Climate Science Glossary

Term Lookup

Enter a term in the search box to find its definition.

Settings

Use the controls in the far right panel to increase or decrease the number of terms automatically displayed (or to completely turn that feature off).

Term Lookup

Term:

Settings

Beginner Intermediate Advanced No Definitions Definition Life:

All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

Recent Comments

Comments 27351 to 27400:

PhilippeChantreau at 17:13 PM on 12 October 2015

NASA Retirees Appeal to their Own Lack of Climate Authority

We are erring on the side of off-topic but since moderators are allowing, I'll follow up. Your humingbird analogy is inappropriate and you qualification of car accident is equally wrong. You don't understand the initial analogy because because you fail to graps the significance of the risk at the scale of an individual vs a population.

You say car accidents are a routine every day occurrence. They are at the level of a population, but not at that of the individual experiencing the accident. For the immense majority of people involved in accidents, they are an extremely rare occurrence. Some find them rare enough that they are confident that it won't happen to them and dispense of insurance. Most people, however do get insurance, not because of the likelihood of the event, but because of dangers involved. For any given person, car accidents are not routine at all. They cause trauma, physical and psychological. They can have very serious consequences, often life changing, and always put a nasty wrench in people's plans.

The initial analogy was about the thought process of an individual assessing his risk and need for an insurance. The probability of the occurrence is low but the implications of it are very significant. Furthermore, the probability is not that low if one looks at the actual numbers, and any individual knows the results of accidents. Therefore, purchasing the insurance is a no-brainer.

At the level of the world population, we need to do the same risk assessment. The people who recently died in floods in the SE US and in France certainly would agree that risk assessment is in order if they could still do so. The fact that most of the New Orleans levees were topped over during Kathrina, the enormous storm surge leading to seawater flooding the NY subway during Sandy, the heat wave in Moscow, the fires in Australia, all these are very real and were either predicted by scientists, or are fully consistent with the theory. We have already reached the level of a continuous background of climate related adverse events. People do die from them and the damages total in the billions.

This makes your hummingbird analogy even more wrong than its sheer absurdity could. We're not talking about a remote risk, dependent on a far fecthed theory at all. We're talking about risk that has already materialized as predicted. We're talking about occurrences happening on a regular basis. How many 1000 years type of events do we need in a decade year for you to understand? How many in a single year?

Your "extreme" mumbo jumbo is completely irrelevant. Responding to future risks identical to some that have already materialized does not constitute extreme risk aversion by any stretch of the imagination. Hence the question about what is extreme, which was in fact entirely justified.

To get back on topic, you still have not come close to demonstrating that the NASA retirees that are the subject of the OP have done a true in-depth examination of the science.

Tom Curtis at 17:08 PM on 12 October 2015

NASA Retirees Appeal to their Own Lack of Climate Authority

zoo58 @62:

"How does one decide whether someone's opinion matters or not?"

1) Your opinion does not matter if you set unrealizable standards for those whose opinion you disagree with. Thus when the letter writers write:

"We, the undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites."

if by "unproven" they mean lacking deductive proof, they set up an unrealistic standard in that no scientific statement can possibly be proved deductively. Of course, if they are not setting up so unrealistic a standard, NASA already complies with their request in that their public statements on climate are back by comprehensive evidence.

2) Your opinion does not matter if your argument depends essentially on applying a restrictive standard on those you disagree with that you do not accept for yourself. On this count, the NASA contrarian signatories clearly fail. They make numerous claims regarding matters of fact in the letter, and provide not even a single refference in support, let alone "proof". They expect us to take their claim, for example, that NASA's public statements on climate amount to "unbridled advocacy of CO2" on their authority alone. They do not even cite their qualifications to prove their authority, so that we are expected to accept mere interns (Thomas Wysmuller) as authorative simply because they were employed by NASA.

In stark contrast, the public statements by NASA are backed be extensive peer reviewed literature - much of which is available free to the public on the NASA website.

Indeed, it is plain that you also do not accept the standard demanded of NASA. You write, "As distinguished people with related skills and education who have attempted to conduct a non-biased and in-depth examination of the evidence ..." but offer not evidence that all or any have either or both of "related skills and education", that they are "unbiased", or that they have conducted any review of the evidence. Nor will you be able to for such a review is not to be found from most (if not all) of the authors of the letter; and description of NASA's statements as "advocacy" and "extreme" shows without doubt that they are biased.

Tom Curtis at 16:24 PM on 12 October 2015

NASA Retirees Appeal to their Own Lack of Climate Authority

zoo58 @71, in your comment @68 you write:

"The risk analysis involved in something as big as climate change (it truly impacts everything on this planet) is really, truly, extremely complex."

If, as you insist, we shoud interpret your earlier use of "extreme" ("Risk aversion taken to the extreme...") to mean "utter extreme", we must do the same here. Transparently that is not the case, however. Climate, while extremely complex, is not so complex as the action of the brain, the interaction of genes to generate life, or even sociology or psychology. Yet surely your second use emphasises the extremity of the case far more than your first.

We can take home from this that you are mistaken in claiming that your first usage is "...not according to my definition, according to the standard definition of the term...", as your second usage is valid but does not comply with your interpretation of the definition. Your inconsistent usage shows that you do not in fact believe your extremist interpretation of the dictionary definition.

Regardless of your usage, of course, it could simply be pointed out that you have taken one of five senses of the word "extreme" (the fourth sense given) and reified to to be the only usage of the term (at least when it suites your argument). That is, "Risk aversion taken to the extreme" need only mean risk aversion taken to "great or exaggerated lengths" (sense 1b) or risk aversion "exceeding the ordinary, usual, or expected" lengths (sense 1c).

In scientific terms the later woud be glossed as "risk aversion in the upper 5%ile of the population" and the amount of risk aversion needed would be dependent on the distribution of risk aversion in the population. As it is not true that 5% of the population is so risk averse that they never do anything, that also means your original claim is not true.

Climate Science Glossary

Term Lookup

Settings

Term Lookup

Settings

Latest Posts

Recent Comments