[mablap]

If you think this is not science, your conception of what science is is flawed. People deny anthropogenic global warming because they don't want to look at the details, take the time to really understand the issues.

Most people have no clue about anything going on around them except for what pays the bills (and even then). I was listening to some random radio host telling how "stupid" doctors and healthcare administrators are, that we should be concentrating our efforts on "prevention" rather than fitting a brand new hip onto a 96 year old person. He then went on to cite cancer patients in particular: we should not cure cancer, we should prevent it. His recommendation? "Preventative" MRI and SCANs for everybody over 30, because these would help "detect cancer" earlier.

I don't have to explain to you how clueless that man is/was. But there you have it. The general population is clueless about everything and people speak out of their asses all the time. So in a sense, you were right, but it's the other way around: the problem is politics and human nature, not science.

[dxhdr]

> People deny anthropogenic global warming because they don't want to look at the details

There's a reasonable argument that we're fairly clueless about how most natural systems actually work. I heard recently that plate tectonics wasn't even a theory until the 70s! It's a tricky situation because the political aspect of global warming is both the only way to solve it and the thing getting in the way of it being solved.

I think people intuitively understand that science doesn't have this figured out. Which isn't to say the science is wrong! But papering over those gaps in knowledge by immediately ascribing all data to global warming does more to hurt the cause than help. It's easy to be a skeptic when there are so many low quality articles like this being produced.

[sgt101]

Agree. I think that this is further driven by two factors in the discovery system.

First Scientists are (I think) moral. So they find some evidence for AGW and then think "oh gosh if this is true my kids are going to have a problem" and then try to raise the profile of the topic to (essentially) help their kids out. On issues like "dog tooth growth" there is no driving moral imperative and so no tree shaking.

The other factor is money, scientists are human. Scientists need grants, appealing to politicians gets grants, stirring up news media gets grants. There has been a lot of grant getting in this space - the top 5% of folks working in the field have got grants in the most professional, highly targetted and useful way possible. The 5% worst applications funded, not so much.

However, this process is all about getting the science done - it seems to me as an outsider that the science has moved from not done but in the news to mostly done but roped around with personal positions, sacred cows and so on (like all science). I think that practitioners in the field think this too as they still want to work in it. In contrast I was will one of the leading Quantum Physicists a few weeks ago, I understood very little of what was said but smiled when he announced "I'm not working in Quantum Computing now as the theory is all done"! Compare...

The problem isn't the professional, ethical and well supported by science messages being put out by most AGW people now; it's the wild (probably correct, but wild) assertions that came out 15 years ago. These were slammed and unpicked by skeptics, leaving a residue of mistrust.

Unfortunately without one (assertion, flap) you don't get the other. This is where Feynman was wrong - PR does sometimes trump (geddit?) nature.

No one seems to be thinking about how Science should accommodate and learn from this. Which, given the Scientific method, is odd.

[acqq]

> It's easy to be a skeptic when there are so many low quality articles like this

It isn't "low quality."

This article reports about the current weather conditions, it was not intended to "prove" anything about the cause of climate change. You expect from the news article something that nobody can give you (understanding of the causes) unless you have the capability and the wish to acquire it.

When the weather conditions reach all-time high, it's news. Especially if it matches the much longer trend.

See my other post here for the links to the graphs with the context.

[mablap]

    There's a reasonable argument that we're fairly clueless
    about how most natural systems actually work.

That's kind of my point. To a certain extent you are right that everybody, including scientists, are "clueless". BUT there's a huge difference in attitude between a scientist and Random Joe. That difference is politics. The scientist looks at the data, formulates hypotheses, asks tough questions, etc. Random Joe reads one article and his mind's made up.

[vivekd]

Hold on a second, even given that global warming exists, there is no way this warm period is caused by global warming because you can't equate local weather to general climate.

The fact that the arctic or any region is experiencing warmer than usual weather lately doesn't mean that climate change is happening or that the weather is a result of climate change.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-sk...

[sgt101]

No, it doesn't.

The causality is unidirectional; there is no entailment in the sense that a period like this could occur without global warming or without global warming effects being responsible for this particular episode.

However, the prior probability of this event is influenced by the warming of the system overall. The expectation that an event like this will occur in a given season is higher if you have a warmed planet than not.

That doesn't mean that it will happen, or that if it happens it's because of global warming. If there is global warming this event is more likely and should be expected more often.

[acqq]

> there is no way this warm period is caused by global warming because you can't equate local weather to general climate

No. There's no way that some warm or cold period can only be caused by global warming (or that it can disprove it). Since thevformer are extremes at the specific point in time, the later is the trend (averages, compared year-to-year).

But some period can be so extreme that it's a big news if it breaks the records compared to all previous measurements. This is the case this time. If it breaks the records in the direction of the trend, it can point to trend getting even stronger. You won't know if the trend actually got stronger until you make new averages, but it is worrying enough.

To compare with something you know: you drive every day 1 hour between two places. You know that your speed at some specific point in time never gets under some value, for example, you never had to stop. If you stop somewhere and wait 1 minute, it doesn't mean you won't have chance to speed up and still get on time. The average can still be the same. You'll know when you're there. But if you day to day have to wait, first day 1 minute, the next 2 minutes, after some number of days you can know that you can't think "maybe I'll still be on time" when you break the wait "record" of all previous days. Now, the climate is one level above: it's not even how fast is one car but how fast are all cars everywhere, if we speak about the whole Earth climate. That's why the denier claiming "but I feel I drove this small route here faster" (i.e. "it seems warm in my town now," not even comparing the actual historical measuremens) is not disproving "it's warmer every year on the whole planet."

The averages are here:

https://tamino.wordpress.com/2017/01/18/global-temperature-t...

[Oletros]

But when a region so huge as the Artic or the Antartic have a trend of increasing temperatures we can start to think that there is a change

[aaron695]

The article specifically states this is a normal occurrence.

It happened 100 years ago, it happened one thousand years ago.

It ponders perhaps it's happening more often, but brings no evidence to the table on this possibility while reporting on this natural occurrence.

If you think this is science, to use examples that have always happened to convince people of change, your conception of what science is is very very flawed.

And my point is, climate deniers can see this. They see through this fake pulp for the masses (I mean seriously the article even admits it's a normal occurrence) and use this to reinforce their opposite cult views.

[mod]

I don't think his point is that global warming study is not science, rather that no science is presented in the article (or the part he quoted, anyway).

An outlying temperature is just one data point, and on its own it doesn't really open the door to reliably talk about global warming.

[mynegation]

Honest question about MRIs and scans: why is it clueless? I understand that implication is they are not effective (?)

[mablap]

Here's some food for thought:

What type of cancers are you talking about? What subtype? What population are we talking about? What subpopulation? What is the difference between an early diagnostic and prevention? Are CTs and MRIs the right tool for the job? Who is most at risk? How often do you screen your target population? How do you make sure they actually come and do the exams? How do you measure success? Are you ready to deal with the outcomes of the diagnosis?

These are just basic questions really. Some people devote their entire life to these hard topics. The radio host sounded like an "expert" with "great ideas" to an equally clueless audience when really he just has no idea.

[obstinate]

At some point, the scan has a higher likelihood of finding a false positive than a true positive. Interventions on false positives can themselves cause harm, both psychological and physical.

[vidarh]

If we ignore the fact that they obviously are not preventative (they can't find a cancer that doesn't exist yet...), and as such it's rather silly to present it as an alternative to treatment, there are still a multitude of issues:

- Early detection, for the sake of argument assuming that the proposed screening program would in fact be effective or could be adjusted to be effective, does not always improve survival rates. There is a diminishing rate of return from pushing the detection earlier and earlier.

- Any screening needs to deal with false positives. Telling someone they may have cancer leads to suffering, and may in some cases trigger more serious effects. E.g. consider someone suicidal who is told they may have cancer, and decides to end it. Or "just" decides to engage in more high risk behaviours, increasing risk of harm. And for something that is rare, even a very small rate of false positives during large scale screening might cause disproportionate suffering, and might end up causing significant harm.

- False positives require further investigation, and if not ruled out with reasonably low impact methods like biopsies may result in over-treatment. This is particularly serious for cancer, where many of the treatment alternatives have a substantial risk of causing death.

- The screening also needs to deal with false negatives. Someone who is told they don't display any symptoms of cancer may pay less attention to signs later on, and may end up discovering their cancer later than they otherwise would, increasing risk of death.

All of these affect overall outcomes, and you need to tally up the effects of all of them before you can say if a screening program will be overall positive or overall negative.

One outcome of actually analysing this, for example, has been a push towards ending large scale mammography screening, because newer surveys that takes the above effect into account shows that while it does in fact reduce mortality somewhat for those who actually have breast cancers that would kill, it causes sufficient overdiagnosis to kill many otherwise healthy patients. Here is one article that covers this problem [1].

The problem is that people often assume the worst case outcome of a screening program is that it won't be effective, but the worst case outcome is that you kill more people than you save.

[1] http://www.cmaj.ca/content/183/17/1957

[sgt101]

They certainly aren't preventative!

[manarth]

CT scans use between 150 and 1100 times the radiation of a normal X-ray. Each scan is the equivalent of a year's typical radiation dose.

Essentially, CT scans increase the risk of cancer.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-ct-scans...