Some people say you can Google WSJ and open their articles in an incognito window, but there really isn't a consensus about that and the evidence is scant.
I don't know who's right, here, but the guy is hardly an unbiased source. Plenty of climate deniers like to paint themselves as just rationally examining the facts and reaching politically inconvenient conclusions.
I read your article, and I think comparing him to a gravity unbeliever/flat earther is grossly unfair.
I don't know who's right either, but the answer isn't attacking Pielke, or preventing him from speaking, or getting him fired, or starting government investigations. Pielke is surely biased, but so is the author of the Guardian article, and so is Tom Steyer, and so is Paul Krugman.
To be fair though, most of those other journalists are biased by most of the scientists and evidence out there. Yes he's not a flat earther, but he is out of his depth in climate science, and his flawed work is used by deniers, as in the comments in the WSJ.
Can you help me understand the graph that article references to claim that more storms are happening?[1] It looks like some classes of disaster have tripled since the '80s, and in general that disasters have basically doubled. Those both seem way beyond what I would imagine being caused by the the global temperature rise of about 1 degree Fahrenheit during the same period. (If temperate increases continue at the same rate, would we see another doubling of all weather-related disasters in ~30 years?).
Anyways, that makes me wonder whether the graph captures something like reported disasters or if disaster trends happen on multi-decade scales and that 35-year span is dominated by "short-term" variation. I can't find the original context, but there looks to be an updated version of the graph in this report from the same source [2] and the commentary is "In terms of the number of events, the trend towards greater and more detailed reporting continued, with the total number further increasing to 1,060 events."
I'm not totally sure, but I'll take a shot. The second link describes these as "loss events." So it's not just tracking storms and floods in general, but rather storms and floods that result in some sort of economic loss. Since this is from an insurance company, I assume it's tracking insurance claims.
As you note, there are a ton of confounding factors. Growing populations and increasing wealth mean that the same number of storms would be expected to result in more losses now than before.
This seems to be the crux of the dispute between the author here and his critics. The author has analyzed the data and come to the conclusion that the increase is entirely due to these non-weather changes. His critics see that some of the increase is left over, and thus due to climate change, after accounting for all other confounding factors.
Note that a small change in the climate could result in a large increase in the number of loss events. For an example I find easy to understand, consider the influence of sea level rise on tropical storms and hurricanes. Making up some numbers, imagine that an area suffers major damage once the storm surge hits 10ft, which is expected to happen in 1% of storms. If the sea level rises by 1ft, then major damage happens at 9ft of storm surge. Since these events can be expected to follow something like a bell curve, we can expect 9ft storms to be far more common, maybe 10% of storms.
Again, numbers totally made up, but the point is the idea that small changes in severity can potentially result in a large change in frequency. And this combines with other effects, like climate change potentially pushing the distributions farther out (so that perhaps 10ft storms become vastly more common, because what used to be a 9ft storm gets slightly intensified) or a shift in severity causing a net increase (worse storms in region X plus milder storms in region Y could result in more total storms being over some damage threshold).
I think that's a great summary of the dispute. One small but significant correction I'd suggest is that (so far as I know) Pielke is not claiming that "the increase is entirely due to these non-weather changes". Rather, I've only seen him make the easier to satisfy claim that there is not yet sufficient evidence to say that climate change is causing such an increase: "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and normalized catastrophe losses."
The author's claim is this, and if true there is merit to listening --- Indeed there is rarely merit to not listening. Science is all about observation and probability. EDIT: although clever political framing can skew naive readers away from truths, which is one of the article's meta topics. ---
"I believe climate change is real and that human emissions of greenhouse gases risk justifying action, including a carbon tax. But my research led me to a conclusion that many climate campaigners find unacceptable: There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally. In fact we are in an era of good fortune when it comes to extreme weather. This is a topic I’ve studied and published on as much as anyone over two decades. My conclusion might be wrong, but I think I’ve earned the right to share this research without risk to my career."
On the other hand, the claim in the following quotation is logically flawed. 'True' and 'no evidence' are, importantly, not opposites:
'I was right to question the IPCC’s 2007 report, which included a graph purporting to show that disaster costs were rising due to global temperature increases. The graph was later revealed to have been based on invented and inaccurate information, as I documented in my book “The Climate Fix.” The insurance industry scientist Robert-Muir Wood of Risk Management Solutions had smuggled the graph into the IPCC report. He explained in a public debate with me in London in 2010 that he had included the graph and misreferenced it because he expected future research to show a relationship between increasing disaster costs and rising temperatures.
When his research was eventually published in 2008, well after the IPCC report, it concluded the opposite: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and normalized catastrophe losses.” Whoops.'
What is the logic flaw? No evidence to support a position is enough to exclude it. Even though you are right, it doesn't mean it is proven false. It does mean no evidence of it being true.
are all different statements. He is committing the fallacy of the excluded middle.
If OTOH he wishes to claim X is false he should say it was proven false. But I infer he didn't have such evidence, just that the committee had found no supporting evidence.
Of course, in science truth is a probabilistic concept, but here we don't have the figures.
I'd also like to read a response from other climate scientists or journalists to see if there's a part of the story he's omitting from his framing here.
I agree with you what you are saying, but at least in the WSJ article, he doesn't claim it was "proven false" so the fallacy doesn't apply.
He is being fair, and quotes the report which simply says "insufficient evidence". But that is enough to exclude from positive claims, even though it doesn't disprove it.
The second paragraph of the quotation begins: 'When his research was eventually published in 2008, well after the IPCC report, it concluded the opposite:'
So he does claim that these are opposites. That is my problem with his argument as presented.
OK, I see where you are coming from, and it is a fair interpretation. I just don't read opposite as equal to false. I read it the opposite of a proven claim is an unproven claim, not a false claim. But I think this is a distraction - even if he meant it as proven false, and fell into fallacious thinking, he should simply be corrected, not vilified, not investigated by the government, and not hounded out of a job by a billionaire activist.
That I agree with, if true. On a broader level OTOH, having now read the articles debunking his 538 writing, it seems this is not a reliable witness. See other links in this and other subthreads here
"I was right to question" is certainly supported by "insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship" coming out later. I don't see any error based on the information presented in the article.
That is a fair point.
Although I've since read a couple of the articles the author complained about for groupthink, and they appear to have more credibility than him, however.
For example:
https://thinkprogress.org/first-climate-article-on-nate-silv... which is quoted in a Guardian article posted in another subthread lower down here.
What specifically about that article makes you doubt Pielke's credibility? I've been loosely following his work for about a decade, and my impression has been that he's trustworthy at least in the sense that he believes what he's saying, and is not intentionally trying to mislead.
Without studying it, the Guardian article has the appearance of an example of the "intense media campaign to have me fired" that he refers to. That such a media campaign exists doesn't make his detractors wrong, but it makes me want to closely evaluate their claims for accuracy.
Please explain to me how this Guardian article constitutes such. It's an article which goes into moderate non technical methodological detail on what Pielke did wrong and why, providing links and sources.
Here's the link in this thread so you can study it https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...
I wasn't trying to convince you that it was part of such a campaign. Rather I was wondering which particular details swayed you, as a presumably impartial observer, to believe one side of the story rather than the other.
But since you ask, the main reason I feel like its part of a campaign is because the recently released emails have confirmed that there was indeed such a campaign. Before knowing that (which I think is a solid fact at this point) I probably would have thought that "intense media campaign" was too conspiratorial to be likely.
Separately, while I don't know the Guardian author's history and experience, I feel like the vehemence of her language and the viciousness of the chosen quotes is greater than that normally shown in a science story. Also, from previous exposure to Mann and Trenberth, I (rightly or wrongly) start with the assumption that they are more concerned with political message than presenting an unbiased scientific overview.
I liked that the first article you linked included a rebuttal from Pielke, and I found his links and counter-argument persuasive. But at this point I'm conscious of my bias toward his side of the story, and thus don't trust my assessment of this particular article. That's why I was asking you which parts you found convincing, so I could try to consider them specifically.
---
The quoting of Judith Curry in the second article you linked is interesting. In 2007 she argued against Pielke's conclusions, but since then she has swung to be one of his strongest defenders. With regard to a parallel 2014 piece at Climate Progress, she wrote:
RP Jr’s post at 538 has elicited what is probably the most reprehensible and contemptible smear job that I have ever seen of a scientist, at least from an organization that has any pretense of respectability
As a result of sticking up for Pielke (as well as for stating her own beliefs) her own reputation has been similarly damaged:
Well as recently as 5 years ago, I never thought I’d live to see the day when I am very grateful that I have tenure at a university, which provides my job with some protection against politically inconvenient scientific analyses.
(As a disclaimer, I'll say that while (like Pielke) I find Curry's writings to be accurate and scientifically trustworthy, many of the reader comments on her site strike me as underinformed right-wing politically biased trolling. If you can, try to judge her by her own writings, rather than by the comments of others.)
I appreciate your openness and data orientation and knowledge that (as I do of myself) we are all open to bias. I'll read more deeply through this particular matter and return to this conversation. Few people are willing to engage in this way, calmly, but I', glad that HN helps find such interlocutors.
A huge problem is that scientists feel compelled to overhypebeause of the PR campaign from the anti-data side. I'd heard of Curry and will look again. Good data are useful, but I understand that - especially with the new lot coming to the White House, that a lot of scientists will be enervated by anything that hte shills can use to create fake not-news. We are at a sad state of current affairs.
You seem to be focusing on the word "opposite" which I think was used in quite a reasonable way here, even if not technically accurate. Does that actually change the validity of his complaint? That fabricated data was published in the IPCC report, and later nobody was able to show that it was true?
Perhaps it may turn out to be true oneday, but the meat of the problem is that it was published without evidence. Then compounded by the fact that somebody looking for evidence failed to find it.
I think you're mistakenly interpreting that quotation as claiming that there is no relationship between temperature increase and catastrophe losses. But it instead makes narrower claims, such as: he was right to question the report; the graph was based on inaccurate information; the later data didn't show a relationship between temperature increase and catastrophe losses.
If he'd written something like "Because there is no relationship between temperature increase and catastrophes, as proven by the insufficient evidence to support that, I was right to question the report", then you'd be right. But he didn't say that. I think he's only saying that he was right to question the report because that graph was inaccurate and invented, and because later data showed there was insufficient evidence for the relationship it was supposed to show. If reports shouldn't contain inaccurate and invented data, especially invented data that isn't similar to empirical data, then he was right to question it.
Even if opposing viewpoints are likely incorrect, there is some risk to omitting sections of the climate change discussion. There are many "things you can't say" about climate change.
And yet I constantly see those "things you can't say" being said in the public mainstream media. Like the Wall St. Journal. The claim that dissent is being suppressed rings hollow to me. Just because that dissent is in opposition to a lot of other voices-- should it be given equal weight or "volume" in our discourse, or proportionate weight?
Ah, the messy intersection of politics, journalism, and science. It looks (from one side) like an example of journalism constructing a narrative and suppressing evidence that doesn't fit. Obviously this doesn't help the cause beyond the short term.
I think that's too simple a reading. There is a whole industry of people whose job it is to create doubt about science so as to prevent action that might harm those who pay them. It started with decades of denial that cigarettes could possibly cause harm, but went from there:
I'm glad that a guy with a political science degree is interested in scientific topics. But I think he'd be a little more sensitive to the broader problem of non-experts jumping in to an area that has become highly politicized, and where industry has such a strong short-term incentive to undermine the appearance of scientific consensus.
You are totally right, and bad science should be vigorously debunked. But that doesn't justify the suppression of dissenting views. Science isn't static, there needs to be free debate.
> There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally. In fact we are in an era of good fortune when it comes to extreme weather.
Try telling that to the residents of California or Gatlinburg, TN.
OK, anecdotes do not constitute data. So here's some data:
Look at the number of acres burned, which is the metric that matters. The upward trend over the past few decades is unmistakable even without fancy statistical tests. And that's just what I was able to find in five minutes on a ridiculously slow internet connection.
It's hard to tell the difference between "there is scant evidence" and "there wasn't any evidence where I happened to look for it."
Sorry, but where is wildfire in "hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought"?
This kind of dismissal of a no-doubt nuanced opinion on a scientific issue based on "what you found in five minutes on the internet" brings literally nothing to the conversation.
The increase in wildfires can be largely attributed to the increase in droughts in some areas.
The reason that droughts don't appear to be getting worse overall is that the rain is moving from one place to another. So some places that used to get more water are now getting less, and places that used to get less water are now getting more. But this is still a problem because it's very hard to move agricultural infrastructure to chase the rain.
> can be largely attributed to the increase in droughts in some areas
Among many other possible explanations.
Look, you wanted to show the author wrong, for whatever reasons, and you went looking for something and went with the first thing you found.
Now, rather than admitting there was nothing there, you really want to argue about the causes of wildfires? Your point was not a good one. Just admit it.
No, absolutely not. I would like nothing better than for the author to be right, and for climate change to not be causing any serious problems. But I'm pretty sure that there is actually a lot of evidence that climate change is causing serious problems. The only reason I'm harping on this one dataset is, as I said, I'm on a slow internet connection and so I can't do any comprehensive research at the moment. I'm going the best I can with what I've got.
Now you are just being deliberately obtuse. You already responed to my comment where I provide an alternative explanation of changes in fire policy, and you agknowledge that "the situation with respect to fire is very complicated".
> I would like nothing better than for the author to be right, and for climate change to not be causing any serious problems.
The author never made such a claim, going so far as to state: "I believe climate change is real and that human emissions of greenhouse gases risk justifying action, including a carbon tax."
The author claimed that there is "scant evidence" that climate change is causing extreme weather events, including drought. Being a resident of California, which is in the middle of its worst drought in history, that claim seems improbable to me. (Note carefully: the claim that I find highly improbable is not that climate change is not causing extreme weather events, but that there is "scant evidence" that climate change is causing extreme weather events.)
I first tried looking up actual drought data, but it's all hiding behind high-bandwidth visualizations which I cannot currently access. So I went with what I could find.
> ... which is not even remotely what the author said
The author said that there was "scant evidence" that climate change is causing extreme climate events. That is what I dispute. I believe the evidence is not scant. In fact, I'm pretty sure the evidence is quite plentiful, but I cannot demonstrate that at the moment because of resource constraints (very low bandwidth internet).
But you could go look up the drought data and prove me wrong, at least about that. (But then we would still have to talk about the author's very misleading claim about hurricanes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13099156)
>>> The increase in wildfires can be largely attributed
>>> to the increase in droughts in some areas.
>
>> Among many other possible explanations.
>
> Like what?
Drought certainly plays a role, but I think a changing strategy of fire suppression will make it difficult to prove causation from the statistics. A gigantic confounding factor is that the approach to handling forest fires changed dramatically in the timeframe you refer to, with a shift from "put it out immediately" to "let it burn", then a backlash leading to somewhere in the middle:
Until around 1970, federal land managers remained obsessed with controlling large fires. But during the 1960s, scientific research increasingly demonstrated the positive role fire played in forest ecology. This led in the early 1970s to a radical change in Forest Service policy—to let fires burn when and where appropriate.
From this the "let-burn" policy evolved, though it suffered a setback in the wake of the 1988 Yellowstone fires. Since around 1990, fire suppression efforts and policy have had to take into account exurban sprawl in what is called the wildland-urban interface.
Of course this doesn't mean that drought has not caused more fires, but it's going to make "total acres burned per year" very hard to use as evidence. Pielke has written about fire in other places:
"Influence of Location, Population, and Climate on Building Damage and Fatalities due to Australian Bushfire: 1925–2009"
I only skimmed it quickly, but it seems to claim that once you've normalize for development, the severity of bush fires in Australia has not changed significantly over the century. Given the difficulty of separating policy from climate, I'm not sure I'd ever take it as firm proof, but it probably gives more insight into Pielke's thought process.
> No, absolutely not. I would like nothing better than for the author to be right
I think we are basically done here, but I just want to point out this rhetorical trick.
You demonstrate motivated reasoning pretty clearly throughout this thread, which is why I called out that you started with your conclusion and then looked for facts and arguments to fit (debate-team style). When I point that out here, you dodge with "I would like nothing better than for the author to be right", which neatly deflects the point.
My criticism is not that you would prefer the author is wrong, but that you clearly started from a conclusion that he is wrong. That is why it didn't really matter to you what particular evidence you had, you just went with it. So pointing out that you would prefer if the author was right (misrepresentation aside) sounds like you are addressing my criticism, without actually doing so.
> you clearly started from a conclusion that he is wrong
I started with a strong Bayesian prior that he is wrong, yes. But it is important to not to lose sight of what is actually in dispute here. We are not arguing about whether climate change is actually increasing extreme weather events, we are arguing over whether the evidence for this is "scant". To dispute that claim, it suffices to show that evidence exists. Which it does:
This is not about your prior. This is about whether you are arguing fairly and interpreting the data impartially. You are not.
You read the article, concluded the author was wrong, and posted anecdotes and a link about wildfires.
After it was pointed out that the author said nothing about wildfires, you suggested that wildfires are caused by droughts, while admitting that the rain is moving around. Why not admit that your point about wildfires was simply off the mark?
After I pointed out that wildfires can be caused by other things than droughts, you asked for me to name them, while admitting elsewhere that the wildfire issue is complicated. Why not simply admit that obviously there are many causes of wildfires?
After I pointed out that you misrepresented what the author said as "not causing any serious problems" then you switched to whether or not the evidence is scant. Why not just admit that you misstated the author's position?
After admitting that "scant" means something more like "insufficient" rather than "nonexistent", you are now saying that to dispute the claim requires only that some evidence exists. Why not simply admit that the issue is more complicated than it seemed to you at first glance and that you may have jumped the gun?
> But it is important to not to lose sight of what is actually in dispute here.
Indeed.
Note that I am not responding at all to the drought data you found. I am simply pointing out the unreasonable way you are arguing.
How can we be sure what caused the increase in fires? We seem to change our approach to fire prevention and management constantly. Some strategies employed by the Forest Service and other state and federal authorities in the past have almost certainly been counterproductive, such as aggressively fighting small fires that would otherwise have prevented the accumulation of undergrowth that is now making larger fires much more dangerous.
It's as ridiculous to cite an increase in forest fire severity and frequency as proof of ACC as it is to cite a few particularly bad snowstorms to deny it. Deniers will legitimately cry foul when you use the same bogus rhetorical tools that you forbid to your opponents.
> How can we be sure what caused the increase in fires?
We can't be sure from this data, but there is a very plausible causal model that leads from drought to fires. It just seems highly plausible that drought over woodland would result in more fires. But I don't have access to that data at the moment. Anecdotally I can tell you with high confidence that the Gatlinburg fire, and most of the recent mega-fires in California, as well as the one up in Canada that made the papers a while back, were all associated with not just drought, but historic drought. That might just be a coincidence, but until someone actually runs the numbers you can't assume that.
In any case, it is pretty clear that something has changed. Do you have a better theory to offer?
That is exactly how a scientific debate works (or at least how it's supposed to work): hypotheses are advanced, the ones that can be rejected out of hand as non-explanatory or at odds with known evidence are rejected, and then experiments are designed to select among the remaining candidates. If there is only one hypothesis that survives the first stage of the process then it wins by default until someone comes up with a better hypothesis.
The basis on which I say this (aside from having done a lot of reading on the philosophy of science): I used to be a scientist working for NASA. I was not a planetary scientist, I was a computer scientist, but I was doing research (in AI), writing grant proposals, etc. My productivity was measured in peer-reviewed publications. So I have some first-hand insight into how the process works, how it is supposed to work, and how these two things often differ.
You don't just jump into a debate about someone's scientific integrity with unrelated web links and speculation that you just pulled out of your ass, and then back out with "well we can't be sure, what do you think?"
I'm not backing out of anything. I still believe that the author's claim that the evidence is "scant" is demonstrably wrong, I just can't demonstrate it right now because I cannot find a low-bandwidth source of drought data, so I'm having to rely on proxies. But proxies are still data.
Instead of leveling ad hominem attacks at me, why don't you go look up the drought data?
I don't think getting into the minutiae of drought data, or the causes of wildfires, is going to get us anywhere.
The claim that evidence is scant or not would need to take into account all the evidence on the effects of climate change on current weather events. You could cherry-pick tons of evidence to support either position, if that's your thing.
If you wanted to shed some light on the topic of the article, it would be more interesting to see what the author's background is and follow up some of the claims about why he was fired by 538, whether he is being unfairly attacked in the media, etc.
Remember that this article isn't primarily about the science, it's about the journalism. The only reason we are talking about wildfires is because you brought it up, which was really quite a stretch.
It is hard to mount one's best arguments when one is operating under tight resource constraints and time pressures. HN threads get stale very quickly.
> You could cherry-pick tons of evidence to support either position, if that's your thing.
Heh, this whole disagreement may actually be a mistake on my part about the meaning of the word "scant." I thought "scant" meant "rare or non-existent" but it doesn't, it means "barely sufficient or adequate." So I was about to say that if there's tons of evidence to be cherry-picked then it cannot be scant. But I suppose it could be.
In any case, I did finally manage to find some drought data:
> forcing the recipient to do the research necessary
Normally I would agree with this, but there are extenuating circumstances here. I'm not fobbing the research off on you out of laziness, I'm doing it because drought data is voluminous, summaries turn out to be very hard to find, and I'm on an extremely slow internet connection.
Are you number of acres is the metric that matters because if we looked at the total number of fired we'd see they have dropped 75% since the 1960s? I don't know which metric is more important, and I'm not sure you do either. But it is a useful link because it shows how easy it is to take good data, and tell whatever story you want with it.
The key point here is that you and I should be able to openly debate acres burned vs total number of fires without me trying to track you down and get you fired, or you having me banned from HN.
> I don't know which metric is more important, and I'm not sure you do either.
If what you care about is how many trees there are (and that's what I care about) then the number of acres burned is clearly the metric that matters.
The trend has been a transition from a lot of little fires to a few huge ones. One of the reasons that the number of fires has dropped is that by the time the mega-fires are brought under control there is nothing left to burn.
> The key point here is that you and I should be able to openly debate acres burned vs total number of fires without me trying to track you down and get you fired, or you having me banned from HN.
That is certainly true. But there is nothing wrong with firing an academic for doing sloppy and possibly politically motivated research. I don't know if that's what this was, but I do have some actual data that indicates that it could be the case. And this data is not obscure nor was it particularly hard for me to find, so it seems likely that when I have the bandwidth to do a more thorough search I might find more evidence that this guy's research was in fact sloppy and politically motivated.
The fact that he published this piece in the WSJ, whose biases are well known, is another indication that this is not a clear-cut case of political correctness run amok. It could be, but it's far from a slam-dunk.
>One of the reasons that the number of fires has dropped is that by the time the mega-fires are brought under control there is nothing left to burn.
Or, without little fires, flammable undergrowth accumulates that makes the fires that do occur even larger. Unlike most natural disasters, humans are very active in directly manipulating fires. This makes it difficult to attribute changes to fire statistics to underlying environmental changes, or fire control practices.
Yes, that's true. The situation with respect to fire is very complicated. I'm not saying it's a slam-dunk either way. All I'm saying is that in five minutes I was able to find some evidence (not proof, mind you, just evidence) that droughts are in fact getting worse. That isn't proof of anything, but it is evidence that the evidence is not "scant". It is possible that in five minutes I just happened to stumble on the only piece of evidence, and that the totality of the evidence is in fact "scant", but that's unlikely. Much more likely is that there is in fact a lot of evidence out there, and when I have access to decent internet connection again, I (or anyone else who looks) can find it.
It's not evidence of anything but your own confirmation bias.
If you can't see why "the first thing I found may not be holding up well to criticism, but since it only took me five minutes to find, there obviously must be a lot more out there" is a bad argument, then you're just rationalizing.
You are ignoring an important piece of evidence: I've told you that I'm on a very slow internet connection. Now, I could be lying about that (I'm not sure how I could prove it to you) but if it is in fact true then that would explain my failure to come up with additional evidence. I have been trying to access drought data directly but it all seems to be hiding behind complex visualizations which I cannot currently access.
However, I think it is telling that so far not a single participant in this conversation has (AFAICT) even tried to get to the actual drought data to see if there is anything there. Somewhere out there, one of you has to be on a high-bandwidth connection, so you could go get the data and settle this, where I currently cannot. That would seem to me to be a more constructive (to say nothing of definitive) way to address this than to accuse me of confirmation bias and rationalizing.
A discipline is scientific if it is possible to challenge it, if it can be proven wrong (it doesn't mean it will, but there is a way to prove it wrong).
If the discipline is using political pressure to prevent anyone from doing so, it cannot be called science anymore. A political movement would be a more appropriate term.
And more generally, my profession (finance) is making extensive use of mathematical models to model something too complex to be understood perfectly (financial markets / the economy). But we know our models suck, because we could do experiment on them, we can test them against reality. We know we can build models or investment strategies that do great in back-testing but fall apart as soon as they go live (I have seen that so many times first hand). I give very little credibility to someone who comes up with a complex mathematical model that pretends it will predict the climate in 30 years, knowing that we will only know if his model was reliable in 30 years, we have no way to test it now. Therefore it cannot be falsified and therefore I don't think it is science.
Any prediction requires us to wait to see what really happens. I don't think it's fair to say that 30 years is too long to wait and that it's therefore not falsifiable. Science has made claims in the past that took much longer than that to prove false, but we still accept them as falsifiable and that they were valid science at the time.
I can think of scientific theories that have been proven wrong after a long time, but they haven't been proven wrong because it was impossible to prove them wrong immediately. Only because it took so long to come up with an experiment / better theory which in insight could have been done on day 1.
This is not the same as telling everyone "I have a model, my back-testings are telling me it works, I will only be able to prove it right (or wrong) in 30 years, but you need to take actions now based on what this model says".
'Waiting 30 years to measure the earth's temperature and weather patterns' is hardly a controlled experiment. You have exogenous variables (volcanic activity, sun activity, the earth's normal variations in temperature) and for how many years would you propose to measure this activity--you'd need a statistically significant sample. Why? Because the earth's weather patterns can fluctuate--i.e. you could have a year with severe weather with or without climate change.
To the best of my knowledge, a better scientific experiment would be having ~30 earths with 1 climate policy, ~30 earths with another climate policy, and yet another control group.
There's a big difference between saying "we scientifically know emitting pollutants into the atmosphere has certain unintended/undesirable consequences, and we're uncertain of the harm so we should stop," and "we know global warming will create extreme weather patterns that will destroy the world's economy and kill billions of people"--I have heard people tell me of these doomsday scenarios, even here on HN.
Politics always exist to serve self-interests. Ask yourself whose are served by this movement.
Do we get to apply that standard to past IPCC predictions too ?
Reality is that the current temperature anomaly is -far- below IPCC 1990 predictions. So ... falsified ? It is, in fact, so that the temperature anomaly is below every IPCC prediction of more than 5 years back, best case scenarios, with the lone exception of the 2010 report's optimistic prediction for last year (2016 however is out of the 95% interval of that one too, unless something drastic happens).
There are reasons for this. Such as that there was a bit of a pause in global warming from late 90s to late 00s. But the fact that the models failed to see this coming, and only incorporated it afterwards of course is further indictment of those models. It kept warming, mind you, except perhaps for 1 year, just way, way slower than predicted.
There is a joke that the IPCC now must be correct for the next 22000 years. Why ? That's the only way to make their 95% certainty predictions actually be true in 95% of the cases, given one prediction every 5 years. And this is not the only consideration. Obviously things like the Kyoto accords were based on these predictions. They turned out wrong. So should we now abandon those accords and laws, at least until the evidence can be examined ? That would be very scientific, or at least, it would be very scientific the way I was taught statistics. To say that this would be politically problematic, a lot of work and very, very, very impractical is an understatement.
And of course, more recent science cannot be used until there is enough evidence to support the correctness of the model. Normally one would say, half to validate, half to be used. The problem is that you cannot trust researchers who've seen (and evaluated) against all data they've seen. So you need to use future data to validate models, but of course all IPCC models so far have crashed and burned in that comparison. So you cannot just say "let's just use the 2015 predictions", because if you just put down the temperatures from last year for the next 100 years you would have done better than the IPCC, so far (meaning even outirght climate deniers' models would easily have 95% accuracy one year out).
And that then violates intuition. The graphs show a clear and consistent rising of temperature for coming up on 160 years now. Obviously the truth is that we don't know why, or at least, not to the level of detail required to predict the effect of policies we implement. Now of course, both cause and effect seem obvious - BUT the models fail to predict effect given cause, so technically a mathematician should use the notions taught in philosophy of science, as applied to statistics, and reject the models. One would be obliged to point out that maybe the models are wrong because their assumptions are wrong, or at least inaccurate.
I would say that we should just train everyone in how to analyze the data, but I realize it's not very practical. Plus it would actually mean climate change would be tempered (one would hope that policies would be moderated given that the predictions they're based on turned out to be overly pessimistic).
All this is ignoring theoretical problems, the most obvious one is that these models are based on statistics. Statistics that studied cause and effect in a situation ... that no longer exists and very likely will never return. We are using models to predict the future based on values that lie outside of the range they were modeled on (predictions out of range is one of the statistical fallacies: you cannot model based on data between 0 and 10, then have confidence in predicting what happens at 15. Everybody does do that of course, but it's wrong, as obviously the distribution of your source data is different from the prediction data. But we don't have data with the same distribution, because the situation is new). Technically that means they're wrong, period. What do we do with that ?
Science with this many variables is messy and has error. But as any good scientist knows, errors are there to help us iterate our models to be less wrong. Frthermore, our computers are literally thousands (^more) of times faster than in 1990, and computational modelling science has improved exponentially as well. Therefore to complain that science wasn't as good in 1990 is merely descriptive, and a good thing. You're assuming everything is static, and should be error-free predictable. That's really not how epistemology works.
There is real science being done, and there is journalism, doing a generally poor job of reporting the science. And then there is politics.
If you let the journalism blind you to the science, then you're going to be misinformed. Read the IPCC reports cover to cover, and then follow up with the references if you don't think there is real science being done.
Agree. Reading just the primer is way better than starting to argue with even HN about this.
Problem us either is HN and Ars Technica are very political or techies and science lovers has started abandoning their love for evidence to participate in "troll hunting" not just blatant trolls but also anyone who asks any critical question.
And, as a former sceptic: from the outside climate science seems cult-like :-/
(That said, even as a former sceptic, I have advocated cutting the dependency on fossil, I do have all my shares in solar etc.)
And there are many other good reasons to cutting our dependency on fossil fuel.
Limited supply, geopolitical implications, and simply quality of air. I am not convinced that electric cars pollute less overall, as they will become obsolete much faster than a normal car, and I understand the batteries are problematic to recycle, but at the very least it creates pollution in low population density areas, rather than under the nose of tens of millions of people, including people with asthma, etc.
Genuine request: what kinds of conversation / arguments tend to work for people who think science is cultish, and might help it to seem less so. This is of course for those willing to engage with you rationally? (although counter-emotive arguments are also good, and maybe more effective). I have a Republican friend who will engage with my and she sees a 'groupthink' problem. Your advice may be invaluable in helping to open up discourse.
You weren't asking me, but... maybe it is a bit cultish? Many adopt it as a belief system and wear rationalism like a mantle. We just aren't that rational. I like Stephen Covey's formulation "Seek first to understand, then to be understood". If you can learn why she feels the way she does, you might find common ground.
And I don't think I ever did, except for clinate sciences.
The reason they appeared cultish to me was the way anyone who doesn't immediately believe it must obviously be a troll or a paid shill and must be attacked.
Also the huge focus on "n x 1000 scientists can't be wrong" just screams bad science.
> A discipline is scientific if it is possible to challenge it, if it can be proven wrong (it doesn't mean it will, but there is a way to prove it wrong).
Thank you for that. I feel relieved (and on HN, a little bit personally vindicated) for seeing this.
In the past I've posted 'about taking the climate change alarmism with a grain of salt.' I've had people attack me personally for that. I've had people write to me on here about 'Mad Max' scenarios, and that climate change could lead people to resort to nuclear war.
The fact is that greenhouse gas emissions leading to long-term temperature rise is what is science. The alarmism, Mad Max scenarios, and the idea that technological progress will not be able to help us adapt (or what is especially heretical, reap the rewards of new resources: countries are already beginning to squabble over these, yet even mentioning they exist garners immediate scorn for expressing such a blasphemous idea--it does not garner informed debate!) is what is politics.
That said, I agree with the author we should take action against climate change: we have a long history of basically screwing up our environment on earth, we should try to tread more carefully in the future.
The whole thing also reminds me of what some criticized the War on Poverty for: the industry has become a movement of individuals whose careers and institutions have, perhaps, become more important than the underlying cause of the movement itself.
Trying to express these ideas reminds me of this quote:
> All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Agree, there are many good reasons to reduce pollution. The first of which is not to live in a toxic environment, health issues, inconvenience, etc.
But I cannot take seriously the UNFCCC agreement in Paris, where countries were negotiating fractions of a degree celcius like if it was something tangible and deterministic.
It's a proxy for painful changes that will require hard political work. If they used equivalent tons of carbon dioxide, the same discussions would be taking place, so what's your problem with it?
I certainly do buy that painful change is better than the likely outcomes of doing nothing.
The idea that climate change predictions aren't science because we must act before the long-term predictions could theoretically be falsified is a bit of a red herring. What exactly would a scientific prediction look like, then? If extended fully, your argument implies that science can literally never make any policy recommendations.
I'm saying you've bought into their 'hard political work.'
I already said I agree with the idea that we should work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Think about this: Do we need a committee to discuss the number of hurricanes in the year 2019, their magnitude, and whatever other 'hard political work' comes with that? What about earthquakes?
What you're buying into is an industry of politics.
> how is that going to happen without all the political machinery?
You're really personally invest in this.
If you read the article, you would be able to begin to answer your own question. One way is a carbon tax: there's reasons why economists so vehemently recommend this. It is efficient, uses market forces instead of heavy handed regulation, and doesn't offer free subsidies to polluters (cap and trade systems have already done this).
I never said government should not get involved...
You should do some reading about environmental economics, and spend some time away from publications published by organizations who have a vested interest in the global warming problem.
How is a carbon tax going to get implemented? Isn't there going to be a lot of hard political work between here and there?
I mean, we have known about this problem for decades, but little has been done. It's a political problem at this point. Any solutions are going to hurt certain industries, affect national economies, cause some job losses, and all of that means politics. Who are you reading, then?
I try to tell people the same thing. I have been involved with RF modeling scientists as a supporting software developer. I also learned that models tend to stink and it's only through painful reality-based tuning that they start to do okay in very limited domains. Long-range claims based upon climate modeling seem to far outstrip the current state of the art. Given the complexity of the problem, it's not at all surprising - but most lay people (even the technology-savvy) don't seem to see the probable gap between reality and the models.
> Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back—providing aid and comfort to the enemy.
In recent years people seem to be more and more comfortable with this war metaphor, not as a matter for concern and reflection, but as a subject of pride. Well, of course we have to win the battle of ideas; it's a culture war after all!
When you think in this way, the goal of argument isn't to find what's true, but to win. And if you have to advance some shaky ideas on your side or ignore some inconvenient facts on theirs, well, it's all in the service of a greater truth anyway, right?
But how can you fight a war in the service of truth when truth is its first casualty?
Indeed, and climate scientists got nowhere for decades being terrible at politics and good at data, which leads us to our current still-probabilistically-hugely-likely (despite this apparent political problem) dire predicament.
The sad problem with climate change is that otherwise sensible people are willing to put intellectual honesty aside in the name of "we desperately need to convince everyone that a disaster is coming so they'll be scared into preventing it". Saying something that might calm people down and fear less is heretical, no matter if it's true or not.
You ignore here the army of lobbyists who are paid to put intellectual honesty aside in the name of convincing everyone not to worry because that protects hundreds of billions in revenue.
it wasn't the people who accept global warming as a reality who started politicizing this. It's unfair to blame them for getting political in response.
From Wikipedia on Piekle [1]:
"Any conceivable emissions reductions policies, even if successful, cannot have a perceptible impact on the climate for many decades", and from this he concludes that, "In coming decades the only policies that can effectively be used to manage the immediate effects of climate variability and change will be adaptive."
This sort of do-nothing fatalism is enormously disingenuous and dangerous, and his WSJ op-ed badly understates his criticism as mainly about current weather effects.
The fact that Pielke's dad was also a high-profile climate change denier can't help, given the fact these sort of "decades to take effect!" arguments have themselves now been made for decades as part of a typical corporate/politically-motivated FUD campaign.
Big oil WANTS carbon tax as this would create predictability and stability albeit at a cost. What big oil doesn't want is unpredictable policy - policy that Washington think tanks want to put in place. Right wingers are terrified of progressive policies and this Pielkle fella is not doing the world any favors by advocating for useless policies such as a carbon tax. He may have good intentions and may be factually correct in his observations about lack of clear evidence but this doesn't change the fact that his work is being used to hinder climate progress.
What's wrong with wanting predictability and stability? Right now oil companies have little incentive to invest in alternate energy given the costs, and a carbon tax would change the cost structure for the future and give them a direct financial incentive to transition to non-carbon energy sources.
Re: carbon tax being useless, how so? Of course the level of the carbon tax matters too, but it doesn't make sense that directly taxing something wouldn't reduce the amount of it.
Is there anything untrue in that quote? Don't we accept that stopping carbon emissions now won't do anything to the climate for at least a few decades? He clearly says "manage the immediate effects". Are you disagreeing and saying that reducing carbon emissions now can effectively manage the effects in the next few decades?
Saying that accepted truth is "dangerous" is what religions do. We don't have to fool ourselves into believing things are worse than they really are. It's OK if climate change won't really end civilization within our lifetimes - or ever.
"Although it is too soon to tell how the Trump administration will engage the scientific community"
I'm gonna go out here on a limb and say Trump hasn't done a good job so far. He's claimed that vaccines cause autism. Something that's been debunked over and over. Skeptism about vaccines has made things much more difficult for immunocompromised kids. My friend's kid had cancer and the low rates of vaccination in town made things much more dicey for them.
The second is Trump has claimed that China is responsible for making up global warming.
Right now you've got the house committee on science tweeting out brietbart links.
The key will be funding. Will he continue to fund science? Science in many ways is the new manufacturing. Research universities are among the largest employers in the Midwest. It's not all white collar jobs. There are many different types of jobs that work towards creating knowledge.
Look at the top comments on that article and you can easily see why people want to avoid him. He may believe in climate change, but his work is being used to justify climate change denial.
That's like trying to convince people to vaccinate their children, but then giving a bullhorn to a guy standing outside the clinic screaming about possible negative side effects.
Obviously I support his right to publish his findings, but he's misconstruing attempts to stop the spread of misinformation (as in his work is being used to justify misinformation) as censorship.
Not only that, he also wants to do nothing about climate change progress other than put in place a small carbon tax to advance technology. This person is not doing any favors to future generations.
If you want to say that the research is no good, that it misrepresents the facts, or that journalists handled the material fairly, that would be material.
However, if you say that we should dismiss it because it is being used by people we don't like in ways we don't like, you may as well admit the denialists are right, there is a conspiracy to suppress (oh sorry, just exclude, dismiss, and ignore!) any science that doesn't fit the narrative, and that you don't trust the public to evaluate anything for themselves.
This is the attitude and the behavior that makes people distrust climate science.
If you put a veneer of falsehood and spin on a mountain of truth, don't be surprised when people assume the falsehood goes all the way through.
I am saying he can publish whatever he wants and challenge whatever climate science he wants. That is his absolutely right.
But if people think his work his crap, and want to ignore him, then that's their right.
It's hypocritical to accuse people of being "political" because they disagree with him, when he himself is unfairly accused of being a pawn to the oil industry.
I see. It seems we disagree on the substance of what is at issue here.
> But if people think his work his crap, and want to ignore him, then that's their right.
Of course. That is not at issue.
From the article: "My conclusion might be wrong, but I think I’ve earned the right to share this research without risk to my career. Instead, my research was under constant attack for years by activists, journalists and politicians."
The allegation is not that people are disagreeing with him in good faith because they think his work was crap. The allegation is that people are shunning him and his research because it is inconvenient. Whether that is true or not, that is what is at issue.
In your top-level comment, you don't take issue with his allegations. Rather, you seem to suggest that whatever happened is acceptable because his research is open to misinterpretation and misuse. You also claim he misconstrued something as censorship, but what he claimed was an attack on his career, which you didn't address.
So, my argument is that you appear to be justifying something that shouldn't be justified (and may or may not have occurred) and you haven't actually engaged with what is being alleged.
> people have to actively "attack" him to curtail the spread of that misinformation.
This is really where we disagree. If he's wrong, then the people who know better should show that he's wrong, and make the point by point rebuttal easy to find and then point people to it. Don't attack the messenger. If you do that, people will repeat the message and assume that something is being covered up.
The people who claim to be on the side of science should be above playing these kinds of political games, and need to be very cautious about even the appearance of impropriety.
I think the idea that science in all its glorious mess needs to be packaged as neater and cleaner than it is, and minority opinions hidden away from the credulous public, actually does much greater harm to the public understanding of scientific issues than any amount of actual divergent opinions that people might come across.
If climate skeptics want to look for opinions outside the mainstream, correct or not, they will find them. That gives them one data point in support of their beliefs. If the messenger is under attack, that just gives them another.
I put "attack" in quotes because those are his own words. Again, I re-iterate my point, he sees them as an "attack". I do not believe people who dismiss his ideas set out to "attack" him.
> The people who claim to be on the side of science should be above playing these kinds of political games, and need to be very cautious about even the appearance of impropriety.
You are setting a high bar for them, and that's fine. But doesn't that mean the author of this article should also meet that high bar?
He's accusing people who disagree with him as playing politics, but his article does not provide proof. In essence, he is playing politics himself.
I don't think that's fair.
You are right about the "one data point" part. This article is just another baseless data point for climate change deniers. And that's a problem.
Actually, I went back to research the article a bit more clearly. He really should not have used that wikileak email as evidence. It really discredits him more than anything:
Walmart $482B in revenue a year
State Grid $329B
China Natural Petroleum $299B
Sinopec $294B
Shell $272B
ExxonMobil $246B
Volkswagen $236B
Toyota $236B
Apple $233B
BP $255B
Six oil companies and two car companies. Trillions of dollars in revenue every year, from oil and other fossil fuels. They have massive think tanks, government lobbyists, media and PR reach etc. They're the center of the world economy and world power.
Yet this climate denier ("I'm not really a climate denier!") writes for the Wall Street Journal (Rupert Murdoch's financial publications are a great place for peer reviewed science - well this guy is a poli-sci major anyhow) about how he is being persecuted by powerful forces.
Please. These people are so out of control they're going to burn up the world. I see someone who mentioned the California droughts, Tennessee etc. was downvoted.
The inertia of these companies at the center of the world economy is to keep doing what they're doing, which is suicidal. Solar etc. has advanced to where changes can be made which are less drastic than expected, but not with this fellow and his supporters here.
As America is going to shit, it's expected that even the silver lining of Silicon Valley's vanguard here are blind to reality and swallow some poli-sci majors climate denial propaganda to Murdoch's paper instead of reading peer-reviewed scientific papers. It goes along with the downward trajectory of the US - the low US growth, crummy unicorns etc. Our incoming pussy-grabbing president used this assessment as his campaign platform, and I agree with him to the limited extent that America is no longer a great country.
I have to cast my eyes to the People's Republic of China to see not only robust growth, but the solar, nuclear and other renewable energy sources. Along with their enormous economic growth over the past few decades, it will be the Chinese who will save things for us, while Americans stumble into the muck of Trump, climate denial and what you can see going on here.
Powerful forces such as Tom Steyer - billionaire donor to Center for American Progress and an advocate of clean energy (oh and he helped keep California air clean - what a terrible person!) How dare the White House stand up against billion dollar companies and establish their own think tank!
Using Hacker News primarily for political, ideological, or religious controversy is an abuse of the site. Those things drown out what we want here, which is thoughtful conversation and intellectual curiosity.
Since we asked you to stop doing this and you didn't, we've banned your account.
We're happy to unban accounts that people give us reason to believe will follow the site rules in the future, so if you'd like to fix this, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. But please don't create new accounts to break the site rules with.
> No Category 3, 4 or 5 hurricane has made landfall in the U.S. since Hurricane Wilma in 2005
That is true, but highly misleading. Yes, Sandy was a Cat 2 when she made landfall in the U.S., but she was a Cat 3 before that, and she was the largest (in terms of area) Atlantic hurricane in recorded history. She was also (and this is the part that really matters) the second costliest hurricane in U.S. history, second only to Katrina, and dwarfing the #3 slot (Ike, in 2008) by a factor of 2.
125 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadMy Unhappy Life As A Gravity Nonbeliever
My Unhappy Life As A Lettuce Is Not A Plant Truther
Also, maybe don't insult people based on articles you haven't read.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...
I don't know who's right, here, but the guy is hardly an unbiased source. Plenty of climate deniers like to paint themselves as just rationally examining the facts and reaching politically inconvenient conclusions.
I don't know who's right either, but the answer isn't attacking Pielke, or preventing him from speaking, or getting him fired, or starting government investigations. Pielke is surely biased, but so is the author of the Guardian article, and so is Tom Steyer, and so is Paul Krugman.
Anyways, that makes me wonder whether the graph captures something like reported disasters or if disaster trends happen on multi-decade scales and that 35-year span is dominated by "short-term" variation. I can't find the original context, but there looks to be an updated version of the graph in this report from the same source [2] and the commentary is "In terms of the number of events, the trend towards greater and more detailed reporting continued, with the total number further increasing to 1,060 events."
1. https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pict... 2. Comment page 54, graph page 56 https://www.munichre.com/site/mram-mobile/get/documents_E-11...
As you note, there are a ton of confounding factors. Growing populations and increasing wealth mean that the same number of storms would be expected to result in more losses now than before.
This seems to be the crux of the dispute between the author here and his critics. The author has analyzed the data and come to the conclusion that the increase is entirely due to these non-weather changes. His critics see that some of the increase is left over, and thus due to climate change, after accounting for all other confounding factors.
Note that a small change in the climate could result in a large increase in the number of loss events. For an example I find easy to understand, consider the influence of sea level rise on tropical storms and hurricanes. Making up some numbers, imagine that an area suffers major damage once the storm surge hits 10ft, which is expected to happen in 1% of storms. If the sea level rises by 1ft, then major damage happens at 9ft of storm surge. Since these events can be expected to follow something like a bell curve, we can expect 9ft storms to be far more common, maybe 10% of storms.
Again, numbers totally made up, but the point is the idea that small changes in severity can potentially result in a large change in frequency. And this combines with other effects, like climate change potentially pushing the distributions farther out (so that perhaps 10ft storms become vastly more common, because what used to be a 9ft storm gets slightly intensified) or a shift in severity causing a net increase (worse storms in region X plus milder storms in region Y could result in more total storms being over some damage threshold).
That takes discipline, but the alternative is trash, so this is a tragedy of the commons issue.
"I believe climate change is real and that human emissions of greenhouse gases risk justifying action, including a carbon tax. But my research led me to a conclusion that many climate campaigners find unacceptable: There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally. In fact we are in an era of good fortune when it comes to extreme weather. This is a topic I’ve studied and published on as much as anyone over two decades. My conclusion might be wrong, but I think I’ve earned the right to share this research without risk to my career."
'I was right to question the IPCC’s 2007 report, which included a graph purporting to show that disaster costs were rising due to global temperature increases. The graph was later revealed to have been based on invented and inaccurate information, as I documented in my book “The Climate Fix.” The insurance industry scientist Robert-Muir Wood of Risk Management Solutions had smuggled the graph into the IPCC report. He explained in a public debate with me in London in 2010 that he had included the graph and misreferenced it because he expected future research to show a relationship between increasing disaster costs and rising temperatures.
When his research was eventually published in 2008, well after the IPCC report, it concluded the opposite: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and normalized catastrophe losses.” Whoops.'
'X is false'
'X is not proven to be true or false'
are all different statements. He is committing the fallacy of the excluded middle.
If OTOH he wishes to claim X is false he should say it was proven false. But I infer he didn't have such evidence, just that the committee had found no supporting evidence.
Of course, in science truth is a probabilistic concept, but here we don't have the figures.
I'd also like to read a response from other climate scientists or journalists to see if there's a part of the story he's omitting from his framing here.
He is being fair, and quotes the report which simply says "insufficient evidence". But that is enough to exclude from positive claims, even though it doesn't disprove it.
So he does claim that these are opposites. That is my problem with his argument as presented.
Opposites as "does not prove" (vs proves). Not opposites as in "disproves".
Without studying it, the Guardian article has the appearance of an example of the "intense media campaign to have me fired" that he refers to. That such a media campaign exists doesn't make his detractors wrong, but it makes me want to closely evaluate their claims for accuracy.
But since you ask, the main reason I feel like its part of a campaign is because the recently released emails have confirmed that there was indeed such a campaign. Before knowing that (which I think is a solid fact at this point) I probably would have thought that "intense media campaign" was too conspiratorial to be likely.
Separately, while I don't know the Guardian author's history and experience, I feel like the vehemence of her language and the viciousness of the chosen quotes is greater than that normally shown in a science story. Also, from previous exposure to Mann and Trenberth, I (rightly or wrongly) start with the assumption that they are more concerned with political message than presenting an unbiased scientific overview.
I liked that the first article you linked included a rebuttal from Pielke, and I found his links and counter-argument persuasive. But at this point I'm conscious of my bias toward his side of the story, and thus don't trust my assessment of this particular article. That's why I was asking you which parts you found convincing, so I could try to consider them specifically.
---
The quoting of Judith Curry in the second article you linked is interesting. In 2007 she argued against Pielke's conclusions, but since then she has swung to be one of his strongest defenders. With regard to a parallel 2014 piece at Climate Progress, she wrote:
RP Jr’s post at 538 has elicited what is probably the most reprehensible and contemptible smear job that I have ever seen of a scientist, at least from an organization that has any pretense of respectability
As a result of sticking up for Pielke (as well as for stating her own beliefs) her own reputation has been similarly damaged:
Well as recently as 5 years ago, I never thought I’d live to see the day when I am very grateful that I have tenure at a university, which provides my job with some protection against politically inconvenient scientific analyses.
https://judithcurry.com/2014/03/20/nate-silvers-538-inconven...
(As a disclaimer, I'll say that while (like Pielke) I find Curry's writings to be accurate and scientifically trustworthy, many of the reader comments on her site strike me as underinformed right-wing politically biased trolling. If you can, try to judge her by her own writings, rather than by the comments of others.)
A huge problem is that scientists feel compelled to overhypebeause of the PR campaign from the anti-data side. I'd heard of Curry and will look again. Good data are useful, but I understand that - especially with the new lot coming to the White House, that a lot of scientists will be enervated by anything that hte shills can use to create fake not-news. We are at a sad state of current affairs.
Perhaps it may turn out to be true oneday, but the meat of the problem is that it was published without evidence. Then compounded by the fact that somebody looking for evidence failed to find it.
If he'd written something like "Because there is no relationship between temperature increase and catastrophes, as proven by the insufficient evidence to support that, I was right to question the report", then you'd be right. But he didn't say that. I think he's only saying that he was right to question the report because that graph was inaccurate and invented, and because later data showed there was insufficient evidence for the relationship it was supposed to show. If reports shouldn't contain inaccurate and invented data, especially invented data that isn't similar to empirical data, then he was right to question it.
https://www.amazon.com/Doubt-Their-Product-Industrys-Threate...
I'm glad that a guy with a political science degree is interested in scientific topics. But I think he'd be a little more sensitive to the broader problem of non-experts jumping in to an area that has become highly politicized, and where industry has such a strong short-term incentive to undermine the appearance of scientific consensus.
Try telling that to the residents of California or Gatlinburg, TN.
OK, anecdotes do not constitute data. So here's some data:
https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_totalFires.html
Look at the number of acres burned, which is the metric that matters. The upward trend over the past few decades is unmistakable even without fancy statistical tests. And that's just what I was able to find in five minutes on a ridiculously slow internet connection.
It's hard to tell the difference between "there is scant evidence" and "there wasn't any evidence where I happened to look for it."
[UPDATE:] Here is some evidence that the author is being deliberately deceptive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13099156
This kind of dismissal of a no-doubt nuanced opinion on a scientific issue based on "what you found in five minutes on the internet" brings literally nothing to the conversation.
The reason that droughts don't appear to be getting worse overall is that the rain is moving from one place to another. So some places that used to get more water are now getting less, and places that used to get less water are now getting more. But this is still a problem because it's very hard to move agricultural infrastructure to chase the rain.
Among many other possible explanations.
Look, you wanted to show the author wrong, for whatever reasons, and you went looking for something and went with the first thing you found.
Now, rather than admitting there was nothing there, you really want to argue about the causes of wildfires? Your point was not a good one. Just admit it.
Like what?
> you wanted to show the author wrong
No, absolutely not. I would like nothing better than for the author to be right, and for climate change to not be causing any serious problems. But I'm pretty sure that there is actually a lot of evidence that climate change is causing serious problems. The only reason I'm harping on this one dataset is, as I said, I'm on a slow internet connection and so I can't do any comprehensive research at the moment. I'm going the best I can with what I've got.
> Like what?
Now you are just being deliberately obtuse. You already responed to my comment where I provide an alternative explanation of changes in fire policy, and you agknowledge that "the situation with respect to fire is very complicated".
> I would like nothing better than for the author to be right, and for climate change to not be causing any serious problems.
The author never made such a claim, going so far as to state: "I believe climate change is real and that human emissions of greenhouse gases risk justifying action, including a carbon tax."
Sorry, I'm juggling a lot of threads here.
> The author never made such a claim
The author claimed that there is "scant evidence" that climate change is causing extreme weather events, including drought. Being a resident of California, which is in the middle of its worst drought in history, that claim seems improbable to me. (Note carefully: the claim that I find highly improbable is not that climate change is not causing extreme weather events, but that there is "scant evidence" that climate change is causing extreme weather events.)
I first tried looking up actual drought data, but it's all hiding behind high-bandwidth visualizations which I cannot currently access. So I went with what I could find.
[UPDATE:] Found this:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/adai/papers/Dai-drought_WIRES201...
So I think it is fair to say that the evidence that climate change is causing increased severity of drought may be debatable, but it is not scant.
... which is not even remotely what the author said. We are in "Did you read the article?" territory here.
> I'm going the best I can with what I've got.
What that means is that you've picked your conclusion, you scrounged some premises, and constructed an argument to fit.
It seems you're approaching this in a high school debate-team, rhetorical, "but what about" style and not actually honestly looking for facts.
The author said that there was "scant evidence" that climate change is causing extreme climate events. That is what I dispute. I believe the evidence is not scant. In fact, I'm pretty sure the evidence is quite plentiful, but I cannot demonstrate that at the moment because of resource constraints (very low bandwidth internet).
But you could go look up the drought data and prove me wrong, at least about that. (But then we would still have to talk about the author's very misleading claim about hurricanes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13099156)
[UPDATE:] Found some accessible drought data:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/adai/papers/Dai-drought_WIRES201...
Until around 1970, federal land managers remained obsessed with controlling large fires. But during the 1960s, scientific research increasingly demonstrated the positive role fire played in forest ecology. This led in the early 1970s to a radical change in Forest Service policy—to let fires burn when and where appropriate.
From this the "let-burn" policy evolved, though it suffered a setback in the wake of the 1988 Yellowstone fires. Since around 1990, fire suppression efforts and policy have had to take into account exurban sprawl in what is called the wildland-urban interface.
http://www.foresthistory.org/ASPNET/Policy/Fire/Suppression/...
Of course this doesn't mean that drought has not caused more fires, but it's going to make "total acres burned per year" very hard to use as evidence. Pielke has written about fire in other places:
"Influence of Location, Population, and Climate on Building Damage and Fatalities due to Australian Bushfire: 1925–2009"
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/20...
I only skimmed it quickly, but it seems to claim that once you've normalize for development, the severity of bush fires in Australia has not changed significantly over the century. Given the difficulty of separating policy from climate, I'm not sure I'd ever take it as firm proof, but it probably gives more insight into Pielke's thought process.
> No, absolutely not. I would like nothing better than for the author to be right
I think we are basically done here, but I just want to point out this rhetorical trick.
You demonstrate motivated reasoning pretty clearly throughout this thread, which is why I called out that you started with your conclusion and then looked for facts and arguments to fit (debate-team style). When I point that out here, you dodge with "I would like nothing better than for the author to be right", which neatly deflects the point.
My criticism is not that you would prefer the author is wrong, but that you clearly started from a conclusion that he is wrong. That is why it didn't really matter to you what particular evidence you had, you just went with it. So pointing out that you would prefer if the author was right (misrepresentation aside) sounds like you are addressing my criticism, without actually doing so.
I started with a strong Bayesian prior that he is wrong, yes. But it is important to not to lose sight of what is actually in dispute here. We are not arguing about whether climate change is actually increasing extreme weather events, we are arguing over whether the evidence for this is "scant". To dispute that claim, it suffices to show that evidence exists. Which it does:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/adai/papers/Dai-drought_WIRES201...
You read the article, concluded the author was wrong, and posted anecdotes and a link about wildfires.
After it was pointed out that the author said nothing about wildfires, you suggested that wildfires are caused by droughts, while admitting that the rain is moving around. Why not admit that your point about wildfires was simply off the mark?
After I pointed out that wildfires can be caused by other things than droughts, you asked for me to name them, while admitting elsewhere that the wildfire issue is complicated. Why not simply admit that obviously there are many causes of wildfires?
After I pointed out that you misrepresented what the author said as "not causing any serious problems" then you switched to whether or not the evidence is scant. Why not just admit that you misstated the author's position?
After admitting that "scant" means something more like "insufficient" rather than "nonexistent", you are now saying that to dispute the claim requires only that some evidence exists. Why not simply admit that the issue is more complicated than it seemed to you at first glance and that you may have jumped the gun?
> But it is important to not to lose sight of what is actually in dispute here.
Indeed.
Note that I am not responding at all to the drought data you found. I am simply pointing out the unreasonable way you are arguing.
OK: my comment about wildfires was off the mark.
> Why not just admit that you misstated the author's position?
OK: I misstated the author's position (initially)
> Why not simply admit that the issue is more complicated than it seemed to you at first glance and that you may have jumped the gun?
OK: I may have jumped the gun.
> Note that I am not responding at all to the drought data you found.
Ah.
It's as ridiculous to cite an increase in forest fire severity and frequency as proof of ACC as it is to cite a few particularly bad snowstorms to deny it. Deniers will legitimately cry foul when you use the same bogus rhetorical tools that you forbid to your opponents.
We can't be sure from this data, but there is a very plausible causal model that leads from drought to fires. It just seems highly plausible that drought over woodland would result in more fires. But I don't have access to that data at the moment. Anecdotally I can tell you with high confidence that the Gatlinburg fire, and most of the recent mega-fires in California, as well as the one up in Canada that made the papers a while back, were all associated with not just drought, but historic drought. That might just be a coincidence, but until someone actually runs the numbers you can't assume that.
In any case, it is pretty clear that something has changed. Do you have a better theory to offer?
That's not how this sort of debate works. Not when you're demanding trillions of dollars' worth of global economic rewiring.
The basis on which I say this (aside from having done a lot of reading on the philosophy of science): I used to be a scientist working for NASA. I was not a planetary scientist, I was a computer scientist, but I was doing research (in AI), writing grant proposals, etc. My productivity was measured in peer-reviewed publications. So I have some first-hand insight into how the process works, how it is supposed to work, and how these two things often differ.
You don't just jump into a debate about someone's scientific integrity with unrelated web links and speculation that you just pulled out of your ass, and then back out with "well we can't be sure, what do you think?"
Instead of leveling ad hominem attacks at me, why don't you go look up the drought data?
The claim that evidence is scant or not would need to take into account all the evidence on the effects of climate change on current weather events. You could cherry-pick tons of evidence to support either position, if that's your thing.
If you wanted to shed some light on the topic of the article, it would be more interesting to see what the author's background is and follow up some of the claims about why he was fired by 538, whether he is being unfairly attacked in the media, etc.
Remember that this article isn't primarily about the science, it's about the journalism. The only reason we are talking about wildfires is because you brought it up, which was really quite a stretch.
It is hard to mount one's best arguments when one is operating under tight resource constraints and time pressures. HN threads get stale very quickly.
> You could cherry-pick tons of evidence to support either position, if that's your thing.
Heh, this whole disagreement may actually be a mistake on my part about the meaning of the word "scant." I thought "scant" meant "rare or non-existent" but it doesn't, it means "barely sufficient or adequate." So I was about to say that if there's tons of evidence to be cherry-picked then it cannot be scant. But I suppose it could be.
In any case, I did finally manage to find some drought data:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/adai/papers/Dai-drought_WIRES201...
That's a review with 137 references, so the evidence doesn't look "scant" to me. But I suppose a reasonable person might disagree.
Here is the original article[1] and a rebuttal[2], both on 538. Doesn't read like wild-eyed denialism to me.
[1]: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/disasters-cost-more-than...
[2]: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/mit-climate-scientist-re...
Ah, another rhetorical ping-flood attack, forcing the recipient to do the research necessary to dispute a vague positive claim.
Normally I would agree with this, but there are extenuating circumstances here. I'm not fobbing the research off on you out of laziness, I'm doing it because drought data is voluminous, summaries turn out to be very hard to find, and I'm on an extremely slow internet connection.
But I did finally find this:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/adai/papers/Dai-drought_WIRES201...
> to dispute a vague positive claim
My claim is not vague. It is very specific: the evidence that climate change is increasing extreme weather events is not "scant".
The key point here is that you and I should be able to openly debate acres burned vs total number of fires without me trying to track you down and get you fired, or you having me banned from HN.
If what you care about is how many trees there are (and that's what I care about) then the number of acres burned is clearly the metric that matters.
The trend has been a transition from a lot of little fires to a few huge ones. One of the reasons that the number of fires has dropped is that by the time the mega-fires are brought under control there is nothing left to burn.
> The key point here is that you and I should be able to openly debate acres burned vs total number of fires without me trying to track you down and get you fired, or you having me banned from HN.
That is certainly true. But there is nothing wrong with firing an academic for doing sloppy and possibly politically motivated research. I don't know if that's what this was, but I do have some actual data that indicates that it could be the case. And this data is not obscure nor was it particularly hard for me to find, so it seems likely that when I have the bandwidth to do a more thorough search I might find more evidence that this guy's research was in fact sloppy and politically motivated.
The fact that he published this piece in the WSJ, whose biases are well known, is another indication that this is not a clear-cut case of political correctness run amok. It could be, but it's far from a slam-dunk.
[UPDATE:] More evidence of bias: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13099156
Or, without little fires, flammable undergrowth accumulates that makes the fires that do occur even larger. Unlike most natural disasters, humans are very active in directly manipulating fires. This makes it difficult to attribute changes to fire statistics to underlying environmental changes, or fire control practices.
If you can't see why "the first thing I found may not be holding up well to criticism, but since it only took me five minutes to find, there obviously must be a lot more out there" is a bad argument, then you're just rationalizing.
However, I think it is telling that so far not a single participant in this conversation has (AFAICT) even tried to get to the actual drought data to see if there is anything there. Somewhere out there, one of you has to be on a high-bandwidth connection, so you could go get the data and settle this, where I currently cannot. That would seem to me to be a more constructive (to say nothing of definitive) way to address this than to accuse me of confirmation bias and rationalizing.
[UPDATE:] Found some drought data:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/adai/papers/Dai-drought_WIRES201...
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/adai/papers/Dai-drought_WIRES201...
So I think it's fair to say that while the evidence may be debatable, it is not "scant".
I agree with Popper's definition of science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
A discipline is scientific if it is possible to challenge it, if it can be proven wrong (it doesn't mean it will, but there is a way to prove it wrong).
If the discipline is using political pressure to prevent anyone from doing so, it cannot be called science anymore. A political movement would be a more appropriate term.
And more generally, my profession (finance) is making extensive use of mathematical models to model something too complex to be understood perfectly (financial markets / the economy). But we know our models suck, because we could do experiment on them, we can test them against reality. We know we can build models or investment strategies that do great in back-testing but fall apart as soon as they go live (I have seen that so many times first hand). I give very little credibility to someone who comes up with a complex mathematical model that pretends it will predict the climate in 30 years, knowing that we will only know if his model was reliable in 30 years, we have no way to test it now. Therefore it cannot be falsified and therefore I don't think it is science.
I can think of scientific theories that have been proven wrong after a long time, but they haven't been proven wrong because it was impossible to prove them wrong immediately. Only because it took so long to come up with an experiment / better theory which in insight could have been done on day 1.
This is not the same as telling everyone "I have a model, my back-testings are telling me it works, I will only be able to prove it right (or wrong) in 30 years, but you need to take actions now based on what this model says".
Gravitational waves. Higgs boson. Relativity.
To the best of my knowledge, a better scientific experiment would be having ~30 earths with 1 climate policy, ~30 earths with another climate policy, and yet another control group.
There's a big difference between saying "we scientifically know emitting pollutants into the atmosphere has certain unintended/undesirable consequences, and we're uncertain of the harm so we should stop," and "we know global warming will create extreme weather patterns that will destroy the world's economy and kill billions of people"--I have heard people tell me of these doomsday scenarios, even here on HN.
Politics always exist to serve self-interests. Ask yourself whose are served by this movement.
Reality is that the current temperature anomaly is -far- below IPCC 1990 predictions. So ... falsified ? It is, in fact, so that the temperature anomaly is below every IPCC prediction of more than 5 years back, best case scenarios, with the lone exception of the 2010 report's optimistic prediction for last year (2016 however is out of the 95% interval of that one too, unless something drastic happens).
There are reasons for this. Such as that there was a bit of a pause in global warming from late 90s to late 00s. But the fact that the models failed to see this coming, and only incorporated it afterwards of course is further indictment of those models. It kept warming, mind you, except perhaps for 1 year, just way, way slower than predicted.
There is a joke that the IPCC now must be correct for the next 22000 years. Why ? That's the only way to make their 95% certainty predictions actually be true in 95% of the cases, given one prediction every 5 years. And this is not the only consideration. Obviously things like the Kyoto accords were based on these predictions. They turned out wrong. So should we now abandon those accords and laws, at least until the evidence can be examined ? That would be very scientific, or at least, it would be very scientific the way I was taught statistics. To say that this would be politically problematic, a lot of work and very, very, very impractical is an understatement.
And of course, more recent science cannot be used until there is enough evidence to support the correctness of the model. Normally one would say, half to validate, half to be used. The problem is that you cannot trust researchers who've seen (and evaluated) against all data they've seen. So you need to use future data to validate models, but of course all IPCC models so far have crashed and burned in that comparison. So you cannot just say "let's just use the 2015 predictions", because if you just put down the temperatures from last year for the next 100 years you would have done better than the IPCC, so far (meaning even outirght climate deniers' models would easily have 95% accuracy one year out).
And that then violates intuition. The graphs show a clear and consistent rising of temperature for coming up on 160 years now. Obviously the truth is that we don't know why, or at least, not to the level of detail required to predict the effect of policies we implement. Now of course, both cause and effect seem obvious - BUT the models fail to predict effect given cause, so technically a mathematician should use the notions taught in philosophy of science, as applied to statistics, and reject the models. One would be obliged to point out that maybe the models are wrong because their assumptions are wrong, or at least inaccurate.
I would say that we should just train everyone in how to analyze the data, but I realize it's not very practical. Plus it would actually mean climate change would be tempered (one would hope that policies would be moderated given that the predictions they're based on turned out to be overly pessimistic).
All this is ignoring theoretical problems, the most obvious one is that these models are based on statistics. Statistics that studied cause and effect in a situation ... that no longer exists and very likely will never return. We are using models to predict the future based on values that lie outside of the range they were modeled on (predictions out of range is one of the statistical fallacies: you cannot model based on data between 0 and 10, then have confidence in predicting what happens at 15. Everybody does do that of course, but it's wrong, as obviously the distribution of your source data is different from the prediction data. But we don't have data with the same distribution, because the situation is new). Technically that means they're wrong, period. What do we do with that ?
If you let the journalism blind you to the science, then you're going to be misinformed. Read the IPCC reports cover to cover, and then follow up with the references if you don't think there is real science being done.
Problem us either is HN and Ars Technica are very political or techies and science lovers has started abandoning their love for evidence to participate in "troll hunting" not just blatant trolls but also anyone who asks any critical question.
And, as a former sceptic: from the outside climate science seems cult-like :-/
(That said, even as a former sceptic, I have advocated cutting the dependency on fossil, I do have all my shares in solar etc.)
Limited supply, geopolitical implications, and simply quality of air. I am not convinced that electric cars pollute less overall, as they will become obsolete much faster than a normal car, and I understand the batteries are problematic to recycle, but at the very least it creates pollution in low population density areas, rather than under the nose of tens of millions of people, including people with asthma, etc.
And I don't think I ever did, except for clinate sciences.
The reason they appeared cultish to me was the way anyone who doesn't immediately believe it must obviously be a troll or a paid shill and must be attacked.
Also the huge focus on "n x 1000 scientists can't be wrong" just screams bad science.
> A discipline is scientific if it is possible to challenge it, if it can be proven wrong (it doesn't mean it will, but there is a way to prove it wrong).
Thank you for that. I feel relieved (and on HN, a little bit personally vindicated) for seeing this.
In the past I've posted 'about taking the climate change alarmism with a grain of salt.' I've had people attack me personally for that. I've had people write to me on here about 'Mad Max' scenarios, and that climate change could lead people to resort to nuclear war.
The fact is that greenhouse gas emissions leading to long-term temperature rise is what is science. The alarmism, Mad Max scenarios, and the idea that technological progress will not be able to help us adapt (or what is especially heretical, reap the rewards of new resources: countries are already beginning to squabble over these, yet even mentioning they exist garners immediate scorn for expressing such a blasphemous idea--it does not garner informed debate!) is what is politics.
That said, I agree with the author we should take action against climate change: we have a long history of basically screwing up our environment on earth, we should try to tread more carefully in the future.
The whole thing also reminds me of what some criticized the War on Poverty for: the industry has become a movement of individuals whose careers and institutions have, perhaps, become more important than the underlying cause of the movement itself.
Trying to express these ideas reminds me of this quote:
> All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
But I cannot take seriously the UNFCCC agreement in Paris, where countries were negotiating fractions of a degree celcius like if it was something tangible and deterministic.
You have bought what they are selling
The idea that climate change predictions aren't science because we must act before the long-term predictions could theoretically be falsified is a bit of a red herring. What exactly would a scientific prediction look like, then? If extended fully, your argument implies that science can literally never make any policy recommendations.
I already said I agree with the idea that we should work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Think about this: Do we need a committee to discuss the number of hurricanes in the year 2019, their magnitude, and whatever other 'hard political work' comes with that? What about earthquakes?
What you're buying into is an industry of politics.
If you're arguing that we don't need governments to get involved, I don't see that working out.
You're really personally invest in this.
If you read the article, you would be able to begin to answer your own question. One way is a carbon tax: there's reasons why economists so vehemently recommend this. It is efficient, uses market forces instead of heavy handed regulation, and doesn't offer free subsidies to polluters (cap and trade systems have already done this).
I never said government should not get involved...
You should do some reading about environmental economics, and spend some time away from publications published by organizations who have a vested interest in the global warming problem.
I mean, we have known about this problem for decades, but little has been done. It's a political problem at this point. Any solutions are going to hurt certain industries, affect national economies, cause some job losses, and all of that means politics. Who are you reading, then?
> Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back—providing aid and comfort to the enemy.
In recent years people seem to be more and more comfortable with this war metaphor, not as a matter for concern and reflection, but as a subject of pride. Well, of course we have to win the battle of ideas; it's a culture war after all!
When you think in this way, the goal of argument isn't to find what's true, but to win. And if you have to advance some shaky ideas on your side or ignore some inconvenient facts on theirs, well, it's all in the service of a greater truth anyway, right?
But how can you fight a war in the service of truth when truth is its first casualty?
it wasn't the people who accept global warming as a reality who started politicizing this. It's unfair to blame them for getting political in response.
This sort of do-nothing fatalism is enormously disingenuous and dangerous, and his WSJ op-ed badly understates his criticism as mainly about current weather effects.
The fact that Pielke's dad was also a high-profile climate change denier can't help, given the fact these sort of "decades to take effect!" arguments have themselves now been made for decades as part of a typical corporate/politically-motivated FUD campaign.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_A._Pielke,_Jr.
Re: carbon tax being useless, how so? Of course the level of the carbon tax matters too, but it doesn't make sense that directly taxing something wouldn't reduce the amount of it.
Saying that accepted truth is "dangerous" is what religions do. We don't have to fool ourselves into believing things are worse than they really are. It's OK if climate change won't really end civilization within our lifetimes - or ever.
I'm gonna go out here on a limb and say Trump hasn't done a good job so far. He's claimed that vaccines cause autism. Something that's been debunked over and over. Skeptism about vaccines has made things much more difficult for immunocompromised kids. My friend's kid had cancer and the low rates of vaccination in town made things much more dicey for them.
The second is Trump has claimed that China is responsible for making up global warming.
Right now you've got the house committee on science tweeting out brietbart links.
The key will be funding. Will he continue to fund science? Science in many ways is the new manufacturing. Research universities are among the largest employers in the Midwest. It's not all white collar jobs. There are many different types of jobs that work towards creating knowledge.
I think it's pretty dishonest to pretend it's still a "wait and see" kinda thing.
That's like trying to convince people to vaccinate their children, but then giving a bullhorn to a guy standing outside the clinic screaming about possible negative side effects.
Obviously I support his right to publish his findings, but he's misconstruing attempts to stop the spread of misinformation (as in his work is being used to justify misinformation) as censorship.
No one is suggesting suppression or censorship. But we should be free to exclude, dismiss, and ignore information we find harmful or irrelevant.
Or politically inconvenient?
If you want to say that the research is no good, that it misrepresents the facts, or that journalists handled the material fairly, that would be material.
However, if you say that we should dismiss it because it is being used by people we don't like in ways we don't like, you may as well admit the denialists are right, there is a conspiracy to suppress (oh sorry, just exclude, dismiss, and ignore!) any science that doesn't fit the narrative, and that you don't trust the public to evaluate anything for themselves.
This is the attitude and the behavior that makes people distrust climate science.
If you put a veneer of falsehood and spin on a mountain of truth, don't be surprised when people assume the falsehood goes all the way through.
I am saying he can publish whatever he wants and challenge whatever climate science he wants. That is his absolutely right.
But if people think his work his crap, and want to ignore him, then that's their right.
It's hypocritical to accuse people of being "political" because they disagree with him, when he himself is unfairly accused of being a pawn to the oil industry.
> But if people think his work his crap, and want to ignore him, then that's their right.
Of course. That is not at issue.
From the article: "My conclusion might be wrong, but I think I’ve earned the right to share this research without risk to my career. Instead, my research was under constant attack for years by activists, journalists and politicians."
The allegation is not that people are disagreeing with him in good faith because they think his work was crap. The allegation is that people are shunning him and his research because it is inconvenient. Whether that is true or not, that is what is at issue.
In your top-level comment, you don't take issue with his allegations. Rather, you seem to suggest that whatever happened is acceptable because his research is open to misinterpretation and misuse. You also claim he misconstrued something as censorship, but what he claimed was an attack on his career, which you didn't address.
So, my argument is that you appear to be justifying something that shouldn't be justified (and may or may not have occurred) and you haven't actually engaged with what is being alleged.
And because his "wrongness" is being used to spread misinformation, people have to actively "attack" him to curtail the spread of that misinformation.
This is really where we disagree. If he's wrong, then the people who know better should show that he's wrong, and make the point by point rebuttal easy to find and then point people to it. Don't attack the messenger. If you do that, people will repeat the message and assume that something is being covered up.
The people who claim to be on the side of science should be above playing these kinds of political games, and need to be very cautious about even the appearance of impropriety.
I think the idea that science in all its glorious mess needs to be packaged as neater and cleaner than it is, and minority opinions hidden away from the credulous public, actually does much greater harm to the public understanding of scientific issues than any amount of actual divergent opinions that people might come across.
If climate skeptics want to look for opinions outside the mainstream, correct or not, they will find them. That gives them one data point in support of their beliefs. If the messenger is under attack, that just gives them another.
> The people who claim to be on the side of science should be above playing these kinds of political games, and need to be very cautious about even the appearance of impropriety.
You are setting a high bar for them, and that's fine. But doesn't that mean the author of this article should also meet that high bar?
He's accusing people who disagree with him as playing politics, but his article does not provide proof. In essence, he is playing politics himself.
I don't think that's fair.
You are right about the "one data point" part. This article is just another baseless data point for climate change deniers. And that's a problem.
Actually, I went back to research the article a bit more clearly. He really should not have used that wikileak email as evidence. It really discredits him more than anything:
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/19569
Yet this climate denier ("I'm not really a climate denier!") writes for the Wall Street Journal (Rupert Murdoch's financial publications are a great place for peer reviewed science - well this guy is a poli-sci major anyhow) about how he is being persecuted by powerful forces.
Please. These people are so out of control they're going to burn up the world. I see someone who mentioned the California droughts, Tennessee etc. was downvoted.
The inertia of these companies at the center of the world economy is to keep doing what they're doing, which is suicidal. Solar etc. has advanced to where changes can be made which are less drastic than expected, but not with this fellow and his supporters here.
As America is going to shit, it's expected that even the silver lining of Silicon Valley's vanguard here are blind to reality and swallow some poli-sci majors climate denial propaganda to Murdoch's paper instead of reading peer-reviewed scientific papers. It goes along with the downward trajectory of the US - the low US growth, crummy unicorns etc. Our incoming pussy-grabbing president used this assessment as his campaign platform, and I agree with him to the limited extent that America is no longer a great country.
I have to cast my eyes to the People's Republic of China to see not only robust growth, but the solar, nuclear and other renewable energy sources. Along with their enormous economic growth over the past few decades, it will be the Chinese who will save things for us, while Americans stumble into the muck of Trump, climate denial and what you can see going on here.
Since we asked you to stop doing this and you didn't, we've banned your account.
We're happy to unban accounts that people give us reason to believe will follow the site rules in the future, so if you'd like to fix this, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. But please don't create new accounts to break the site rules with.
That is true, but highly misleading. Yes, Sandy was a Cat 2 when she made landfall in the U.S., but she was a Cat 3 before that, and she was the largest (in terms of area) Atlantic hurricane in recorded history. She was also (and this is the part that really matters) the second costliest hurricane in U.S. history, second only to Katrina, and dwarfing the #3 slot (Ike, in 2008) by a factor of 2.