[N_Fiddledog]

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

It doesn't really matter to me what you believe. Zip of the internet has an undergrad in engineering and graduate degrees in science, and about 25 years as an environmental scientist. But you believe what you want to believe.

I met a guy here who used to tell me he was a professor.

I remember talking to him one night at 9:30 which would have be 12:30 where he was. I had mocked him for claiming to be in tight with a fellow professor at his claimed university. I knew that Prof by reputation from his battles with climate alarmists. My CKA acquaintance (also a professor, he assured me) was fond of throwing around the slur, "Denier." So this one night at what would have beem 12:30 on a school night where he was got pissed at me and told me he'd just called his good buddy the climate skeptic scientist and told him a guy was being mean to him on the internet or something. Apparently, skeptic scientist upon being awakened at 12:30 on a school night to be told of my villainy by Professor name-caller of 'denier' mocked me - or so I was told. I think I was require to feel bad about that.

And yet this was me.

[llama66]

To me, either way, 3 trillion tons of anything is an almost inconceivable amount of weight.

[N_Fiddledog]

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

He's constantly using terms like "Co2 is good"--how is that science. We aren't arguing whether CO2 is good or bad.

What? You mean he's applied a subjective tag of "good" to the natural gas we know helps plants grow. That un-scientific cretin. Doesn't he know we've changed the definition of pollution to fit it in there?

He needs to see some real science like the guys in the OP who were telling us how this melt in the Antarctic which turns out to be kind of inconsequential in context is going to throw the gravitational pull out of whack so bad the only way to visit a Vancouver beach of today will be in a submarine...or something.

I was down at the beach last week. Things still look OK though. Whew....

[N_Fiddledog]

llama66 llama66:

To me, either way, 3 trillion tons of anything is an almost inconceivable amount of weight.

I remember hearing about this advertisement from some climate alarmist organization - I think it was Al Gore's - where they were comparing CO2 to elephants and getting hysterical about the hundreds of thousands of elephants by weight that were falling out of the sky.

Apparently there's a lot of gigatons of CO2. Until you look at in context of the gigantic area it covers and how much greater the space taken up by other gases is. Then all these elephants of CO2 look pretty tiny.

Similar thing with "3 trillion tons of Antarctic ice." Apparently "99.989% of the Antarctic Ice Sheet Didn’t Melt."

[Zipperfish]

N_Fiddledog N_Fiddledog:

What? You mean he's applied a subjective tag of "good" to the natural gas we know helps plants grow. That un-scientific cretin. Doesn't he know we've changed the definition of pollution to fit it in there?

Exactly. He's arguing a point. He's using powers of persuasion and rhetoric. Valuable tools indeed, for the statesman or the journalist. But not science.

$1:

He needs to see some real science like the guys in the OP who were telling us how this melt in the Antarctic which turns out to be kind of inconsequential in context is going to throw the gravitational pull out of whack so bad the only way to visit a Vancouver beach of today will be in a submarine...or something.

Which guys in the OP? You mean the authors of the paper. I read the paper, and I saw no such claim, nor anything close to it. Here's the abstract:

$1:

The Antarctic Ice Sheet is an important indicator of climate change and driver of sea-level rise. Here we combine satellite observations of its changing volume, flow and gravitational attraction with modelling of its surface mass balance to show that it lost 2,720 ± 1,390 billion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2017, which corresponds to an increase in mean sea level of 7.6 ± 3.9 millimetres (errors are one standard deviation). Over this period, ocean-driven melting has caused rates of ice loss from West Antarctica to increase from 53 ± 29 billion to 159 ± 26 billion tonnes per year; ice-shelf collapse has increased the rate of ice loss from the Antarctic Peninsula from 7 ± 13 billion to 33 ± 16 billion tonnes per year. We find large variations in and among model estimates of surface mass balance and glacial isostatic adjustment for East Antarctica, with its average rate of mass gain over the period 1992–2017 (5 ± 46 billion tonnes per year) being the least certain.

You deniers are just losing more credibility with every post.

[BartSimpson]

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

Science isn't about certainty, it's about uncertainty.

Yet to far too many on the left science has become a replacement for religion and they have conferred the trappings of religion upon science.

And too much of what gets passed off as science is unquestioned for fear that the scientific skeptic will be denounced as a heretic and then excommunicated from the Church of Climatology.

While your comment is accurate the problem is that the majority of the people on your side of the argument would call you all sorts of names if you even contemplated that there may be any uncertainty about the claims of the AGW alarmists.

My own problem with computer models (of any kind) is that their biases are never randomly distributed but instead are almost always reflective of the political biases of the people who created them.

Thus I trust climate models to the same extent as I trust similar computer models that proved that the UK would stay in the EU and that Hillary Clinton was going to be President.

Just to let you know, the computer models that favor anything I support? Yeah, I trust them even less.

[N_Fiddledog]

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

Exactly. He's arguing a point. He's using powers of persuasion and rhetoric. Valuable tools indeed, for the statesman or the journalist. But not science.

Yeah, cause you'd never do that when arguing the science, right?

$1:

Which guys in the OP? You mean the authors of the paper. I read the paper, and I saw no such claim, nor anything close to it.

OP refers to 'original post' which can refer to the linked article. In that article, as I recall, there's some guy they're telling us is a scientist and he's educating us on how some gravitational whatchamacallit is doing a whosamajigger to the whatever. He insinuates from that imagined horror that it's tits up for Vancouver.

[llama66]

N_Fiddledog N_Fiddledog:

llama66 llama66:

To me, either way, 3 trillion tons of anything is an almost inconceivable amount of weight.

I remember hearing about this advertisement from some climate alarmist organization - I think it was Al Gore's - where they were comparing CO2 to elephants and getting hysterical about the hundreds of thousands of elephants by weight that were falling out of the sky.

Apparently there's a lot of gigatons of CO2. Until you look at in context of the gigantic area it covers and how much greater the space taken up by other gases is. Then all these elephants of CO2 look pretty tiny.

Similar thing with "3 trillion tons of Antarctic ice." Apparently "99.989% of the Antarctic Ice Sheet Didn’t Melt."

I get that, I just mean in the broader sense of 3 trillion is an almost inconceivable number... 3 trillion miles and we are deep into interstellar space... marveling at the number is all.

[Zipperfish]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Yet to far too many on the left science has become a replacement for religion and they have conferred the trappings of religion upon science.

$1:

It's definitely become like a religion. When religion lost its appeal to authority, people turned to science. They used to say "God is on our side" and now they say "Science is on our side." That's both sides saying that.

$1:

While your comment is accurate the problem is that the majority of the people on your side of the argument would call you all sorts of names if you even contemplated that there may be any uncertainty about the claims of the AGW alarmists.

I've been called those. It doesn't bother me any more than it bothers me getting called those names by deniers.

$1:

My own problem with computer models (of any kind) is that their biases are never randomly distributed but instead are almost always reflective of the political biases of the people who created them.

I'm not sure why you would differentiate a computer model from another type of model. They are the same thing--an abstraction that can be mathematically manipulated. Your problem with models, in my opinion, is a problem with scientific method.

But I think you are correct in some ways. I believe that science does not progress naturally, as many believe, but is profoundly shaped by culture.

[BartSimpson]

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

I'm not sure why you would differentiate a computer model from another type of model.

Because computer models allow you to input a bias and to reflect that bias in the output.

Models of ship hulls that get tested for resistance, stability, and propulsion might be biased in the assumptions behind creating them but the testing pools always level those biases and let you know if your design is a piece of shit no matter how you 'feel' about it.

The input (hull model) might be biased but the output is neutral because water doesn't give a fuck how you feel.

Same thing with seismic models. I've seen computer simulations that show a design performing well under a lateral loading and then you build an actual model and place it on a shake platform and find out that the shake platform doesn't give a fuck what the computer said.

I've also had ballistic experts argue with me about the capabilities of a platform I evaluated because their models told them this or that. And then I hand them the rifle and tell them to try it out for real and they wonder why the rifle performs better or worse than what all of their amazing calculations said it would.

See, computers deal with theory and I like reality.

And while in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is.

[llama66]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

I'm not sure why you would differentiate a computer model from another type of model.

Because computer models allow you to input a bias and to reflect that bias in the output.

Models of ship hulls that get tested for resistance, stability, and propulsion might be biased in the assumptions behind creating them but the testing pools always level those biases and let you know if your design is a piece of shit no matter how you 'feel' about it.

The input (hull model) might be biased but the output is neutral because water doesn't give a fuck how you feel.

Same thing with seismic models. I've seen computer simulations that show a design performing well under a lateral loading and then you build an actual model and place it on a shake platform and find out that the shake platform doesn't give a fuck what the computer said.

I've also had ballistic experts argue with me about the capabilities of a platform I evaluated because their models told them this or that. And then I hand them the rifle and tell them to try it out for real and they wonder why the rifle performs better or worse than what all of their amazing calculations said it would.

See, computers deal with theory and I like reality.

And while in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is.

Gah! one time a shipyard cheaps out and a ship sinks, and now its test this, make safe that... it was one time people.

[Thanos]

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

I believe that science does not progress naturally, as many believe, but is profoundly shaped by culture.

Find a way to make pollution reduction as profitable as burning coal for fuel is and the deniers would be cut off at the knees overnight as the corporations stampede away from them as fast as they can in the direction of the new money.

[BartSimpson]

llama66 llama66:

Gah! one time a shipyard cheaps out and a ship sinks, and now its test this, make safe that... it was one time people.

Well, their models told them it was unsinkable and the ice told them otherwise.

[BartSimpson]

Thanos Thanos:

Find a way to make pollution reduction as profitable as burning coal for fuel is and the deniers would be cut off at the knees overnight as the corporations stampede away from them as fast as they can in the direction of the new money.

Just come up with a cheap, clean source of energy and there you'd be.

I read a sci-fi book a lot of years ago about the drama of some guy inventing a new kind of energy that would be free to everyone and the story was about the myriad interests trying to kill him before he could make the secret public.

It may have been fiction but it hewed a close line to the truth.

[llama66]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

llama66 llama66:

Gah! one time a shipyard cheaps out and a ship sinks, and now its test this, make safe that... it was one time people.

Well, their models told them it was unsinkable and the ice told them otherwise.

+5 for getting my lame Titanic reference.