Thursday, April 07, 2016

99.9% of Nations Accept that Human Influence on Climate Is Today Dominant


Well, the 97% wars have never stopped, but Joe Romm gives it a try
The overwhelming majority of climate scientists — over 97 percent — understand that humans are the primary cause of climate change. This is one of the central facts about human-caused climate change that any climate communicator needs to keep repeating, for several reasons. 
First, it’s true, as Politifact detailed on Monday. The scientific literature is clear on this.
but Joe gets something completely wrong a couple of times in the post
The thing is, by 2013, the IPCC’s summary of the science — which are notoriously conservative in part because they require line-by-line approval by every major country in the world — concluded. “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”
 That should read
The thing is, by 2013, the IPCC’s summary of the science — which are notoriously conservative in part because they require line-by-line approval by every major country in the world — concluded. “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”
Somebunny want to list any countries that did not approve that statement?  And, of course the unanimous approval of the text in the Paris COP21 meeting of 191 countries is a small hint


14 comments:

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

The nice thing about Joe's 99% gambit is that you don't need to know if there is any for his well-framed statement to be true .

As surely as humans are responsible for 99% of anthropogenic climate change, they are responsible for 100% of tautology.

Bryson said...

Where did you find the word 'anthropogenic' in the cited statement? I can only guess it's a misreading of the sentence, "This is one of the central facts about human-caused climate change that any climate communicator needs to keep repeating, for several reasons." Read in context this clearly doesn't mean what you take it to mean... I'd say making an issue of it by reading it as saying trivially that humans are responsible for anthropogenic climate change, when the statements discussed and proposed clearly don't say this is an idle language game. (As a philosopher, I don't have much trouble noticing those when they come along.)

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Welcome to the philosophy of climate show !

Come for the semantic aggression ( disconnecting " human influence" from "anthropogenic") and stay for the tautology.

As a matter of long practice, Joe & Jim want to blame discrete consequences on anthropogenic causes.

Fine , but natural and human forcings are so profoundly, indeed entropically, entangled and Jim Joe , and the manifesto writing and petition signing classes in general do not posess any privileged non-physical means of deconvoluting the set of causes operating on the climate system because none exists.

Biology got over Vis vita , and climate science doesn't need any more rigid designators in the null set.

EliRabett said...


Eli, of course, is a helpful bunny and has arranged for a google search on anthropogenic

EliRabett said...

Of course, if that were but a POE, perhaps not

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

I once hoped that Climate Progress was a poe, but it turned out to be a Podesta.

BBD said...

99.9% of Nations accept...

As Mr Cohen said, Everybody knows.

In that sort of way.

John said...

Let's do that calculation..

99.9% x 191 = 190.8

so how many nations didn't s sign?

0.2 nations

Hunh?? What is 0.2 of a nation? Vatican city?? Which is a few acres of office space in downtown Rome.

Actually, I think the Vatican has signed with the consensus.

Something not quite right about the math here..

Are they counting the denialist think tanks as a fraction of a nation??

Bryson said...

Russell, your jibe turns on taking a phrase from one sentence and imposing it as as qualification on what another says, when what the other says is clear as it is. On another note, one interesting climate issue from a philosophical perspective is the epistemology of denial-- examples like climate change (and creationism/ 'intelligent design, too) are good test beds for reflecting on the difference between evidence-based reasoning and 'reasoning' aimed at avoiding undesirable conclusions.

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

The declension you seem to be evading is :

We socially construct statistical arguments
He make things up.

Climate advocates play to public credulity as much as climate deniers, and both often end up believig their own propaganda.

Bryson said...

A nice combination of changing the subject and false equivalence.

Kevin O'Neill said...

Russel writes: "Climate advocates play to public credulity as much as climate deniers..."

One, this is an assertion that has no evidence to back it up. Most climate advocates actually just repeat scientific findings; in fact, most of the time it's the lack of scientific understanding that leads deniers astray. Rather than appealing to anyone's credulity most climate advocates expect the science to speak for itself.

Two, there is a difference in appealing to credulity based on factual evidence and logical reasoning versus just making shit up or feeding people what they want to hear despite its distance from the truth. While there are many on the denier side that are simply ignorant and/or incapable of understanding the science, there are many pseudoskeptics that were they made by Geppetto would have noses 3 ft long.

P.S. clearly the statement was not tautological; it was speaking of the 97% consensus - not the fact that AGW is human-caused.

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

"there is a difference in appealing to credulity based on factual evidence and logical reasoning versus just making shit up "

Sounds rather like the presidential primaries

Anonymous said...

The nice thing about Russell's countergambit is that he can shift from tautologies to rigid designators as if he could waive he hands in all the possible worlds at the same time.

If that does not suffice, there's always teh stoopid modulz frame.