2762

The fact that this thread is in “Politics and Religion” is what the problem is with climate change.

2763

Right… he was correct (probably) and we have passed the point of no return.

He’ll only be actually wrong if we can successfully reverse course and return the climate to normalcy.

2764

His statement wasn’t actually based on serious science though.
As far as I know, there isn’t any real basis for 2016 being some kind of magical corner being turned.

2765

It could have been a legitimate estimate, all estimates have to make some assumptions. Do you have some evidence that it was not based on data?

2766

The fact that it wasn’t supported by data.

2767

Is that a fact?

2768

What data supported his statement that 2016 marked some great turning point?

2769

The data supported a pretty wide range of conclusions depending on your assumptions. Now, I have never seen Gore’s movie, nor dug into what their specific position was or why, but you’d probably have to come up with something better than “they were wrong (maybe)” as evidence that they weren’t using some sort of data driven model.

2770

One big problem with climate change is that the effects have such a long lag time. You can’t look around in 2016, measure the CO2 level and say “This is the climate we get with this CO2 level”. Even in the unrealistic scenario where we cut back on emissions tremendously and stabilize CO2 at the current levels, there will be more warming.

I suppose an analogy would be a thermostat. We have been dialing the thermostat up, and presently are debating whether or not to dial it up a bit slower. Currently it is feeling just slightly warm, but we need to account for the fact that the furnace will still take decades to catch up to the setting we’ve already dialed in.

Plus, we haven’t seen the long-term effects of the current temperature. The world is already warm enough to cause a lot of melting.

Five studies in particular commanded especial attention. One showed that the floating ice shelves ringing Antarctica (which do not affect sea level directly, but do prevent billions of tons of glacier ice from sliding off the continent into the ocean) are thinning, their bulwarking ability compromised. Another found pervasive blue meltwater rivers gushing across the ice surface of Greenland through the use of drones, satellites, and extreme field work. A major NASA program (called “Oceans Melting Glaciers” or OMG) showed that the world’s warming oceans—which thus far have absorbed most of the heat from rising global greenhouse gas emissions—are now melting the big ice sheets from below, at the undersides of marine-terminating glaciers. A fourth study used historical air photographs to map the scars of 20th century deglaciation around the edges of the Greenland ice sheet, showing that its pace of volume loss has accelerated. A fifth, very long time-horizon study used advanced computer modeling to posit that the massive Antarctic ice sheet may even disappear completely in coming millennia, should we choose to burn all known fossil fuel reserves.

I don’t think the last will happen (we won’t burn all the fossil fuel reserves), but that does mean the people who currently own those reserves will take a bit hit to their portfolio.

2771

Look dude, when you say, “the data supported a pretty wide range of conclusions” then you’re just repeating what I said, which is that his conclusions aren’t supported by scientific evidence. Because it’s not supported if you can just look at that data and draw other conclusions just as easily. That’s what supported by data means.

If you think that Gore made a solid scientific argument to back up his statements, then go ahead and present it here. I don’t believe you can. What’s laughable, is that you apparently have no real information about anything he said, and yet are for some reason defending it.

Your argument of requiring proof of his lack of proof is equally laughable, as it’s essentially the argument that people make in favor of God or some other faith based entity. “What proof do you have that he DIDN’T support his positiion?!” The proof is that there is the lack of a scientific argument in support of his position. My statement is self evident, unless you are able to present a coherent scientific argument in defense of Gore’s claims. But you can’t, because he created a movie designed to generate publicity rather than a scientific paper.

Like I said, you can prove me wrong by showing a robust scientific basis for the suggestion that 2016 was some kind of important date. But if you can’t, then my statement stands.

2772

You know better than this, Timex. Data can be interpreted in different ways and the same data can EASILY support multiple hypotheses (which is what Gore presented, not a “conclusion”).

My daughter coughed in the car three times on the way to dropping her off at school. My hypothesis (“conclusion”) is that she’s getting sick, just like her friend who is down with the flu. Her hypothesis is that some of the cinnamon that she sprinkled on her oatmeal got into her sinuses and that I’m worrying over nothing.

Both “conclusions” are equally supported by the sparse, available evidence even though they are contradictory.

2773

Pretty sure you are wrong about that.

If you think that Gore made a solid scientific argument to back up his statements, then go ahead and present it here. I don’t believe you can. What’s laughable, is that you apparently have no real information about anything he said, and yet are for some reason defending it.

I think you can probably just watch an inconvenient truth; I believe (though again I have not seen it) that the whole thrust of the film is Gore presenting data in support of his conclusion. Now he could be completely wrong, or partially wrong, or a little off or have gotten it exactly right, but whatever the case his conclusions were based on scientific data (probably!! again I haven’t seen the movie. Maybe he uses no data! Maybe it’s just long shots of polar bears on dwindling chunks of ice!)

2774

Whoa there, a hypothesis can totally have a conclusion…

2775

Ugh, this seems to be a debate about a non-issue. In 2006 Gore basically said “we really need to start acting in the next 10 years”. He said that replacing fossil-fuel based electricity in 10 years was entirely possible and needed to be done. Those statements seem true to me. It was then the conservative media (Rush Limbaugh) that pounced on this and started the whole “Doomsday Clock” countdown thing. Now it’s 10 years later and of course they’ll trot it out. But note they’re not trotting it out too hard, and the media isn’t picking it up too hard, because it was conservative BS to begin with, and because GHG and global warming are becoming more apparent, not less.

2776

An Inconvenient Truth has been poured over and debated perhaps more than any documentary in existence. The general consensus is that the science presented in it was largely accurate in that anthropogenic climate change is real, bad stuff is coming, and we need to get ourselves in order to prevent even worse stuff. However, his “2016” claim was actually not a part of the film. Rather, it was something he said during an interview at the Sundance Film Festival.

From that off the cuff statement, people have been spinning BS ever since.

2777

Yeah, this is all punditry, and not Science. Which is B.S.

2778

This isn’t really true though, or rather, while a given set of data can be explained by different hypotheses, then none of those hypotheses are actually supported by it.

You make a hypothesis, which inherently doesn’t require any data support at all… and then you TEST it, by collecting data and seeing if the data supports that hypothesis.

If the data can be legitimately interpreted in multiple ways, some of which support that hypothesis and some of which do not, then the hypothesis is not supported by that data. In order to be supported, that means you need to extend your data collection such that those other interpretations are eliminated due to being inconsistent with part of the data. This is how science works.

You can’t just collect some data which doesn’t specifically disprove your hypothesis. That’s not enough, which we can see most obviously in the extreme case where you simply collect no data at all, which ends up failing to disprove any hypothesis. That doesn’t mean that it constitutes support for those hypotheses though. Failing to disprove something isn’t the same as proving it.

In the case here, neither of your hypotheses are really supported by rigorous scientific studies. They’re just guesses. And honestly, that’s what was contained in “An Inconvenient Truth”. Just guesses. That’s why I stated that they weren’t supported by science, because there was no rigorous study which supported the notion that 2016 constituted some major turning point. It was merely a statement made because it sounded scary.

I think you can probably just watch an inconvenient truth; I believe (though again I have not seen it) that the whole thrust of the film is Gore presenting data in support of his conclusion.

But again, simply presenting some data which doesn’t specifically disprove your theory isn’t the same as proving it.

This is the biggest problem with so much of the climate debate, in that the discourse is dominated by such little factoids, and not the actual science… frankly, because most people don’t want to think hard enough about the actual science. Actual scientists very rarely speak in the absolutes that make good soundbytes on the news. Actual climatologists never say stuff like “after 2016 we’ll pass a point of no return!” They tend to speak in dramatically more narrow, specific terms. They say things like, “Over this period of time, these specific things were observed, and with these specific caveats a given model makes these predictions with this expected degree of error.” But then most people just hear the charlie brown teacher’s voice, so folks in the media make grossly simplified statements which aren’t actually correct. And then as a result, they give skeptics a target to attack.

Saying that 2016 constituted a point of no return fits into this category, I believe. I do not think that there is any kind of rigorous scientific study which supported that statement. It was largely a number pulled out of a hat… a nice round number (10 years) that happened to be after he made his movie.

2779

Pretty much nothing in science is absolutes. Except for Physics, which is Math disguised as Science.

2780

Which is exactly why actual scientists very rarely speak in absolutes.

2781

But, they speak, and we should listen to the research.