World may not be warming, say scientists | Hacker News Reader

World may not be warming, say scientists

timesonline.co.uk

11 pointsjamesbritt26 comments

Regardless of your opinion on climate change, The Times is not a reliable source for such matters: http://liberalconspiracy.org/2009/12/14/how-the-times-distor...

The Times, by the way, is owned by News Corp (Rupert Murdoch). Depending on your political affiliation, that might either be a very relevant or a completely irrelevant point :)

Depending on your political affiliation, that might either be a very relevant or a completely irrelevant point

It shouldn't be relevant to anyone.

Logical fallacy: ad hominem attack

"Arguments of this kind focus not on the evidence for a view but on the character of the person advancing it; they seek to discredit positions by discrediting those who hold them. It is always important to attack arguments, rather than arguers, and this is where arguments that commit the ad hominem fallacy fall down." http://www.logicalfallacies.info/relevance/ad-hominem/

The article itself does not appear biased to me. In particular, it does caution "His study, which has not been peer reviewed...", and " 'It’s not just temperature rises that tell us the world is warming' ", etc.

Many logical fallacies are actually good quick-and-dirty heuristics for deciding whether something is worth considering. "The source is biased, therefore the argument is wrong" is clearly incorrect, but "the source is biased, therefore the argument has a high likelihood of being wrong, therefore reading it is not a good use of my time" is not just correct, but also a very useful rule.

"The source is biased, therefore the argument is wrong" is clearly incorrect, but "the source is biased, therefore the argument has a high likelihood of being wrong, therefore reading it is not a good use of my time" is not just correct...

No, your reformulation is also incorrect. A correct formulation might be "The source is biased; therefore I would be wise to be skeptical and subject any claims to greater scrutiny."

The overarching problem is that everyone with expertise has a bias. It's crazy to claim that those skeptical of AGW may be biased, but those backing the notion -- like the British scientists who found themselves in hot water last year -- are somehow above it all.

Everyone in this game is biased. Why would they have become involved if they didn't have some passion for the subject? Thus, we're left with needing to subject the ideas of all to great scrutiny, on both sides.

No, your reformulation is also incorrect. A correct formulation might be "The source is biased; therefore I would be wise to be skeptical and subject any claims to greater scrutiny."

A nice thought, but naive and impractical in application. Engaging in a proper skeptical analysis for a technical subject requires a thorough knowledge of the subject being discussed and a great deal of time and dedication. In short, it means acquiring personal expertise.

Most people don't have time to become an expert in everything; relying on other people's opinions is the only practical policy, and heuristics for deciding whose opinions are most likely to be trustworthy are valuable--even though said heuristics tend to sound an awful lot like logical fallacies.

It's crazy to claim that those skeptical of AGW may be biased, but those backing the notion -- like the British scientists who found themselves in hot water last year -- are somehow above it all.

Did I claim that?

Everyone in this game is biased. Why would they have become involved if they didn't have some passion for the subject? Thus, we're left with needing to subject the ideas of all to great scrutiny, on both sides.

Well, I wasn't talking about the one topic specifically. But, generally speaking, everyone in the entire world is biased, crazy, and wrong about most things. So it goes.

Complaining about how every participant in a debate is biased is technically correct but useless, and tends to obfuscate clues about who might actually be worth listening to.

Not ad hominem at all: simply inductive reasoning - not foolproof by any means, but often a good pointer.

I think we need to change the discussion regarding climate change. For every scientist who says the world is warming, you'll can find another who says it isn't.

This just continiously leads to people trying to figure out if this species or that species is in danger, etc, etc.

If instead we focus on the amount of pollution, and reducing that, I think we change the argument. I don't know that scientists or anybody else can argue that pollution is good.

Is there a 'pro-pollution' argument?

>"Is there a 'pro-pollution' argument?"

Yes. Cost-benefit analysis. Civilization is built on pollution. Humans have been hurting the environment for their own good since before the days of agriculture. The question wise leaders should ask is "how much pollution is okay given the vast benefit we get from polluting activities?" not "how can we get pollution down to zero?".

In some ways, that's even a reasonable argument, but it completely ignores the long-term effects. A large part of the trouble is that we don't ever tend to account for the cost of large-scale environmental damage. For instance, under many climate change forecasts, the coffee growing industry is going to be much, much less profitable (http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2009-0...). Beyond just the economic costs, though, we don't tend to evaluate the quality-of-life costs of environmental damage.

Of course, there's also people like me who see environmental conservation as a moral imperative, beyond any economic motives. My only point here is that even from a purely economic standpoint, there are many good reasons to spend immense amounts of money fighting pollution. Even 1% of the Iraq War budget would be hugely beneficial.

>"In some ways, that's even a reasonable argument, but it completely ignores the long-term effects."

Not if you do it seriously. The thousands of scholars who study these kind of issues for a living have thought of such simple objections a long time ago.

It's not a simple objection at all. Of course there are scholars who do so, but in practice, the costs are largely ignored, just like any externality tends to get ignored by individual agents in an economic system. That leads to an argument that environmental effects must fall under the umbrella of governmental responsibility, since those calculating cost/benefit ratios are rarely those who will pay the brunt of the costs of climate change and other such effects. This is especially evident if one considers the quality-of-life concerns, which are by their very nature cross-cutting, and thus hard to account for at the level of an individual or single corporation.

I think we need to change the discussion regarding climate change. For every scientist who says the world is warming, you'll can find another who says it isn't.

That... really isn't true, you know. Depending on who you're asking, the opinions of scientists range from "a majority thinks it's the likeliest hypothesis" to "overwhelming agreement"--and the consensus tends to be stronger among those whose area of expertise is closer to the relevant subjects.

There are, as always, a handful of vocal outliers, and plenty of non-scientists who think everything to do with climate change is bunk, but scientists in general? For every scientist who says the world is warming, you'll find you'll run out of the ones saying it isn't real fast.

Is there a 'pro-pollution' argument?

Sure--a simple cost-benefit analysis. Eliminating pollution entirely would pretty much require the destruction of technological civilization (and don't even ask about the ecological damage caused by the crime against Mother Nature that is "agriculture"). The real question is how to avoid causing irreparable damage or creating pollution faster than the environment can handle, while maximizing the benefits to humanity.

<quote>For every scientist who says the world is warming, you'll can find another who says it isn't.</quote>

This statement is flatly untrue. If you look at the papers published by so called deniers, you will quickly find that they come from a small group of people (including Christy and McKitrick, two cited in this article). Moreover, you will find that they simply repeat the same scientifically debunked arguments over and over again.

The purpose of these articles, and the others being astro-turfed all over HN and other news sites, is to create the illusion of debate where (scientifically at least) there is none.

That isn't to say that no one will ever come up with a viable alternative explanation for global warming. If and when they do, the climatology community will be perfectly happy to test it experimentally. But it hasn't happened yet, and meanwhile the world continues to grow warmer.

It's also worth noting that the political factions promoting climate change as an issue, and the policies and actions being proposed as solutions, are largely unrelated to the details of actual science.

It's a perfectly reasonable position to say "the science indicates global warming is likely, but the proposed solutions would be worse". Many people would disagree with that position, but it's not obviously absurd.

Yet in practice, people's opinions on climate change seem to correlate pretty strongly with having political views that do or do not like the proposed solutions. Funny, that.

To some degree, I think you are right in that the focus on climate change is overly narrow. That said, climate change is undeniably real; for every scientist who says the world isn't warming, you can find approximately 100 to 1,000 that say it is, and have actual data to back that up.

Thus, while I think we should change the argument to focus on climate change being part of a broader set of environmental problems brought on by unrestricted pollution, I also think that it is imperative that we not lose sight of how massively important climate change really is.

CO2 is not a pollutant, and is like 10% of all atmospheric greenhouse gases. The science is weak and involves people overstating their arguments by claiming to understand complex cycles of systems that they have minuscule amounts of data about. If you have 100 years of data for 1000 year cycle how can you claim to know what's going on?

People concerned about climate change, should be researching crops that can grow in warmer temperatures and other risk mitigating fields. Energy research will of course continue, and we need better climate satellites so that we can understand what's going on. But, the massive boondoggle that targets individuals is a waste of resources. Instead target small areas that can have a big effect - cement production, iron & steel production, and energy generation.

The "pro-pollution" argument is that there are many competing causes for us to spend our time and resources on. People are dying today from relatively simple problems that can be significantly alleviated with less effort than what's being wasted on trying to convince individuals to change their behavior.

As President Obama said in his State of the Union address whatever the truth is can be considered irrelevant, because the rest of the world believes in curtailing pollution, and will look to invest in the countries that are delivering greener solutions. With that perspective it makes sense that the U.S. pursue such policy for economic benefit if nothing else.

If the market will decide it then business will voluntary adopt these policies so that they can take advantage of the world market. If that is the case then there is no reason for the US to have a policy on this matter. The only reason for the US to force companies to do it is because they know that the world doesn't care.

The pro-pollution argument is that if some kinds of pollution are not very harmful (e.g. CO2 emissions?) then it's not worth expending extra effort trying to prevent or clean them.

The pro-pollution argument is this - pollution is an unwanted environmental result of an otherwise desirable activity. Reducing pollution may mean curtailing the desirable activity (undesirable) or changing how the activity is performed to reduce the unwanted consequence. The second approach usually makes the activity more expensive and thus less desirable.

No one would argue that reducing pollution at a lower cost is a problem; that would benefit everyone. The problem is that pollution reduction is almost always a trade-off To understand the trade-offs you must understand the consequences and costs. The element that makes the whole situation intractable is that different people value the costs and benefits differently.

Sorry, this is a tough one.

The thing is, there is a whole lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of energy efficiency, which lowers pollution, with a cost which is paid back in a few years [thus soon becoming lower cost than the more polluting status quo].

One of the easiest and yet largest changes would probably be to shift cars and other vehicles from a generate on-board model to a model where energy is stored in the vehicle but is generated in a more centralized manner. Centralizing energy production enables better scaling (small ICEs are on average much less efficient than large ones), reduces the cost of deploying new technologies as they become available, enables depending on local opportunities for renewable energy, etc. There are many good proposals for how to store energy in-vehicle, such as capacitors, batteries, flywheels, fuel cells and even pneumatic storage. There's many good business opportunities to be had exploring these options and bringing them to market. See, for example, Tesla Motors and the Chevy Volt. There's a lot of startups doing good work in this field, including one founded by a HN regular DaniFong: http://lightsailenergy.com/ As time goes on, I think we'll see an explosion in this area, but only if we as a society place the proper emphasis on tacking the problem.

But the folks who would bear the costs of improving efficiency don't appear to value the resulting reduction in pollution more than the cost. If they did, they would pay for the efficiency.

I would rather see the debate reframed from a battle of cooler vs hotter to "how can we control Earth's climate?".

That's rather problematic, though. We can't really control the climate. We can definitely affect it in drastic ways, but to control it, we'd have to be much better at figuring out what change corresponds to a desired outcome. Right now, we are very good at predicting the outcome to one specific course of action-- that is, the status quo-- but that's a quite narrow problem compared to climate control.

That's my point; we can't control the climate today regardless of the fact that the globe is heating up, cooling down, or staying the same. Who cares? Its bound to change at some point, we might as well learn how to control it to limit those changes.

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