Seban's Comments

I'd like journalists to stop living out their fantasies of being filmmakers. They are supposed to convey information, not play on emotions.

We know what a flood is. If you are shown in a boat, we'll assume there's no way for you to stand anywhere. If you show us images of a burning tank in Lybia filmed under 10 different angles, we're gonna assume a sh*tload of tanks are burning.

To me, all these "illustrative" inclusions in news reports are, if not lies, manipulations.

Oh also, stop asking everybody in the street their opinion on stuff they're clueless about.
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How nice to see the term skeptic applied to someone who actually is a skeptic!

From the wikipedia entry on skepticism:
"A scientific (or empirical) skeptic is one who questions beliefs on the basis of scientific understanding. Most scientists, being scientific skeptics, test the reliability of certain kinds of claims by subjecting them to a systematic investigation using some form of the scientific method."

This is exactly what Muller did, which resulted in him changing his mind. This is also exactly what other so-called climate "skeptics" do not do. Calling them skeptics is a huge compliment they don't deserve. They are simply deniers, and denying doesn't require any work.
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@TRO & DPruitt
Oh, so now we can't draw conclusions from data... that's a problem. I guess we'll have to assume your opinion is right then.
Nah, just joking. Claiming that the data is "falsified" and that it had been "exposed" is is the conspiracy lunatic's final defense. Unless you can show evidence for this falsification, but you can't because it isn't true.

I'd like to just be able to ignore the nutters, but public policies are usually decided by democratic means. In a country like the USA, which should be leading the way in terms of "green" technology, if a large number of people can hold idiotic opinions an not be laughed at, they'll end up falling behind.
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@babatumbe
Me! Me!
You should look up an article entitled "A link between reduced Barents-Kara sea ice and cold winter extremes over northern continents", by Pethoukov and Semenov.

Here's a short excerpt:
"Our results imply that several recent severe winters do not conflict with the global warming picture but rather supplement it, being in qualitative agreement with the simulated large-scale atmospheric circulation realignment."

But they're probably part of the global conspiracy to make you feel bad! With names like that, there's no other explanation.
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@liberty
"It is the height of hubris to think that we have much impact on climate or could somehow bend it to our will"

If we could bend the climate to our will, there wouldn't really be a problem. Just bend it a bit colder.
And I don't see how thinking that we emit CO2 is in any way pretentious, because we just do. It's not good or bad, it's a fact. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that's another fact. Put those two together, and lo, we may have an effect on the climate.
And if you look at a picture of the Earth at night, all the artificial light you can see should tell you that we're not such an insignificant force on this planet.
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You won't convince people about global warming because of a heat wave. We don't need to resort to these cheap arguments, we have data. Years and years of data that shows that climate change is real.
That said, I too am amazed at the number of commenters on here who don't accept reality because they don't like it. I thought this blog was frequented by rationally-minded people.
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I've also seen parking spaces designated for women in some car parks in Switzerland. I've been told that the reason was to reduce the chance of women being attacked (hence the proximity to the exit and the lighting).
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I remember spending unmentionable amounts of time having the stupidest conversations with bots during high school.
That was 10 years ago and they don't seem to have gotten any smarter since then. I am dissapoint.
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@Tirno
Your first paragraph isn't encouraging. If it needs hundreds of years to stop, then it must have started hundreds of years ago? That is an absolute non-sequitur. But coincidentally, it does work actually: they say mitigation will take a hundred years to have any effect, and the start of the industrial revolution was one hundred years ago. So using the retarded argument of symmetry, here is evidence for anthropogenic climate change!

Yes, the climate has always been a dynamical system. Everybody knows that. The difference this time is the rate of change, which is very quick compared to other such events. And the fact that what is causing this rapid change is very possibly us humans. So we can just ignore it, yes, but that would be slightly irresponsible. The Earth doesn't belong to us.

As for climate models, even if the code itself isn't peer-reviewed, the way in which the are validated is if they reproduce the past climate accurately. This is something that can be checked against data. So if a model, however badly written, produces valid graphs for the period 1900 - 2000, we can hope that it will also work beyond that. And any climate research always uses multiple models, and although there are differences in the numbers, the trends that all these models produce are the same.

Then you criticize the "scientists" whose method is to call journalists to announce their results. I don't know who you are talking about, but it's certainly not the authors of the cited article. That was published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change.

And to complete the irony, then you cite the example of the ice-age craze of the 70s as an example of the unreliability of climatology. Here's the punchline: That was the media craze you're complaining about. It was all based on a TIME article, while a vast majority of articles in peer-reviewed papers predicted warming caused by CO2.
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@Tirno
Well that sure is interesting, but what or who are you arguing with here?

You roughly calculate a sea-level rise of 1.69m over the next century. You caution that it is unrealistic, and yes it is: the article's worst prediction is 32cm of increase by 2100.

So what? Are we supposed to say "that number is not very big, what's all the fuss about"? If that's the idea, I'd expect something a bit more thought-out from a scientist.
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Nice and interesting little chart!

It would be difficult to draw conclusions about the state of medicine from it though, because there are a lot of other factors to take into account.

For one, life expectancy in 1900 was around 47 years in the US, versus 78 years in 2010. This means that people in 1900 may have died of tuberculosis before the onset of cancer or heart disease.

Then, there's the diagnosis problem. A lot of the types of cancer that we can identify today weren't known or diagnosable in 1900, so people could have died from cancer and the death could be attributed to something else (e.g. senility).
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  • Member Since 2012/08/04


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