Well, they’ve accurately predicted quite a lot, including rising atmospheric temperatures, warming oceans, etc. You don’t seem to notice except when a prediction turns out to be inaccurate.
Also, what you describe as “excuses for why all the past predictions failed” appears to be what scientists call “modifications to a hypothesis in order to better model observed results”; or in other words, “doing science”.
The only way to make future predictions more accurate is to re-examine scientific models and propose “excuses”, i.e., explanations, for why past predictions failed. You seem to believe instead that climate scientists ought to be magically attaining accurate predictions a priori without needing any empirical process of trial and error. That’s not really the way science works.
It’s true that trends in Antarctic sea ice are not yet fully explained by climate models, although variousexplanations have recently been proposed for them. But there’s nothing about them that somehow automatically invalidates other science concerning climate change.
I agree with your sentiments in general, but I’d put more credibility in this study published in Nature than on those hypotheses with respect to Antarctic sea ice. In any case, the important point that is always confused in the mass media and in denialist diatribes is the really fundamental difference between the Antarctic land-based continental ice sheet and the seasonal sea ice.
Wow. By this “logic”, I’m generating new scientific evidence against the global warming hypothesis every time I fill an additional ice cube tray and put it in my freezer. Hey, there’s more ice now than there used to be, right? That must mean that the planet’s getting colder! Hurray, I’ve demonstrated that global warming is a myth! Cancel the red alert, everybody, crisis averted!
…Or maybe, y’know, terrestrial thermodynamics is complicated enough that on some smaller scale—be it the size of my refrigerator or the size of the coastal waters surrounding the Antarctic landmass—it’s possible to have a temporary net increase of ice amounts even though the planet as a whole is getting warmer in the long term.
Stunningly counterintuitive, I know, but that’s science for you.
either they’re accurate or they’re not. You can’t have it both ways. “Well gosh some of them are accurate” is not an argument, it’s an excuse.
Great, come back when you can accurately predict it. It gets really old listening to a chorus of “the sky is falling” followed by “we’re getting better all the time at being wrong and there’s a valid reason why”.
Not only are the models often wrong (for valid reasons here-to-for unknown) but they don’t take into consideration the technological advances being made.
Thanks for the terrific scientific explanation. Moving on with the facts, we see that Scientists Report Faster Warming in Antarctica. And I also wonder whether you understand the distinction between the Antarctic ice sheet and the seasonal sea ice, and what you think might happen when coastal waters are inundated with meltwater from the receding ice sheets which has a higher freezing point than the normal seawater. Do facts ever matter to you at all?
Incidentally, knowing how cold the south pole was to begin with, even the world warming a few degrees would not mean much for the surface ice over there. The point however that the loss of ice in the arctic is much more than the gain observed in the Antarctic, and still there, as pointed out, there are areas that are not doing so well.
So you really think that a scientific model can’t be partly correct and partly incorrect? You’d condemn all of Newtonian classical mechanics, for example, because there are still some flaws in the way its lunar theory models certain highly sensitive perturbations in the moon’s orbit?
Science is emphatically not an all-or-nothing, “accurate or not” enterprise. It’s a process of refining theoretical quantitative approximations so that over time they do a better job of modeling observed phenomena. There is no magical transition point at which a scientific hypothesis transforms from idle speculation into utter reliability.
If you mean that you decline to take climate science seriously until its models can predict precisely what we’re going to observe in every possible manifestation of climate phenomena, then you’ve just removed yourself from the realm of rational debate. Your great-grandchildren will be long dead by the time climate science models can predict everything determinable about climate systems. (And, of course, that’s not even taking into account the fact that many things about chaotic dynamical systems such as climate will always remain by their very nature impossible to predict in a deterministic way.)
For one thing, you seem unaware that climate-change predictions do involve considering different scenarios incorporating different possible technological impacts in the future (in both mitigation and reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions), so the idea that models aren’t considering technological advances is simply wrong.
For another, you seem unaware that a lot of climate-change predictions are focused on the impacts of anthropogenic changes that have already been made. Even if by some miraculous means we never added another part-per-million of CO2 to the earth’s atmosphere ever again, there is a hell of a lot of science required to figure out how the atmospheric changes already made are going to affect climate systems in the coming decades and centuries.
But no, I didn’t read the whole article because I’m familiar with the original research. There are in fact a lot of geographical and seasonal variations, and there are even isolated areas where land ice mass has increased. But the overall evidence, as one might expect from the global trends, is warming, and there is overall loss of ice mass from the continental ice sheet. So your statement that “there’s more ice because it’s colder” is, I am afraid, unsubstantiated bullshit.
Incidentally, contrarians always forget about the volume, that is why they like to stick with the surface area, but even there there is not much for them to grab on.
Thanks for forgetting what the discussion was about. Your statement was “there is more sea ice because it’s colder”. That is categorically false. The Antarctic is clearly losing land ice mass as I showed, and the balance of evidence is that it’s warmer overall, not colder. Sea ice is seasonal and the reasons that more of it can form during the winter months have already been discussed. Reading a few scientific papers like the two I linked would go a long way toward improving your understanding and might help to stem some of your denialist-fueled misconceptions.
This may be the single most wrong-headed remark I have ever heard. The reason we speak of a paradox is because it’s not colder. It’s warmer. But of course, there’d *have *to be a strict correlation between temperature and ice extent…
…In a continent constantly locked at temperatures far below zero. Once you have successfully removed your foot from your mouth, please leave the thread until you actually have a damned clue what you’re on about.
Good luck getting through with that sort of logic. First it’s cold leads to more ice, the next thing you know cold will lead to colder winters, then more snow, there is no stopping how crazy things will get.
You have to keep in mind that warming means colder, and more ice means it’s warming.
Or you could look at the evidence, which clearly shows the great bulk of Antarctica is cooling, and has been for a while now.
Hahaha. Please leave the thread because you don’t agree with Budget Player Cadet. Seriously? The last time I checked, you can’t have a debate without an opposing viewpoint. A debate without an opposing viewpoint is a speech.
