshtitotions to attack, hyu realise. Vere's it gon to schtop, Vegener, Mendel? Newton?

If everyting has been faked, vun musht queshtion exactly vot end diz scheme iz vorkink towards. Und if not everyting has been faked, den vere iz de scundal?

[Wolf]

Wow, Dante--and I thought I was losing it. Well, if things here are going to degenerate anyway, you all might as well entertain yourselves with this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-DetYirwzI. It has to do with the environment. Sort of.

But honestly, NASA is under such frequent attack from virtually every political sector, lobby and wing of this country that I don't blame them for not releasing it: not to mention that they've probably obtained a lot of this data with fantastic, top-secret high-tech equipment that they would rather not have other countries and space agencies developing via reasoned inference. In general, I have a ton of respect for NASA--I'm not worried about them.

[chatfsh]

But honestly, NASA is under such frequent attack from virtually every political sector, lobby and wing of this country that I don't blame them for not releasing it: not to mention that they've probably obtained a lot of this data with fantastic, top-secret high-tech equipment that they would rather not have other countries and space agencies developing via reasoned inference. In general, I have a ton of respect for NASA--I'm not worried about them.

Yes, surely that must be the reason that NASA isn

[Wolf]

I'm not even kidding: look up MOLE and the NRO, a lot of the time there's an overlap in strategic reconnaissance and climate/meteorological observation technology. Both those organizations were founded to find solutions to the problem of weather patterns obscuring visibility of ground installations. In fact, that latter organization still has an unreleased "black budget" because of the importance of its activities--like I said, you don't want someone seeing the climate data or the budget numbers and starting to guess at all the possible things you're doing and then starting to narrow down... Anyway, since then, we've found numerous ways to get around this problem, and others, many of which have direct (and by direct, I mean direct--there's no modification of the equipment required) applications to climate monitoring.

[Wolf]

Somewhat relevant: http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/12/07/global.warming.poll/index.html

[Edric O]

Moderator note: I have split off a number of posts that went entirely off-topic and talked mainly about music. They can now be found in this thread in the General board.

However, those posts did contain a few sentences relevant to the climate topic, which I will reproduce here.

Dante: If hyu're gon to attack NASA, vot possible pillar uf de scientific community could hyu possibly hold in high eshteem? Dot's all Hy vonder.

Wolf: Oh, and PS--massive kudos to DragoonKnight for the correct Ferengi rule and its number.

SandChigger:

But honestly, NASA is under such frequent attack from virtually every political sector, lobby and wing of this country that I don't blame them for not releasing it

My personal favorite wingnut faction is the Face-on-Mars crowd. "NASA IS EDITING THE IMAGES NOW!!!" :D

[Dunenewt]

So Hwi, Climate Change is not a problem, or irrelevant?  I'd love for you to tell that to the people of the Maldives...

[chatfsh]

If you insist