(th)ink by Keith Knight for May 15, 2015

Notice: This cartoon not available to Florida residents, by order of the governor.

Ha!! Not in Texas or California!!

faster than previously thought? is that what they really said? it was all a big guess? come on, people… no wonder you have skeptics out there when you use that kind of language. kind of like the himalayas are melting slower than previously thought.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2015/05/19/updated-nasa-data-polar-ice-not-receding-after-all/2/

Just like all of the climate alarmist scientists are paid liars. hmmm.

If you are interested in knowing how one does this, Google is your friend. Here is a good, simple explanation from National Geographic. For a slightly more involved, but still quite understandable article, check this one out from Gizmodo. For some extra information, as well as some data points, you can see this site from the NOAA, one of those agencies that does the measuring.

Very short answer: There are tide gauges all over the world, supplemented by satellites. In the US, the gauges are checked every hour, and these figures are averaged over the course of 19 years to take into account the gravitational effects of the Moon. And what these measurements are showing is a very clear trend of sea level rise. There is no appreciable scientific debate over whether this rise is happening, not even from the tiny number of climate scientists who are paid shills for the fossil fuels industry.

You apparently have no sense of the importance of trend lines. If the line is going up continuously, even with the statistical +/-at a given single point of data, then, for instance, we can say with certainty that sea levels are rising. Which all evidence points to. It’s the same sort of the thing that happens with things like tracing inflation in the economy. Your wishful obfuscation does nothing to change the facts or the math of the matter.

Considering that I’m not in fact a professional climate scientist nor an oceanographer, I’ll leave it up to them to do. Which they’ve done a ton of, and shown a ton of their work. Take that or leave it. Unless, maybe you have your very own set of measurements that you’d like to show the work for? In fact, since you seem to be arguing against the overwhelming scientific consensus, I would say it’s much more incumbent upon you to do so. Until then, you have no leg to tread water with. (I also find it curious that you would try to tell someone not to use a very clear metaphor as a way of clarifying a point for those who might not be very statistically literate.) You can claim that what you are doing is not obfuscatory, but by trying to manufacture a nonexistent controversy regarding measurements, that is in fact what you are doing. That you claim not to be just makes the disingenuousness of what you are doing all the clearer.

It’s less about getting through to these specific characters, and more about making sure that the many other folks perusing these forums aren’t just inundated with denialist drivel.

Thanks for those links, ahab.

Are you saying that tides and sea level are the same thing? They aren’t.

I’ve just been reading another pretty interesting book: “How Not to be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking” by Jordan Ellenberg. The title is a little misleading — almost all the math is statistics or math closely related to statistics. The questions discussed range from the mathematics of lotteries to public opinion polls to preferential voting systems to medical statistics of various sorts. I wouldn’t put it quite as high as I put Kahneman, but it’s pretty good. And certainly more fun that most statistics books.

After all this, you can’t be bothered to show any of your own work or math. Just another demonstration that you aren’t being intellectually honest about any of this, and of your strong bias in the face of an avalanche of data. You’ve proven yourself quite adept at straws-clutching, though.

& @martens misses all her friends

Careful, you two. Someone’s liable to learn something around here.

You don’t have to predict the distance between Boston Harbor and the Chelsea Street Bridge, you can measure it.I would take your position more seriously if you could show that you understand a few basic distinctions:tide versus sea levelevent versus stateprediction versus measurement

The skeptics don’t help themselves when they can’t make coherent arguments.

Baslim and martens are far better at anything scientific than I am, and I defer to their expertise. But here’s my two cents, anyway. If I have a bucket of water, I don’t have to predict how deep the water is, I can stick a ruler into it and measure. If I slosh the water around, however, I don’t know in advance how far up the side of the bucket it’s going to slosh; I can make a prediction, but it may not be very accurate. Once I’ve sloshed it, I can tell how far it sloshed by seeing where the side of the bucket is wet. When the water at rest in the bucket it’s a state; it’s relatively stable, and it can’t be measured. The sloshing is an event; it involves change over time. Some events can be predicted with a lot of accuracy, some can’t. For example, if I have a hose putting water into the bucket in a regular flow, I can predict over time what the water level will be. And once an event has occurred, often you can measure what happened. Sea level is a state, and it can be measured. A tide is an event, and it’s affected by a number of variables, so it’s not always easy to predict the extent of any particular tide. But once the tide has occurred, you can measure it.

I hope you realise you’re being “taught” rather than “told” on this thread. Up to you how to take it.

Me, I’m happy to admit I’m learning from this thread.

@omQ RIn this case instead discussing the Sahara Dessert…. here we are discussing the ocean… and after all “The ocean is a desert with it’s life underground And a perfect disguise above”

We are still talking about water. I think the Sahara just didn’t get its just desserts, which was precipitation.

The basic point is that there are four different situations:1. measuring today’s tide2. predicting next week’s tide3. measuring today’s sea leve4. predicting the sea level in 50 yearsThese are all different. Each has it’s own problems and solutions, it’s own level of accuracy and confidence. If you don’t show that you understand the differences, there’s no point discussing it with you.

Those seem like excellent questions. From what I can tell, the answers are complicated. That’s not so strange, a lot of science is pretty complicated. I remember once when I asked the astronomer Carl Sagan a question at a bug pubic meeting, and he his answer, though more polite, came down to “Take a good astronomy course.” But I did a little poking around, and I came up with some sites that looked good to me. Here’s the wiki article on Tide:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TideAnd here’s a passage from the article:“Current procedure for analysing tides follows the method of harmonic analysis introduced in the 1860s by William Thomson. It is based on the principle that the astronomical theories of the motions of sun and moon determine a large number of component frequencies, and at each frequency there is a component of force tending to produce tidal motion, but that at each place of interest on the Earth, the tides respond at each frequency with an amplitude and phase peculiar to that locality. At each place of interest, the tide heights are therefore measured for a period of time sufficiently long (usually more than a year in the case of a new port not previously studied) to enable the response at each significant tide-generating frequency to be distinguished by analysis, and to extract the tidal constants for a sufficient number of the strongest known components of the astronomical tidal forces to enable practical tide prediction. The tide heights are expected to follow the tidal force, with a constant amplitude and phase delay for each component. Because astronomical frequencies and phases can be calculated with certainty, the tide height at other times can then be predicted once the response to the harmonic components of the astronomical tide-generating forces has been found.”This is also relevant:http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/kits/tides/tides10_oldmeasure.htmland this:http://omp.gso.uri.edu/ompweb/doee/science/physical/citide2.htmand this is very good on measuring sea level.But I return to the basic point. Whatever the complications of the science may be, predicting tides is not the same as measuring the sea level, and the uncertainties in predicting the tides are not the same as the uncertainties in measuring sea level.

Are you asking these questions because you’re actually curious? If so, folks here have given you a ton of leads with which to teach yourself.

Or are you passively-aggressively trying to impeach the work of whole rafts of scientists and technicians?

Or are you engaging in a game of trolling?

Since you’re so full of questions yourself, maybe you can at least answer these tiny, non-technical ones.

“Troll” is a word that other use to silence the opinions of other…

Troll is also an accurate descriptor of behaviors on the internet. And notice that I didn’t declare you such. I actually wanted to know, based on your repetitive questions in the face of plenty of references to places that could give you quite extensive explanations of everything Baslim and martens especially have been saying. Also, I based my question on a repetitively pedantic tone coming through your posts.

I asked technical questions and you ask non-technical question back…

I’ve been leaving the technical answers to the aforementioned Baslim and martens, as I am not a climate scientist (which maybe you forgot I said waaaaayyyyy back toward the beginning of this thread). But the questions I asked you are quite relevant to the process of the discussion of climate change overall, particularly as there is a rather well-funded crowd whose business it is to muddy the waters as much as they can.

would you like to give the set of four questions a try?

Nope. As I’ve mentioned, martens and Baslim are doing a bang-up job in that regard. Why be redundant?

I have lived on the water for 50 years. The sea level has not risen 1 inch.

Thanks for these links. Quite interesting and useful.

Has Gresch ever actually indicted that s/he knows the difference between prediction and measurement? Or between tide and sea level? There’s been a lot of going off in other directions, and demands for this and that, such as a complete course in oceanography right now in two paragraphs, but I don’t think I’ve seen any direct reply to those points.

I have gone through the links and have found them lacking…

Since you’re so enamored of specifics, please be specific as to how you find them lacking. And please back up those specifics with sound measurements and scientific evidence. In other words, please show your work.