|
Give Up Blog - for scientists like these!
You hid my archives, didn't you Steve!
Maps and Figures "Hitler or Coulter?" QuizMap1 - Teen Pregnancy Map2 - Incarceration Map3 - Homicide Rates Map4 - Drop-out Rates Map5 - Bankruptcy Rates Map6 - Driving Distances Map7 - Energy Use Map8 - Gonorrhea! Map9 - Tax Burden Map10 - State GDP Map11 - DHS funding Map12 - Adult Illiteracy. Map13 - Abortion Bans: Map14 - ER Quality Map15 - Hospital Quality Map16 - Coal Burners Map 17 - Infant Mortality Map 18 - Toxic Waste Map 19 - Obesity Map 20 - Poverty Map 21 - Occupational safety Map 22 - Traffic deaths Map 23 - Divorce Figure 1 - Wages vs Right to work Figure 2 - Unemployment vs Right to work Give Up Shopping guide  
link to xml feed
|
Friday, June 23, 2006
Global Warming report from the academy
It's official, the NAS has released a report on global warming indicating that we are currently the warmest we've been for about 2000 years and humans are influencing global climate. It is a report verifying "controversial" results from a paper from 1999 showing a major upward trend in temperatures as recorded by proxies in the most recent decades. These results were only really controversial because they told people what they didn't want to hear.
While the results covered are limited, only covering the last 2000 years, this figure in particular is worth a look.  The good news is that the premier scientific agency in the world has officially recognized that the paper that originally presented this data 7 years ago was legit, and their conclusions about warming in the last 2 millenia are real. So, to those who deny the existence of the obvious, shit on science, and make up false dissent from the consensus, suck it. Anyway, visit Real Climate for a nice educated discussion of the results. Or check out the news coverage from NYT, or from science magazine. |
4 Comments:
This is a good article with some global warming solutions.
8:51 AM, June 23, 2006
Pfft.
10:01 AM, June 23, 2006
If you read the actual report, you will find that what they actually concluded is that it is plausible that the past several decades are the warmest in the past 400 years since the start of the Little Ice Age in about 1600. They did not make a conclusion that it is or is not the warmest in 2,000 years. You can read the NAS statement itself in the report at
http://darwin.nap.edu/books/0309102251/html/109.html
1:44 PM, June 23, 2006
I did link to the paper in the post.
I also did read the paper (abstract, conclusions etc., you know, a science read), in that annoying on-at-a-time format they use at NAS. Climate science is a little beyond me. I had to go to realclimate to really get at the significance.
However, I disagree about that particular interpretation. They confirmed the Mann paper was correct, which was the big fuss, and that it was likely that we were at a 2000 year warm point. Apparently there is a great significance attached to the use of likely/plausible/probable etc indicating the various degrees of confidence in the data, however, realclimat was saying they just dropped to the "likely" level rather than trying to do the statistical analysis to justify the higher confidence synonyms.
I had no idea they were so particular about those terms. But I suppose with a field where so much uncertainty infects the data you have to normalize your language to data with such variation.
So, to quote the real climate analysis:
It's unfortunate that the committee did it like this. IPCC authors have spent a lot of time moving towards more precise language when communicating the strength of the belief of expert judgments, and I'd been under the impression that the bulk of the community was following this trend. However, the reversion to poorly defined ambigious language in this report seems to belie that. However, in the case of the 'late 20th C warmer that any period over the millennium' claim, the panel specifically gave roughly 2:1 odds in favour of the statement being true in the press conference and that translates directly to the IPCC 'likely' designation.
I'll go with real climate, they're the experts.
2:37 PM, June 23, 2006
Post a Comment
<< Home