There was a delightful Usenet post way back around 1990, where someone described how they had just purchased a new multi-CD player. They very excitedly filled it up with their collection of Prince CDs, and set it to random shuffle play mode.
Great for a while, but then they complained that all the slow songs were bunched together. And perhaps the random shuffle play mode was sampling the songs, deriving the tempo of each, and adjusting the shuffle accordingly.
Very funny.
---
Heh-heh, I independently came up with Fibonacci hashing for color many years ago.
My web app was drawing a diagram of N rectangular items, color-coded to tell them apart, with a table listing the details of each below.
(Normally I would use EIA standard colors, with a nod to my EE brethren.)
But I didn't want the colors to bias anything. So you'd normally try random colors. But random colors can come out weird and some can be close together.
So I used a Golden Angle around the hue circle, with a constant brightness and saturation. And sure enough, the generated colors were nicely differentiated.
BUT... not as nice as I'd like. Something was wrong.
It turns out that our perception of color is more complex. And when we're differentiating between colors, it really, really helps if the colors are familiar, and describable.
So simple colors like blue and purple are much easier to differentiate than a new weird blueish color and a new weird purplish color.
So my Golden Angle colors were technically superior, but not as good a user experience.
12-tone serial composition is simply a technique for removing natural tonality from a composition.
I think the big issue is whether 12-tone approaches are used occasionally in a piece as an expressive tool, or as a "new way of life" where the entire composition is serial, and the listener is stuck in it. Or all of a composer's work is serial.
Which is what makes it... challenging.
It's the same with Minimalism.
But used in smaller doses, it's a powerful technique.
Here's an example, in Frank Zappa's "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" there's a little section that's a 12-tone piece, starting with the lyrics "We see in the back of the City Hall mind...". It's short, it's weird, and it works very well in context.
And in Zappa's "St. Alphonso's Pancake Breakfast", the middle instrumental section, the first 20 notes are going up and down a simple C-Major scale... (What could be more tonal?)... and then he rips into a 12-tone row. The result is downright delightful.
> for removing natural tonality from a composition
Of course, nothing stops you from using the "removing natural tonality" trick in a way that's ultimately subordinate to broader tonal goals. For instance, a small tone row fragment can be used to set surprising tonal expectations and cleanly modulate to any key - even in a completely monophonic piece with no background harmony! It's just supposed to be a horizontal composing-out of some arbitrary set of notes, but this is also what makes it work within tonality as a pivot point.
(And if the atonal fragment can be snuck in initially as a melodic "variation" of motivic material from the piece, it needn't even surprise the listener as such - until, that is, they find themselves listening in a completely different key area and have to wonder "wait, how did that twist work?")
Shostakovich did this a lot in his later work. His violin sonata starts with a long slow atonal dirge, then suddenly slinks into this little tonal waltz. It gives a “haunted music box” vibe that I absolutely love.
Zappa is a great example of deploying 20th century avant classical into compelling compositions that an audience can latch onto.
For me the best example is ‘The Bebop Tango’ from his Roxy and Elsewhere album. The core melodic theme is extremely atonal and angular, but his arrangement and his band lean into it with such conviction and panaché that it is just as compelling as any rock show.
He pokes fun at it too later on in the recording when he solicits members of the audience to get up on stage and do dance solos while George Duke directs them from his keyboard.
"Braxton often titles his compositions with diagrams or numbers and letters. Some diagrams have a clear meaning or signification, as on For Trio, where the title indicates the physical positions of the performers. The titles can themselves be musical notation indicating to the performer how a piece is played. Some letters are identifiable as the initials of Braxton's friends and musical colleagues, but many titles remain inscrutable to critics. By the mid-to-late 1980s, Braxton's titles began to incorporate drawings and illustrations, as in the title of his four-act opera cycle, Trillium R. Others began to include lifelike images of inanimate objects such as train cars, which were most notably seen after the advent of his Ghost Trance Music system. Braxton settled on a system of opus-numbers to make referring to these pieces simpler, and earlier pieces have had opus-numbers retroactively added to them."
In their earlier years, the Symbolics 3600 series machines included a Motorola 68K series Front End Processor (the "FEP") for booting the main processor. And the assembler for that was written in Lisp.
Sea levels have been monitored for over 100 years... because of commerce.
East coast US seems to be going up about 3mm/year, or a foot per century. That's on top of 7 foot tides.
West coast US is very steady, barely moving at all.
The sea level is dropping in Alaska by 10mm/year. Dropping in Scandinavia also.
Some cities show rising sea levels, but really the cities are sinking due to collapsing aquifers; New Orleans and Bangkok. And measurements made on river deltas are always going to be wild due to silt and all.
Most notably, I can't find an example in the NOAA data of the rate of sea level rise increasing due to industrialization. Anybody?
Back in 2006, our expectations were set when An Inconveient Truth contemplated what would happen if sea levels rose by six meters (in our lifetime). 3.6mm a year seems a bit meh in that context.
Something I see a lot is people looking at worst case predictions as if they were presented as the most likely predictions. A lot of the IPCC reports say things like “if we continue to increase emissions, this will happen” (a worst case scenario) and also “if we make moderate improvements, this will happen” (a slightly better scenario). Then people who don’t want to talk about climate change mitigation will highlight the worst case scenario and say “see they were wrong and hysterical!” even when the moderate prediction, which they will ignore, ended up being essentially totally accurate.
that's not a problem in the decade timeline but it is problematic over a century or two. it's especially problematic since it's accelerating and has a couple decades of inertia. the CO2 we release today will raise sea levels for the next 50 years or so.
>that's not a problem in the decade timeline but it is problematic over a century or two.
So after roughly 100 years, we can look forward to the terrible catastrophe of sea levels (in some places only, not in others) rising by.. just over a foot. A problem for many really flat coastal areas, sure, but hardly the picture of global coastal flooding much of the alarmism has put forward. And if that one-foot rise happens across a full century, there will be many measures that can be taken to counter it even if the rise itself is unstoppable.
I'm not arguing against human-caused climate change, but some of the hyperbole i've seen said with deep certainty goes well beyond the scope of known evidence, realized events or even many scientific assessments.
With such things, it's not hard to see why some people find good reasons for being skeptical of yet another worst-case prediction.
I expect the parent is referring to human-caused melting of glaciers as the root cause of that tectonic movement, rather than the expected natural motion of the tectonic plates.
> As a result of melting ice, the land has continued to rise yearly in Scandinavia, mostly in northern Sweden and Finland, where the land is rising at a rate of as much as 8–9 mm per year, or 1 m in 100 years. This is important for archaeologists, since a site that was coastal in the Nordic Stone Age now is inland and can be dated by its relative distance from the present shore.
The absolute value of gravity is (to oversimplify) the sea-level datum for current generation datums, like the delayed NGS (nominal year) 2022 datums.
They've (NGS) been flying absolute gravity measurement equipment in planes with precision GPS and lidar since ~2005 as part of the GRAV-D program.
Additionally, slight 'variations' (ie deviations from the expected circular/elliptical) in the orbits of GPS satellites can be used to infer slight variations in the gravity below.
Separately, the military likely has had all of this measured and modeled for decades as part of ballistic missile targeting, but remains mostly classified at useful resolutions.
The transitions from NGVD27 to NAVD88 to the work-in-progress 22 datum is exactly because the idea of a simple "universal" sea-level doesn't exist in the manor you would expect it to.
But even with the GRAV-D based datums, the actual observed water levels will occur at slightly different datum heights in different locations, for various geophysical reasons.
> East coast US seems to be going up about 3mm/year, or a foot per century. That's on top of 7 foot tides.
That's the average rise it you average all data going back to the 1950s.
Unfortunately, looking back to the 50s is only really useful if interested in how much sea levels have already risen. Otherwise it presents an unrealistically optimistic view, as the rate has accelerated since.
Per the article, the east coast (North Carolina) is currently experiencing an increase of about a third of an inch per year, which is an increase of one foot per 36 years, or close to a meter per century.
If current trends continue, this will accelerate, not decelerate.
They do take that into account. They calculate that the ocean floor is sinking but then ADD that displacement to their reported measurement of "sea level", which is backwards. When the ocean floor sinks sea level goes down, but they report it as going up instead, using this justification:
currently some land surfaces are rising and some ocean bottoms are falling relative to the center of the Earth (the center of the reference frame of the satellite altimeter).
since the ocean basins are getting larger due to GIA, this will reduce by a very small amount the relative sea level rise that is seen along the coasts.
We apply a correction for GIA because we want our sea level time series to reflect purely oceanographic phenomena. In essence, we would like our GMSL time series to be a proxy for ocean water volume changes. This is what is needed for comparisons to global climate models, for example
This is nonsense, of course. Volume isn't measured in millimeters, that's a measurement of distance. GMSL when talking about satellites is defined as the average distance of the surface of the ocean from the center of the Earth, and the reason people care about it is because if it gets too high then things we care about end up flooded. Changing the definition of GMSL half way through from sea level to sea depth is the kind of slippyness that pervades this space.
There is only one reason the sea can rise currently due to weather and that is glaciers getting melted.
Another reason (but not due to weather) is that when land somewhere goes up, it will displace water everywhere else. And so, for example, if the land is still recovering from the ice age we should see ocean levels going up everywhere except for the pieces of land that are recovering from the weight of the glacier that is no longer there.
Mind that Arctic is not causing sea level rise. Any ice that is floating on water will not cause any water level change when it melts. (I know this is somewhat unintuitive but it comes directly from Archimedes principle)
So we are talking basically Antarctic ice and Greenland because these are by far the largest bodies of frozen water that are supported by land rather than floating on the ocean.
I think it should be pretty easy to observe how much of that water melted or slipped into the sea.
I also think that currently, coastal erosion is mostly caused by changing weather patterns. Basically this comes down to wind blowing in different directions, speed and variety and these changing patterns mean coasts are eroding in different places than before.
First of all, most of the temperature rise only happening close to the surface with average surface temperature rise being only about 1.5F or 1C since 1901.
Furthermore, at around 4C which is what deep ocean water is close to (everything below 200m is essentially 4C), thermal expansion is almost nil. For colder water thermal expansion is actually negative.
4C is when water is at its densest. It is not an accident that all oceans are 4C, because 4C water sinks to the bottom and anything colder or hotter than 4C floats up. This remarkable property of water is what causes even shallow water to be fantastically stable in temperature -- a lake that has more than couple tens of meters in depth is likely to be 4C at the bottom throughout the year whether it is frosty winter or hot summer above it, unless some kind of powerful event is able to mix the water in the lake.
Now, the small temperature differences will definitely have outsize effects on water circulation, ocean currents, life and weather. But I doubt they will cause meaningful sea rise unless somebody can calculate otherwise?
That’s mostly accurate, but the nuances are significant and lead to different conclusions. For example the hypolimnion may be much warmer than 4C in lakes in warmer areas. More importantly tropical ocean water is above 4C down to roughly 2km and not only is that depth expected to increase, but also the depth of warm water as you go north. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermocline
The important thing to remember is even a 1 part in 1,000 decrease in density * 2km of depth = 2m of expansion. Ballpark estimates aren’t enough you really need fairly detailed simulations to get any significant accuracy. Actually doing such simulations shows meaningful sea level rise from thermal expansion at ~0.07 inches per year or roughly half the current rate of increase. This might not sound like much, but consider that volume of sand you need to replace to maintain beaches etc etc.
No, that is mostly inaccurate. Thermal expansion is small, but there is an awful lot of water. As you point out yourself, thermal expansion contributes about half the sea level rise. Oceans absorb energy just like the atmosphere does and this effect has been known for quite a while (e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/330127a0 ).
The average ocean surface temperature is about 20°C and the thermal expansion coefficient is 0.000207/°C (https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/water-density-specific-we...). If I have my google-fu and math right, that's about 1cm/° for a 50m deep water column.
Thermal expansion of surface water is not negligible.
Except water in oceans is at 4C (at least almost everything deeper than ca 200m). And in the vicinity of 4C the thermal expansion is very negligible. This graph should explain why: https://images.app.goo.gl/FXzvTkPvE9dYxoUA7
Umm. I’m pretty sure if water that exists above the water line is melted into the water line, the overall water line will rise. You can directly observe this in a glass of ice that starts with no liquid water will melt into a glass of liquid water.
I could be wrong about this (it's been awhile since I took chemistry), but I think the ice has to be floating for the Archimedes principle to apply.
You can fill a glass of ice-water right up to the brim, and it won't spill over as the ice melts. But only if the ice is floating in the water. It's because the ice's mass pushes down on the liquid water, displacing a fixed amount relative to the weight of the ice.
Ice is about 91% the density of water. If you have water at 0 height, and you put in water equivalent to +1 unit of height. If it's in liquid form, obviously height goes up by +1. If it's in ice form, there is +1.09 height worth of ice (because it expands when it freezes), but it only displaces water up to +1 unit of height in order to support its weight through buoyancy. The overall change in height is +1 unit regardless of whether it's liquid or ice
No, it's not just due to weather (you probably mean climate anyway). For example, ice melting in one place, say Antarctica, will affect sea levels elsewhere on the planet because of weaker gravitational forces where the ice used to be. Geoscience is complex and measuring changes on such a global scale is not "pretty easy", even if it's only sea level changes. It's nothing like a bathtub or elementary school physics.
Not to rant but this is one of those threads again. The majority of comments contain misinformation.
I don't think it was possible to measure them separately until we had good satellite data from the last two decades. If we're extending trends back to the beginning of the industrial revolution, they're going to be mixed.
Satellite data isn't that good unfortunately. Tide gauges say 1.5mm/year of rise, satellites say 3mm/yr, and they estimate satellite error to be +/- 0.5mm year, so the error bars are a significant fraction of the size of the overall change.
Also that assumes the scientists are completely accurate and don't make any mistakes. As recently as 5 years ago they discovered that the measured rise for almost all of the 90s was wrong and revised it by 3mm/year +- 1.7mm/year - the error was the same amount as the imputed level of rise!
This is no knock on the scientists, because measuring the height of a moving ocean from orbit to a level of accuracy that lets you see mm level changes is inevitably going to be very hard. But we should bear in mind that they're heavily biased towards wanting to believe the data is accurate. Their decade long inability to get the measurements correct didn't seem to have any impact on their confidence that they're currently getting it right, and why would it? Those who seize the data, seize the day.
> Also that assumes the scientists are completely accurate and don't make any mistakes. As recently as 5 years ago they discovered that the measured rise for almost all of the 90s was wrong and revised it by 3mm/year +- 1.7mm/year - the error was the same amount as the imputed level of rise!
Citation for this? There are always improvements to our understanding of past data, but you seem to be implying that the uncertainty exceeds the signal. That's simply not the case [1].
Ablain, "Uncertainty in Satellite estimate of Global Mean Sea Level
changes, trend and acceleration", p4
They have shown that there was a drift in the GMSL record over the period 1993-1998. This drift is caused by an erroneous on-board calibration correction on TOPEX altimeter side-A (noted TOPEX-A). TOPEX-A was operated from launch in
October 1992 to the end of January 1999. Then TOPEX side-B altimeter (noted TOPEX-B) took over in February 1999 (Beckley et al., 2017). The impact on the GMSL changes is -1.0 mm/yr between January 1993 and July 1995, 120 and +3.0 mm/yr between August 1995 and February 1999, with an uncertainty of ±1.7 mm/yr (within a 90%CL, (Ablain, 2017)).
Figure 1 from that paper didn't convince you that it was a minor issue? Their correction is about 7% of the 1993-2018 signal, and it resolves the discrepancy with respect to other estimates, including non-satellite ones. Nobody relies on estimates from a single satellite alone.
> The six main groups that provide satellite-altimetry-based GMSL estimates ...
1) You're restricting your attention to groups producing satellite-derived estimates.
2) Several of those groups, e.g. CSIRO, are using data assimilation to combine satellite estimates with gauges [1].
3) There are multiple satellites, often overlapping in time, often of totally different design/orbit/etc... [2]
4) Up to the most recent IPCC report (AR6), assessments were based on tide gauges alone [3]. For many of the reasons that you bring up. Hence "Nobody relies on estimates from a single satellite alone." Reconstruction of historical sea level is a huge scientific discipline and you would benefit from doing some more reading before beating a dead horse. The estimated uncertainty is large for a reason, but it does not encapsulate any scenarios where the observed change has been insignificant. If you think otherwise, I'd be happy to take your money for 2100 options on coastal real estate in about 90% of the world's coastline.
- Uncertainty exceeding signal in satellite data is "simply not the case"
to
- OK maybe it was the case but it doesn't matter and nobody relies on one satellite anyway
to
- OK maybe some groups relied on one satellite but this is flogging a dead horse everyone already knows about
That's a big distance in a short thread! Also, note that you said "nobody relies" and now you're arguing "not everyone relies", which is different.
I won't be alive in 2100 but if you've got some nice seafront property you'd like to sell me below market price I'd definitely consider it. Maybe in Tuvalu? (see other post).
>> Nobody relies on estimates from a single satellite alone.
Yes they did. From the paper I just cited:
The six main groups that provide satellite-altimetry-based GMSL estimates (AVISO/CNES, SL_cci/ESA, University of Colorado, CSIRO, NASA/GSFC, NOAA) use 1 Hz altimetry measurements from the T/P, Jason-1, Jason-2 and Jason-3 missions from 1993 to 2018 (1993–2015 for SL_cci/ESA). The differences among the GMSL estimates from several groups arise from data editing, from differences in the geophysical corrections and from differences in the used method to spatially average individual measurements during the orbital cycles
The apparently independent time series are actually computed from the same raw data sources, as there isn't an abundance of redundant satellites measuring sea level.
But isn't this goalpost shifting? At first you said I was wrong that uncertainty has been the same size as the measurements in the past, citing the IPCC as proof which of course doesn't mention any of this, saying only that they have high confidence in these numbers (the IPCC is not trustworthy). Then it became that the error isn't big enough for you, and nobody relied on a single satellite. Now I show that they did indeed rely on a single satellite.
The core issue here remains the same: how do they know they're getting it right now? A calibration error so large it invalidated their entire time-series lasted for the entire lifetime of the TOPEX-1 mission, and it then took 20 years for the problem to actually be detected and corrected for. They've only been measuring sea level with satellites for 30 years, and the discrepancy between tide gauges and satellites has never been properly reconciled even though they theoretically measure the same thing.
> Careful man! You're on the verge of becoming a climate denier with research like that! Sea level rise is indeed not due to CO2 or industrialization. Here's a graph of what's claimed to be long term sea levels:
You... really have no idea how to read that graph, do you? Or what a lagging indicator is, I'm guessing.
The fact is - we can see the rate of change of the sea levels start changing in the mid-90s, though the graph you're using compresses the Y-axis to minimize how obvious that is (deliberately, I'd say, given the source).
Which, given its a lagging indicator of the result of rising CO2, makes sense it would happen after.
So, even accounting for the dishonesty of the presentation (and make no mistake, it's VERY dishonest) it actually demonstrates the exact opposite of what you claim.
The graph shows clearly that sea level rise did not change at that location, and thus cannot demonstrate the exact opposite of what I claim. The Y axis isn't particularly compressed and changing it wouldn't reveal anything, as should be clear from looking at it. But feel free to replot that gauge with a different Y axis and show us the results if you like.
Your belief that sea level rise accelerated in the 90s comes from splicing of two divergent datasets. Up until the 90s sea levels were tracked with tide gauges which say ~1.5mm a year on average although it varies depending on measurement point. At the start of the 90s TOPEX-1 started tracking sea levels from space, but the rate of rise measured by satellites was 2x the rate as measured from the ground. Rather than resolve this disagreement they simply cut to the satellite data from the tide gauge data and pronounced the discontinuity an "acceleration".
I'm old enough to remember we were all "science" supposed to be entirely underwater by now. Yet here we are quibbling about millimetres? First it was "the coming ice age", then "global warming", now its "climate change".
What's next? The "millimetre sea-level imbalance catastrophe"?
I'm over it. I've lost my respect for climate science, and the field has done that to itself. It needs to take full responsibility for its repeating cycle of "alarmism -> failed prediction -> u-turn" that caused me to.
I've lost my respect for people like you who'd rather deny the very real effect climate change is having and will have on hundreds of millions of people.
Or is it the very real effect continued geo-engineering is having and will have on hundreds of millions of people? Look up China's participation in that.
Or is it the solar cycle - how much impact does the primary core driver of earths climate moods have on earths climate? Look that up.
Or is it a mix of these and other possible causes, some potentially those identified by so-far very unreliable dogmatic climate science?
You can't solve problems with science if you are so mired in the current "correct" way of thinking you can't think objectively continuously, and especially during those times it seems like everyones got it "figured out".
(And even more especially when those same people can be demonstrated to have been consistently wrong for decades.)
> I'm old enough to remember we were all "science" supposed to be entirely underwater by now.
The science never really said that. Bad PopSci reporting did. The science said that was a worst case possibility. Kind of "if we do the worst things possible as much as possible, then this is the worst case scenario".
Then you read hacks--and paid disinformation spreaders, which we have documentation of various oil companies in particular doing I might add--reporting that as if it was a sure thing. Because clickbait isn't a new concept.
Also - we actually DID change what we did. We did things like ban CFCs, etc. It made a significant difference to models! Hooray us for doing the bare minimum.
We're not quibbling over millimeters, not unless you're completely misunderstanding or misrepresenting the topic anyhow. We're pointing out the rate of change is increasing and we haven't even seen the worst case effects yet (like CO2 release from the oceans, Greenland melting, etc).
The global temperature is going up, rapidly, and we're at the point were these effects are already starting to be seen. That's... a tipping point.
Unfortunately, if we take what prestigious climatologists have said as "the science" then you're wrong. They have in fact said exactly that. Here's just two examples, of many.
James Hansen is perhaps the most famous climatologist, he worked at NASA and testified to Congress about global warming at the end of the 1980s. Back then he was telling people that by ~2010 highways in New York would be underwater, there'd be tape on the windows due to high winds and that crime would have increased due to the heat.
Not that it might happen, or there was a worst case possibility that it would happen. That it would definitely happen.
None of that occurred (and in fact crime in New York went down a lot) but he didn't learn anything. Here he is in 2008. "Hansen, echoing work by other scientists, said that in five to 10 years the Arctic will be free of ice in the summer".
It's now 35 years after his first prediction and 15 years after his second. New York isn't under water and the Arctic isn't ice free in the summer.
When people claim that scientists never get it wrong, that when people remember bad predictions it actually never happened and if it did it was all the journalist's fault, then they are making the problem worse because it teaches scientists that they can be wrong without consequence, that people will side with them over the journalists who in most cases were directly quoting what they had said.
It's pretty telling that all you've linked to are news stories with zero direct quotes about underwater highways or an "ice free arctic" and very little context to the alleged claims.
The point being made, that many people have been largely misinformed about the science and what it predicts by media that misrepresented those things, still stands. The good news though is that even if James Hansen did run around telling everyone wild theories (and some argue that many of his predictions have held up remarkably well https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...) we don't have to depend on anyone's comments to the press, there is actual research being reviewed, modeled, and reassessed constantly that just doesn't get the attention alarmist news stories or interviews by authors trying to cash in on climate fear will generate.
That isn't to say that scientists don't get things wrong. Some scientists are just plain bad at their job, some scientists get paid to falsify data and bury results unfavorable to the person signing their paychecks, and some just make mistakes, and those are all things we should be working to minimize, but I'd be shocked if our best understanding of the impacts of our changing climate hadn't changed several times over the last 35 years.
Scientists getting things wrong isn't some gotcha that proves science is broken, it shows that science is working. Getting things wrongs is just one step of the process. All science does is provide the tools to give us the best understanding of something we can get with the information we have at the time. The more we learn, the more data we have, the more our understanding will change and evolve. People don't like uncertainty and some might wish science was all about dictating indisputable truths that cannot be wrong or questioned, but that's never been what science does or what it's for.
>> Scientists getting things wrong isn't some gotcha that proves science is broken, it shows that science is working.
See this is the attitude that causes people to give up in disgust:
If scientists make correct predictions, that's science working!
If scientists make wrong predictions, that's also science working!
Literally no matter what they do or what happens, they cannot lose.
>> People don't like uncertainty
People are fine with scientific understanding being uncertain. They are not fine with being told by scientists that The Science is so certain it's undisputable, that the only people who disagree are paid to do so, that the world should undergo massive changes on the back of this 100% certain science and then when their predictions are all invalidated it's "hey, being wrong is all just part of the process, if you don't understand that you don't understand science!".
If scientists make a confident prediction and then turn out to have been woefully misjudging their own competence, it is correct and right that their reputations are trashed and they should get defunded. But that doesn't happen. Instead we get the Believe Science brigade who insist that all those bad predictions never happened, if they did happen it wasn't a problem and anyone saying otherwise needs to be suppressed.
And BTW both quotes come with literally an entire article of context, and Hansen wrote a whole article for the Guardian in which he makes the same predictions about Arctic ice. So please don't try to claim he never said these things. He's on record as doing so, many times in many contexts.
> Literally no matter what they do or what happens, they cannot lose.
Well... yeah, because either way we learn something! When predictions work out, it strengths a theory, but getting some new piece of data that shatters a current theory and changes how we look at something forever is way more exciting. Science just isn't about winners and losers.
> They are not fine with being told by scientists that The Science is so certain it's undisputable,
No scientist ever says this. In fact, they're more likely to say "Please prove me wrong!"
> that the only people who disagree are paid to do so
They don't say that either, but let's face it, people getting paid to lie and spread misinformation is a big problem. Scientists disagree with each other all the time and that's totally fine! It's desirable even! Here's the catch though, if you want dispute science and be taken seriously, you have to be able to back that up with evidence. Blindly questioning or disagreeing for no reason or for purely emotional or ideological reasons is worthless. You can always fight science with science, but somebody has to be able to check your math, review your methods, and reproduce your results. If your data or your work is weaker, it's not going change many minds.
> that the world should undergo massive changes on the back of this 100% certain science
Again, science isn't going to be 100% certain about anything, but realistically, based on what information we have, it can still be pretty damn sure about things. It's only logical to take advantage of the best understanding we have and to let it guide our choices and our policy. "Ignore what we know is most likely correct" is just a bad strategy.
> If scientists make a confident prediction and then turn out to have been woefully misjudging their own competence, it is correct and right that their reputations are trashed and they should get defunded.
If a scientist continuously makes careless mistakes, then I'd say it should tarnish their reputation and that funding should to go to better qualified researchers, but predictions can turn out to be wrong without there being any mistakes at all and without misjudgements about competence too. Testing our understanding of how we think things work is a critical part of the process, and by necessity sometimes those tests fail and those failures further shape and refine our understanding leading to new tests.
Getting something wrong doesn't make a scientist a failure, and we're supposed to have guardrails in place to help prevent and catch avoidable errors. We should have people performing meaningful peer-review, and there should be many eyes on important research, with many people replicating studies to confirm results, and others trying to poke holes in those theories wherever they can.
Right now, we absolutely aren't doing enough of that. There's a lot of problems with how science is being done and how it's funded, but again, if something has become widely accepted and you want to dispute it, you'd better come with data and be ready to accept that disproving someone's theory isn't going to turn into a witch hunt. Even if you are successful at proving that a popular theory is wrong, people are just going to adjust their models, update the text books, and use it as an example of science working as intended, because that's literally a case of science working as intended. I do wish we did more about cases of actual fraud though.
>> No scientist ever says [the science is beyond dispute, that only people who are paid shills disagree], you can always fight science with science
I wish real scientists behaved in the way you imagine they do. The world would be a better place for it. Unfortunately, real scientists do all these things and more. They call themselves scientists, but don't live up to the role. Here's the same article I cited elsewhere in the thread (beyond a now flagged/killed post), by James Hansen in 2008. A famous scientist indeed but just one example of many possible examples.
- "Now, as then, I can assert that these conclusions have a certainty exceeding 99%."
- "fossil companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, as tobacco companies discredited the smoking-cancer link. Methods are sophisticated, including funding to help shape school textbook discussions of global warming."
Impossible to get clearer than that: exactly the kinds of statements I was complaining about.
And what of checking their data, reviewing their methods, reproducing their results? In short, why not fight science with science? Again, sadly you're describing imaginary scientists, the sort of people we would hope do climatology. Actual climatologists do NOT allow their science to be fought with science and actively go out of their way to prevent people checking their maths, reviewing their methods and reproducing their results.
Here's an old story that sums up what happens when someone - an invited IPCC reviewer no less - actually tries to do that kind of review
One of the most important IPCC representations is the supposedly tremendous quality control of its review process. I’ve mentioned in passing on a number of occasions that, when I sought to obtain supporting data for then unpublished articles, IPCC threatened to expel me as a reviewer.
[...]
Osborn immediately replied, calling the request that the data be archived an abuse of my position as an IPCC peer reviewer. Rosanne D’Arrigo (CG2-2590) wrote to Osborn and Briffa, advocating that I be “fired” as an IPCC reviewer. D’Arrigo urged the Climategaters to be “very cautious about our emails as Lord V will stop at nothing”
Universities don't care if their professors are engaged in pseudo-science so these stories never have happy endings. The bad apples always win, are never fired and media/politics repeats their bogus claims ad nauseum.
It really does seem IPCC has some bad actors, and a huge transparency problem. I'd like to think however that the kinds of politics and incentives for corruption that exist at that international scale don't apply to most scientists in their day to day work. Especially in areas where the science doesn't threaten the fossil fuel industry or the profits of multinational corporations.
>> perhaps a likely one, if we didn't change course somewhat... which we did
We didn't. CO2 has continuously risen and the rise accelerated with time. Hansen's predictions should therefore have absolutely come true if he was right, but they didn't. Or do you think the graph of CO2 I showed you in the other post is misleading as well?
W.R.T. the quotes, now you're getting really desperate. Sure, sure, those poor innocent scientists keep getting ascribed word-for-word predictions they never made and they're all just too polite to complain about having words put in their mouth like that. Come on, wake up! He wasn't being misquoted. Here he is in another 2008 article written by himself in which he makes exactly the same prediction:
"As a result, without any additional greenhouse gases, the Arctic soon will be ice-free in the summer."
Lots more CO2 was added, 15 years passed, the Arctic is not ice free. Nor are ice levels falling. Here's the data from Hanen's own former employer showing that summer ice sea levels stabilized around 2010, which should not have been possible according to these people:
Yeah. A great example of the corruption problem is the story of Tuvalu. Here's a research paper from 2018 that looked at the size of the islands using radar data:
"Sea-level rise and climatic change threaten the existence of atoll nations. Inundation and erosion are expected to render islands uninhabitable over the next century, forcing human migration"
but then just two sentences later:
"Results highlight a net increase in land area in Tuvalu of 73.5 ha (2.9%) [in the past 40 years], despite sea-level rise, and land area increase in eight of nine atolls"
Tuvalu got bigger! It goes on to explain that Tuvalu has grown due to other factors that were not previously considered. Yet the field is so corrupt that a paper literally reporting that Pacific islands are getting bigger has to start by repeating the claim that those very same islands will be "inundated" and "rendered uninhabitable". It goes on to argue that maybe the biggest problems the islands face is not climate change per se but rather "the historic imprint of colonial agendas and entrenched land tenure systems".
That was in 2018. It had no effect on the narrative whatsoever. In 2019 the Guardian wrote a huge story telling its readers that Tuvalu is going to be drowned by climate change and how angry they are at Donald Trump because in future they'll have to evacuate their homes:
“Tuvalu is sinking” is the local catch-all phrase for the effects of climate change on this tiny island archipelago on the frontline of global warming.
The entire story is misinformation, but you'd never know that if you didn't double check these things and the Guardian not only never will but actively tells its readers that people who do double check are evil.
https://till.com/articles/MooresLaw