No One Can Predict Future Climate, So Stop the Scaremongering
"... the point is if your chart cannot be distinguished from one generated by a random walk, then you have no reason to put any faith in the patterns you see in it."
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@sda Models of the future arent needed to know one simple and undeniable fact. Never in the history of life on this planet has climate ever changes as quickly as it currently is.
It is undeniable from this simply truth that climate change is real, undeniable, and serious. Any inability to create accurate models of the future is irrelevant to that truth since it is a statement about the present and the past not about the future.
@freemo
First line of the article:
Two years ago, climate scientist Ed Hawkins created what he called “warming stripes” to demonstrate global warming “undeniably,” in the hopes of, “triggering a change of attitude that will lead to mass action."
@sda Ed's image was not of the future. It was a visualization of past data.. So whats the issue. Are you suggesting the data was incorrect, it has been verified and clearly isnt. Random walks also clearly show more randomness than his diagrams.. so still not sure I understand the point here
@freemo
The point is that the author makes a valid point:
The warming stripes do not communicate science, they rely on a well-known human bias to see patterns in random walks. This is the same bias exploited by many investment charlatans, and it is dispiriting to see it win awards for science communication.
@sda Well yes and no.. It isnt science, it wasnt meant to be. Science requires a lot of expert knowledge to understand and is thus not accessible to the commoner. It was intended to be a visualization of data that, while not science, does help visualize the very real global warming we are all suffering from.
Also your claim that it is indistinguishable from a random walk is patently false. In fact if you look at the link you shared it is rather obvious that the random walks are random walks and look very different from the actual data. The actual data shows a clear upward trend. The random walks show up and down peaks with bigger alternating stripes of color.
The very basis of the whole post seems invalid.
@sda yea sadly with issues like this the biggest obsticle is how can we make less educated people aware of the scientific fact of climate change without exposing them to actually learning the science. That isnt an easy task. Stuff like this is probably a decent way to do that.
@freemo
Well... Like giving Obama the Peace Prize before he'd been in office 10 months, and then he goes and launches 10x the drone strikes (or was it 10x "collateral damage?") that Bush did.
Giving an award for "scientific communication" that wasn't in the least bit scientific is just... wrong.
@sda Id say data visualization is a part of science even if doing the visualization on its own is not enough to constitute a scientific endeavor.
@sda What scientist did that? Usually if a scientist posts a model they include error rates. Assuming the scientist passed peer review the actual results tend to be within that error rate.