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Forget answering it – can someone explain it?
A typical question from our Dr. Jello:
“Why is it hard for global warming believers to accept that the Antarctic Ice Extent is greater today than at any time in the last 30 years?”
>>Update: Try this experement - Leave a tray of ice cubes on your kitchen counter where it's warmer than your freezer. After an hour, do you have more or less ice in the tray? How do people think that warming temps cause more ice?<<
[the above is included just because it is too damn funny]
>>Update 2: Here's a picture of the Antarctic for those who think there's no ice on the land there –<<
The original graph appears at the URL below under the heading ”Monthly Sea Ice Extent Anomaly Graph.”
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/
Given that the information COMES from “believers” - and is made publicly available by believers - how does someone come to the conclusion that believers find it hard to accept?
Is there a cognitive process that explains why ‘Person A’ might think that using a graph as supporting evidence of something that is not in the graph would convince ‘Person B’ to accept an idea that Person B had already accepted because it was Person B’s idea and Person B was the one who told the idea to Person A.
9 Answers
- Hey DookLv 76 years agoFavorite Answer
RE "Can someone explain it?":
After 1400 "questions" recycling multiple variants each of a hundred prefab questions, which make collectively a good dozen radically different arguments whose main consistency is that they are mostly deliberate anti-science lies, and many of those "questions" -like the one referenced here- are misworded, mispelled, miscopied, and themselves inconsistent, one tends to lose track of everything other than the cultish mania to hate science and fight it feverously.
- ?Lv 76 years ago
AJ -
>>The point is that the ice may has increased in extent but not in volume<<
No – the point (about the original question) is showing a time- series graph of sea ice data and saying that it is a graph land ice data.
==================================
E --
>>Meth is not good for you.<<
Better Living through Chemistry.
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Graphicconception –
>> I still wonder how they can measure sea level to a couple of millimeters from 800 miles away but Antarctic mountains and valleys through three miles of ice with as much as half below sea level ... The mind boggles.<<
That is tide gauge data and you are probably right that the high-frequency signal is too noisy.
>>I used to work in instrumentation. We had no problem pointing a pyrometer at a rotating turbine blade running at about 1000°C with speeds approaching 11,000 rpm. We could always get a read-out - but did we believe it? <<
You probably “accepted” the mean and/or variance from some number of readings as being either in or out of tolerance.
>>My expectation would be that the error bars are of a similar magnitude to the reading when it comes to Antarctic land ice.<<
Certainly true at some scales, but, 68% of Antarctica is covered by ice. That’s over 3.5 million square miles and a lot of ice. You can probably get decent comparative data from large changes in mass.
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linlyons –
>>On the other side, why to "believers" (your term) think as they do? Because that's what more than 90% of scientists, particularly climate scientists,<<
“Believers” is not my term – or in my experience. I was born without a faith-gene. And, I know what climate scientists think – because I was one. I remember when Hansen was the only scientist any of us knew who was not a full-blown skeptic. I even remember when Michael Mann was a skeptic. I also remember the sudden change after the 1997/98 El Nino data were available that left me as one of last two skeptics in our lab – and of all my friends at other labs.
I was attacked by both Al Gore (in the early 1990s) and McIntyre-McKittrick (in the early 2000s) – a difference of 10 years and a million miles; but the most important thing stayed the same - I was following the data and they were not. And it is still the same – climate scientists listen to what their data say; Deniers cannot listen to data – because they cannot find data – because they don’t know what data look like.
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Young --
>>Jello^tm is making a straw man argument. <<
And therein is the essence of my question: What if the arguments have no logic or reason? Is it really a straw man argument if the person making it does not know enough to make a straw man argument?
- 6 years ago
One question you can always ask is: "How do they know that?"
When it comes to Antarctic Ice, how do people know how thick it is?
It is one thing to be able to map the surface level but quite another to map the underlying land.
I still wonder how they can measure sea level to a couple of millimeters from 800 miles away but Antarctic mountains and valleys through three miles of ice with as much as half below sea level ... The mind boggles.
I used to work in instrumentation. We had no problem pointing a pyrometer at a rotating turbine blade running at about 1000°C with speeds approaching 11,000 rpm. We could always get a read-out - but did we believe it?
My expectation would be that the error bars are of a similar magnitude to the reading when it comes to Antarctic land ice.
- campbelp2002Lv 76 years ago
Global warming denial is an article of faith, not science. If the polar ice caps completely melted that would be a natural variation proving nothing. You can't win with them. More hurricanes are proof that there's no warming, so are fewer hurricanes, more and less snow are both natural variations proving nothing. But this is what happens when people leave the world of objective science and lean on faith.
- ?Lv 66 years ago
Because theyre measuring the square kilometer of ic, not the total volume. Ice melts, and the water created, refreezes at the edges of the ice structure. what you get is an overall thinning of the ice. Much like when you take a lump of pizza dough and spread it out. It gets thinner, and wider. Now with Ice, some is lost to melting, and not all of that melt water re-freezes, so you do get an overall loss of mass, but it appears the opposite because the total square footage increases
- Dr JelloLv 76 years ago
Global warming is an article of faith, not science. If the polar ice caps started to cover Canada, that would be proof that the planet was warming. You can't win with them. More hurricanes are proof that there's warming, so are fewer hurricanes, more and less snow are both caused by warming. But this is what happens when people leave the world of objective science and lean on faith.
- Anonymous6 years ago
sure. he is a denier. there is no intent in learning
- Anonymous6 years ago
Meth is not good for you.