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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Feb 11, 2015 - 12:13pm PT
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much higher likelihood for you.
Factoid from recent surveys: Who believes that humans were created within the past 10,000 years?
24% of those who believe climate change is happening now, caused mainly by human activities.
41% of those who believe climate change is happening now, but caused mainly by natural forces.
69% of those who believe climate change is not happening now.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Feb 11, 2015 - 12:39pm PT
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I don't think anyone really believes the 10k year old humanity sh#t. They're goddamned liars, every one of them.
In my state, 33% say they do. I suspect it's quite a bit higher in some other states.
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dave729
Trad climber
Western America
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Feb 11, 2015 - 12:40pm PT
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The old saying a sucker is born every minute is true. Sell them
a bridge, a religous belief system, a global warming carbon tax.
All the same.
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Cragar
climber
MSLA - MT
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Feb 11, 2015 - 12:48pm PT
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how do you know they are lying?
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Mike Bolte
Trad climber
Planet Earth
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Feb 11, 2015 - 01:01pm PT
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DMT, you have obviously not been following this thread!
EDIT: in case it was not clear I was referring to this statement from DMT "No one is that damned stupid. "
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Feb 11, 2015 - 01:10pm PT
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Plenty of folks have made the same point in this thread re deniers.
Hmmm, a point I was making, using data, is that there's significant overlap between those who reject the scientific consensus on climate change, and those who reject it on evolution. In draft form: what about vaccines?
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Feb 11, 2015 - 01:52pm PT
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Chiloe, I think the issue with climate deniers and vaccine objectors both involve misuse of statistics, rather than a mistrust of science. The two misuses differ, though.
The arguments I've seen to refute the findings of mainstream climate scientists usually involve data from specific places and specific times. They would argue, for example, that global atmospheric temperatures have remained relatively stable for the last 15 or so years, or that Antarctic ice covers more of the oceans surface now than it did then. Those arguments try to disprove an aggregate forecast by improper disaggregation.
My example is a bit obscure, so please bear with me. When I put a pot of water on my stove and turn up the heat, I expect the water to boil, but what do I mean by "boil?" I obviously don't mean that all of the water will instantly vaporize. I also don't mean that a particular group of water molecules with vaporize at any particular time. The movement of boiling fluids poses forms a classic chaotic system. When I predict the water will boil, I mean that, taken as a whole some of the water in the pot will vaporize at some fairly predictable rate.
Our climate change models make similar predictions. They don't predict the temperature of some specific part of the earth at any particular time. Rather, they predict that if you change the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, you change the temperature of the earth, taken as a whole, in a predictable way.
We cannot predict the temperature for only part of the earth - even if that part is quite large, such as the entire atmosphere - for any but very short periods of time, and we certainly cannot do so for relative small sections of the earth. Weather at any particular location is perhaps the classic chaotic system. We can, however, predict what will take place for the earth as a whole.
Thus, trying to contradict climate change models with only atmospheric data fails, because it does not account for all the other places that predicted heat can go, e.g. the oceans. Similarly, increasing surface area of Antarctic ice, alone, does not contradict the predictions. Only data for the entire system that we call the earth can tell us whether our models give accurate predictions.
The vaccine phobia involves a different statistical issue, namely "nonsense correlations." For example, a country's per capita beer consumption has a strong negative correlation to a country's infant mortality rate. The more beer consumed, the lower the infant mortality. Unfortunately, this fails to prove that drinking more beer leads to healthier babies. Beer consumption is a decent proxy for wealth. The more wealth, the more a country can spend on prenatal and natal care, and therefore the lower the mortality rates.
The alleged relation of vaccines to autism forms a similar nonsense correlation. When the studies purporting to show a correlation came out, I didn't buy the arguments for at least the following reasons: (1) They failed to set forth a plausible mechanism for the causation; (2) they failed to account for the benefits of the vaccine, and, most importantly (3) they were performed for the benefit of the plaintiffs' bar. It did not surprise me when those studies were later debunked.
Incidentally, in California, those who reject vaccines are more likely to be leftists in Santa Monica than righties in Fresno.
John
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Feb 11, 2015 - 02:04pm PT
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Incidentally, in California, those who reject vaccines are more likely to be leftists in Santa Monica than righties in Fresno.
We tested this hypothesis! Details to come (much) later, it's in peer review right now.
Regarding your point about statistics, I think one thing might be even more basic: whether people grok probability, that infinite space between zero and one. Some minds fall more quickly to absolutes, dichotomies, good and evil, us and them, yes or no. Others are comfortable with ambiguity, complexity, uncertainty, probability ....
Do vaccines always work? Nope. Do they reduce probabilities of infection? Yep. So what should you do? This reasoning works for me, but a lot of folks stop dead at point 1. We've seen that in quite a few ST comments when vaccines did come up.
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dave729
Trad climber
Western America
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Feb 11, 2015 - 02:13pm PT
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Thread refocus.
By definition they are 'terrorists'. They can't stop shouting climate disaster! Everyone will die (unless you pay us protection money).
In a way these Warmists are also screaming 'allah akbar'.
But does it make muslim extremists and climate nazis 2 sides of the same coin?
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 11, 2015 - 03:09pm PT
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K-man - You crack me up. Such an active imagination.
I'll take that as a compliment EdT.
But I am not alone; look at the folks who respond to your posts, and what they assume you mean by them. They all have active imaginations too, I suppose.
Or, could it be that you project a certain viewpoint in the ambiguous posts you create? Could it be that you make your posts to elicit heated responses, otherwise known as trolling?
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Feb 12, 2015 - 05:29am PT
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Good (IMHO) article on geoengineering in Slate today, by University of Chicago geoscientist and frequent Realclimate contributor Raymond Pierrehumbert:
Climate Hacking is Barking Mad
You can't fix the Earth with these geoengineering proposals, but you can sure make it worse
He casts a skeptical eye on ideas floated (mainly for "more research") in the recent National Academy of Sciences geoengineering report. An excerpt from Dr. Pierrehumbert's Slate piece (my emphasis; the rest is worth reading too):
The nearly two years’ worth of reading and animated discussions that went into this study have convinced me more than ever that the idea of “fixing” the climate by hacking the Earth’s reflection of sunlight is wildly, utterly, howlingly barking mad. In fact, though the report is couched in language more nuanced than what I myself would prefer, there is really nothing in it that is inconsistent with my earlier appraisals.
Even the terminology used in the report signals a palpable change in the framing of the discussion. The actions discussed for the most part are referred to as “climate intervention,” rather than “climate engineering” (or the common but confusing term geoengineering). Engineering is something you do to a system you understand very well, where you can try out new techniques thoroughly at a small scale before staking peoples’ lives on them. Hacking the climate is different—we have only one planet to live on, and can’t afford any big mistakes. Many of the climate “engineering” proposals are akin to turning the world’s whole population into passengers on a largely untested new fleet of hypersonic airplanes.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Feb 12, 2015 - 07:49am PT
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What's the right-headed way to solve this problem?
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
Terence Wilson greeneck alleghenys,ny,
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Feb 12, 2015 - 08:00am PT
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PBS had a feature on Hydro power in the US last night.
80 thousand dams in the US,only 3% of them are Hydroelectric.
If that number was raised to 50%,WE could shut down 85% of coal burning PP's.
Do you think that might happen?
It is all a hoax!
Especially when the Argument continues.Drill Baby Drill.
And please do not tell me we are going to die without FF's.
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
Terence Wilson greeneck alleghenys,ny,
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Feb 12, 2015 - 08:11am PT
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Chief ,I agree on the most part,but I should have mentioned this was about small scale hydro,all the way down to paddlewheels.
It is a verifiable option with existing infrastructure.
BTW,If they tore down half of those dams we could still hit a large energy target.
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greyghost
Trad climber
Las Vegas, NV
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Feb 12, 2015 - 08:32am PT
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If I had to label the author of this article, I'd say conservative think tank. Their primary focus is researching cycles and trying to predict, not always successfully
http://economyandmarkets.com/markets/forecasts/bubble-in-the-heartland/
quote from the article predicts it will get colder over next few years:
"But the emerging wild card in agriculture is climate change. Forget global warming for now. More variable climate is clearly here and is likely to continue into the future and it threatens food production as any extreme between droughts and flooding is bad for production.
Doug and I agree that the climate is likely to get colder for the next decade or more, despite CO2 levels rising for decades at unprecedented rates which have been associated with global warming."
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Feb 12, 2015 - 08:45am PT
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Nuclear with fuel storage deep in the salt mines of Minnesota.
Is that a good option? My (rusty) geological wisdom had it that Nevada is one of the few US places that has plausible longterm storage sites, both geologically and hydrologically stable on the timescales required. No guarantees, just the least bad among actual choices.
Seems like anything could be better than storing onsite at the nuke plants themselves, which is probably happening not far from you and me both.
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Feb 12, 2015 - 09:20am PT
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Nuclear reactor engineering have gone through a couple generations of research and design evolution since the last ones were built here in the U.S. in the 1970's. The solution of the huge costs of safety redundancy, elimination of dangerous wastes, and reduction of scale to custom fit smaller markets are being designed today. We just need to eliminate enough of the non sensical, rabid enviro, obstructionists to deploy these new technologies on tiny footprints instead of the huge ecology ravaging millions of acres blighted by so called clean and green grid scale solar and wind.
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