What's True
A petition that has been in circulation since 1998 claims to bear the name of more than 30,000 signatures from scientists who reject the concept of anthropogenic global warming.
What's False
The petition was created by individuals and groups with political motivations, was distributed using misleading tactics, is presented with almost no accountability regarding the authenticity of its signatures, and asks only that you have received an undergraduate degree in any science to sign.
Also worth noting is the person who wrote the top answer on Quora only has a BS in Systems Science and an MA in Computer Science with no credentials in any climate related sciences, and his...
I don't buy any of this. The math behind human-caused global warming is pretty simple. We know gasses like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide create a greenhouse effect, which we can easily...
I don't buy any of this. The math behind human-caused global warming is pretty simple. We know gasses like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide create a greenhouse effect, which we can easily measure. We know about how much of these gasses we are pumping into the atmosphere every year, and we know how much of that gets sequestered in plant life. So, we know that human activity is causing a large net increase in the quantity of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere every year.
To argue that human-caused global warming is not happening requires proof that these known greenhouse gasses that we are emitting do not actually create a greenhouse effect, or that our own measurements of the massive increase of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere are somehow incorrect.
This whole article opinion piece relies on public misunderstanding of how the scientific process works, and how claims are made in the scientific community. It doesn't present any actual evidence to dispute the easily demonstrable mechanisms of action that drive anthropogenic global warming. It makes a weak argument for the benefits of an increased concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere in some parts of the world while completely ignoring the colossal damage it is causing and will cause elsewhere. This sounds like the kind of hit pieces GM used to secretly fund before we finally banned Tetraethyllead's use in gasoline.
i stopped at the first dude's "There's no scientific consensus that climate change is harmful." because that's frankly hilarious and insane, particularly in light of the--and this is just a small...
i stopped at the first dude's "There's no scientific consensus that climate change is harmful." because that's frankly hilarious and insane, particularly in light of the--and this is just a small number of events--: (1) two literal-record-breaking heat waves that just raked europe; (2) the massive melting of greenlandic ice which just took place as that heat wave moved north on a scale which was not projected to occur until 2070; (3) the particularly severe heat in alaska this year, including 90 degree days which have literally never happened in some places before; (4) the catastrophic collapse of arctic sea ice including, for the first time, no ice being found within 150 miles of alaska's shoreline; (5) the heat wave in india and pakistan earlier this year; (6) the heat wave in japan earlier this year, a year after another heat wave killed 80 people...
Anecdotal but I knew someone who signed this (or at least a very similar) petition. He was a research scientist with all the relevant qualifications and background to know what he was talking...
Anecdotal but I knew someone who signed this (or at least a very similar) petition. He was a research scientist with all the relevant qualifications and background to know what he was talking about. He was also a dogmatic Republican who believed that global warming (and the hole in the ozone layer) were European conspiracies to keep down American industry. It made me think of fundamentalist religion where certain bedrock beliefs are considered axiomatic and any evidence about how the world actually works must be understood in the context of those unquestionable truths. His explanations were apologetics, just like how a theologian might argue for the historicity of biblical miracles without needing to have been convinced by that evidence in the first place and without the possibility of contrary evidence changing those beliefs.
Coincidentally, the NYT reports today on global food shortages arising as a result of climate change. 20+ years on, the suppositions in that petition seem fairly baseless. The data and assertions...
Coincidentally, the NYT reports today on global food shortages arising as a result of climate change. 20+ years on, the suppositions in that petition seem fairly baseless. The data and assertions ignore some fairly basic physics, chemistry, and biology as well.
Pretending that more CO2 is globally beneficial is misleading at best. The rate of change in CO2 level is even more important than the quantity, both with respect to climate change and ocean acidification.
The oceans contribute substantial chemical and thermal buffering effects, given enough time for CO2 gas diffusion. Increase CO2 at current rates, and an increasingly acidic layer is forming at the ocean surface where everything may die off. That surface layer contains most of the microflora which start the aquatic food chain and produce 70% of the oxygen in Earth's atmosphere. The evidence is already in to show that diatoms and other hard-shelled organisms are starting to fall.
Likewise, there've been greenhouse periods in Earth's history where more of the surface was warm, wet, and green, but the available land surface was significantly smaller, and the flora and fauna had millions of years to adapt.
There's a prior paleontological model for what's happening, and it isn't pretty.
Posting this because I have been on the typical side that humans are causing global warming / accelerated climate change, which appears to be the consensus on Tildes based on my reading. This...
Posting this because I have been on the typical side that humans are causing global warming / accelerated climate change, which appears to be the consensus on Tildes based on my reading. This Quora discussion (the top two answers) is some of the most reasonable objection to my long-held perspective that AGW is true and I'm wondering what everyone else thinks. Good points? Anything grossly misleading? The top two answers also have a standard that is appropriate for Tildes.
It's not really reasonable though. It's just a bunch of random assertions, none backed up by any reasonable rationale, about AGW either not being serious (define what "serious" means?) or a...
It's not really reasonable though. It's just a bunch of random assertions, none backed up by any reasonable rationale, about AGW either not being serious (define what "serious" means?) or a damaging effect (define what "damaging" means?).
I'd write a longer comment, but it's so thoroughly nonsensical and worthless that I don't even consider it a good use of my time.
As a rule of thumb: The more differently styled, pixelated graphs you find on an "info dump" post, the more tinfoil-hat it is. You can find a small library worth of information countering this,...
As a rule of thumb: The more differently styled, pixelated graphs you find on an "info dump" post, the more tinfoil-hat it is. You can find a small library worth of information countering this, start by looking for a book recommended by someone who actually is a professional climate scientist.
They found 30,000 people (not climate scientists) who do not want the negative effects of climate change to be real. There's probably billions.
Also regarding graphs, particularly as seen in the top answer: Ask yourself: Why is the x-axis the way it is? Do we really not have more data? Do we really not know how many hurricanes there were...
Also regarding graphs, particularly as seen in the top answer: Ask yourself: Why is the x-axis the way it is? Do we really not have more data? Do we really not know how many hurricanes there were before 1980? Numbers are convincing, I get it. But if someone has to draw a trend line through a lot of noise, it's really easy to fake it by selecting the right timeframe. Also, if something is only tangentially related to the issue at hand, like that tree growth / CO2 experiment, ask yourself: Is the domain of numbers we're working with here reasonable? We're working with 400ppm CO2 right now, it used to be 280ish. Even the 535 ppm example is questionable, because that is still quite a ways in the future and we have serious trouble with climate change already.
And lastly, methodology. It is often really hard to verify a proper methodology, if you're not a subject matter expert. And sometimes it's entirely missing. How did that dude with the plants ensure they all had all the other factors be equal? I could think of a few ways, none of which are readily noticable. How applicable is this to the real world? I don't know, I just know that acid in soil is the technique coniferous trees use to flush out nutrients, and CO2 in water is an acid. Maybe this just depleted the soil faster?
The top two answers could be viewed as a gish gallop. They make a lot of assertions, all loosely connected. But let's back up. They're a counter-argument to a well-known chain of reasoning. How do...
The top two answers could be viewed as a gish gallop. They make a lot of assertions, all loosely connected. But let's back up. They're a counter-argument to a well-known chain of reasoning. How do you attack that chain? You break any of its links to the point where it can't be repaired.
The 2 top answers (the 2nd curiously has less votes than the third, which is in line with scientific consensus. Funny.) attack multiple links in the chain. "It's not us! And even if it is, it's not harmful". That's already two improbable claims right there. A priori it is more likely that our scientific consensus has made one huge blunder rather than two, so already I'm skeptic. And these attacks are mostly surface level. They provide the numbers, but not the context. "Water Vapor causes about 36%-70% of the greenhouse effect." Oh yeah? How has that fraction changed? How much has the greenhouse effect total changed? Since the sum total greenhouse warming nets us a total of 30°C warming (compared to no greenhouse effect at all), we can already see that the greenhouse effect isn't the problem in itself, it's the change thereof. So if the warming from water vapor isn't changing, it's not even part of the discussion. Done.
That was one claim. From the lesser of the two answers in question. (less popular, less well sourced) I'd have to do that dozens of times to "repair" the argument of AGW against these attacks, and frankly, most people aren't going to bother. That's a lot of work. That IS a gish gallop.
Let's randomly sample another claim and see if I can't pull that into question either. Let's choose from the first answer this time: "The fact that farmers laugh at the notion that a degree or two of warming would harm agriculture, because in most places 1°C of warming can be fully compensated for by planting 6 to 7 days earlier." - I'm not going to go into too much detail, but we can easily observe from weather that while the average only rises a bit, the extremes rise sharply. Just this year, Europe had record breaking heat waves, is at risk of droughts and looking at diminished harvests, water levels in rivers are low, groundwater is low. That is not avoided by planting earlier, because the temperatures didn't shift 1°C up, they went bonkers. Again, the argument is only partially even relevant to the discussion.
So? What do we do? We rely on the people who know the systems in and out; the scientists. As long as that consensus is maintained, we're fine.
"But what if the scientific community is bought out?" By whom, the oil lobby? More seriously though, while it is possible the community is biased against climate-skeptic results, that could easily be checked by looking at peer-review results. So to the author of that answer on quora: Put it in a paper, submit it to a reputable journal and send me the rejection and peer-review results. If they just discarded you because of blunders you made, I'm fine with that, system working as intended. If the rejection is due to the wrong reasons or spuriously supported, we can talk.
Because that's where this conversation is supposed to happen. Academics are much better at shit-testing an argument and we don't end up all doing the same work.
Snopes reviewed this back in 2016: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/30000-scientists-reject-climate-change/
Also worth noting is the person who wrote the top answer on Quora only has a BS in Systems Science and an MA in Computer Science with no credentials in any climate related sciences, and his website certainly doesn't lend him any more credibility either IMO. See: https://sealevel.info/
The Malware Bytes Firefox extension doesn't even allow me to access the website due to it being "suspicious".
I don't buy any of this. The math behind human-caused global warming is pretty simple. We know gasses like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide create a greenhouse effect, which we can easily measure. We know about how much of these gasses we are pumping into the atmosphere every year, and we know how much of that gets sequestered in plant life. So, we know that human activity is causing a large net increase in the quantity of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere every year.
To argue that human-caused global warming is not happening requires proof that these known greenhouse gasses that we are emitting do not actually create a greenhouse effect, or that our own measurements of the massive increase of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere are somehow incorrect.
This whole
articleopinion piece relies on public misunderstanding of how the scientific process works, and how claims are made in the scientific community. It doesn't present any actual evidence to dispute the easily demonstrable mechanisms of action that drive anthropogenic global warming. It makes a weak argument for the benefits of an increased concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere in some parts of the world while completely ignoring the colossal damage it is causing and will cause elsewhere. This sounds like the kind of hit pieces GM used to secretly fund before we finally banned Tetraethyllead's use in gasoline.i stopped at the first dude's "There's no scientific consensus that climate change is harmful." because that's frankly hilarious and insane, particularly in light of the--and this is just a small number of events--: (1) two literal-record-breaking heat waves that just raked europe; (2) the massive melting of greenlandic ice which just took place as that heat wave moved north on a scale which was not projected to occur until 2070; (3) the particularly severe heat in alaska this year, including 90 degree days which have literally never happened in some places before; (4) the catastrophic collapse of arctic sea ice including, for the first time, no ice being found within 150 miles of alaska's shoreline; (5) the heat wave in india and pakistan earlier this year; (6) the heat wave in japan earlier this year, a year after another heat wave killed 80 people...
Anecdotal but I knew someone who signed this (or at least a very similar) petition. He was a research scientist with all the relevant qualifications and background to know what he was talking about. He was also a dogmatic Republican who believed that global warming (and the hole in the ozone layer) were European conspiracies to keep down American industry. It made me think of fundamentalist religion where certain bedrock beliefs are considered axiomatic and any evidence about how the world actually works must be understood in the context of those unquestionable truths. His explanations were apologetics, just like how a theologian might argue for the historicity of biblical miracles without needing to have been convinced by that evidence in the first place and without the possibility of contrary evidence changing those beliefs.
That's why I don't like the expression of "believing" in climate change. It's not a dogma of faith.
Coincidentally, the NYT reports today on global food shortages arising as a result of climate change. 20+ years on, the suppositions in that petition seem fairly baseless. The data and assertions ignore some fairly basic physics, chemistry, and biology as well.
Pretending that more CO2 is globally beneficial is misleading at best. The rate of change in CO2 level is even more important than the quantity, both with respect to climate change and ocean acidification.
The oceans contribute substantial chemical and thermal buffering effects, given enough time for CO2 gas diffusion. Increase CO2 at current rates, and an increasingly acidic layer is forming at the ocean surface where everything may die off. That surface layer contains most of the microflora which start the aquatic food chain and produce 70% of the oxygen in Earth's atmosphere. The evidence is already in to show that diatoms and other hard-shelled organisms are starting to fall.
Likewise, there've been greenhouse periods in Earth's history where more of the surface was warm, wet, and green, but the available land surface was significantly smaller, and the flora and fauna had millions of years to adapt.
There's a prior paleontological model for what's happening, and it isn't pretty.
Posting this because I have been on the typical side that humans are causing global warming / accelerated climate change, which appears to be the consensus on Tildes based on my reading. This Quora discussion (the top two answers) is some of the most reasonable objection to my long-held perspective that AGW is true and I'm wondering what everyone else thinks. Good points? Anything grossly misleading? The top two answers also have a standard that is appropriate for Tildes.
It's not really reasonable though. It's just a bunch of random assertions, none backed up by any reasonable rationale, about AGW either not being serious (define what "serious" means?) or a damaging effect (define what "damaging" means?).
I'd write a longer comment, but it's so thoroughly nonsensical and worthless that I don't even consider it a good use of my time.
As a rule of thumb: The more differently styled, pixelated graphs you find on an "info dump" post, the more tinfoil-hat it is. You can find a small library worth of information countering this, start by looking for a book recommended by someone who actually is a professional climate scientist.
They found 30,000 people (not climate scientists) who do not want the negative effects of climate change to be real. There's probably billions.
Also regarding graphs, particularly as seen in the top answer: Ask yourself: Why is the x-axis the way it is? Do we really not have more data? Do we really not know how many hurricanes there were before 1980? Numbers are convincing, I get it. But if someone has to draw a trend line through a lot of noise, it's really easy to fake it by selecting the right timeframe. Also, if something is only tangentially related to the issue at hand, like that tree growth / CO2 experiment, ask yourself: Is the domain of numbers we're working with here reasonable? We're working with 400ppm CO2 right now, it used to be 280ish. Even the 535 ppm example is questionable, because that is still quite a ways in the future and we have serious trouble with climate change already.
And lastly, methodology. It is often really hard to verify a proper methodology, if you're not a subject matter expert. And sometimes it's entirely missing. How did that dude with the plants ensure they all had all the other factors be equal? I could think of a few ways, none of which are readily noticable. How applicable is this to the real world? I don't know, I just know that acid in soil is the technique coniferous trees use to flush out nutrients, and CO2 in water is an acid. Maybe this just depleted the soil faster?
And this petition with 30k people, is from 1998 (snopes.com).
The top two answers could be viewed as a gish gallop. They make a lot of assertions, all loosely connected. But let's back up. They're a counter-argument to a well-known chain of reasoning. How do you attack that chain? You break any of its links to the point where it can't be repaired.
The 2 top answers (the 2nd curiously has less votes than the third, which is in line with scientific consensus. Funny.) attack multiple links in the chain. "It's not us! And even if it is, it's not harmful". That's already two improbable claims right there. A priori it is more likely that our scientific consensus has made one huge blunder rather than two, so already I'm skeptic. And these attacks are mostly surface level. They provide the numbers, but not the context. "Water Vapor causes about 36%-70% of the greenhouse effect." Oh yeah? How has that fraction changed? How much has the greenhouse effect total changed? Since the sum total greenhouse warming nets us a total of 30°C warming (compared to no greenhouse effect at all), we can already see that the greenhouse effect isn't the problem in itself, it's the change thereof. So if the warming from water vapor isn't changing, it's not even part of the discussion. Done.
That was one claim. From the lesser of the two answers in question. (less popular, less well sourced) I'd have to do that dozens of times to "repair" the argument of AGW against these attacks, and frankly, most people aren't going to bother. That's a lot of work. That IS a gish gallop.
Let's randomly sample another claim and see if I can't pull that into question either. Let's choose from the first answer this time: "The fact that farmers laugh at the notion that a degree or two of warming would harm agriculture, because in most places 1°C of warming can be fully compensated for by planting 6 to 7 days earlier." - I'm not going to go into too much detail, but we can easily observe from weather that while the average only rises a bit, the extremes rise sharply. Just this year, Europe had record breaking heat waves, is at risk of droughts and looking at diminished harvests, water levels in rivers are low, groundwater is low. That is not avoided by planting earlier, because the temperatures didn't shift 1°C up, they went bonkers. Again, the argument is only partially even relevant to the discussion.
So? What do we do? We rely on the people who know the systems in and out; the scientists. As long as that consensus is maintained, we're fine.
"But what if the scientific community is bought out?" By whom, the oil lobby? More seriously though, while it is possible the community is biased against climate-skeptic results, that could easily be checked by looking at peer-review results. So to the author of that answer on quora: Put it in a paper, submit it to a reputable journal and send me the rejection and peer-review results. If they just discarded you because of blunders you made, I'm fine with that, system working as intended. If the rejection is due to the wrong reasons or spuriously supported, we can talk.
Because that's where this conversation is supposed to happen. Academics are much better at shit-testing an argument and we don't end up all doing the same work.