Global Warning/Climate Change

Things that are not part of politics happening presently and how we approach or address it as Anabaptists.
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Wayne in Maine
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Re: Global Warning/Climate Change

Post by Wayne in Maine »

Bootstrap wrote:Christy has no problem publishing his data, even though his group's results are often quite different from other scientists looking at the same data. But scientists just can't agree on what atmospheric temperature is according to satellite data, which is why surface data is generally considered more reliable.


The issue is more complex than that. The disagreement over satellite data is not in regards to what the temperature is - that does not matter when one is measuring the change in temperature, the disagreement is over the fact that satellite measurements show little or no increase in atmospheric temperature in comparison with surface temperature measurements. Every individual surface temperature station has to have corrections applied over time, because local conditions change. The bias of these adjustments in favor of global warming (an old friend who was working for NOAA brought it to my attention) is what turned the tide for me and made me begin to doubt the "science" of global warming.
Its great to have scientists like Christy and others hashing out their data, publishing papers that disagree with each other and trying to come to common ways of understanding the data. We don't need politicians like Donald Trump putting their thumbs on the scale. There's been some progress on that, but so far, scientists still don't agree on how to interpret this data
.

I honestly think the current administration is trying to remove some thumbs from the scale.
Ground temperature is considered more reliable.


By those whose support the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. Logically it makes little sense to rely on mechanical thermometers that are not evenly distributed across the globe as a measurement of global temperature.

Given the distribution of measuring instruments one can best conclude that the United States, and urban centers of Africa, the pacific rim and Western Europe have warmed.Image.

The University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) team is a favorite of the denier camp...
Using that sort of derogatory language demonstrates your political/philosophical bias. It's why I really can't be bothered toi debate science and facts with you on this topic any longer. And why should you even respond to me if I'm just a denier after all.
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Bootstrap
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Re: Global Warning/Climate Change

Post by Bootstrap »

Wayne in Maine wrote:
Bootstrap wrote:Christy has no problem publishing his data, even though his group's results are often quite different from other scientists looking at the same data. But scientists just can't agree on what atmospheric temperature is according to satellite data, which is why surface data is generally considered more reliable.


The issue is more complex than that. The disagreement over satellite data is not in regards to what the temperature is ...
I actually think the disagreement is precisely over what the temperature is. Satellites don't measure temperature. Thermometers do. Satellites don't have thermometers dangling at different levels of the atmosphere.

Scientists are trying to find accurate ways to compute temperature from radiance wavelengths that satellites do measure, but it's complicated. Different scientists look at the same satellite data and come up with significantly different temperatures. There are five main temperature datasets, all derived from the same satellite measurements, and they disagree significantly.

Did I get any of this wrong? I can find quite a few sources that all agree on this, and I haven't found authoritative sources that disagree with it. I quoted a few above. If I'm wrong on any of this, can you please point to some better sources than what I have found?

Here's one clear explanation: Which Satellite Data?

There is a way to measure atmospheric temperature directly, by putting thermometers in balloons.
Another way to evaluate the satellite data is to compare is to the upper-air measurements from thermometers carried aloft by balloons. They radio their readings back to earth, which is why it’s sometimes referred to as “radiosonde” data. Satellites have the advantage of more global coverage, but radiosondes have the advantages of being from actual thermometers, and of dating back to 1958 (satellite data don’t start until 1979).
And unlike satellite data, datasets created using thermometers in balloons have excellent agreement across groups of scientists. And this data agrees with ground temperature measurements too.
Ground temperature is considered more reliable.


By those whose support the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. Logically it makes little sense to rely on mechanical thermometers that are not evenly distributed across the globe as a measurement of global temperature.
Logically, it makes a lot of sense to use thermometers to measure temperature. Logically, it makes sense to measure temperature in ways that scientists agree on, to prefer simpler measurements to more complex ones, and to calibrate new and unproven ways of measuring temperature using techniques scientists already agree on. And I really do believe that the UAH approach to measuring temperature must be considered unproven at this point.

And if you take a look at the last link I provided, the satellite temperatures that agree the best with temperature measured on the ground or using balloons is the RSS data, not the UAH data.
The University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) team is a favorite of the denier camp...
Using that sort of derogatory language demonstrates your political/philosophical bias. It's why I really can't be bothered to debate science and facts with you on this topic any longer. And why should you even respond to me if I'm just a denier after all.
With respect, I think it demonstrates my scientific bias. I trust scientific sources over political ones. The scientific journals and associations and publications I can find generally agree. If the scientific community were reaching different conclusions, I would have a different opinion.

You regularly use terms like "alarmists" and other emotionally loaded terms to describe mainstream science. I consider Christy a scientist, and he engages at a scientific level with the scientific community. That's not the kind of person I mean when I refer to 'deniers', I use it specifically to refer to the people who have a position they want to push no matter what the data say. Often, they really do seem to be politically motivated.

It's one thing to say that our knowledge is limited and scientists have been wrong about predictions in the past. That's quite true, and we should be humble about human knowledge. It's quite another to say that mainstream science is hogwash and we know better. Christy and the other satellite temperature scientists will keep hashing it out in the scientific community, and over time we will probably have a way to measure temperature from satellite data that most scientists consider accurate. We aren't there yet.
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JimFoxvog
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Re: Global Warning/Climate Change

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Now it's cooling. 2017 was only the second hottest year on record (surface temperatures). http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2 ... re-record/ Not as hot as 2016.

The NASA release is here: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/long ... -nasa-noaa

2017 was the hottest non-El Niño year. How does El Niño affect the average surface temperature? I would think it would just redistribute the heat without affecting the average. Or does less of the heat go into warming the ocean?
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Bootstrap
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Re: Global Warning/Climate Change

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Wayne in Maine wrote:I honestly think the current administration is trying to remove some thumbs from the scale.
I think we're coming from different places. I would really hate to see Al Gore or Donald Trump in charge of determining what research gets funded or published. I suspect they have really heavy thumbs.

To me, this undercurrent of conspiracy theory is really driving much of the discussion of global warming, and it implies that mainstream science is corrupt and partisan, but there is a side in American politics that is objective and knows the right answers so that it can lead scientists in the right direction. To me, it feels like some people are implying that the scientists who specialize in these fields don't know the things that the politicians can teach them, or that they have never read what John Christy or Judith Curry write, or that they are just too stupid to understand, or that someone has bought off all of mainstream science but right wing politicians are as pure as driven snow and can lead them on the right path.

I think it's more helpful to look at what such scientists wrote and compare it to what other scientists are writing, see what other scientists have said about their data and why they disagree. That's the only way I know to understand both sides of the argument.

I trust the scientific community to discuss the work of many researchers and come to common understandings of what we know and what we do not know on a scientific basis. I don't think we have any other institution that can do this as fairly as the scientific community. In climate studies, all of the data is now published so that researchers can analyze each other's data and analyze it themselves, it's become a very transparent process.
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JimFoxvog
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Re: Global Warning/Climate Change

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Bootstrap wrote: I think we're coming from different places. I would really hate to see Al Gore or Donald Trump in charge of determining what research gets funded or published. I suspect they have really heavy thumbs.
I would like to see Al Gore in charge of this. He cares and has educated himself well on the subject.
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Bootstrap
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Re: Global Warning/Climate Change

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JimFoxvog wrote:
Bootstrap wrote: I think we're coming from different places. I would really hate to see Al Gore or Donald Trump in charge of determining what research gets funded or published. I suspect they have really heavy thumbs.
I would like to see Al Gore in charge of this. He cares and has educated himself well on the subject.
He's too much a poster child for one point of view to be perceived as fair.

But I think there's an elephant in the room. One of the words Donald Trump wanted to ban agencies from using was "evidence-based", another was "research-based". That's obvious in his budget priorities.
President Donald Trump’s proposed budget in March raised the possibility of deep funding cuts for a number of federal agencies with science research missions, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and NASA. According to analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the president’s proposed budget would lead to some of the deepest cuts for science and engineering research in more than 40 years. Concerns over the funding outlook for scientific research were among issues raised by people participating in the March for Science held April 22.
That's caused a a dilemma for scientists. On the one hand, scientists very much want to insulate themselves from politics.
“Throwing our weight behind a protest movement may result in short-term gain, but it will more so contribute to the increased politicization of our work and further confound the public understanding of scientific rigor,” said Daniel Sharoh, an American working on a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience in the Netherlands.

He added that wearing the hats of activist and scientists at the same time damages “our need for insulation from daily politics in order to conduct basic research.”
An entomologist at the University of Florida, Joe Funderburk, described his concerns with the endorsement of the march by the Entomological Society of America, which he warned harms the credibility of its scientists.

“I, like many scientists, am asked to provide science information and knowledge to policy makers,” he said. “It must be free of bias. It must be free of political passion.”
On the other hand, science itself has become a weirdly political issue, and so has the notion that there is any such thing as facts that can be distinguished from political opinions.
“I feel that as a concerned American, as well as a scientist, I need to advocate for the use of real, unbiased scientific facts in any policy decisions,” said Michele Millham, who does research on personalized medicine at a company in Connecticut and will march in Washington. “Even the concept of ‘alternative facts’ scares me.”
Jeffrey Anderson, an associate professor of radiology and bioengineering at the University of Utah, planned to fly from Salt Lake City to the march in Washington with his partner and four teenage children.

“The wholesale disregard of truth and fact by the president and his close advisers, their devaluing evidence and the scientific method, is so extreme that I can’t be silent,” he said.
If the government does not fund science, there's not much to counter "alternative facts", and "facts" can be established by threatening and bullying and pretending to know more than the scientists.
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ohio jones
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Re: Global Warning/Climate Change

Post by ohio jones »

Bootstrap wrote:But I think there's an elephant in the room. One of the words Donald Trump wanted to ban was "evidence-based", another was "research-based".
That turned out to be a mouse, actually. But maybe you'll find that out when visiting the dentist a few years from now.
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Bootstrap
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Re: Global Warning/Climate Change

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ohio jones wrote:
Bootstrap wrote:But I think there's an elephant in the room. One of the words Donald Trump wanted to ban was "evidence-based", another was "research-based".
That turned out to be a mouse, actually. But maybe you'll find that out when visiting the dentist a few years from now.
But one elephant is that scientists are getting 40% fewer grants for climate change since Trump took office. Scientific evidence is going out of style ... and not just for climate change.

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Robert
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Re: Global Warning/Climate Change

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Bootstrap wrote:
But one elephant is that scientists are getting 40% fewer grants for climate change since Trump took office. Scientific evidence is going out of style ... and not just for climate change.


Screen Shot 2018-01-23 at 7.44.24 PM.png
Yes, the government is spending less money it does not have. How dare they lessen the deficit!
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JimFoxvog
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Re: Global Warning/Climate Change

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Robert wrote: Yes, the government is spending less money it does not have. How dare they lessen the deficit!
That seems a strange approach, when most of the spending is going for the ever increasing military budget of the country that spends more on the military than the next 8 or so countries combined!

What goes for climate change research is a small fraction of that, and is apt to be much more helpful for security.

No deficit reduction has been proposed. With the big, big increase in arms and the large tax break for the corporations and the rich, the debt will increase at ever faster rates.
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