One Degree: global warming channel

October 8, 2006 7:09 AM

The Weather Channel launches One Degree, a broadband channel dedicated to global warming - for the "weather obsessed", sexy-voiced climatologists Heidi Cullen brings global warming mainstream. Are you a "climatechanger"?
posted by stbalbach (9 comments total)

I was recently at the National Geographic offices in DC and passed a room with a hand-drawn tag on the door "Climate Change" - I asked someone about it and was told they were starting a long-term project, perhaps a permanent division.
posted by stbalbach at 7:52 AM on October 8, 2006

that voice, the new agey music tinkling...despite that, I think this is a good thing. The more people have to think about it, the better off we'll hopefully be in the long run. hopefully.
posted by atlatl at 8:42 AM on October 8, 2006

stbalbach, as always, thanks.

It is a very interesting effort. The team seems to have researched (at least googled sufficiently) what is out there in terms of resources so I expect they will be on top of things. I would also like to know who their science advisors are... Personally, I would like this to be an effort to debunk/address certain common misconceptions about climate for example vs. weather scale predictions. Much like what the realclimaters are doing in their blog. I want to see them convince the weathermen first and the general public then.

And of course, I do wish to see political and economic discussions on the topic, already! And I mean more people like Hansen (scientists) and more people like Gore (politicians, decision making policy makers) to work together. Otherwise we remain in the abstract realms of scientific debate; we should have been past that a decade ago...
posted by carmina at 8:50 AM on October 8, 2006

One small point, slightly off topic comment with regard to scientific consensus for those readers who happen to be skeptical of climate science.

Think of all of the scientists you've ever heard of.

Einstein. Newton. Neils Bohr. Watson and Crick. etc. etc.

What do they all have in common? Their hypothesizes, though contrary to conventional wisdom and scientific consensus at the time, proved to be, through observation and experimentation to be more accurate descriptions of reality.

They were the lone, correct voice crying out in the wilderness. Now, tell me if you think I'm lying, but, do you honestly think that any scientist in their right mind would choose to go along with the consensus if they had compelling, reproducible and evidence to the contrary?

Does anyone honestly think that scientists everywhere secretly want to go along with the crowd? Moreover, that there is a significant incentive to simply agree with the crowd?

No, I tell you this, any scientist who produces solid, scientific, reproducible evidence contrary to the conventional theories, any conventional theory, that scientist would be an instant scientific celebrity, and would never want for grant funding, much like those names I listed above.

Are conservatives that ignorant of the mechanisms of basic human ambition?
posted by Freen at 10:48 AM on October 8, 2006

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of - this history - because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong - and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.

- Richard Feynman, in "Cargo Cult Science"
posted by phrontist at 11:48 AM on October 8, 2006

(That said, I'm just providing a counterpoint to Freen - Global warming is fantastically well supported)
posted by phrontist at 11:49 AM on October 8, 2006

"Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows XP Media Center 2005, Mac OSX 10.3 or Mac OSX 10.4 is required to view this page"
posted by 3.2.3 at 12:08 PM on October 8, 2006

Freen,

when Jim Hansen back in '87 first talked about global warming people looked indifferent if not bemused. That was the consensus then. Today of course the tide has reversed. The majority of thinking and working scientists do not dispute the effect (but only the magnitude). The loners (skeptics, if you wish) out there have yet to come up with "compelling, reproducible evidence to the contrary" to use your words, if I may.
And seriously, today nobody disputes relativity, does that mean it's controversial? Give me a break. Sophisms of that sort you are throwing at us are not serious arguments.
posted by carmina at 12:11 PM on October 8, 2006

carmina and phrontist et. all: I think perhaps I haven't explained my point as well as I could have, and as a result there is some sort of misunderstanding.

Scientists do not think global warming is controversial because there is no compelling evidence against it. I agree with the vast, overwhelming majority of scientists: Global warming is real, and happening.

My point is that in all scientific endeavors, those who discover new, empirically testable explanations for phenomenon are rewarded. Greatly. It is new discoveries that challenge the status quo that are rewarded. Note, this does not mean that I think there will be a lone skeptic whose contrary theories prove to be more accurate than the consensus. Only that there is actually a significant incentive for such a skeptic who has compelling, reproducible evidence for his or her theories.

That said, it is a telling and powerful endorsement of global warming that there is such a consensus about global warming because in the field of science, there is significant incentive for skepticism of convention.

Those who claim that somehow, scientists don't want to debunk global warming, or somehow profit from going along with the consensus are deeply wrong about the motivations of science and scientists.

In essence, the beliefs of climate change skeptics about the motivations of scientists are radically flawed, and demonstrate a huge misunderstanding of the concept of "success" in science, and the process of securing grant money in modern academia.
posted by Freen at 4:05 PM on October 10, 2006