For those (like me) who don't know the authors, apparently they are well-published authors in the field of climate science whose work is very highly cited:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=gra...
Not a perfect measure of whether this is a reputable article but at least readers should know this isn't from some randos in a basement somewhere.
Ironically, those still unconvinced of the human influence on climate change seem to be the sort that would trust the basement randos more than they would reputable scientists
Because they are practicing the reverse scientific method. They hold a conclusion in their hand, like, man-made climate change is a hoax, and seek to find any threads of "evidence" that support their foregone conclusion.
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Yes, of course there are bad actors, but this is false equivalence to equate science and the scientific method with basement randos.
Most importantly, most people don't understand scientific consensus vs. individual research papers or individual scientists. A major feature of the scientific method is that when an interesting result is published, it can be independently verified by lots of other researchers, and if they come to the same conclusion, that is excellent evidence that the result accurately describes the real world.
Scientists are people, and just like people everywhere they have biases and personal motivations. But again, the scientific method is much bigger than any individual or even group of scientists. If anything, being skeptical of unexpected results is a huge pillar of the scientific method. But skepticism alone is not enough - the next step is to look for validating research, not to say "hah, science is bullshit, let's trust this YouTube rando instead." As usual, I think Jessica Knurick does a great job explaining things: https://open.substack.com/pub/drjessicaknurick/p/trust-the-s...
True, and personally, I don't believe climate science is affected by bias to such a degree that the overall conclusion is wrong. But it absolutely does occur that a whole field can be biased, so the "independent verification by lots of other researchers" will cast unreasonable skepticism on results they dislike, while letting results they like pass with cursory examination. This is the case in e.g. social science:
The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not.
https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi...
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1986-12806-001 (the study referenced in the article)
Man, if you are going to try to attack the credibility of the field of a hard science like climate science, try doing it with claims directly related to that field of science.
Substituting in social science as a proxy for your criticism takes the wind completely out of your sails.
"Physicists are super untrustworthy and biased, it's a cabal, I mean just look at astrology and these articles criticizing it!"
> if you are going to try to attack the credibility of the field of a hard science like climate science
But I'm not. In fact I said as much. If it'll stop you from fighting phantoms, I'll make it explicit: I'm quite certain anthropogenic climate change is real, and that climate science is broadly correct about it. Yet, not even physics is fully immune from such bias, according to Feynman: https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/264/timeline-of-meas...
(Though as the charts show, in physics it has a short half-life, at least for something as straightforward as the electron charge.)
What do you mean by these statements if not exactly to cast doubt on and paint the field of climate science and the consensus behind anthropogenic climate change as being the result of bias?
> affected by bias to such a degree
Implication that there is bias, and the degree to which is left up to the reader's imagination.
> the overall conclusion is wrong
What about the specifics of the conclusion, which specifics, what percentage of the assertions, 20%, 50%, 80%? This again allows the reader to fill in the blanks with their own biases which are likely far less rigorously tested than the conclusions of the field of climate science.
> it absolutely does occur that a whole field can be biased
This statement, on the topic of climate change and climate science, immediately following your above two statements, serves to further reinforce the idea that climate science is biased.
> the "independent verification by lots of other researchers" will cast unreasonable skepticism on results they dislike, while letting results they like pass with cursory examination.
The quotes around the independent verification of researchers serves to undermine their work and cast doubt on it. You then state they are unreasonable in their skepticism of results they "dislike", implying these are emotional decisions rather than empirical measurements of reality.
Of course, extremely ironic as the reader meant to consume this is of course the one actually looking for emotional reinforcement of their preconceptions, but in this framing gets to project that onto the scientists.
And yeah, "cursory exmination" of course in no way reflects the reality of the last several decades of climate science, but is added in as another unsubstantiated slight.
> case in e.g. social science
And then, the coup de grace, attempting to substitute the reputation of the famously soft and hard to replicate social sciences for climate science, in an attempt to equate the two and thus further degrade the perception of climate science.
> Implication that there is bias, and the degree to which is left up to the reader's imagination.
I would be shocked if there was zero bias - the field is staffed by humans, and has political implications. And no, I did not leave the degree of bias up to interpretation - I set an upper bound to it, that precludes global warming skepticism.
> What about the specifics of the conclusion
To date no field has been 100% correct in everything. I already told you I'm not a global warming skeptic - what do you want, for me to pretend climate science is infallible for the benefit of morons that want to twist my words?
> And then, the coup de grace, attempting to substitute the reputation of the famously soft and hard to replicate social sciences for climate science, in an attempt to equate the two and thus further degrade the perception of climate science.
On two separate occasions I explicitly wrote I believe climate science. Obviously my attempt at imparting a nuanced understanding of scientific fallibility is wasted on someone that doesn't even bother to read my posts. You want a PR statement aimed at reassuring the lowest common denominator that the scientists know what they're doing, not a discussion.
If this is how much you argue with someone who agrees with you, then, I don't know what to say. Good luck in life, man.
You must understand the net content and impact of your messaging, which is far from "Hey I'm just pointing out that humanity is fallible, apropos of nothing."
It's not -
"hey, we can argue about the best way to address climate change and the details of how it's going to play out"
it's -
"this entire field is biased" (you said "it's absolutely the case that entire fields can be biased"), the "independent verification of empirical data is actually untrustworthy and primarily motivated by personal dislike", "they make their scientific conclusions with cursory examinations", and "they're as reliable as the social sciences".
I'm sorry, but it beggars belief that you are not aware of what you're doing.
It's not the communication style of an engineer just trying to be technically correct, it's filled with subtle and not-so-subtle accusations and implications all driving in a single direction which is the discreditation of the entire scientific field.
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That sounds like a perfect match for a meta study do you have any? I am very dubious about your conclusion. I am basing this on work I did in high school on this so I really have no sources for my claim.
EDIT did some more searching and have not been able to finding anything supporting you claim. People have not been very alarmist about sea levels.. 7500m by the year 2500 in Waterworld does not count.
In fact I remember reading the opposite recently, that IPCC sea level rise predictions from the 90s were actually pretty accurate given the limitations of the models at the time. And that a good bit of the error was underestimations of rise, not overestimations.
> Here we show that the mid-range projection from the Second Assessment Report of the IPCC (1995/1996) was strikingly close to what transpired over the next 30 years, with the magnitude of sea-level rise underestimated by only ∼1 cm.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025ef00...
People wouldn't just lie on the internet!
Systems are complicated. Given there are numerous predicted outcomes (it's not just about the actual measured sea-level rise, after all) and many of those predictions are coming to pass far earlier than hoped, it might be worth having an open mind to the fact that sometimes people who devote their lives to studying something might be worth listening to.
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My phenomenal observations are that it's been getting warmer during my lifetime, but as soon as I mention this in an online conversation I get slapped down with 'the climate is always changing' and 'n=1'.
Most climate change denial arguments eventually boil down to social assertions about the change believers having perverse incentives, like being greedy for grants to go on sailing vacations to Antartica or feather their academic nests.
What are the cycles called? How do they function? A lot of people use the world cycle like other people use the word magic. A mystery pretending to be an explanation.
The number of critics of Anthropogenic global warming who actually have expertise on climate change and actively publish on the subject can be counted on one hand. If 99.9% of astrophysicists agreed that a meteor was going to hit your house next Tuesday you wouldn't wait around for the few crackpot holdouts before you to agree to leave.
>that’s cute
Unnecessary but moving past that: I understand where you’re coming from but a hallmark of people like that is they are not willing to learn or be swayed no matter how you try to educate them. They have decided what is real and it often dovetails with their social/political views in a way that is very hard to disentangle.
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Allegations of cherry-picking scant bits of evidence to support a claim are less effective when that claim is held up by vast quantities of distinct, high-quality evidence.
my wife is an actuary, and we always joke that you know climate change has real cause and effect because the actuaries are specifically monitoring and modeling for it lol
Can you apply that too to the "earth is round" argument?
The heliocentric model of our solar system "argument"?
I guess general relativity is only a "theory" in the end, geodude420 on twitter has an awesome thread debunking that Einstein schlub's whole career!
There’s actually research to support the claim you’re making here (Elaboration Likelihood Model).
When forming attitudes in an area where one doesn’t care, one tends to rely more on who is saying it than what is being said. The opposite is true, if you care about [climate change], you listen to the arguments regardless of who is presenting it.
Theres a mistrust of government and the establishment. Not saying fringe is better but the behavior of govts, corruption and influence by rich donors doesn't help
It also doesn’t help that anyone with few scruples and a desire to make a buck can quickly monetize screaming about how up is down on YouTube
> Theres a mistrust of government and the establishment. Not saying fringe is better but the behavior of govts, corruption and influence by rich donors doesn't help
These are scientists, not the government, and the US government, at least, has long opposed or been ambivalent toward climate research.
I'm not sure how rich donor influence is involved. Rich donors generally have acted to oppose climate research.
Also scientists generally suck at messaging and persuasion. They think if they just dial up the stakes and consequences a little more, it'll be compelling! Maybe if we make one more documentary with bad CGI disaster movie scenes, that'll do it! Same with the stupid "Doomsday clock" that is somehow always "the closest we've ever been to nuclear war!" whenever it gets trotted out. You'd think people who know what stochastic noise is would realize when they're producing it.
They would have made a lot more headway talking about clean air, clean water, jobs, and a bright prosperous future where we manufacture wind turbines, batteries and solar panels in deep red Missouri. A minority tried that, but most stuck with the catastrophizing for decades and now that they've ruined their social credit no one will listen to the message they should have opened with.
You need people emotionally invested, and it's a lot easier to get them invested in their lives than in the abstract consequences of computer models that are at least 100 years out if they're even accurate. And most people are not independent enough to direct their own lives. If they make the right decisions on abstract concepts, it was more because the incentives/disincentives in their environment were set up correctly than they actually understood the decision they were making. Message accordingly.
Every approach you've suggested above, and others besides, has been tried by scientists, NGOs and government agencies for the last few decades, and largely failed.
The IPCC has consistently DOWNPLAYED the negative consequences of climate change, and reality keeps outpacing their worst case predictions year after year.
Every attempt to message the reality and consequences of climate change, and the possible avenues for blunting it, has been tried. From the sugarcoating "everything will be rosy and great and abundant, look at all the benefits of green industry" to the milquetoast watered-down try-to-please-everyone messaging of the major political parties, to the desperate attempts to communicate the brutal reality of what we're facing (and still failing to match the reality that is consistently worse).
None of it works.
1) People are selfish, myopic, and stupid. They think about their short term personal needs and wants above all else. Large scale coordination on this issue is virtually impossible, see the Prisoner's Dilemma. Human psychology is simply not fit for this task.
The satisficing nature of evolution means we are the dumbest possible animal that could otherwise achieve the technological civilization that we have, and this is another example where it really shows.
2) The wealthiest and most powerful people and corporations on Earth have spent decades pushing propaganda attempting to sow doubt about climate change, because genuine action on it is directly against their interests.
Those poor multi-trillion dollar industries underpinning all modern society and power structures are the altruistic, honest bastions of truth, it's those evil corrupt post docs on minimum wage that are the truly corrupt and greedy ones, twisting the truth for their own financial gain and machiavellian ends!
And they've been far more effective than the cigarette companies of the early 20th century could have ever dreamed.
> The IPCC has consistently DOWNPLAYED the negative consequences of climate change, and reality keeps outpacing their worst case predictions year after year.
Except downplaying consequences downplays the upside, i.e. opportunity.
The dire warnings should be dire, but paired with a call to opportunity opportunity opportunity. Instead of focusing on enemies or little inconvenient things we could all do, if only we could all be uniformly focused and high minded enough as uncoordinated individuals.
That fact that virtually every way we can reduce climate damage involves new capabilities and resources with additional economic and health benefits (not to mention political disentanglements) makes positive self-interested calls to profitable action much more sensible.
And political leaders shouldn't be afraid to work with the CFO's of fossil fuel companies to create incentives they want. It might be costly, but CFO's get flexible when there is a clear path to making more money. Any costs of smoothing that path (let's be clear, in a way that would be pure corruption if the size of the problem didn't make that a value creator) are nothing compared to the costs of climate change.
China gets it. (Not uniformly of course, but more, and its paying off for them.)
Also doesn’t help when hyperbolic predictions do not come true, such as Maldives being underwater by 2020
Certainly doesn't help that nobody made those predictions but denialists make up or intentionally misinterpret people making predictions so as to "prove" nothing is actually happening.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nations-vanish-global-warm...
The widely-cited UNEP report where people get the supposed non-occuring Maldives prediction from suggested that half of the Maldives could be inundated by 2100 in a one-meter-rise scenario.
It depends if they can agree with what they are saying.
It's a culture thing, nobody on the right would ever be convinced by science, they will shop around until they find what they need to hear. My sister in law sent me a video and told me that she thought it was a really good explainer and had a lot of good facts and figures to support it. To humor her, I took a brief glance at it, and saw that it was produced by Dr. Shiva. I was thinking "no way, it can't be that Shiva, could it, email guy?" Yes, yes it was.
We are doomed.
Tell her that you have a greenfield synergistic solution to upscale her big tent.
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“reputable scientists” = tax plundered research for purposes of political power. Regardless of human effect it is china doing it.
While it's true that China is currently responsible for the largest share of CO2 emissions at least their output is trending down:
See https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
And, it's important to understand why they're emitting some of that CO2: Western wallets demanding foreign produced goods, because Western society collectively, and enthusiastically, pushed manufacturing to China.
It's more important to understand why they're emitting so much of that CO2 - because a lot of people in China need to eat and have a roof over their heads.
Any analysis that fails to take per-capita into account is not made in good faith.
China has a large population but so does India. Don't forget that China is the world's factory and that's where a very large chunk of CO2 emissions come from.
Worth also noting that on a per capita basis China aren't even in the top ten.
Tax plundering, really dude?
Quick guess, do you think more tax dollars have gone to the fossil fuel industry, or climate scientists?
Political power, just again, amazing.
Who do you think wields more political power in the world? The fossil fuel industry and petro states, or climate scientists?
It's such a blatant, weird attempt to invert reality. It's the whole "accuse your enemy of that which you are guilty" approach.
I don't understand how this propaganda talking point sticks in anyone's head and doesn't fall apart with two seconds of critical thought.
There are various levels of perspectives
- Climate Warming is a hoax
- Climate Warming is happening, but not Man Made and part of larger cycles
- Climate Warming is Man Made, but drastic De-growth strategies cause more harm.
- Climate Warming is Man Made, don't need de-growth strategies because Technology will solve energy efficiency, clean energy growth and carbon capture and humans adapt along the way
- Climate Warming is Man Made and we need drastic de-growth strategies and complete ban of fossil fuels.
For people in the last group, all other groups look like Climate Deniers because they don't agree to their de-growth/ban plans
Things must be bleak for climate deniers if they have to make an itemized list of strawman arguments to feel good about it.
You're missing: "Climate is warming, but this is a good thing because it means Jesus will come back sooner and I'll live in endless bliss and not have to go to work anymore, so I'm going to do my part by driving a huge truck and pretend like it's fake."
More commonly these days is the message that CO2 is plant food, and climate change is a nefarious plot to kill off the plants by starving them in order to reduce the Earth's population. I can dig up several tweets this week pushing that message.
It is a shame that Twitter's algorithm is so damn easy to manipulate that it's basically owned by propaganda firms now. Elon doesn't even care, more outrage == more engagement and that's what feeds the system. It's a feedback loop of crap.
> It is a shame that Twitter's algorithm is so damn easy to manipulate that it's basically owned by propaganda firms now.
Not "basically" owned. Manipulation is the explicitly optimized and financed purpose.
The feed is a two-directional manipulation competition, with both directions enhancing each other, with a conflict of interest afterburner, for all parties to maximally control users. Neutrality doesn't exist.
(1) An auction for ads/influence to get your manipulative content in front of the most likely vulnerable users.
(2) A never ending competition to create addictive content, funded in direct proportion to successful impact on users.
(3) And the value in both directions is magnified by the "personalized" leverage manufactured through pervasive logging, beyond service surveillance, dossier collation, psychology hacking and real time feed manipulation.
(4) None of this is impeded by any "standards", neutrality, or a concern about external damage.
Admittedly great things for users and society, except for the four on that list that are not.
It's not even that Elon doesn't care as in he is ambivalent about it, it directly feeds into reinforcing his political preferences.
Try to create a brand new twitter account, you'll find that 80+% of the accounts that get suggested to you are right wing propaganda with climate denial being one of their greatest hits.
Hypothetically speaking, if people in the last group were right, and that is the logical conclusion to be reached from careful evaluation of the evidence, wouldn’t the other positions indeed be ones of wilful denial of the state of the climate?
> de-growth
Associating action to prevent with 'de-growth' is disinformation from the deniers. Climate change itself is massively de-growth. The question is how to best prevent it.
- Climate Warming in the last ~200 and current years is Man Made, but given Man’s relative shortsightedness and propensity for becoming preoccupied, his ongoing impact on climate change will run its course to one end or another, probably redefining coastlines in the process and including other effects on agriculture, diversity of species, and so on. Much, much later the Earth will more than likely enter another Ice Age and most of the planet will be frozen over. Between the Man induced (relatively) extreme warm period and the next Ice Age, Man will find his way one way or another. Or Not.
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Setting aside the names of the authors, this is a very bad paper. They take temperature data sets, "adjust" [1] them by attempting to remove the biggest recent factors (volcanism, solar and el nino cycles) affecting temperatures, then do a piece-wise regression analysis to look at trends in 10-year chunks. This is just bad methodology, akin to what a junior graduate student with a failing thesis might do to find signal in a dataset that isn't being cooperative to their hypothesis.
Climate data is inherently noisy, and there are multiple interconnected cyclic signals, ranging from the "adjusted" factors to cycles that span decades, which we don't understand at all. "Adjusting" for a few of these, then doing a regression over the subset of the data is classic cherry-picking in search of a pre-determined conclusion. The overall dubious nature of the conclusion is called out in the final paragraph of the text:
> Although the world may not continue warming at such a fast pace, it could likewise continue accelerating to even faster rates.
They're literally just extrapolating from an unknown point value that they synthesized from data massage, and telling you that's a coin toss as to whether the extrapolation will be valid.
I am not a climate scientist so you can ignore me if you like, but I am "a scientist" who believes the earth is warming, and that we are the primary cause. Nonetheless, if I saw this kind of thing in a paper in my own field, it would be immediately tossed in the trash.
[1] You can't actually adjust for these things, which the authors admit in the text. They just dance around it so that lay-readers won't understand:
> Our method of removing El Niño, volcanism, and solar variations is approximate but not perfect, so it is possible that e.g. the effect of El Niño on the 2023 and 2024 temperature is not completely eliminated.
Your summary of the article is wrong. The authors model temperature using time series over solar irradiance, volcanic activity, and southern oscillation. They calibrate that model using time series over global surface temperatures. This allows them to isolate and remove each of the three listed confounding factors. The resulting time series fits a super-linear curve -> accelerating global warming.
> Your summary of the article is wrong. The authors model temperature using time series over solar irradiance, volcanic activity, and southern oscillation. They calibrate that model using time series over global surface temperatures. This allows them to isolate and remove each of the three listed confounding factors.
No, it isn’t. You’re just rephrasing what I said with more words: they attempted to adjust for three of the biggest factors that affect temperature, then did a piecewise regression to estimate a 10-year window.
You can’t do it in a statistically valid way. Full stop. The authors admit this, but want you to ignore it.
This has always been the big issue I have with the conclusions draw in climate publications. I encourage anyone with strong opinion on climate change to do a deep dive on the temperature analysis.
The best example I can think of is the "global warming hiatus" that was discussed in depth in the top climate journals in the mid-2010s. Nature Climate Change even devoted an entire month to it.[1]
5 years later publications were saying "there was no hiatus at all".[2]
And as you said, when you dive into the paper, you realize that temperature measures are not objective at all. And I would ask - If everyone was in agreement that temperature increases paused, then 5 years later everyone agrees they didn't, how much confidence do we really have in the measures themselves.*
As someone who conudcted scientific research, this has a ton of inherent problems. It doesn't matter what I'm measuring, if the data collection is not objective, and there is no consensus (or at least trong evidence for adjustments), then the data itself is very unreliable.
If I tried to publish a chemical paper in a top journal and manually went in and adjusted data (even with a scientific rationale) the paper would be immediately rejected.
[1] https://www.nature.com/collections/sthnxgntvp [2] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/global-warming-pause-cli...
> And as you said, when you dive into the paper, you realize that temperature measures are not objective at all.
I don't know if I'd go that far. The measurements are as objective as they can be given the limits of technology and time, but what we do with the datasets afterward is usually filled with subjective decisions. In the worst cases, you get motivated actors doing statistically invalid analysis to reach a preferred conclusion.
This happens in every field of science, but it's often worse in fields that touch politics.
I think research ranges from this paper to ones more rigorous, but the problem of "adjustments" is consistent.
And the issue is not so much the research is being done, but rather how it's reported on. Scientists know the limits of rigor in climate science, but the public doesn't. So catastrophic predictions are viewed by the public as a sure thing, versus one particular prediction with wide error bares.
> This happens in every field of science, but it's often worse in fields that touch politics.
Indeed. Nobody plays fast and lose with papers on the structure of some random enzyme for political purposes.
It says this in bold red at the top - "This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal."
I am not a climate scientist - how should I think about this statement? Normally I am looking for some statement that shows a document has been vetted.
For non-specialists, I think the most important view on papers is to not view them as nuggets of truth, but communications of a group of people who are trying to establish truth. No single paper is definitive!
Peer review is an important part of scientific publication, but it's also important for the general public to not view peer review as a full vetting. Peer reviewers look for things like reproducibility of the analysis, suitability of the conclusions given the methods, discussions of the limitations of the data and methods, appropriate statistical tests, correct approval from IRBs if there are humans or animals involved, and things like that. For many journals, the editors are also asking if the results are interesting and significant enough to meet the prestige of the journal.
Peer review misses things like intentional fraud, mistakes in computations, and of course any blind spots that the field has not yet acknowledged (for example, nearly every scientific specialty had to rediscover the important of splitting training and testing datasets for machine learning methods somewhat on their own, as new practitioners adopted new methods quickly and then some papers would slip through at the beginning when reviewers were not yet aware of the necessity of this split...)
Any single paper is not revealed truth, it's a step towards establishing truth, maybe. Science is supposed to be self-correcting, which also necessitates the mistakes that need correction. Climate science is one of the fields that gets the most attention and scrutiny, so a series of papers in that field goes a long ways towards establishing truth, much more so than, say, new MRI technology in psychology.
I'd say that for a non-scientist, you should treat it as a non-event -- a paper that hasn't happened yet.
The climate is not something for which you need daily, weekly, or even monthly updates. Rather, this paper is just one more on top of a gigantic pile of evidence that that climate change is serious, something that we can and should do something about.
If the paper passes muster, you'll hear about it then, though all it'll do is very slightly increase your confidence in something that is already very well confirmed. Or, the paper may not pass review, in which case it doesn't mean anything at all, and you fall back on the existing mountain of evidence.
If the paper had reached the opposite conclusion, that might merit more investigation by you now, since that would potentially be a significant update to your beliefs. And more importantly, it would certainly be presented as if it were a fait accompli, even before peer review.
Instead, you can simply say, "I don't know what this paper means, but I already have a very well-founded understanding of climate change and its significance."
Peer review is still very relevant in climate science. But given it is from well-respected authors, I am more inclined to trust the results at this stage.
There is no need for "trust".
There is no benefit in non-expert readers inserting their own subjectivity into an already complex topic. Even for themselves.
What we know: It is an interesting paper. It is going to get attention.
Good to be aware. It is also good to reserve judgement while the community evaluates the results.
It is already published at Geophysical Research Letters, a highly (if not the most) reputable source in the area. But that journal is behind a paywall: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
Oh, that contains an ELI5:
> Plain Language Summary The rise in global temperature has been widely considered to be quite steady for several decades since the 1970s. Recently, however, scientists have started to debate whether global warming has accelerated since then. It is difficult to be sure of that because of natural fluctuations in the warming rate, and so far no statistical significance (meaning 95% certainty) of an acceleration (increase in warming rate) has been demonstrated. In this study we subtract the estimated influence of El Niño events, volcanic eruptions and solar variations from the data, which makes the global temperature curve less variable, and it then shows a statistically significant acceleration of global warming since about the year 2015. Warming proceeding faster is not unexpected by climate models, but it is a cause of concern and shows how insufficient the efforts to slow and eventually stop global warming under the Paris Climate Accord have so far been.
For one thing, some of the places which would publish this kind of thing will authorize authors to provide anybody and everybody pre-prints but not the final copy they published.
In principle you could go (pay to†) read the actual final published copy, maybe it's different, but almost always it's basically the same, the text is enough to qualify.
If you go to https://eel.is/c++draft/ you'll find the "Draft" C++ standard, and it has this text:
Note: this is an early draft. It's known to be incomplet and incorrekt, and it has lots of bad formatting.
Nevertheless, the people who wrote your C++ compiler used that "draft" document, because it isn't reasonable to wait a few years for ISO to publish the "real" document which is identical other than lacking that scary text and having a bunch of verbiage about how ISO owns this document and it mustn't be republished.
And you might be thinking "OK, I'm sure those GNU hippies don't pay for a real published copy, but surely the Microsoft Corporation buys their engineers a real one". Nope. Waste of money.
† If you have a relationship with a research institution it might have this or be willing to help you order it from somewhere else at no personal cost.
Are you? How many preprints are posted here every day?
Pre-prints exists because it can take up to 18 months to get a paper published in a journal or reputable conference. Since lots of people can publish pre-prints[1] what you should think depends on the authors. If they have a record of publishing good research you should think highly of the paper.
[1] - Actually, there are hoops on pre-print repositories, such as arXiv, so not everyone can post there. I guesstimate that 99% of the public has no means of posting on arXiv.
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No, it really does not work like that, for reasons that should be obvious.
Yes, credibility is one component of evaluating conclusions from evidence.
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Their credibility and experience makes it more likely that they will have followed scientific procedures correctly, that their measuring techniques will not have obvious flaws and their findings reflect the evidence.
This is not an appeal to authority: the paper will be examined thoroughly by peer reviewers and likely by academics across the world, in part because of their credibility. That will take time. Meanwhile it should be taken seriously.
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