"Society globally has to collectively decide that we need to drastically lower our population very quickly."
Right, and how does Arne Mooers propose we do this? Thermonuclear war maybe? That would be too damaging. Sterilize everyone? Not even China does that. Maybe ask billions of people to escort themselves off the face of the Earth? Make some Solyent Green? Global pandemic?
Maybe more people would take them seriously (and really take them seriously, not just run around scared) if they gave us more choices than "maybe die" and "definitely die".
That specific phrase "drastically lower our population very quickly" is very interesting because it appeared as exactly those words in the last article about this paper that appeared here yesterday: http://www.sfu.ca/pamr/media-releases/2012/study-predicts-im...
I made some comments about that exact wording and was criticized because that phrase as it is is not in the original paper, but was in the press release about the paper, a press release apparently written by the paper's authors since it gives them as contacts.
And here the phrase, not from the actual paper, appears in yet another alarmist article claiming that total irreversible planetary doom is certain if purges do not begin.
> And here the phrase, not from the actual paper, appears in yet another ALARMIST article claiming that total irreversible planetary doom is CERTAIN if PURGES do not begin.
I put three key words in bold above. But I want to focus on this:
"doom is certain if purges do not begin."
Please point me to where that was said, either in the paper itself or in the co-author's summary. You don't be able to because it doesn't exist. They didn't say that. You said that.
I would argue that your comment -- where you falsely accused them of claiming that doom is certain if purges do not begin --- is the one being alarmist. I am certain of that. :P
Also, strictly speaking, one possible explanation for why you might be seeing a seemingly growing number of recent "alarmist" articles about the climate & population impact, etc., is because, perhaps, the folks who are studying these areas are actually becoming increasingly alarmed. If that's happening, and they're sharing that with us, that's a good thing. "I wish that darn burglar alarm would stop going off every few weeks!" Well, are you more concerned about the inconvenience of repeatedly hearing the alarm, or that your house keeps getting robbed? :) Let's err on the side of the latter case, if any.
I'm serious. If you want to curtail the out-of-control growth rate, and consensually so, women need to be able to choose birth control; they need to not fear rape; they need to not be viewed as an economic liability (where e.g. parents with a son might stop there but parents with a daughter say "hey, we need another child so that someone cares for us in our old age").
The places with high birth rates will be the places where birth control is either hard to find or culturally discouraged.
To test this, I went to the CIA World Factbook and multiplied their population growth rates (which are sadly from 2002) against populations to find that the situation looks approximately like this:
Country Millions added/yr
India 15.79
China 6.45
Nigeria 4.34
Ethiopia 2.98
Pakistan 2.95
United States 2.82
Indonesia 2.58
Bangladesh 2.55
Brazil 2.26
Philippines 1.94
Congo, D.R. of 1.90
Egypt 1.61
Uganda 1.28
Mexico 1.25
Kenya 1.05
Iran 0.99
Vietnam 0.96
Turkey 0.96
Tanzania 0.85
Iraq 0.73
The net is 76.46, summing over all countries, so India is 21% of the problem, China is 8.4% of it. One nice thing about this metric is that both Bangladesh and China are reasonably high here -- Bangladesh of course is struggling with some of the highest population density in the world, while China has a low growth rate but their population is absolutely staggering. It's very hard to get them both to appear in a top 10 list of "where the problem is".
If past history is any indication, China will self-regulate its population by descending into civil war, so the major thing to focus on is India + Pakistan. However, if you could make a dent in the United States somehow, that could also help to reduce our population-deficit.
When I say that we don't need more children and should people not encourage to get more children because we already have enough humans I get the weirds looks. If i tell them that japan has many problems, but their shrinking population is not nobody believes me. They ask "What about their social security?" (I'm European) Well, it's just a ponzi scheme it will collapse anyway. First of all people should stop thinking more people = better. If we cut all our propaganda and financial aid for more children the children per women would probably drop well below one child per woman. That would be a way to start.
The human species very much behaves like an individual in that it will always take a burnt finger to stop touching the hot plate.
What that tells us is that we're indeed going to break the ecosystem/climate at some point.
What history tells us is that we're going to fix it much faster than we broke it
We have broken hunting/gathering and we had the fix before it became critical. (agriculture)
We have broken fossile fuels and we had the fix before it became critical. (nuclear,elec,batteries,fuel cells)
We have broken nuclear fission energy and we had the fix before it became critical. (fusion, hydro, geotherm)
We may have almost broken the climate and we will fix it before it becomes critical.
(There is no problem so far so I can't guess the fix, but we already have the capability to design any animal or plant and mass produce it to solve any ecosystem riddle)
This article would be a lot more credible if it mentioned timescales. Do we have 1 year to make a change or 100? At current rates of progress, when do we reach this tipping point?
Without at least that number, it's just a useless alarmist rant.
"Looking towards the year 2100, models forecast that pressures on biota will continue to increase. The co-opting of resources and energy use by humans will continue to increase as the global population reaches 9,500,000,000 people (by 2050), and effects will be greatly exacerbated if per capita resource use also increases. Projections for 2100 range from apopulation low of 6,200,000,000 (requiring a substantial decline in fertility rates) to 10,100,000,000 (requiring continued decline of fertility in countries that still have fertility above replacement level) to 27,000,000,000 (if fertility remains at 2005–2010 levels; this population size is not thought to be supportable; ref. 31). Rapid climate change shows no signs of slowing. Modelling suggests that for ,30% of Earth, the speed at which plant species will have to migrate to keep pace with projected climate change is greater than their dispersal rate when Earth last shifted from a glacial to an interglacial climate, and that dispersal will be thwartedby highly fragmented landscapes. Climates found at present on 10–48% of the planet are projected to disappear within a century, and climates that contemporary organisms have never experienced are likely to cover 12–39% of Earth. The mean global temperature by 2070 (or possibly a few decades earlier) will be higher than it has been since the human species evolved."
For the record, my vote is that this is pseudoscience. No theory, model, or testable predictions are presented. It is a non-falsifiable idea that is couched in such generic and vague terms that it could mean just about anything.
"Did you read the original article or just the news story?", he asked, exasperated.
The article that the news story references was just published in Nature, which has been around since 1869, is peered reviewed, well-respected, oft-cited, and has many distinguished moments, including the initial publication of Watson and Crick's work on DNA. "pseudoscience" might be unfair. Nice object lesson in the "social structures for doing something just aren’t there" though.
When publishing a paper, "peer review" typically means that two or three scientists ask you for one round of revisions before publishing. It does not mean complete replication of the source code and data analysis. It means a cursory pass, not a complete unit test suite.
Nature and Science in particular have been forced to retract many papers recently for failure to replicate. A short list of recent retracted Nature and Science papers:
All of those papers were beaten up after they were accepted because other scientists couldn't replicate their results. Perhaps we should see whether this too holds up to scrutiny for a few years before remaking the $100T world economy.
"retracted" is a bit strong: more accurate would be, put on hold temporarily while a statistical flaw is fixed. Even the author of the blog concedes that the overall paper could stand perfectly fine after the flaw is corrected.
It's also interesting to note how the "auditors" compare to the scientists: while the scientists graciously send a thank you for pointing out a flaw and get to work on fixing it, the auditors seem almost entirely focused on crowing, getting a scalp and spreading conspiracy theories and innuendo. Interesting.
Well, the "auditors" are called denialists and attacked from many sides -- even though they are the only ones who publish full source code, push for raw data release, and actually try to replicate results. We are making $100T decisions on the basis of $1M papers and closed datasets.
Regarding retraction, I think this is pretty unambiguous
Dear Stephen,
I am contacting you on behalf of all the authors of the
Gergis et al (2012) study ‘Evidence of unusual late 20th
century warming from an Australasian temperature
reconstruction spanning the last millennium’
An issue has been identified in the processing of the data
used in the study, which may affect the results. While the
paper states that “both proxy climate and instrumental data
were linearly detrended over the 1921–1990 period”, we
discovered on Tuesday 5 June that the records used in the
final analysis were not detrended for proxy selection,
making this statement incorrect. Although this is an
unfortunate data processing issue, it is likely to have
implications for the results reported in the study. The
journal has been contacted and the publication of the study
has been put on hold.
This is a normal part of science. The testing of scientific
studies through independent analysis of data and methods
strengthens the conclusions. In this study, an issue has
been identified and the results are being re-checked.
We would be grateful if you would post the notice below on
your ClimateAudit web site.
We would like to thank you and the participants at the
ClimateAudit blog for your scrutiny of our study, which
also identified this data processing issue.
Thanks, David Karoly
Print publication of scientific study put on hold
An issue has been identified in the processing of the data
used in the study, “Evidence of unusual late 20th century
warming from an Australasian temperature reconstruction
spanning the last millennium” by Joelle Gergis, Raphael
Neukom, Stephen Phipps, Ailie Gallant and David Karoly,
accepted for publication in the Journal of Climate.
We are currently reviewing the data and results.
Now, props to Karoly for being gracious in this takedown. Part of the problem is that a scientific paper is like a monolithic binary where a bugfix means going out and recalling every copy of the software out in the field.
So paper authors usually are very resistant to bugfixes, as they are career ending.In this case Karoly severely damaged Gergis' career and may have hurt his own. From a purely self-interested perspective he should have just stonewalled the "denialists" like Michael Mann has. But he was honest as a scientist.
Much better to move towards an open source culture where a "paper" is just the documentation for a major version number associated with a data/code repository.
because the trait they have in common is denial of climate crisis, urgency, or climate change validity
> and attacked from many sides
because the majority of them either (a) lack relevant expertise, or (b) are blatantly on the payroll of fossil fuel & extraction businesses, or billionaires derived thereof. And so if you take a stance from a position where you appear to lack credibility or objectivity, and you do it repeatedly, and because the stakes are indeed huge and world-wide, you're going to be attacked. fair enough.
> even though they are the only ones who publish full source code, push for raw data release and actually try to replicate results
utter bullshit and you know it
> and actually try to replicate results. We are making $100T decisions on the basis of $1M papers and closed datasets.
hint: the existing "$100T" world economy is already the result of the combined actions of a bunch of people working from $1M papers and closed datasets. When BP decided to do the Maconda well and Deepwater Horizon, and decided how they did it, and weighed the risks/rewards, do you think they shared the data with the whole world beforehand and let us all submit our vote on whether to do it and precisely how to do it? Hell no. Repeat this pattern ad nauseum across the entire world economy, every day, 24/7. Except if BP makes an oopsie with Maconda the worst-case downside is ruining merely the entire Gulf of Mexico ecosystem and fishing/tourism industry, perhaps for only 30 years, maybe -- worstcase. But in the case of climate change, the worst-case downside scenario is fucking up the entire Earth, for everybody, potentially irreversibly. That's bad. That's really fucking bad. And you're right we want the science on it to be good. But we also want to make sure that it's only people with relevant expertise who are making the recommendations, and not people with clear financial incentives to keep their heads buried in the sand until it's too late. You can be skeptical all you want about a doctor's recommendation, but if given a choice between following the advice of a doctor, or a crazy old lady across the street, I know who I'm sticking with. And we're not even talking about only relying on one particular individual doctor, but on the consensus view of a large majority of practicing, experienced doctors.
For a related anecdote: I've lost track of how many weather records I've heard broken in the last few years. And I've lived in Colorado most of my life, and am personally witnessing some of the weirdest weather patterns I've seen in just the last year and a half. We had about 3 days of nearly constant rain last year -- this is in arid sunny Colorado -- it flooded a basement room because the ground was so saturated. I've witnessed many weird days with super strong winds and unusually colored skies, winds reminiscent of downtown Chicago. Record wildfires. Record tornado touchdowns and devastation. Hurricanes. Iceberg melting and ice shelf collapsing/shrinkage. Is it all just a coincidence? Just a temporary blip and will go back to normal in a few years all by itself? Maybe. Is that the smart bet to make? Because that's what we'll be doing. Making a bet. With the entire planet, all our our cities (especially coastal cities) and ecosystems AND economy, all at stake. I'd rather bet on the science folks than the fossil money folks.
I disagree with your note, but have resisted the urge to down vote it. McIntyre does not concede that the paper could "stand perfectly fine", rather allows that its conclusions may be correct result despite serious methodological and statistical flaws in the approach:
[T]he specific impact of an erroneous method on a practical data set is hard to predict. In our case, it does not mean that a given reconstruction is necessarily an “artifact” of red noise, since a biased procedure will produce a Stick from an actual Stick signal. (If the “signal” is a Stick, the biased procedure will typically enhance the Stick.) The problem is that a biased method can produce a Stick from red noise as well and therefore not much significance can be placed to a Stick obtained from a flawed method.
I agree that McIntyre's tone is ungracious, and fear it may be counterproductive, but I don't think that the Karoly's email was that gracious either. In particular, he did not thank anyone for pointing out a flaw, rather for "also identifying" it, moments after it had been coincidentally found by the original authors. Nowhere does he allow that the auditors provided any new information.
Rather than politely accepting this face saving maneuver (a commenter compared it to the polite fiction of not noticing that someone farted at a cocktail party) McIntyre impolitely, but in my opinion, accurately, calls out the lie and accuses him of failing to give proper credit. Here's the original in case anyone is interested in pursuing it themselves:
The link is to a website that clearly has the agenda of "anti-climate-crisis" and is run by a guy named Steve McIntyre, who, surprise surprise, appears to be from the mining and minerals exploration business, either as a finance guy or lawyer or both, per his own words here:
"Previously, I spent about 35 years in the mining and mineral exploration business. During the last 20 years of this, I worked in the micro-cap exploration business and have a great deal of practical experience in dealing with prospectus and securities issues from the company point of view. Concepts like audit trails, due diligence and full, true and plain disclosure become second nature when you work in such an environment.
............
For McIntyre, undertaking this project has required an unpaid leave of absence from his career in mineral exploration financing, at the cost of over a year’s foregone earnings so far."
.............
Wikipedia: "Stephen McIntyre is a Canadian mathematician, former minerals prospector, and semi-retired mining consultant (...) In 2011 he became Chairman of the Board of Trelawney Mining and Exploration Inc."
Thus, probably a shill, and/or somebody with a financial incentive to hold his views, combined with a lack of relevant expertise. Bad combo. And unlikely to be trustable or objective.
I'll stick with the views of the vast majority of climate scientists, thank you very much. However imperfect and human they may be.
> Perhaps we should see whether this too holds up to scrutiny for a few years before remaking the $100T world economy.
That line is not a strong argument, in my judgement, particularly the last 5 words. To get real specific, if the implication is that:
(1) the total economy is $100T therefore we can't possibly change anything ... then, that argument is invalidated by the case that if we DON'T do anything, we may hurt or shrink that economy even more/worse than if we do take steps to address climate change. "We can't possibly make an incision in your skin, that could cause bleeding! Uh, there's a bullet lodged in your lung, you'll be much worse off if we DON'T remove it."
(2) a $100T world economy means if we were to add say a 10% overhead cost to the production of all those goods services, the economy would somehow collapse and disappear, with millions or billions laid off, dogs and cats living together, oh my! No, that's not how it would work. First off, costs always get passed on. If people still needed a given thing, they'd still get it. Maybe they get less of one thing and more of another. And any money spent to reduce pollution or recapture carbon, etc. is money STILL spent on goods & services, on jobs, etc., so it still goes into people's hands, to in turn be spent again on other things. It might be the case that the billionaires and multi-millionaires who make profits from the existing state of the fossil fuel industry might make less profits -- or, they might make the same, if they shifted what they produce or reduced costs in other ways. For example, perhaps the oil & coal industry becomes less profitable. But the solar & wind industries grow and become more profitable. On the net, on the whole, big picture, that could be break even or even overall much better for the world economy. And there's no technical reason why someone like, say, a Koch, who gets a large amount of his current wealth from the oil industry, couldn't also invest in renewables, or in climate change mitigation technologies, and end up just shifting his profit sources over to that. The filthy rich can stay filthy rich. The blue collar guy driving trucks or doing trainable equipment maintenance in the natural gas industry can instead do it in the solar/wind/tidal/geothermal industry, etc.<...
Not sure why you emitted this block of text. Let's rewind to what Arne Mooers actually said:
Society globally has to collectively decide that we need to
drastically lower our population very quickly.
It's rare that it's said so explicitly. But if you can't bring yourself to believe that giving 22 guys the authority to remake the world economy is a bad idea, perhaps you can submit that rapidly killing off billions of people on the basis of a single review article might not be such a great concept.
Show us the quote where he said that. You can't because he didn't. This is classic denialist logic.
First of all, that statement wasn't in the paper, but in a brief summary. And if you look at the context of it, and the other things said in the paper, the actual details, a more honest interpretation of that summary is that, regarding the climate issue, there would be beneficial effects if we could, say, emigrate out of and therefore de-populate more of the Earth's surface, to let it go back to it's natural state, and/or optimize the density in areas where it would be better for the climate due to system recovery/equilibrium effects, and economic effiencies in the systems that support civilization. And especially reduce the related resource consumption & related emissions due to that, which are the primary impacts, at a system level, of the large human population on the climate and ecosystems. Here's the following sentences in his summary, which you conveniently left out:
"More of us need to move to optimal areas at higher density and let parts of the planet recover. Folks like us have to be forced to be materially poorer, at least in the short term. We also need to invest a lot more in creating technologies to produce and distribute food without eating up more land and wild species. "
He did NOT say we need to KILL people. Or let them die. Indeed, the whole point of taking action is so that less people will die, and more people can lead better lives than otherwise. There are many ways of literally reducing the population that are relatively benign, such as pushing down on the global birth rate (through birth control or abstinance, for example, to take your pick between liberal-vs-conservative ponies), or in a more high-tech scenario, off-planet colonization (the whole SpaceX, Planetary Resources Inc. model). It's clear that these are scientists looking at systems and the big picture, and being a bit geeky. If you dig into the population numbers and years in their model, many of those "very bad, past sustainable" points are 40 years out and projections based on trends -- that's not overnight so not "quickly" in the layman's sense.
Here's a link directly to the actual paper in question. If you can cite or quote something in it explicitly that you think is bullshit, wrong, insane, reckless, etc. (and I'll temporarily overlook the fact that neither you or myself are climate scientists), please reply in a comment with it and I'll consider it:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/hadlylab/pdfs/Barnoskyetal2012...
As to peer-review, this was not published as either an "article" or "letter" (see: http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/gta/2a_Manuscript_forma...) but as a "review", which is more or less just a published essay. As such it falls under a much different peer review guideline.
Even so, peer review is no surety of fact, far from it, it's nothing more than a signoff that the authors have seemingly followed the basic forms of reproducible scientific investigations. However, in this case I think that Nature has let down its readers even in publishing this essay as a "review".
There is nothing that is not vague and generic in this essay. There is no model here, no theory. And no predictions nor falsifiability. It is not science in any sense and should not be treated as science. At best it is the shadowy outline of a future theory, at worst it is politics, mysticism, and superstition masquerading as science. And yes, reprinted in one of the most prestigious science journals of our times. That doesn't make it better, that makes it worse.
At first I shared your frustration, but I glanced at the paper and it looks to me (as a layman) as though the authors did their homework. It was published in Nature after all.
Here's a high level intuitive argument: Imagine that lots of important parameters about the Earth's climate and ecosystems could be modeled using a bunch of differential equations. Right now, due to humans, our current state is deep in historically unexplored territory. To be safe, it makes sense to try to modify all the parameters we can back to where they were in case weird stuff happens in the unexplored territory.
It's also important to note that this is a review article: it's an attempt to distill an opinionated consensus in the field, not to fully flesh out the models and provide all the empirical evidence.
For that, the reader should check the copious end notes.
Just because they have plenty of notes doesn't mean that they've come up with something worthwhile. Their "theory" is nothing more substantive than New Age mysticism. They talk about states, state shifts, and forcings but do not fully describe any of them except at the most superficial levels. They put forward no tests (quantitative or qualitative) to determine the boundaries of a state or to test whether a "state shift" has occurred. That is a flaw at the very lowest level of their "theory". On top of that they build many fanciful constructs which have even less basis in the scientific method.
I've commented on this before, but it bears repeating. Here is "Figure 2" from the article: http://i.imgur.com/Zi3uB.png. Neither axis is meaningful, they both lack a definition for what is being measured, let alone how, let alone how to sort it, even qualitatively. This is junk. It's no better than a diagram with "mood" on the y-axis and "emotional energy" on the x-axis, it's utterly, utterly meaningless.
If radical climate change really is imminent, we should look in to geoengineering. Technology has already saved us from a few catastrophic predictions like this one.
Need to read the article -- my library doesn't have access yet but this seems way too sensationalized.
I have no doubt the world will change. I don't think that we could prevent it even if we turned off the figurative taps but there's no way that the article advocates that the planet will not support life after this change.
Does it go into the probable losses and the mechanisms for those losses (heat/acidification/etc)? From that we could identify probable impacts to the nutrient cycle.
Their claim is that we alter approximately 2.27 acres worth of environment to support each person (mainly nutrients). This comes out to 40%?? of the land of Earth being transformed and showing state change.
Through this transformation of land and our consumption of primary nutrients we currently consume between 20-40% of the biota production and also degrade the whole production chain.
Their claim is that at current human growth levels we will exceed 50% transformation of the land mass and this will cause rapid, unpredictable changes (state change) and we will reach this in 2025.
Interestingly, they claim that through greenhouse gas emissions we have delayed this massive state change (by putting more energy into the environment).
Edit: Removed paywalled link (there's a better one somewhere in the thread). My point is that the article seems inaccurate, so it may be a mistake to judge the matter by the impression you get from the it. I'm yet to read the paper myself.
I highly recommend everyone do as I have done: read the paper and track down the references they state support their claims such as "43%!" and "50%!" and determine whether or not the references cited support the claims as made. It's an entertaining exercise.
Then, based on one's findings having done this, decide for oneself whether the paper should be withdrawn and all 22 of the authors fired from their positions.
Like all the advocates are saying, read the paper. To that I add follow up on the citations.
The advocates don't go into detail about their amazing findings, they just wax poetic about the brilliance of the paper without offering details.
Since that's clearly the accepted standard, that's exactly where I'm standing on it as well. Does "Critical thresholds associated with habitat loss" refer to planetary scale changes or microenvironments? Does it support a tipping point of 50% altered planet? Read the paper to find out. That's just one reference. There's 100 to follow through on for the most fun.
That's also the only way this can be seriously discussed. Otherwise every single damn thing I will point out here will be nitpicked to death by the population purge advocates. If everybody loads up on the facts then that can't happen. So reading the paper and following all the citations is the only way to decide for yourself. Anything advocates or critics say could be bullshit here. People won't know unless they go see for themselves.
In this and the other thread discussing this paper, a number of people pointed out that they did not actually have proven models that really showed planetary doom, and it was also questioned whether 43% of the land mass on the planet is really either farm or city. To these responses, advocates attacked them, accused them of not reading the paper, and insisted the paper, and its citations, did support that. None of these advocates were willing to provide details about that.
So at this point the only way to know is to read the paper and all the citations and decide if the advocates are right about this or not.
I didn't have to read all 100 citations fortunately to find out since the claims are specifically footnoted.
Here's where all the right-wing programmers on HN, with no relevant training or expertise in climate science, geology, physics, etc., all chime in with their own right-wing consensus view that, "Thems evil liberal hippie scientists have an agenda to raise our taxes and fund their labs! I say it's just mystic mumbo jumbo and bah humbug!" Meanwhile, serious mature accomplished people with relevant expertise and years of experience in the field, who study real data, and done lots of model tuning & analysis, and overall have a much deeper knowledge of the physical and biological systems involved are worried, very worried, and calling for action, and their numbers are growing.
Given that humans can mistakes. And given that it's hard to know for sure who exactly is right. And given the magnitude of the stakes involved, the magnitude of the downside risk in the "bad" scenario variants, which kind of people do you think it would be wiser to believe and follow their advice? On climate, I'm going to bet on the climate scientists, and I hope enough of the rest of you join me, for all our sakes.
OK so here's a question: Let's assume for the moment that this paper is 100% accurate in its assessment of the future of our climate, and let's further assume that the general public will continue to be apathetic for the time being. What's going to happen? Are we doomed because we won't be able to act on a large enough scale in time? Or will things change (quickly enough) once the average Joe starts 'feeling the heat'?
The scientific method is not "right wing". You can pretend that politically motivated pseudoscience is science, it does not make it so, and at the end of the day it hurts the cause of science.
We live in a world (world, not just country) where strong support for science and reason is very much in the minority. We are so very close to the tipping point of falling into a new dark age of superstition. And by far the easiest way to end up in that state is to pervert and twist the scientific establishment into supporting a specific set of ideals a priori, independent of evidence and reason, and destroying the credibility of the scientific establishment and indeed in the very concept of science in the process.
If you want to argue a point, argue from the evidence. Not with politics. Not with vitriol. Not with hatred.
You make an ad hominem attack with your first sentence. Then you make good use of the fallacy of the excluded middle, the straw man argument, argument from authority, and then an appeal to popularity.
You can do better. And when it comes to topics such as scientific integrity and ethics as well as the future of human civilization we must do better.
> You can pretend that politically motivated pseudoscience is science, it does not make it so (...)
Indeed. And calling something pseudoscience does NOT MAKE it pseudoscience. And if you are not a scientist, especially not one in the relevant field, then my position is that your opinion and conclusions on the matter are of much lower weight than of those who are and who do have these qualities.
> If you want to argue a point, argue from the evidence. Not with politics. Not with vitriol.
Indeed. Let's let the folks with relevant experience, training and credentials work on this issue, and let them make their recommendations to their fellow citizens who are laymen. And then let's follow their advice on these matters. I see way too much politics and game-playing on the part of the anti-climate-change folks, so a large percentage of that community is at best, noise, and at worst, suspect, in my judgement.
You are good at coming up with terms for patterns in debate. That does not make your position on the climate change issue correct. Nor does it make my position wrong. Nor does it make the judgments of climate scientists wrong. In fact, it's irrelevant. What does matter is whether we listen to people with the relevant expertise or not.
43 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 90.9 ms ] threadRight, and how does Arne Mooers propose we do this? Thermonuclear war maybe? That would be too damaging. Sterilize everyone? Not even China does that. Maybe ask billions of people to escort themselves off the face of the Earth? Make some Solyent Green? Global pandemic?
Maybe more people would take them seriously (and really take them seriously, not just run around scared) if they gave us more choices than "maybe die" and "definitely die".
I made some comments about that exact wording and was criticized because that phrase as it is is not in the original paper, but was in the press release about the paper, a press release apparently written by the paper's authors since it gives them as contacts.
And here the phrase, not from the actual paper, appears in yet another alarmist article claiming that total irreversible planetary doom is certain if purges do not begin.
I put three key words in bold above. But I want to focus on this:
"doom is certain if purges do not begin."
Please point me to where that was said, either in the paper itself or in the co-author's summary. You don't be able to because it doesn't exist. They didn't say that. You said that.
I just grepped for "purge" in the paper and in the summary and article you linked to above, and they both yielded 0 results. The paper: http://www.stanford.edu/group/hadlylab/pdfs/Barnoskyetal2012...
?
I would argue that your comment -- where you falsely accused them of claiming that doom is certain if purges do not begin --- is the one being alarmist. I am certain of that. :P
Also, strictly speaking, one possible explanation for why you might be seeing a seemingly growing number of recent "alarmist" articles about the climate & population impact, etc., is because, perhaps, the folks who are studying these areas are actually becoming increasingly alarmed. If that's happening, and they're sharing that with us, that's a good thing. "I wish that darn burglar alarm would stop going off every few weeks!" Well, are you more concerned about the inconvenience of repeatedly hearing the alarm, or that your house keeps getting robbed? :) Let's err on the side of the latter case, if any.
I'm serious. If you want to curtail the out-of-control growth rate, and consensually so, women need to be able to choose birth control; they need to not fear rape; they need to not be viewed as an economic liability (where e.g. parents with a son might stop there but parents with a daughter say "hey, we need another child so that someone cares for us in our old age").
The places with high birth rates will be the places where birth control is either hard to find or culturally discouraged.
To test this, I went to the CIA World Factbook and multiplied their population growth rates (which are sadly from 2002) against populations to find that the situation looks approximately like this:
The net is 76.46, summing over all countries, so India is 21% of the problem, China is 8.4% of it. One nice thing about this metric is that both Bangladesh and China are reasonably high here -- Bangladesh of course is struggling with some of the highest population density in the world, while China has a low growth rate but their population is absolutely staggering. It's very hard to get them both to appear in a top 10 list of "where the problem is".If past history is any indication, China will self-regulate its population by descending into civil war, so the major thing to focus on is India + Pakistan. However, if you could make a dent in the United States somehow, that could also help to reduce our population-deficit.
looks up denial in the dictionary
The human species very much behaves like an individual in that it will always take a burnt finger to stop touching the hot plate.
What that tells us is that we're indeed going to break the ecosystem/climate at some point.
What history tells us is that we're going to fix it much faster than we broke it
We have broken hunting/gathering and we had the fix before it became critical. (agriculture) We have broken fossile fuels and we had the fix before it became critical. (nuclear,elec,batteries,fuel cells) We have broken nuclear fission energy and we had the fix before it became critical. (fusion, hydro, geotherm) We may have almost broken the climate and we will fix it before it becomes critical.
(There is no problem so far so I can't guess the fix, but we already have the capability to design any animal or plant and mass produce it to solve any ecosystem riddle)
Without at least that number, it's just a useless alarmist rant.
For the record, my vote is that this is pseudoscience. No theory, model, or testable predictions are presented. It is a non-falsifiable idea that is couched in such generic and vague terms that it could mean just about anything.
The article that the news story references was just published in Nature, which has been around since 1869, is peered reviewed, well-respected, oft-cited, and has many distinguished moments, including the initial publication of Watson and Crick's work on DNA. "pseudoscience" might be unfair. Nice object lesson in the "social structures for doing something just aren’t there" though.
Nature and Science in particular have been forced to retract many papers recently for failure to replicate. A short list of recent retracted Nature and Science papers:
http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2010/10/14/highly-cited...
http://www.genomesunzipped.org/2012/04/guest-post-accurate-i...
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=study-fails...
And here is a recent climate paper by Gergis which was retracted after the blogosphere found flaws while attempting to replicate their work:
http://climateaudit.org/2012/06/10/more-on-screening-in-gerg...
All of those papers were beaten up after they were accepted because other scientists couldn't replicate their results. Perhaps we should see whether this too holds up to scrutiny for a few years before remaking the $100T world economy.
It's also interesting to note how the "auditors" compare to the scientists: while the scientists graciously send a thank you for pointing out a flaw and get to work on fixing it, the auditors seem almost entirely focused on crowing, getting a scalp and spreading conspiracy theories and innuendo. Interesting.
Regarding retraction, I think this is pretty unambiguous
http://climateaudit.org/2012/06/08/gergis-et-al-put-on-hold/
Now, props to Karoly for being gracious in this takedown. Part of the problem is that a scientific paper is like a monolithic binary where a bugfix means going out and recalling every copy of the software out in the field.So paper authors usually are very resistant to bugfixes, as they are career ending.In this case Karoly severely damaged Gergis' career and may have hurt his own. From a purely self-interested perspective he should have just stonewalled the "denialists" like Michael Mann has. But he was honest as a scientist.
Much better to move towards an open source culture where a "paper" is just the documentation for a major version number associated with a data/code repository.
because the trait they have in common is denial of climate crisis, urgency, or climate change validity
> and attacked from many sides
because the majority of them either (a) lack relevant expertise, or (b) are blatantly on the payroll of fossil fuel & extraction businesses, or billionaires derived thereof. And so if you take a stance from a position where you appear to lack credibility or objectivity, and you do it repeatedly, and because the stakes are indeed huge and world-wide, you're going to be attacked. fair enough.
> even though they are the only ones who publish full source code, push for raw data release and actually try to replicate results
utter bullshit and you know it
> and actually try to replicate results. We are making $100T decisions on the basis of $1M papers and closed datasets.
hint: the existing "$100T" world economy is already the result of the combined actions of a bunch of people working from $1M papers and closed datasets. When BP decided to do the Maconda well and Deepwater Horizon, and decided how they did it, and weighed the risks/rewards, do you think they shared the data with the whole world beforehand and let us all submit our vote on whether to do it and precisely how to do it? Hell no. Repeat this pattern ad nauseum across the entire world economy, every day, 24/7. Except if BP makes an oopsie with Maconda the worst-case downside is ruining merely the entire Gulf of Mexico ecosystem and fishing/tourism industry, perhaps for only 30 years, maybe -- worstcase. But in the case of climate change, the worst-case downside scenario is fucking up the entire Earth, for everybody, potentially irreversibly. That's bad. That's really fucking bad. And you're right we want the science on it to be good. But we also want to make sure that it's only people with relevant expertise who are making the recommendations, and not people with clear financial incentives to keep their heads buried in the sand until it's too late. You can be skeptical all you want about a doctor's recommendation, but if given a choice between following the advice of a doctor, or a crazy old lady across the street, I know who I'm sticking with. And we're not even talking about only relying on one particular individual doctor, but on the consensus view of a large majority of practicing, experienced doctors.
For a related anecdote: I've lost track of how many weather records I've heard broken in the last few years. And I've lived in Colorado most of my life, and am personally witnessing some of the weirdest weather patterns I've seen in just the last year and a half. We had about 3 days of nearly constant rain last year -- this is in arid sunny Colorado -- it flooded a basement room because the ground was so saturated. I've witnessed many weird days with super strong winds and unusually colored skies, winds reminiscent of downtown Chicago. Record wildfires. Record tornado touchdowns and devastation. Hurricanes. Iceberg melting and ice shelf collapsing/shrinkage. Is it all just a coincidence? Just a temporary blip and will go back to normal in a few years all by itself? Maybe. Is that the smart bet to make? Because that's what we'll be doing. Making a bet. With the entire planet, all our our cities (especially coastal cities) and ecosystems AND economy, all at stake. I'd rather bet on the science folks than the fossil money folks.
[T]he specific impact of an erroneous method on a practical data set is hard to predict. In our case, it does not mean that a given reconstruction is necessarily an “artifact” of red noise, since a biased procedure will produce a Stick from an actual Stick signal. (If the “signal” is a Stick, the biased procedure will typically enhance the Stick.) The problem is that a biased method can produce a Stick from red noise as well and therefore not much significance can be placed to a Stick obtained from a flawed method.
http://climateaudit.org/2012/06/10/more-on-screening-in-gerg...
I agree that McIntyre's tone is ungracious, and fear it may be counterproductive, but I don't think that the Karoly's email was that gracious either. In particular, he did not thank anyone for pointing out a flaw, rather for "also identifying" it, moments after it had been coincidentally found by the original authors. Nowhere does he allow that the auditors provided any new information.
Rather than politely accepting this face saving maneuver (a commenter compared it to the polite fiction of not noticing that someone farted at a cocktail party) McIntyre impolitely, but in my opinion, accurately, calls out the lie and accuses him of failing to give proper credit. Here's the original in case anyone is interested in pursuing it themselves:
http://climateaudit.org/2012/06/08/gergis-et-al-put-on-hold
The link is to a website that clearly has the agenda of "anti-climate-crisis" and is run by a guy named Steve McIntyre, who, surprise surprise, appears to be from the mining and minerals exploration business, either as a finance guy or lawyer or both, per his own words here:
"Previously, I spent about 35 years in the mining and mineral exploration business. During the last 20 years of this, I worked in the micro-cap exploration business and have a great deal of practical experience in dealing with prospectus and securities issues from the company point of view. Concepts like audit trails, due diligence and full, true and plain disclosure become second nature when you work in such an environment. ............ For McIntyre, undertaking this project has required an unpaid leave of absence from his career in mineral exploration financing, at the cost of over a year’s foregone earnings so far." ............. Wikipedia: "Stephen McIntyre is a Canadian mathematician, former minerals prospector, and semi-retired mining consultant (...) In 2011 he became Chairman of the Board of Trelawney Mining and Exploration Inc."
Thus, probably a shill, and/or somebody with a financial incentive to hold his views, combined with a lack of relevant expertise. Bad combo. And unlikely to be trustable or objective.
I'll stick with the views of the vast majority of climate scientists, thank you very much. However imperfect and human they may be.
> Perhaps we should see whether this too holds up to scrutiny for a few years before remaking the $100T world economy.
That line is not a strong argument, in my judgement, particularly the last 5 words. To get real specific, if the implication is that:
(1) the total economy is $100T therefore we can't possibly change anything ... then, that argument is invalidated by the case that if we DON'T do anything, we may hurt or shrink that economy even more/worse than if we do take steps to address climate change. "We can't possibly make an incision in your skin, that could cause bleeding! Uh, there's a bullet lodged in your lung, you'll be much worse off if we DON'T remove it."
(2) a $100T world economy means if we were to add say a 10% overhead cost to the production of all those goods services, the economy would somehow collapse and disappear, with millions or billions laid off, dogs and cats living together, oh my! No, that's not how it would work. First off, costs always get passed on. If people still needed a given thing, they'd still get it. Maybe they get less of one thing and more of another. And any money spent to reduce pollution or recapture carbon, etc. is money STILL spent on goods & services, on jobs, etc., so it still goes into people's hands, to in turn be spent again on other things. It might be the case that the billionaires and multi-millionaires who make profits from the existing state of the fossil fuel industry might make less profits -- or, they might make the same, if they shifted what they produce or reduced costs in other ways. For example, perhaps the oil & coal industry becomes less profitable. But the solar & wind industries grow and become more profitable. On the net, on the whole, big picture, that could be break even or even overall much better for the world economy. And there's no technical reason why someone like, say, a Koch, who gets a large amount of his current wealth from the oil industry, couldn't also invest in renewables, or in climate change mitigation technologies, and end up just shifting his profit sources over to that. The filthy rich can stay filthy rich. The blue collar guy driving trucks or doing trainable equipment maintenance in the natural gas industry can instead do it in the solar/wind/tidal/geothermal industry, etc.<...
Show us the quote where he said that. You can't because he didn't. This is classic denialist logic.
First of all, that statement wasn't in the paper, but in a brief summary. And if you look at the context of it, and the other things said in the paper, the actual details, a more honest interpretation of that summary is that, regarding the climate issue, there would be beneficial effects if we could, say, emigrate out of and therefore de-populate more of the Earth's surface, to let it go back to it's natural state, and/or optimize the density in areas where it would be better for the climate due to system recovery/equilibrium effects, and economic effiencies in the systems that support civilization. And especially reduce the related resource consumption & related emissions due to that, which are the primary impacts, at a system level, of the large human population on the climate and ecosystems. Here's the following sentences in his summary, which you conveniently left out:
"More of us need to move to optimal areas at higher density and let parts of the planet recover. Folks like us have to be forced to be materially poorer, at least in the short term. We also need to invest a lot more in creating technologies to produce and distribute food without eating up more land and wild species. "
He did NOT say we need to KILL people. Or let them die. Indeed, the whole point of taking action is so that less people will die, and more people can lead better lives than otherwise. There are many ways of literally reducing the population that are relatively benign, such as pushing down on the global birth rate (through birth control or abstinance, for example, to take your pick between liberal-vs-conservative ponies), or in a more high-tech scenario, off-planet colonization (the whole SpaceX, Planetary Resources Inc. model). It's clear that these are scientists looking at systems and the big picture, and being a bit geeky. If you dig into the population numbers and years in their model, many of those "very bad, past sustainable" points are 40 years out and projections based on trends -- that's not overnight so not "quickly" in the layman's sense.
Here's a link directly to the actual paper in question. If you can cite or quote something in it explicitly that you think is bullshit, wrong, insane, reckless, etc. (and I'll temporarily overlook the fact that neither you or myself are climate scientists), please reply in a comment with it and I'll consider it: http://www.stanford.edu/group/hadlylab/pdfs/Barnoskyetal2012...
As to peer-review, this was not published as either an "article" or "letter" (see: http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/gta/2a_Manuscript_forma...) but as a "review", which is more or less just a published essay. As such it falls under a much different peer review guideline.
Even so, peer review is no surety of fact, far from it, it's nothing more than a signoff that the authors have seemingly followed the basic forms of reproducible scientific investigations. However, in this case I think that Nature has let down its readers even in publishing this essay as a "review".
There is nothing that is not vague and generic in this essay. There is no model here, no theory. And no predictions nor falsifiability. It is not science in any sense and should not be treated as science. At best it is the shadowy outline of a future theory, at worst it is politics, mysticism, and superstition masquerading as science. And yes, reprinted in one of the most prestigious science journals of our times. That doesn't make it better, that makes it worse.
Here's a high level intuitive argument: Imagine that lots of important parameters about the Earth's climate and ecosystems could be modeled using a bunch of differential equations. Right now, due to humans, our current state is deep in historically unexplored territory. To be safe, it makes sense to try to modify all the parameters we can back to where they were in case weird stuff happens in the unexplored territory.
For that, the reader should check the copious end notes.
I've commented on this before, but it bears repeating. Here is "Figure 2" from the article: http://i.imgur.com/Zi3uB.png. Neither axis is meaningful, they both lack a definition for what is being measured, let alone how, let alone how to sort it, even qualitatively. This is junk. It's no better than a diagram with "mood" on the y-axis and "emotional energy" on the x-axis, it's utterly, utterly meaningless.
I have no doubt the world will change. I don't think that we could prevent it even if we turned off the figurative taps but there's no way that the article advocates that the planet will not support life after this change.
Does it go into the probable losses and the mechanisms for those losses (heat/acidification/etc)? From that we could identify probable impacts to the nutrient cycle.
Their claim is that we alter approximately 2.27 acres worth of environment to support each person (mainly nutrients). This comes out to 40%?? of the land of Earth being transformed and showing state change.
Through this transformation of land and our consumption of primary nutrients we currently consume between 20-40% of the biota production and also degrade the whole production chain.
Their claim is that at current human growth levels we will exceed 50% transformation of the land mass and this will cause rapid, unpredictable changes (state change) and we will reach this in 2025.
Interestingly, they claim that through greenhouse gas emissions we have delayed this massive state change (by putting more energy into the environment).
Edit: Removed paywalled link (there's a better one somewhere in the thread). My point is that the article seems inaccurate, so it may be a mistake to judge the matter by the impression you get from the it. I'm yet to read the paper myself.
Then, based on one's findings having done this, decide for oneself whether the paper should be withdrawn and all 22 of the authors fired from their positions.
The advocates don't go into detail about their amazing findings, they just wax poetic about the brilliance of the paper without offering details.
Since that's clearly the accepted standard, that's exactly where I'm standing on it as well. Does "Critical thresholds associated with habitat loss" refer to planetary scale changes or microenvironments? Does it support a tipping point of 50% altered planet? Read the paper to find out. That's just one reference. There's 100 to follow through on for the most fun.
That's also the only way this can be seriously discussed. Otherwise every single damn thing I will point out here will be nitpicked to death by the population purge advocates. If everybody loads up on the facts then that can't happen. So reading the paper and following all the citations is the only way to decide for yourself. Anything advocates or critics say could be bullshit here. People won't know unless they go see for themselves.
In this and the other thread discussing this paper, a number of people pointed out that they did not actually have proven models that really showed planetary doom, and it was also questioned whether 43% of the land mass on the planet is really either farm or city. To these responses, advocates attacked them, accused them of not reading the paper, and insisted the paper, and its citations, did support that. None of these advocates were willing to provide details about that.
So at this point the only way to know is to read the paper and all the citations and decide if the advocates are right about this or not.
I didn't have to read all 100 citations fortunately to find out since the claims are specifically footnoted.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v486/n7401/full/nature1...
http://www.stanford.edu/group/hadlylab/pdfs/Barnoskyetal2012...
Given that humans can mistakes. And given that it's hard to know for sure who exactly is right. And given the magnitude of the stakes involved, the magnitude of the downside risk in the "bad" scenario variants, which kind of people do you think it would be wiser to believe and follow their advice? On climate, I'm going to bet on the climate scientists, and I hope enough of the rest of you join me, for all our sakes.
We live in a world (world, not just country) where strong support for science and reason is very much in the minority. We are so very close to the tipping point of falling into a new dark age of superstition. And by far the easiest way to end up in that state is to pervert and twist the scientific establishment into supporting a specific set of ideals a priori, independent of evidence and reason, and destroying the credibility of the scientific establishment and indeed in the very concept of science in the process.
If you want to argue a point, argue from the evidence. Not with politics. Not with vitriol. Not with hatred.
You make an ad hominem attack with your first sentence. Then you make good use of the fallacy of the excluded middle, the straw man argument, argument from authority, and then an appeal to popularity.
You can do better. And when it comes to topics such as scientific integrity and ethics as well as the future of human civilization we must do better.
I did not say that. Quote me where I said that.
> You can pretend that politically motivated pseudoscience is science, it does not make it so (...)
Indeed. And calling something pseudoscience does NOT MAKE it pseudoscience. And if you are not a scientist, especially not one in the relevant field, then my position is that your opinion and conclusions on the matter are of much lower weight than of those who are and who do have these qualities.
> If you want to argue a point, argue from the evidence. Not with politics. Not with vitriol.
Indeed. Let's let the folks with relevant experience, training and credentials work on this issue, and let them make their recommendations to their fellow citizens who are laymen. And then let's follow their advice on these matters. I see way too much politics and game-playing on the part of the anti-climate-change folks, so a large percentage of that community is at best, noise, and at worst, suspect, in my judgement.
You are good at coming up with terms for patterns in debate. That does not make your position on the climate change issue correct. Nor does it make my position wrong. Nor does it make the judgments of climate scientists wrong. In fact, it's irrelevant. What does matter is whether we listen to people with the relevant expertise or not.