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XKCD nails it

Threegoofs said:
As I told him, his low estimate is a guess from Mithrae, his high estimate is a guess from him, but my guess is zero, so his range really should be zero to 20 million.

But innumeracy is his strong point.
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Some people see no problem with rounding 0 up to the nearest 20,000,000. ;)
 
Comprehension level = cartoons...

Sad, but true...
 
Threegoofs said:
Thanks for your expert opinion based upon magical thinking.

Always helpful.
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Well some people believe the climate changes by magic, kinda like Godidit.
 
Phys251 said:
Prove both accusations. BTW, that is one hell of a wide interval on your numbers.
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Well the 200K per year of deaths due to the use of food of fuel is from the lowest estimates others have provided here.

The 20 million plus is my lowest estimate based on the effect of a 30% to 70% rise in the cost of basic food to the poorest billion people on the planet. I can't see how it could possibly only kill 0.2% of these people per year but that's why there is a plus.

That is of course just the direct numbers dying each year. What those figures don't show is the effect of maintaining the poverty of the next poorest billion people in the world. If all your money goes on food how do you buy medicine or transport to the doctor?

How many do you think are likely to be dying slowly of malnutrition related deaths due to the artifical increase in food prices?
 
Tim the plumber said:
Well the 200K per year of deaths due to the use of food of fuel is from the lowest estimates others have provided here.

The 20 million plus is my lowest estimate based on the effect of a 30% to 70% rise in the cost of basic food to the poorest billion people on the planet. I can't see how it could possibly only kill 0.2% of these people per year but that's why there is a plus.

That is of course just the direct numbers dying each year. What those figures don't show is the effect of maintaining the poverty of the next poorest billion people in the world. If all your money goes on food how do you buy medicine or transport to the doctor?

How many do you think are likely to be dying slowly of malnutrition related deaths due to the artifical increase in food prices?
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Estimates? And not reputable sources? That is not a proof. Not even close. Please try again.
 
Threegoofs said:
It won't be an issue in the election!

One side refuses to believe it, and the other side knows people will bail from voting if they are forced to recognize reality.

We will slowly plod to a solution, with hope that some kind of Hail Mary will salvage us.

Meanwhile, the Sixth Extinction will accelerate unabated.
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Hillary supports fracking so it is questionable whether her motives are because it will cost her votes. It is an issue that could cost her money.
 
Tim the plumber said:
Well the 200K per year of deaths due to the use of food of fuel is from the lowest estimates others have provided here.

The 20 million plus is my lowest estimate based on the effect of a 30% to 70% rise in the cost of basic food to the poorest billion people on the planet. I can't see how it could possibly only kill 0.2% of these people per year but that's why there is a plus.

That is of course just the direct numbers dying each year. What those figures don't show is the effect of maintaining the poverty of the next poorest billion people in the world. If all your money goes on food how do you buy medicine or transport to the doctor?

How many do you think are likely to be dying slowly of malnutrition related deaths due to the artifical increase in food prices?
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I don't know how to be clearer.

My educated estimate is zero.

You need to adjust your range.
 
backpacker said:
Hillary supports fracking so it is questionable whether her motives are because it will cost her votes. It is an issue that could cost her money.
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Maybe. But still better than the alternative.

I'm not sure fracking support overall is unreasonable though.
 
Threegoofs said:
Maybe. But still better than the alternative.

I'm not sure fracking support overall is unreasonable though.
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It is certainly not unreasonable if you don't mind contaminated ground water.
 
FieldTheorist said:
This is trivial, Fishking, and anyone who's even badly informed about this issue can tell you why. So if you want to know the answer to your question, then try googling it yourself and learning to educate yourself.

Again, with such little understanding, this highlights why there's no reason whatsoever to debate the anti-AGW crowd.
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Largely because the material is too difficult for you.
 
Threegoofs said:
Randall Munroe, the creator of the great comic XKCD has a fantastic timeline that illustrates how many of the denier arguments you hear are absolutely nonsensical.

Worth reading and scrolling through.

This Temperature Timeline Of Earth Shows Exactly How Nonsensical Climate-Change Deniers Really Are | IFLScience


And, here's a bonus comic:

8523f1f51a4f2a8cd2b9b18bd3c01643.png
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Content-free polemic.
 
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/09/20/josh-takes-on-xkcds-climate-timeline/

Two things that make Josh’s take on it better (besides his superior artistic skills):

  1. The sources used are not just pro climate change like XKCD did
  2. It is factually correct, rather than illustrating a preferred narrative.
Here is is: prepare to scroll. Some people with lame un-updated operating systems, low RAM, and/or outdated browsers may not be able to see the entire thing.
 
The public has stopped listening to the climate doomsayers. And this is why:

Predictions.jpg
 
[h=2]How to make climate graphs look scary — a reply to XKCD[/h]
This week XKCD (a popular Geek comic site) posted an epic cartoon called “A Timeline Of Earth’s Average Temperature”. It was a cutesy long godzilla hockey-stick — “scary” to the unwary.
It’s easy to make a scary historical-looking temperature graph — so easy that the artist probably didn’t even know how. (Thank Shakun, Marcott, Annan, Hadcrut and the IPCC for doing the tricky part.) First, guesstimate temperatures over last 20,000 years with anything at hand: tree-rings, ice bubbles, coral, fossilized tea leaves, whatever. Blend. Then stop the proxies, tack on thermometer data that was recorded in a different way with different errors and a very different response to faster temperature changes. Finally, launch that line into the future with unvalidated, skillless multivariate models that predict a fingerprint which 28 million weather balloons can’t find. Then take the models that didn’t work for the last twenty years, and run with the errors to the next century… Voila!
I took the 14,000 pixel cartoon and squeezed it to one shot that shows the curve that matters. See the error bars? Me neither.
(But who needs an uncertainty range when you have faith?)
​
 
They're debating cartoons.
 
Tim the plumber said:
Well the 200K per year of deaths due to the use of food of fuel is from the lowest estimates others have provided here.

The 20 million plus is my lowest estimate based on the effect of a 30% to 70% rise in the cost of basic food to the poorest billion people on the planet. I can't see how it could possibly only kill 0.2% of these people per year but that's why there is a plus.
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20 million is 2% of the poorest billion people, genius. Just like 400 per million is 4 in 10 thousand, not 0.4 as you claimed yesterday in another thread. Exactly what level of credibility do you think anyone should give your opinions when they're not only unsubstantiated, and not only fly directly in the face of more credible information, but when you regularly get your figures wrong by utterly laughable amounts?


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Threegoofs said:
As I told him, his low estimate is a guess from Mithrae, his high estimate is a guess from him, but my guess is zero, so his range really should be zero to 20 million.

But innumeracy is his strong point.
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It was not a guess from me: In a previous discussion, after I had repeatedly asked Tim to provide a reference for his claim that biofuel crops cause at least 200% of all hunger-related deaths worldwide as he claims, instead of providing any information of his own he begged other posters to do his homework for him. Eventually Jack Hays obliged, citing a post on an ultra-liberal AGW alarmist source (WUWT) touting a paper which claimed biofuel crops kill more people than global warming.

Tim then decided that he didn't like that answer - it was only published in the Journal of American Physicians, after all - so he proceeded to ignore the information he'd requested and persisted in his ridiculous claim that of ~9 million hunger-related deaths per year globally, at least 20 million were caused by biofuels.

We know that he's right, because he maths good!
 
LowDown said:
No, we can expect maybe 1.5 to 2 degrees at most. Most likely. Don't harsh my mellow with your hysteria.
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If everyone stopped giving a damn and no further action were taken, an additional 1.5-2.5 degrees by 2100 (~2.5-3.5 above 1900) would be the most likely range, from what I've seen. However, another one degree on top of that would likely be within an 80% confidence interval, and even two degrees on top of that (~5.5 above 1900) may well be closer to a 1% possibility than zero.

The cartoon in the OP does seem to be alarmist, and doesn't accurately reflect the IPCC reports. On current trends (ie, with considerable public interest/awareness and limited government investment in renewables, but so far without "prompt, aggressive limits on CO2 emissions") I'd be surprised if we managed to hit the IPCC's RCP6.0 scenario: And the median temperature projection for RCP6.0 is less than 3.2 degrees above 1900 by 2100.

So on current trends, best estimate is probably less than 3 degrees; if the 'sceptics' had their way and everyone stopped caring, probably more like 3.5 degrees. In either case, the 4-5 degrees claimed by the OP cartoon is misleading (though not impossible; just as a lot less is not impossible).
 
Mithrae said:
20 million is 2% of the poorest billion people, genius. Just like 400 per million is 4 in 10 thousand, not 0.4 as you claimed yesterday in another thread. Exactly what level of credibility do you think anyone should give your opinions when they're not only unsubstantiated, and not only fly directly in the face of more credible information, but when you regularly get your figures wrong by utterly laughable amounts?
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I think that 20 million is a very low estimate of the deaths due to the artifically raised food prices that biofuel is responcible for.

How many deaths do you consider acceptable to mitigate the bad things of climate change?
 
Mithrae said:
If everyone stopped giving a damn and no further action were taken, an additional 1.5-2.5 degrees by 2100 (~2.5-3.5 above 1900) would be the most likely range, from what I've seen. However, another one degree on top of that would likely be within an 80% confidence interval, and even two degrees on top of that (~5.5 above 1900) may well be closer to a 1% possibility than zero.

The cartoon in the OP does seem to be alarmist, and doesn't accurately reflect the IPCC reports. On current trends (ie, with considerable public interest/awareness and limited government investment in renewables, but so far without "prompt, aggressive limits on CO2 emissions") I'd be surprised if we managed to hit the IPCC's RCP6.0 scenario: And the median temperature projection for RCP6.0 is less than 3.2 degrees above 1900 by 2100.

So on current trends, best estimate is probably less than 3 degrees; if the 'sceptics' had their way and everyone stopped caring, probably more like 3.5 degrees. In either case, the 4-5 degrees claimed by the OP cartoon is misleading (though not impossible; just as a lot less is not impossible).
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So how many deaths are OK to avoid this happening? How big a price should be considered OK?
 
Tim the plumber said:
I think that 20 million is a very low estimate of the deaths due to the artifically raised food prices that biofuel is responcible for.

How many deaths do you consider acceptable to mitigate the bad things of climate change?
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Food prices vary for many reasons, of which wasted cropland is just one, and food price fluctuations are not even the biggest cause of hunger worldwide. If 20 million people per year died due to biofuel crops, the total from all food price fluctuations would be even higher, and total global annual hunger-related deaths would be 100 million or more, not the <10 million total (or ~5 million children) which every source I've seen suggests.

But of course, you've somehow managed to persuade yourself that a hundred million people are dying every year without anyone noticing, haven't you? It comes from the same level of genius which has you believing there's been no reductions in global poverty over the decades to offset price fluctuations, and that desperately poor people would never dream of growing their own food either. Such things cannot be, because you, Tim the Plumber, have decided upon a percentage of the world's poorest billion who must die - never mind that even on that exceedingly simple and arbitrary task you managed to fail by a factor of ten :roll:
 
Tim the plumber said:
I think that 20 million is a very low estimate of the deaths due to the artifically raised food prices that biofuel is responcible for.

How many deaths do you consider acceptable to mitigate the bad things of climate change?
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Your number came out of your ass, don't get mad when people challenge it.
 
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