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sailingsoul
SFN Addict
2830 Posts |
 Posted - 11/29/2011 : 07:28:59 [Permalink]
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| This is like when a pissing match broke out in the boys room during recess. Gentlemen, are we done? If anyone thinks were not, please think again. As those in the OWS movement might say, "the whole world (forum) is watching". |
There are only two types of religious people, the deceivers and the deceived. SS |
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Valiant Dancer
Forum Goalie
USA
4826 Posts |
Posted - 11/29/2011 : 10:40:48 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by bngbuck
chef......
bngbuck got a woody for me!
God, what a thought!
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OK, you're both pretty.
Can we move on now? |
Cthulhu/Asmodeus when you're tired of voting for the lesser of two evils
Brother Cutlass of Reasoned Discussion |
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chefcrsh
Skeptic Friend
Hong Kong
380 Posts |
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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13476 Posts |
Posted - 11/30/2011 : 11:33:41 [Permalink]
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Yeah. That's a pretty good rundown. I saw the article on the study in New Scientist. I tend to follow Real Climate because it's the only site that I know of that's actually the work of climate scientists. And they have problems with the new study. That's not to say they reject it out of hand. On media coverage in their response to the study, and more generally most press releases about new scientific studies, they say:
Response and media coverage
All in all, this is an interesting paper and methodology, though we think it slightly underestimates the most likely sensitivity, and rather more seriously underestimates the chances that the sensitivity lies at the upper end of the IPCC range. Some other commentaries have come to similar conclusions: James Annan (here and here), and there is an excellent interview with Nathan Urban here, which discusses the caveats clearly. The perspective piece from Gabi Hegerl is also worth reading.
Unfortunately, the media coverage has not been very good. Partly, this is related to some ambiguous statements by the authors, and partly because media discussions of climate sensitivity have a history of being poorly done. The dominant frame was set by the press release which made a point of suggesting that this result made “extreme predictions” unlikely. This is fair enough, but had already been clear from the previous work discussed above. This was transformed into “Climate sensitivity was ‘overestimated’” by the BBC (not really a valid statement about the state of the science), compounded by the quote that Andreas Schmittner gave that “this implies that the effect of CO2 on climate is less than previously thought”. Who had previously thought what was left to the readers’ imagination. Indeed, the latter quote also prompted the predictably loony IBD editorial board to declare that this result proves that climate science is a fraud (though this is not Schmittner’s fault – they conclude the same thing every other Tuesday).
The Schmittner et al. analysis marks the insensitive end of the spectrum of climate sensitivity estimates based on LGM data, in large measure because it used a data set and a weighting that may well be biased toward insufficient cooling. Unfortunately, in reporting new scientific studies a common fallacy is to implicitly assume a new study is automatically “better” than previous work and supersedes this. In this case one can’t blame the media, since the authors’ press release cites Schmittner saying that “the effect of CO2 on climate is less than previously thought”. It would have been more appropriate to say something like “our estimate of the effect is less than many previous estimates”. |
Real Climate
It sort of reminds me of when Ardipithecus Ramidus was described as not being particularly chimp like, and had some "human" features, some headlines pronounced that the chimp/human common ancestor was more human than ape. And some people took that to mean chimps literally split from humans when all it really meant was that we have to rethink what our ape ancestors looked like, and how we can't look at modern apes as a blueprint for ape and human ancestry. But the media likes bold headlines. Science reporters really should know better, science being what it is. So in this thread we have a "game over" blogger, and reports from science reporters that jump to the opposite conclusion. Or at least, they leave that impression on many readers.
Just being informed, let alone drawing conclusions, takes work.
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Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.
Why not question something for a change?
Genetic Literacy Project |
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Game over?
