Posts by David Hood
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FG thinks that most will not have noticed the errors which, it is presumed, you have drawn to the publication’s editors.
I am confident that the publication will not publicise the errors or issue a retraction, as they people involved never have in the past.
Are you optimistic?
I tend to go with world population peaking in 2070 at 9 billion, then declining fairly sharply. I think the UNDP assumption that countries with a replacement rate of below 2 are going to come back up to it are unfounded (as there is no evidence of this actually happening) so their estimate of 10 billion then stabilising is to me a bit high. All of this is more or less completely linked to the education of women (correlation with causative explanation).
As a result I tend to view it as a matter of getting through the next 200 hundred years without doing anything to the planet that causes mass extinction. Unfortunately I'm not optimistic about ocean acidification, as that looks likely to hit a state-change level. -
Here is another example of the exaggeration:
I agree that that blog is an exaggeration in it's criticism of the NCDC, and if you are interested in taking a skeptical approach to writings on the matter you will of course have noticed the basic mathematical error made in the reasoning of the blog's criticism. And if you are interested in taking a skeptical approach, you will have done the two minutes of research that reveal that the blog's criticism are based on false accusations about the NCDC and actually 2012 was the warmest. However, not posting these corrections (or equally, bringing to the table stuff with basic mistakes in fact) does not make it seem like you want to be genuinely well informed on the matter.
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It’s a reasonable bet that there will be another 15 years or so of this
15 years might be your threshold to be convinced, but the Daily Mail will go on printing bollocks for many more years than that. To put it in perspective the research for the Daily Mail's article comes from a blogger who has said that global warming is a conspiracy between the European Union, the Obama government, the New Zealand Government, Marks and Spencer's, Boots Chemists, wind farms , primary schools (and a list of others). I see no reasons to believe he is likely to ever be convinced by the science, so will continue to be a source for "reporting the debate" for a long time to come. I have deliberately not named him as, in my opinion, he is known for googling himself and taking offence, and I would ask everyone else to observe this (in the interests of maintaining polite dialog).
FG if you are genuinely interested in the way science is distorted by media and politicisation, I suggest watching the Horizon documentary "Science under attack". It is normally fairly easy to find on YouTube.“no causation without correlation”
The convential formation of this saying is "Correlation does not imply causation." The formation you used is occasionally used by fringe sites to say because we do not know something for certain (for values of certain always greater than today's knowledge and often involving a magical perfect consensus among everyone commentating) we cannot assume it to be the case so should not do anything. In it's standard form it has been misused from time to time, but what it is getting at is that just because you have a correlation, it may not be a genuine relationship, you also need a causative mechanism to explain the relationship (it most often used for demonstrating the importance of third interconnected factors that are actually the underlining ones). Now in the case of global warming, we have a correlation (temperature/ time) and we have a causative mechanism (it has been known for hundreds of years what adding Carbon to the atmosphere and oceans does) so really, at this point it is up to skeptics to explain how our basic understanding of chemistry is wrong. The correlations have been repeatedly tested (science!) over the past decade with different data sets, all of which have confirmed the initial hypothesis (failing to confirm the initial hypothesis leads to modifying or rejecting it, that is how science works).
Now there is debate about the exact, precise rate of warming- some of the detail about the exact finer detail of the relationship between climate and weather, and the exact, precise rate at which atmospheric carbon is acidifying the oceans, but the overal trends have been repeatedly tested, and when the global warming deniers say "but it is never been tested in this way", and when it is then demand more tests, it does start to look like they are wasting everyone's time. Particularly when it is coupled with legal political moves to suppress climate research (like NZ deniers trying to have the NZ climate data banned or the U.S. republican state North Carolina banning any projections that sea levels will rise). -
Better links:
The well written skeptical science explanation
and the rather more constrained official British Met Service response (but there are some useful links off it on the detail of how the five year series is calculated).
Either way the Daily Mail got it wrong. -
Maniototo. Same place, camera pointing a different direction
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Maniototo
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Blue lake, St. Bathans
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It was swampd by the Swartz news, but the day before JSTOR had announced they were trialing limited open access for individuals.
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For those familiar with the gravel Queenstown Bay Domain foreshore, there is a bit of driftwood on it in the wake of the heavy rains in the headwaters of the Wakatipu.
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I knew it had the wrong shaped head to be a shag, and looking at the zoomed in picture later, I realise I was seeing an Australasian Crested Grebe in Queenstown Bay.
