Super typhoon Haiyan slams the Philippines

[Patroklos]

You don't seem to be able to grasp quite a simple concept, if you ignore their advice then you and your family are the ones who suffer. It's not like ignoring the science makes the science disappear. It's just cutting off your nose to spite your face.

If they ignore their advice it's me and my family that suffer.

[Elok]

Hypocrisy, or accusations thereof, is a routine feature of international diplomacy. If eliminating it were a real priority, we wouldn't get anything done. Okay, we would probably have some effect on global warming; if we stopped hypocritically pretending the Arabs were our friends, it might screw up the world's oil supply pretty badly.

Incidentally, Patroklos, my son is convinced that your avatar is a frog. I'm really not seeing it, just thought I'd pass that on.

[kentonio]

If they ignore their advice it's me and my family that suffer.

True, although as Mike points out they aren't really ignoring their own advice anyway. Even if they were however, the solution isn't to just copy bad behaviour.

[MikeH]

I think it's more likely that we'll wait until things get truly horrible then try actively solving the problem through technology. People are too selfish to change their behaviour much, I certainly am.

[Patroklos]

True, although as Mike points out they aren't really ignoring their own advice anyway. Even if they were however, the solution isn't to just copy bad behaviour.

I said nothing about not following their advice, I only took issue with you claiming its unimportant to hold them to account for their hypocrisy. Whether or not it actually took place in this case is irrelevant because you claimed you wouldn't when you thought they were.

Climate science may be about hard science inside the people with the expertise to understand it, but neither you or I are climatologists and would probably be hard put to understand more than the cover page of the science and data behind this latest report. We are basically taking their word for it ON TRUST based on their credentials and credibility. If you are reporting on the doom or mankind and lobbying for ME to do something about when you yourself are not that really puts into question both the claimed gravity of the problem you are presenting as well as your credibility in it not motivating you to the same action you want in others when you are supposed to be the expert!

And that's talking to people who are inclined to believe them, for those who they are trying to be convinced such hypocrisy isn't going to make the sale. Its like going to a car dealership and asking if the salesman owns a car from that company. If the answer is no what would you then think about the sales pitch you just sat through?

And furthermore Ken, since you are in a way taking the word of these scientists on trust due to your inability to understand the science behind their conclusions its really important to treat them as scientists and not Scientists, meaning demanding they keep accountability with those they are influencing and especially in this case where moral obligation and action generally follows hand in hand with the science, or you are just accepting the word of a mystical priest at his alter who unsurprisingly has most of the priesthood behind him. This goes for any profession where in deep competency is beyond the reach of the casual person from rocket scientist to your car mechanic.

[Colonâ„¢]

Well, from what I've heard the link between climate change and cyclones is nothing as certain as the link between co2 levels and global warming. That's one reason it's stupid to shout GLOBAL WARMING every time there's extreme weather. Another is that events like this are irregular. What are the shouters going to do if there aren't serious cyclones like this the next few years? Accept global warming isn't really happening? Global warming and its main consequences are gradual, not sudden. Which brings us to its most important threat, namely rising sea levels. Using cyclones as an illustration for global warming diverts attention from the threat to low lying areas that are often heavily urbanized. It's also pretty ****ing disrespectful to propagate your cause while the dead are still rotting in the streets.

[MikeH]

Read this this morning, nice quote at the end.

http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/11/14/typhoon-haiyan-and-climate-change-why-we-cant-say-for-sure-is-wrong/

The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question. All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.

Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at National Center for Atmospheric Research

[regexcellent]

Well, from what I've heard the link between climate change and cyclones is nothing as certain as the link between co2 levels and global warming. That's one reason it's stupid to shout GLOBAL WARMING every time there's extreme weather. Another is that events like this are irregular. What are the shouters going to do if there aren't serious cyclones like this the next few years? Accept global warming isn't really happening? Global warming and its main consequences are gradual, not sudden. Which brings us to its most important threat, namely rising sea levels. Using cyclones as an illustration for global warming diverts attention from the threat to low lying areas that are often heavily urbanized. It's also pretty ****ing disrespectful to propagate your cause while the dead are still rotting in the streets.

There is no known connection, certainly not one that can be demonstrated with any degree of rigor. At best there are hypotheses. The word is escaping me, but essentially you have to be able to prove a hypothesis wrong, and as you've observed that isn't possible here; lack of extreme weather is not taken as lack of evidence for global warming or the connection between extreme weather (a poorly defined term in itself) and global warming. In fact, as I said before in this thread, lack of extreme weather (Atlantic hurricanes) has been blamed on global warming as well, in 2007 when the season was remarkably quiet. That's when papers about global warming and increased wind shear started getting published. It's the reverse scientific method; you come up with a hypothesis that you like (global warming in this case) and then figure out why it's true based on the evidence you observe.

[regexcellent]

To add...

The thing is, each of these papers on their own might not be invalid; they present some idea that global warming might cause xyz phenomenon. There's an issue with circular reasoning going on where these papers are published coincidentally after certain weather events, they get cited in the news, newsmen or whoever then point to the papers to say "look, look, global warming has these horrible tangible effects!" which causes people think holy ****, global warming is a real dangerous thing caused by humans, which reinforces the assumptions made by the papers talking about how it causes storms or whatever in the first place. And taken as a whole there's a lot of glaring contradictions in the published body of research, since the truth is based on what kind of weather we're getting at the time.

Scientists may (in fact most of them probably do) understand the circular thinking going on here and not fall victim to it. But when we have politicians screaming about how we need insane government controls on the economy in order to stop a biblical disaster, that's when you need to step back and think about how ****ing ridiculous this is.

Which is why I don't care that the Republicans call it all fake. Whatever it takes to stop the kind of insane and pointless climate policies environmentalists pursue, I'm fine with.

[MikeH]

Hypothesis is a standard part of scientific method.

People didn't just make up global warming out of thin air. What happened was we saw lots of observations, we formed hypotheses to try and explain them, we narrowed them down, disproving some, tweaking and improving others. After 30 years of research, in ever increasing amounts what we are seeing is that people aren't finding evidence that disproves anthropogenic climate change. They keep finding supporting evidence.

With every passing year the evidence and our understanding becomes clearer.

[MikeH]

But when we have politicians screaming about how we need insane government controls on the economy in order to stop a biblical disaster, that's when you need to step back and think about how ****ing ridiculous this is.

Which is why I don't care that the Republicans call it all fake. Whatever it takes to stop the kind of insane and pointless climate policies environmentalists pursue, I'm fine with.

This just shows that those politicians understand the extent of the problem better than you.

[MikeH]

the circular thinking you are talking about really doesn't happen - see the post on hypotheses above.

[kentonio]

If you are reporting on the doom or mankind and lobbying for ME to do something about when you yourself are not that really puts into question both the claimed gravity of the problem you are presenting as well as your credibility in it not motivating you to the same action you want in others when you are supposed to be the expert!

You see this is the difference between us, I see scientists as people who do science, not as people who have a job to sell their findings to you or me.

Its like going to a car dealership and asking if the salesman owns a car from that company. If the answer is no what would you then think about the sales pitch you just sat through?

I wouldn't ever have asked that question, because I think it's a bizarre one. Why would a salesman need to personally own the product they are selling? To me a salesman is just someone doing a job, I expect everything they say to be a pitch, and I certainly wouldn't expect them to have to live their personal life around the product they are selling.

And furthermore Ken, since you are in a way taking the word of these scientists on trust due to your inability to understand the science behind their conclusions its really important to treat them as scientists and not Scientists, meaning demanding they keep accountability with those they are influencing and especially in this case where moral obligation and action generally follows hand in hand with the science, or you are just accepting the word of a mystical priest at his alter who unsurprisingly has most of the priesthood behind him. This goes for any profession where in deep competency is beyond the reach of the casual person from rocket scientist to your car mechanic.

When it comes to the sciences (especially science as complex as climate), there is always going to have to be a degree of trust in the ability of the scientists who live and breathe that stuff day in day out. The beautiful thing about science though is that you don't need to just blindly trust in individuals, respectable work is published and peer reviewed.

When you have a consensus as vast as the one about human driven climate change, then you either accept the findings or else you build a conspiracy theory where something like 95% of the world climate scientists are engaged in a massive fraud. Only one of those two options involves a wild flight of fantasy and I'm pretty comfortable it's not the option I'm taking.

[MikeH]

Exactly.

I used to live in a house where I was the only one who wasn't a climate scientist working for the Met Office. It's massively complex, sure, and you are measuring a variable system but the volume of experiments and observations that are supporting the major predictions are pretty breathtaking.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

What you have instead are vested interests which are fighting for no action, to protect themselves, while in the medium to long run they will harm themselves through inaction as well as everyone else. However short term is king and we will reap the "benefits" of that sooner or later, in many ways we already do.

It is not at all unusual, in principle it is normal behaviour, except that with climate change the bill coming in at a later stage for inaction today, will be rather large.

Makes me think of another recent obvious mistake - Iraq war, case built on lies, bill was meant to be 60bn USD with a happy "liberated" population greeting the liberators and what we have instead is a several TN bill with several hundred thousand dead more (in addition to what would have otherwise been), with Iraq in bed with Iran and several thousand dead Americans to show for it... was pretty obvious going in, even though personally I did not expect several TN bill, but rather an order of magnitude higher which would have been sufficiently "wrong" combined with the other factors... the bill is even larger than I expected.

With climate change though, same principle, just worse outcome, more death, destruction, destabilization and a lot greater hurdle to keep the existing standard of living world wide, let alone improve on what we currently have is ahead... but noone cares from the people who are actually making the decisions, with a vocal minority of the population (in Europe), or majority in the US keeping their heads in the sand fighting for ignorance and worse outcomes down the line.

We will take action, eventually, except with climate the reversal is on the order of centuries and not years or decades... and in the meantime huge population shifts caused by draught, sinking coastlines, even more severe weather events etc... but who gives a **** when it does not affect you today watching fair and balanced expert views telling you that it is all a hoax and that inaction is best action. People just love fighting for nothing... kind of tricky when illiterate masses have the same "vote" in the decision as educated few.