Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

what's the bellwether for climate change? Rising temperatures, rising CO2 concentrations?

There's strong evidence there actually isn't warming going on. The "warming trend" may be due to the temperature sensor locations. Originally the sensors were put in remote, rural, unpopulated and unused locations (ideally!). As communities grew... you understand that the sensors now are no longer rural, remote, unpopulated areas. What happens to the air in a city? If you're unsure, "urban heat island". This is extremely localized "weather" - the sort of thing that i've been yelled at "IS NOT CLIMATE".

I'm only going to link 1 thing here, because doing this sort of thing on my lifelong handle has never done me any favors:

> Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 23:105015 (20pp), 2023 October

> Challenges in the Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Trends Since 1850

> https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-4527/acf18

Great example of what I was talking about!

I looked at the paper you referenced.

Interestingly, it does not say that the warming trend is not happening, rather they argue that the evidence is insufficient to say for sure if the warming is caused by human-driven causes or natural ones (e.g. volcanic activity or solar changes). They mention the heat island effect as one of the issues that may complicate the attribution of the contribution of different factors to the warming trend.

To quote from the paper:

“To summarize, by varying ST and/or TSI choice and/or the attribution approach used, it is possible to conclude anything from the long-term warming being "mostly natural" to "mostly anthropogenic" or anything in between. While each of us has our own scientific opinions on which of these choices are most realistic, we are concerned by the wide range of scientifically plausible, yet mutually contradictory, conclusions that can still be drawn from the data.”

Ok, arctic sea ice.

Ice exists at temperature below 0C or 32F at 1atm AND at system energy levels below the enthalpy of melting for liquid water, or latent heat for this first order phase change.

Thermodynamics uses temperature and pressure to explain system energy of molecules for liquid vapor solid phase systems. Latent heat is the esoteric part of this phenomenon because it requires a scientific education to understand calculus and work. Understandably, everyone can grasp temperature.

I think your comment is a perfect example of misdirection and people using “data driven methods” to attack a “first principles” explanation of physical phenomena.

Here’s a link because that gives my idea more weight.

https://earth.gsfc.nasa.gov/cryo/data/current-state-sea-ice-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05686-x

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj8469

Computer people talk about scientific methods and their “home lab” stuff, ai and inherent structure of data then absolutely fall for the facebook-grade-misinformation arguments to not trust something that is too mainstream. Jfc

you mean the sea ice, that had the highest extent in 20 years this year? Or a different sea ice, perhaps the one they always trot out around January? you know, when it's summer in the southern hemisphere?

The sea ice data isn't 1:1 with the seasons, so "data scientists" and "climate scientists" pick the cutoff date that makes the best headline. Even this year they were saying the ice was lower than average, but they cutoff 3+ weeks early, the ice was above average a few weeks later.

https://usicecenter.gov/PressRelease/ArcticMaximum2024

Besides all this, i am unsure if you're supportive or not of what i said.

okay, and whats your point? The point is "97%" or "99%" of "climate scientists agree" that "anthropogenic causes" are the reason for climate change. But this study questions the foundations (and i mentioned i am only linking one, that i downloaded a few weeks ago to save, there are of course other papers that each chip away at the political and media narrative about the whole field). Please refer to the GP:

> I wonder how much of this same kind of manipulation/distortion is going on when we are told to "trust the science" with regard to climate change?

"climate science" is all models, this paper (among others) implies that the data fed in to the models may be influencing the output of the models in a way that isn't conducive to actually understanding the "climate". How can i make this assertion? I read the IPCC reports. both the pre-release and the official releases. I don't recommend it, unless you feel like being Cassandra.

This is cherry-picking. There is a raft of solid science from a large number of independent researchers looking at many different indicators that corroborate well with each other. The evidence is overwhelming, global warming is happening. Picking one thing that says we haven't always gotten it 100% right doesn't mean it isn't happening.

I admit data collection is imperfect, especially looking back 200 years. But to attack a fairly sound hypothesis that is multi factorially demonstrated in physical geological behavior, I wholeheartedly disagree with.

Just because US weather stations in the 70’s were more rural than urban does not in itself gives credence to the idea that climate change/warming/ greenhouse gases is a nonissue or somehow a totally misunderstood non-warming phenomenon. Even a climate that tended to one mean value zero standard deviation throughout the year would be devastating coming from our current temporal and geographical distribution.

Your point about weather stations is a technical detail in data collection while there are several other corroborating methods indicating a warming ocean and atmosphere, albeit not geographically uniformly distributed. But you have this gotcha fact about weather stations ambient baseline temp vs some platonic ideal temp that reflects what’s going on in the abstract notion of a climate.

The sea ice has satellite photo analysis (area) dating to 70’s or 80’s with daily or weekly granularity.

I cannot convince a climate change denier or skeptic but am leaving that comment and this one hoping that observers don’t just take your initial counter-fact to be a valid falsifying argument.

As everyone says weather is not the climate, spurious yearly data do not nullify long form trends, and I’d just look at low pass filtered or line fit or yearly average of granular image data to argue that there is a time localize trend since the 80’s consistent with a warming ocean.

I disagree with you I think you used logical fallacies to misdirect and cause skepticism about something that is fairly corroborated and the debate needs to focus on mitigation or investment or policy changes.

> you mean the sea ice, that had the highest extent in 20 years this year?

Your link says it's "the seventh highest recorded since 2006 when this metric from IMS was first tracked consistently". Where are you getting "highest extent in 20 years"?

You're not sufficiently parsing causality versus predictivity. The global warming hypothesis matches the projections. So it's a food enough model. The causal attribution does take time, but recall we can estimate the global greenhouse emissions with reasonable accuracy and can compare to benchmarks in history.

Push all we want against the sun, it continues to shine regardless of our efforts.

Edit I shouldn’t have used word geological bit meant ‘worldwide’

Yep, and they're using numbers from February, cute, isn't it? If you go look at the actual numbers, it was higher in 2002, but the 20 year period 2003-2023, the arctic sea ice extent in 2024 was higher than all those years. Now, i'd love to do all the work for you, but the government makes it difficult on cursory inspection to get this data in bulk, when i did this myself 2 months ago, i assure you the graph is higher this year than all the other years.

in fact, go google "sea ice extent 2024" and see how many different figures you get and check the dates! February 2024 they were claiming we were in dire straits because it was at 15.01mm sqkm. what you have to do, as a reasonable person, is get the actual data, as granular as you can. 2024's ice extent was above 1995s, even. and approached 1990s. it was way higher than 2014-2020:

https://scied.ucar.edu/sites/default/files/documents/sea-ice...

https://i.imgur.com/ZIopSoI.png

My point is just repeating ad nauseam tripe like "the ice is melting" and "hottest year ever" isn't convincing anyone of anything. I'm also tired after doing this reading and research and talking about it and arguing about it for 23 years now, already. I can't be the only one who looks at the actual data, can i?

global warming hypothesis! Have you seen the temperature graph for earth's history? Judd et al., Science 385, 1316 (2024)

It's actually remarkably cold on earth, colder than it's been in over 450mm years. but if you look at the graph, it's not a diagonal or straight line, it goes up and down over millions of years.

so, with these two facts: Will it get warmer or colder?

Knowing that, why do i have to listen to this claptrap?

all the models that they use as evidence use the temperature sensor data so i am not sure what you're trying to convince me of. Also: Judd et al., Science 385, 1316 (2024)

see my links at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42189475 if you like, it adds to the fact that sea ice this year was higher than the prior 20 years; because 2002 was higher. Furthermore, sea ice in that detail only goes back to 1979, and we're talking about a literal ~6% decrease in that period (at least prior to 2024!) - which, 6% in 40 years, we don't really know enough about it, considering that ice has been there for, oh, let's ballpark at a million years as it is today, actually it's been growing probably for 20 million years, but that's irrelevant.

The atlantic was colder this year than normal. I know a lot of media people were saying "hot as bathwater" and "perfect fixins for storms and climate issues" but also this year they said that the AMOC may be ending and northern europe will be igloo central. Guess how long we've been studying that? 20 years. TWENTY.

call me old fashioned, but "models" made in the last few decades on data we've only been realistically collecting in a "rigorous" fashion for 20-40 years don't impress me, especially with stuff like Judd et al., Science 385, 1316 (2024) coming out in the past couple months showing that the global temps over the last 485mm years mean all this "anthropogenic climate change" stuff is hilariously wrong-headed.

Now, hear me out for one second. I am environmentally conscious, i try not to pollute. i rarely drive, i never fly, i tried solar but it didn't work very well in my location. I care about people not damaging the planet we live on. What i can't abide is pointing at models (what's the M in LLM stand for? does SD have models? how about the music generation stuff, those models?) and extracting currency from everyone to solve a problem that moves when you stare at it.

i don't expect to convince anyone here. It's not my calling in life to go debate this in public. Do what you want. Just don't tell me i have to do something else because "the model says so", alright?

there's a joke "apparently the police have been beating up black people like hotcakes" that was unknown until consumer camcorders and cameras were widespread. We now have billions and billions of sensors on this planet, and we can all do our duty to VERIFY that what the model says is accurate, and what the model was fed was accurate. You ever researched when the first "accurate" thermometer was developed/patented?

You're looking at data for confirmation of your bias. Sea Ice volume has been pretty steadily decreasing even as the coverage can increase.

https://www.polarportal.dk/en/sea-ice-and-icebergs/sea-ice-t...

All I can conclude from your posts in this thread is that you are in an unfortunate bubble, are desperately trying not to see reality, or simply want others to doubt it for whatever reason.

ok https://www.polarportal.dk/fileadmin/polarportal/sea/SICE_cu...

That seems to show all of last six years as being in the lowest quartile of measurements from 1981 to 2010.

Or is there something else I'm supposed to be seeing?

I am so confused how their corroborating charts indicate that sea ice is receding, yet they interpret it as a reversal and proof that warming / climate change is a myth.

The core of the concern about climate change is what it’s going to do to human society. Nobody gives a shit what the climate looked like a million years ago - complex human society reliant on large scale agriculture didn’t exist a million years ago, and that’s all we care about. We worry about droughts because they affect our crops and cause famines, we worry about heat waves because they kill our people and livestock, we worry about sea level rise because it damages our cities, we worry about hurricanes of increasing intensity because they kill people and damage our cities. We don’t give a shit if we’re in a relatively cool period in earth’s history or if the whole thing will shift in a hundred thousand years because that’s totally fucking irrelevant to what’s going to happen in the next hundred years and how we’re going to adapt our cities, crops, and cultures to it, because that’s what actually matters to us, because we’re actual living people in a complex society and we’d like to stay that way on both counts.