Consensus on Global Warming?Follow

Stubs i've argued your case more times than i can count, but even i'm not backing you up on this one.

There's no need. Smash's method of arguing is to simply demean his opponent and present incredibly distorted or downright false interpretations of his opponent's argument. Not once has he ever directly proven any of my arguments wrong. Now, if you consider pretending someone said something else so that it supports your analysis of their argument and then attacking them for things completely unrelated to the topic as signs of a better arguer, well then sure. He takes the top honors.

I don't deny Smash is intelligent. His bad attitude and lack of common sense are far more prevalent, however.

Erm, back in the 80s, or early 90s, I read a book called "Chaos" or "Chaos Theory". Unfortunately it's in storage, and googling it has turned up dozens of similarly named books, and I'm not sure which one it is, and who the author is.

Otherwise I'd point it at people as a very easy to understand book, (which I found fun to read), that although was talking about the maths of fractals and weather, didnt' make me do any maths, just provided a lot of interesting and pretty pictures, explanations, and stories about researchers and their work.

The major issue in the book of vital importance here is an explanation of HOW climate works, and the feedback systems that keep it in homeostasis around a single average....and what actually happens when enough input parameters are changed to finally, finally, finally overwhelm and break the damping mechanisms of the feedback systems, and the entire climate jumps abruptly to a new homeostatic average.

This bit was right at the end of the book, which was written well before the Anthropomrphic Climate Change issue had moved much beyond the awareness of scientists and environmentalists. If it was written today, I bet that section would have been much expanded, and the book even marketed on that angle.

However, that section had a completely chilling effect on me. It meant that we couldn't say... ok, we've reached a climate that is getting unpleasant, now we'll put the breaks on and limit any more climate change inputs. What it means is that we won't be able to see, feel or measure the BULK of the change we are making to the Earth's climate, until SURPRISE! the homeostasis breaks, and we have an entirely new climactic system thrust upon us.

Edited, May 21st 2008 12:43pm by Aripyanfar

Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes and Yes.

BUT Chaos mathematics describes HOW the moves are made, whether the change comes from natural variations in inputs, or from human induced ones.

In the past the Earth has been so hot that the only plantlife was in rain-forests around the poles, everything else was desert, and the sea level was more than 70m (230 feet) higher than it is now. It's been so cold that the only plantlife was around the equator, and the sea level was so low that people could walk all the way from China to Australia, or China to America.

Chaos maths describes the shifts from one climate to the other as not happening in a linear fashion, but in a type of graph called "period doubling", which involves two fast jumps to a very different state from the beginning state. From a very large distance, over extremely long timeframes, the graphs of climate look like sine waves. But much closer in, in a meaningful time-frame for human culture, the graphs involve sudden jumps.

BUT Chaos mathematics describes HOW the moves are made, whether the change comes from natural variations in inputs, or from human induced ones.

Tries to. There's no sufficiently robust mathematical model for climate change. Or weather for that matter.

But at the moment Chaos mathematics is our best effort so far. It's the model that most closely mimics actual events.

Edited, May 21st 2008 1:03pm by Aripyanfar

/scoff

Pfft, I'm surprised he used a source, albeit a ****** one, but a source nonetheless.

Wow. That's a new one.

You post flat out ******** to make us question ourselves? Gosh, gbaji, you're like, so selfless. I never really looked at your posts from this angle, but it all makes sense now.

Our point was that your "31,000 scientists" was a bogus number (even the term "scientist" is misapplied here since anyone with a bachelor's in any scientific field apparently qualifies) and that the PhDs don't count for much in this context when they're for fields completely unrelated to the subject at hand.

The scientists who say that it's true are ones actually in related fields who are publishing papers about it. Not random names on a mail-in petition including people who are dead and complete joke names. Sh*t, out of ten random names, I found a so-called PhD who was someone submitting the name of a school as a scientist. Maybe I just got real lucky to find the one joke name out of 31,000 but I kind of doubt it.

When I mention scientific concensus, I'm referring to people actively in the fields related to climatology and anthropogenic climate change who have published studies and works regarding it. I don't have to wonder about how many of them are fake names or if the study I'm reading was actually written by a dentist or a metallurgist or an animal behavior researcher. So, sorry, your little petition doesn't really do anything to discredit the notion of consensus.

Edited, May 21st 2008 5:57pm by Jophiel

I'm a scientist and I think gbaji's a ****.

Does that help?

No, but I could post paragraph upon paragraph about the effectiveness of petitions.

Does that help?

I had thought, and still think, that a lot of the hate gbaji receives is undue, but it's hard to argue that point when we're down the road of "It's a test, you all failed!."

Asking for it.