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Ebone4rock
SFN Regular

USA
894 Posts

Posted - 10/19/2010 :  09:28:49  Show Profile Send Ebone4rock a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Another example of why the whole climate change debate is so damned confusing to me.

Fuzzy Critter Piss

For example, current climate models suggest that, as the Northern Hemisphere became drier about 5,500 years ago, the Southern Hemisphere got wetter. But traces in the hyrax-urine samples suggest that the southern part of Africa also dried out during this period, according to a paper by the team published in the July 2010 issue of Quaternary Research.

"If the model can't simulate the past. ... how much trust do we have in its ability to predict the future?" study leader Chase said.



Who are we laypeople supposed to beleive? Whenever I do any research I just come across contradiction from supposedly reliable sources.


Haole with heart, thats all I'll ever be. I'm not a part of the North Shore society. Stuck on the shoulder, that's where you'll find me. Digging for scraps with the kooks in line. -Offspring

filthy
SFN Die Hard

USA
14408 Posts

Posted - 10/19/2010 :  11:49:02   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send filthy a Private Message  Reply with Quote
A lot of the science is so arcane that few outside it's field fully understand it. I certainl6y don't.

But hey, right or wrong, all we have to do is wait....




"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)

"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres


"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude

Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,

and Crypto-Communist!

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astropin
SFN Regular

USA
970 Posts

Posted - 10/19/2010 :  13:40:28   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send astropin a Private Message  Reply with Quote
The best we can do is look at the "consensus" of the truly qualified climatologists.

I would rather face a cold reality than delude myself with comforting fantasies.

You are free to believe what you want to believe and I am free to ridicule you for it.

Atheism:
The result of an unbiased and rational search for the truth.

Infinitus est numerus stultorum
Edited by - astropin on 10/19/2010 13:50:05
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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26022 Posts

Posted - 10/19/2010 :  18:04:43   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Judging from the abstract (which isn't much to go on, but I don't have $31.50 to spare for this), the researchers have found a couple of mechanisms of climate forcing that weren't deemed "important" in current models, and which suggest that the northern and southern hemispheres get wet and dry out at the same time, rather than one getting wet while the other dries out. These changes occur over centuries of time, and the predictions they're talking about would wind up being modified in terms of the times the events occur, not that they won't occur at all, and certainly not "hey, the globe isn't warming after all."

This would be equivalent to the relatively recent shift in biology away from selection being the major driver of evolutionary change and instead focusing more on genetic drift. That didn't overturn evolutionary theory as a whole, no matter how much creationists tried to turn it into a huge "controversy." As with creationism, global climate change denial is a "manufactrovery," in which relatively innocuous problems are built up into huge straw men where the science is on the verge of collapse. The easiest way to not be confused is to ignore anyone who suggests that tens of thousands of scientists need to find new careers because they've been totally wrong.

Also, I would be very wary of that elision in the quote from Chase. Popular science reporting aims for attention grabbing more than accuracy, and it'd be nice to know what he was actually saying, instead of the snippet that Nat Geo has given us. Not a few scientists have been complaining, recently, about what the popular press has reported about their research, about climate change and other fields. See this comic:



(Don't forget to click to the original, and hover over the red button.)

- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too.
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