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Recent Comments by Almanildo
 | comment listing type: Top Sift for Dec 8th, 2009Friends O' the Sift Top New Future Videos by Vote  Subscribe Top 15 Future Sifters of All Time Top 8 Future Sifters of the Past Week 3. rubywillow
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Coolest Clock ever
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How is it lame to rage against people trying to stereotype atheists as having no morals?
Ghastly homophobic Ugandan law supported by US fundie group
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Urban myths about climate change
How do you make science and politics play well together?
In science, concensus isn't that important. Sure, people will be skeptical if you champion some way out there theory, but entertaining strange possibilities is seen as a good thing.
Climate scientists, however, suddenly found themselves in a position where they had to get into politics with the message they got out of their data. Politics, however, is another beast entirely. You have to deal with absolute truths, otherwise people won't give a damn about what you're saying.
How do you make an informed decision based on science? Since it doesn't offer absolute truths, there has to be some element of risk analysis behind your reasoning. But the problem isn't only that no one scientist is absolutely sure about his answer, it's that people disagree on how sure you can be. How do you perform risk analysis when you don't know the risk?
This is where consensus becomes important in science. You can't have a concensus about what's true and what's false, but maybe you can have a consensus about what the risk is. That is what the IPCC is all about.
Now, people won't just trust a consensus; they want to know what lies behind. That's why public access journals are so important.
That's my thinking on the subject, anyway. I, however, am no expert.
Urban myths about climate change
Perhaps the first time I've ever heard a AGW advocate admit that C02 isn't the only factor influencing temperature! This is a red letter day.
I have never heard anyone say that CO2 is the only factor. What people are saying is that CO2 is the main factor in driving the most recent climate change.
I guess in all the time that he spent in all those journals he just MISSED the truckloads of reports that solar activity has radically decreased over the past several years, and that 2009 alone has had the lowest amount of solar activity in the past 100 years. Yet he says "solar activity has been more or less constant for 30 years".
Solar activity periodically varies over an 11 year cycle, and we are currently at the minimum of this cycle. Besides this periodic variation, solar activity has been more or less constant.
And then he goes on and says "C02 levels have been constant for the past thousand years".
Obviously, he means that CO2 levels have been constant for the past thousand years until the industrial revolution. One of the main reasons for believing in anthropogenic climate change is the good correlation between CO2 levels and global temperature.
AGW proponents blame a global temperature increase of ONE degree in 100 years on human C02. Then they ignore a global temperature decreases of one degree in ONE year.
Climatologists deal with long-term trends and global means. Differences in temperature between one year and the next is expected and difficult to explain, but models for long-term and large-scale means have turned out to be quite good. They only work, however, when CO2 is taken into account.
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