What's Really Warming the World? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/ <comment><USER4> Cool visualization.

It's worth keeping in mind that the modeled data lines up with reality because it's supposed to. That's how you calibrate your model, by making sure it fits reality.

The real trick is to see how well your model extrapolates from the data you have out into the future. As in, if you feed it data up to, say, 1990, will it correctly spit out 2015 temperatures that fit the reality of 2015, or will it spit out crazy 2015 predictions like the models that were built in 1990 did. And, the bigger question: How will its predictions for 2040 (given 2015 data) match up to the reality over the next 25 years.

We seem to be getting a lot better at the modeling side. That's a good thing, since the first couple decades of watching people panicking and fighting each other over whatever scary results came out of the first generation climate models wasn't any fun to watch.

<comment><USER5> Is there a scorecard for which models have performed well?

<comment><USER6> None of the models have performed very well. You probably won't find a scorecard because it's embarrassing.

<comment><USER7> Citation needed.

<comment><USER4> Here's a good one:

[http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/04/global-warming- slowdown-...](http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/04/global-warming-slowdown-the- view-from-space/)

44 Climate Models all fighting to out-panic one another, not a single one guessing low enough to predict the actual values for 2012 (when it seems the dataset in question ended)

... and a seemingly more reputable one showing roughly the same thing:

[http://phys.org/news/2015-01-peer-reviewed-pocket- calculator...](http://phys.org/news/2015-01-peer-reviewed-pocket-calculator- climate-exposes-errors.html)

<comment><USER8> I wouldn't call a paper whose lead author is a well-established denier with no scientific training ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Monckton,_3rd_Visc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Monckton,_3rd_Viscount_Monckton_of_Brenchley)), and which is co-authored by a known practitioner of large-scale scientific fraud for pay ([http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Willie_Soon](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Willie_Soon)) particularly reputable.

<comment><USER9> ad-hominem. Who cares who wrote it, what does it say?

<comment><USER10> Ad hominem fallacy fallacy: [http://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html](http://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html)

Pointing out that someone is not trustworthy when considering whether or not to trust their conclusions is not ad-hom.

<comment><USER11> Attacking a persons 'trustworthiness' instead of dealing with their arguments and evidence is pretty much the dictionary definition of the ad-hominem diversion. It doesn't interest me to learn that he kicks cats or dresses in lingerie and calls himself Marjorie at the weekends. If you believe that he is wrong, then show where and how he is in error.

<comment><USER12> You're right not to be intersted in whether he kicks cats or not when you're thinking about whether he's honest or not.

But, when thinking about whether he's honest or not being given examples of previous dishonesty is relevant.

<comment><USER11> Just like the infamous Smathers campaign speech?

[http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi- bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_to...](http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi- bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=101;t=000379;p=0)

"Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert [pervert]? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism [necrophilia] with his sister-in-law and he has a sister who was once a thespian [lesbian] in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper, before his marriage, habitually practiced celibacy [???]."

<comment><USER8> No, because that was actually irrelevant. In this context, Soon's record within the scope of climate research is what's being scrutinized, not his personal life.

If Soon's opponents were attacking his love of Dune or his tendency to eat falafel, there might be an analogue here.

<comment><USER11> Irrelevant. The technique you used was the same as Smathers, and your intent was the same - to damage someone's reputation by insinuations and smears. It is low behavior.

<comment><USER8> Smathers' accusations related to issues that had no bearing on Peppers' merit as a political candidate or his ability to carry out his official duties. My 'insinuations' (actually, again, statements of fact) are related to Soon's behaviour within the context of climate science. If you cannot grasp this, you are not qualified to engage in debate. If you do not wish to for whatever reason, it makes it pretty clear that you are not interested in good faith discussion of this issue and are not worth anyone's time in that regard.

<comment><USER11> A damaging and false insinuation is a damaging and false insinuation, whatever ground it purports to cover. Smathers chose smears that would do the maximum damage to Pepper as a politician, you did the same for Soon as a scientist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This repeats some buried comments but I think it's worthwhile: I'm not a climate scientist, but in my experience the absolute most reliable, most time- efficient way to learn about climate change is the IPCC reports. I wonder if there is anything written in any other field that compares:

[http://www.ipcc.ch/](http://www.ipcc.ch/)

Specifically, if you are short on time, read the 'Summaries for Policymakers', written at the level and attention spans of non-technical politicians. They are quite readable and as I wrote in another post, if they can understand it, so can you. :) (The longer reports are fascinating, if you have an interest in science and want to get lost in something.)

As I understand it the reports are prepared by a global team of hundreds of scientists, and reviewed by thousands more.[1] (Seriously, has anything like that existed in any other field?) They are meant to cover the breath of climate science and the reports also are meticulous about the language of probabilities.

Spend a little time reading them and it will save you the time of reading 99% of what's written elsewhere, and you'll be much better informed.

\---

EDIT:

[1] Review process: [http://www.ipcc.ch/activities/activities.shtml](http://www.ipcc.ch/activities/activities.shtml) (scroll down to "The AR5 Writing and Review Process") -- for example, one report had over 50,000 comments on two drafts from >600 experts.

\---

EDIT 2: Website interface help.

Can you believe this needs to be written, and for HN readers? I had JavaScript off which makes the site usable (if not pretty). With JavaScript on, apparantly the UX concept is 'Easter eggs':

There are 4 images arranged horizontally at the top; these are report covers (with text too small to read even if you knew they were clickable). If you click a report cover then the section beneath it changes to display a description of and links to that report.

All that work making the reports accessible to the world, hamstrung by web design.

<comment><USER14> A couple years back I read the IPCC reports trying to find out if global warming was real or not. I noticed the Vostok ice core data in the earlier reports showed the temperature rose first and then the CO2 rose. Likewise, the temperature fell first and then the CO2 fell later on. They fixed this little inconvenient data problem in the later reports.

<comment><USER15> Ugh. This is exactly the type of poorly-informed response you generally get when people attempt to "read the data" for themselves with little to no understanding of the science behind it. Seems to be a lot of that going around HN today.

<comment><USER16> Please try to be specific in your criticism. What misunderstanding does the above poster have about the science or the data?

<comment><USER17> Well, for one, that their uneducated skim through the IPCC report found a mistake which thousands of qualified scientists had missed, one so fundamental that it undermines all of the rest of the work in the report and the conclusions it leads to.

<comment><USER16> The scientists say so, therefore the commenter is wrong? This still doesn't explain _why_ the above is wrong. Attacking the premises of an argument is sound logic, and should be welcome. Ad hominem arguments should be called out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Helpful when reading this thread to keep in mind Michael Mann's six stages of climate change denial:

1\. CO2 is not actually increasing.

2\. Even if it is, the increase has no impact on the climate since there is no convincing evidence of warming.

3\. Even if there is warming, it is due to natural causes.

4\. Even if the warming cannot be explained by natural causes, the human impact is small, and the impact of continued greenhouse gas emissions will be minor.

5\. Even if the current and future projected human effects on Earth's climate are not negligible, the changes are generally going to be good for us.

6\. Whether or not the changes are going to be good for us, humans are very adept at adapting to changes; besides, it's too late to do anything about it, and/or a technological fix is bound to come along when we really need it.

<comment><USER19> Though I wouldn't accept #5 and #6 exactly as phrased, it does seem like positive effects ought to be balanced against the negative, and the uncertainty of future technological developments ought to inform our current decision of how much to spend addressing climate change.

Does that make me a climate change denier?

<comment><USER11> Your position is similar to that of Swedish environmentalist and academic, Bjorn Lomberg who accepts that rising CO2 levels are the cause of warming, and that this is a problem, but argues that the dangers are overstated and resources would be better devoted to mitigation of climate change and addressing other pressing issues such as global poverty.

Despite his relatively orthodox views, he was recently run off campus at the University of Western Australia where he had set up a think tank, The Consensus Centre, to which the Australian government had pledged $4 million.

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-08/bjorn-lomborg-uwa- cons...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-08/bjorn-lomborg-uwa-consensus- centre-contract-cancelled/6456708)

<comment><USER20> Bjorn Lomborg is a sad case. He titled his book _The Skeptical Environmentalist_ and everyone got the message, without reading the book, that he was a _climate-change skeptic_ \-- and for the most part labeled him as an "enemy" and rebuffed him. It was just a public relations disaster.

For what it's worth, he's not a "skeptic" in any of the conventional ways. I also remember looking at the IPCC reports once when I was a young physics student and saying, "hey, it's only a couple degrees Celsius over many years?" I was educated enough to realize that you could predict bad storms etc -- what I like to tell people right now is that it's like having a really huge boulder and, right next to it, digging a little ditch, only to cause the boulder to smack you down: the small change in the height of an equilibrium can still have a huge effect if a big enough system is relaxing to the new equilibrium. Someone came up with a memorable name for it: it's less of a concern about "global warming" and more about "global weirding." It took me a while to appreciate that there is a small (but scary) probability that the slope that the boulder is on might have a net incline one or the other way, so that the boulder might not just hit us but roll over us if it gets disturbed far enough from equilibrium. It makes a lot of sense for there to be a big scientific research program about that, even though no IPCC model predicts runaway climate change because the probability is so low and the possible causes are typically unexpected.

With that said: though hurricanes, floods and tornadoes certainly can have a massive economic impact, Bjorn has a good point of "the weather disasters that we know will happen due to the warming that we know is happening are important, but let's figure out how this compares to other things which we can predict really well, and see where our money is best spent: climate-change relief efforts, or climate-change mitigation, or general alleviation of poverty, or what?"

What I think is most missing from all of this is: we're talking about so little money, especially if we compare to governments' military expenditures, going towards the science. What would be great is if a government said, "hey, we're putting forward this huge grant to climate change research _just because we think research is intrinsically good_ and want to support this huge project of, y'know, _knowing more_."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Please don't take this as a denial of climate change, it is an honest question. How do scientists learn the levels of ozone, aerosols, green house gases, and the other data points going so far back at a global scale? Is the data from before the latter half of the 20th century spotty? If so, why is it considered good enough to use in a context of scientific research where quality and correctness of data is paramount?

<comment><USER22> I also question how we know the difference between nature/cycles and man-made pollution.

Here is a good example:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age)

"Several causes have been proposed: cyclical lows in solar radiation, heightened volcanic activity, changes in the ocean circulation, an inherent variability in global climate, or decreases in the human population."

It seems we don't even know how the little ice age happened. How do we know these same forces aren't changing our environment now?

We've been having all these strange temperatures lately and also this:

[http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and- tech/new...](http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and- tech/news/huge-solar-storm-hits-earth-power-grid-and-gps-could-be-disrupted- but-auroras-might-be-seen-10338332.html)

The problem is that it's too political now. When claimed scientists are coming out and saying the science is "settled", I know we have a problem. Science is never really settled.

<comment><USER13> > I also question how we know the difference between nature/cycles and man- > made pollution.

It's a great question, one which has occupied many scientists. It has been addressed in detail in the scientific research. See:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9772353](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9772353)

> The problem is that it's too political now.

Remember that's a well-documented, established technique often used by people who want to obstruct things; create so much noise (as in signal-to-noise) and FUD (Fear, uncertainty, and doubt) as to confuse the public about the facts. In every field, you always can find someone to say anything on TV; heck, you can find tax attorneys who will say you don't have to pay income tax (good luck with that!).

> When claimed scientists are coming out and saying the science is "settled", > I know we have a problem. Science is never really settled.

'Settled science' is jargon; it distinguishes theories that are still up in the air (string theory) from theories that have proven themselves as very reliable (gravity). Nothing in the world is ever "settled", but the evidence is pretty certain about climate change:

IIRC, 97% of climate scientists believe it's happening and caused by humans; the US National Academies of Science agree, as does the Royal Society in the UK; the US defense and intelligence communities are planning on it, as is the insurance and other industries. Sure, they all could be wrong, but so could the deniers. Who seems like a better bet, the 3%, or the 97%?

<comment><USER23> It's become a politicized issue, and as such, the media has created a narrative of 2 sides and a "debate." Take the 97% and put it into a different context and it makes the situation seem absolutely ludicrous.

If you had a sore stomach, and asked 2 groups of people to help you figure out why, would you trust the diagnosis from a group with 100 world-class doctors, surgeons, dieticians, etc... or 100 random people? When the random people say "Ya, but the doctor's don't know anything"... why would you believe them?

We've got global consensus from the leading experts in a dozen or so related fields, all pointing to the same thing. I trust the people that landed on the moon and can launch satellites to space to give me better information about the Earth's macro trends than the guy next door that uses his bible and the cold weather last week as his evidence of a trend.

<comment><USER11> >If you had a sore stomach, and asked 2 groups of people to help you figure out why, would you trust the diagnosis from a group with 100 world-class doctors, surgeons, dieticians, etc... or 100 random people?

Not unless two of those 100 random individuals were Barry Marshall and Robin Warren and the stomach pain was due to a peptic ulcer.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Barry_Marshall](https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Barry_Marshall)

"Marshall and Robin Warren showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) is the cause of most peptic ulcers, reversing decades of medical doctrine holding that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid."

The point being that a reasonable belief long held by experts was shown to be false by careful scientific investigation. That said, I don't find this kind of meta-rhetoric helpful as it serves only to steer attention away from the pertinent matter at hand and to shut down discussion.

<comment><USER23> I get what you're saying, but Marshall was a doctor. He'd be in the 3% of the group of informed scientists that are working to figure out this scenario. My point is that the general public's opinion and perception of the issue shouldn't carry as much weight as the experts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The chart at [http://d1vn86fw4xmcz1.cloudfront.net/content/royptb/363/1501...](http://d1vn86fw4xmcz1.cloudfront.net/content/royptb/363/1501/2299/F11.large.jpg) (put together by The Royal Society) shows that _most_ deforestation in Eastern Canada occurred over 400 years ago. This one [http://mongabay- images.s3.amazonaws.com/12/1203all-time-defo...](http://mongabay- images.s3.amazonaws.com/12/1203all-time-deforestation.jpg) shows a shift starting about 300 years ago from temperate forest removal to tropical forest removal. Together, they start to paint a picture of massive deforestation, hundreds of years ago.

It's important to note that history didn't begin in 1880, and that some effects lag their cause. Forests, along with oceanic flora, normally sequester Carbon from CO2 and return O2 to the atmosphere. However, this effect only takes place when the forests are actually there.

I don't have any religion, one way or another, about climate change and its causes, but I think we won't learn anything from media propaganda like this. It doesn't even bring up the possibility of albedo playing a role in climate change?

<comment><USER25> > It doesn't even bring up the possibility of albedo playing a role in climate > change?

Isn't that exactly what the "So If It's Not Nature, Is It Deforestation?" slide is about?

<comment><USER24> No. The topic of deforestation covers a host of issues, but albedo can be changed without regard for forests. For instance, covering all the empty land black-top roads and parking lots, and putting black shingles on the roofs of hundreds of millions of houses adds a lot of dark surface area to the planet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Does it bother anyone else that only the Global temperate has its axis labelled?

What is the orbital wobble measuring? What is the volcano line measuring? Is that decreased forests or decreased land use? Should be be using more aerosols? Is that meant to be suns temperature or sun activity, or sun colour?

I realise that the actual data is from reliable carefully measured models but it makes this illustration so pointless.

<comment><USER27> > What is the orbital wobble measuring? What is the volcano line measuring?

Read the bottom of the page; it explains that the colored lines measure the modeled expected impact from orbital wobble/whatever on climate. That is, all of the lines measure global temperature.

<comment><USER28> All of the lines _model_ global temperature. Except the temperature line... right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> In climate 130 years is not a long time. I wish these articles showed graphs with historical data that go back thousands of years so that I could see how, in a historical context, greenhouse emissions are affecting the world. I've only ever seen data from the 1900's, and it looks pretty hockey stick, but would be interesting to see fluctuations with the ice age(s) and local highs included.

Edit: historical data is of course not available, but approximations must exist?

<comment><USER30> [http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/indicators/ghg/ghg-...](http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/indicators/ghg/ghg- concentrations.html)

[http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/last_400k_yrs.html](http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/last_400k_yrs.html)

[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6124/1198.abstract](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6124/1198.abstract)

<comment><USER31> Are there any data on water vapor concentrations? I ask that because I have read that the contribution of water vapor to the greenhouse effect is perhaps two to four times greater than CO2.

<comment><USER32> Not only that, all greenhouse models require a 'water feedback loop'.

Of course there are plenty of anthropogenic water emissions to go about. When you irrigate, you are effectively throwing water into the air - by increasing the surface area of water evaporation through plant transpiration networks.

I have never seen anyone talk about this alternative hypothesis.

A disclaimer - I am all for reducing CO2 emissions strictly on principle (this is not dependent on the effects of CO2) and have put my money behind my beliefs - I have driven hybrid vehicles to support technology towards that end since 2003. But in my judgement as a scientist in general (and to some degree as a chemist who has done advanced spectroscopy including IR spectroscopy) I am losing confidence in climatology.

<comment><USER33> It's a reasonable question. While I am not a climatologist...

Anthropogenic evaporation is probably minuscule next to deviations in natural evaporation due to small changes in temperature. A single hurricane, for example, dumps more power (as heat) than all human power generation.

Also, unlike CO2, I would also guess that atmospheric water probably reaches equilibrium much faster (half life ~1 year instead of ~30 years).

<comment><USER32> There is basically no equilibrium condition here. If you mean that there is a more 'inelastic' equilibrium constant, then keep in mind that the concentration level governed by such a constant is dependent on rate in versus rate out, and there are certainly ongoing inputs of ag water. We've completely drained several seas and underground aquifers as a result of human activity in the last 50 years.

<comment><USER33> The amount of water used globally (approx 10^13 m^3) is only about 2.5% the total yearly evaporation off of the ocean (approx 4*10^14 m^3).

I suspect small changes in climate have a much greater effect on net evaporation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This graphic really just plays into the hands of climate change deniers. No labelled axis, a timeline of only 100 years (you could also argue the dinosaurs caused global warming), and the quite proud declaration at the end the argument is really "no contest" under the assumption that correlation == causation. I could also make a graph that shows the increase in global temperature correlating with the rise in the Latino population, could I then declare it a "no contest"?

<comment><USER35> > under the assumption that correlation == causation

Except we do have a pretty good understanding of the chemisty/physics of the greenhouse effect, too. So there's a prediction ("increased CO2 will lead to warming") and a validation. What more do they want?

<comment><USER34> Is this increase in CO2 a significant amount on the scale of Earth's history? How much of it was caused by humans vs natural cycles? A cursory search informed me C02 levels and average temperature was much higher during the dinosaur ages[0], what was the cause then? Note I'm playing devil's advocate here and I haven't studied climate much, but my point is the graphic wouldn't persuade someone who is already biased against human-driven climate change, and only encourages equally primitive arguments from their side.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesozoic#Climate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesozoic#Climate)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This article only serves to stroke the ego of people who already believe that CO2 emissions cause global warming. It does nothing for people who already deny it.

Evidence, no matter how strong doesn't serve to change the nature of a man. People would rather bend the logic and the evidence to fit their convenient perception of reality.

Which brings me to the question: "What can change a nature of a man?" Imminent danger? If an assailant had a gun pointed at your head, it'd be impossible to deny. How can this evidence about global warming be presented so that it can't be denied?

<comment><USER37> People of all stripes have the tendency to weight the believability of the evidence based on how well it matches their beliefs instead of weighing their beliefs based on how well they match the evidence.

<comment><USER32> So, here was something that bothered me this year. This peer-reviewed article was published:

[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2015/06/05/science.a...](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2015/06/05/science.aaa5632.full)

Which claims that the 'global warming' hiatus doesn't exist and is a surface measurement artefact. Adjusting a subset of the surface measurement data removes 'this artefact' and shows that global warming has still been on the rise. Sorry, it's paywalled, if you want a review of it perhaps try:

[http://www.npr.org/2015/06/04/411998275/scientists-cast- doub...](http://www.npr.org/2015/06/04/411998275/scientists-cast-doubt-on-an- apparent-hiatus-in-global-warming)

But when I heard this NPR article, I thought to myself, "Hold on. Aren't there non-surface measurements that have agreed with the existence of the last 10 year 'global warming hiatus'?" Indeed, the various satellite measurements (which do not suffer from as many methodological concerns) agree that the last 10 years have been relatively stagnant in terms of global warming.

Adjusting data in this fashion is extremely dangerous, and climate scientists are certainly not immune from the "tendency to weight the believability of the evidence".

<comment><USER38> > Indeed, the various satellite measurements (which do not suffer from as many > methodological concerns) agree that the last 10 years have been relatively > stagnant in terms of global warming.

I can't engage with the rest of what you're saying, but FWIW a 10 year period is just not a reasonable time period to attempt to draw conclusions about changes in temperature. There are multiple ten year periods of falling temperatures which can be taken out of the obvious increases in temperature which have happened over the last 60 years. Looking at a ten year period, you're going to get much more noise than signal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Not trying to argue against manmade climate change here, but the conclusion is inconsistent with the stated point/headline.

The main question is whether or not humans are the primary driving factor in the changes observed. Graphs show lack of correlation with various manmade causes and some natural causes, but then the conclusion is reached with the graph of "the influence of greenhouse gas emissions." In other words, the "nail in the coffin" evidence is simply showing the _effects_ of the problem graphed against the problem itself; it doesn't prove one way or another whether the _cause_ of the rise in greenhouse gasses is manmade.

Downvote as you will, but that doesn't seem like science to me; it feels like proving a point by simply restating the point.

<comment><USER38> > it doesn't prove one way or another whether the cause of the rise in > greenhouse gasses is manmade.

Does anyone seriously doubt that rises in CO2 are not principally driven by human activity? I have never even seen that as a talking point.

<comment><USER39> Does the popularity of a doubt or idea even matter here when we're supposed to be discussing science?

<comment><USER40> Brakenshire didn't question the popularity of the topic, rather whether it had been convincingly postulated by anyone worth mentioning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Since I seem to be repeating myself all over this thread:

It is basic physics (the optics of IR and visible light and thermodynamics) that trace amounts of CO2 and methane can significantly warm the atmosphere.

We know physics pretty damn well, and if you do not accept this, there is no conversation.

Sure, one should look at the data to see to what extent this is happening and there are all kinds of questions one can ask. But all this talk of "correlation is not causation" is nonsense.

<comment><USER42> The science around climate change is well established--it's happening, it's man-made, and it will continue--but it's a bit more complicated than that. The physics suggests a relatively small increase in temperature (<1C); it's the positive feedbacks, particularly water vapor vapor feedbacks, that make climate change so potentially costly.

<comment><USER43> It doesn't help that estimates of the climate sensitivity seem to be all over the place.

<comment><USER44> I think being "all over the place" is what skeptics and "denialists" have a problem with. Let's get more data before making drastic changes to our regulations that may hurt hard-working people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> > "No, it really is greenhouse gasses." .. "See for yourself."

Being patronising has such a great track record in turning hearts and minds, I'm glad they didn't stoop to such decadent clap track as "engaging with opposing arguments".

<comment><USER46> With the greatest respect, there are no opposing arguments with which to engage at this point. The issue is political, and not scientific.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> What's always been puzzling me is why the relationship between man-produced emissions and climate is considered important in the fossil fuel debate.

As if it's not enough that the air in major cities and vast parts of entire countries is literally toxic.

<comment><USER28> Because it's not a debate about science, it's a debate about policy.

Imagine you are a Los Angeles politician looking to promote one of two policies:

1) Clean up the air in Los Angeles at a measurable cost of X, most of which will be paid by Los Angeles taxpayers (including said politician).

2) Reduce CO2 emissions worldwide at an unmeasurable cost of Y, most of which will be paid via the inflation of consumer prices. The air in Los Angeles will probably remain just as dirty, but the politician gets to say that he "did something".

Which of these policies would the hypothetical politician be more likely to support?

<comment><USER48> > Because it's not a debate about science, it's a debate about policy.

Bingo! The science is settled, as much as any science ever can be. The problem comes in with people "just asking questions", the same questions, over and over again, that have been answered so many times, but people don't want to change their beliefs. Reminds me a lot of tactics used by certain other groups with deeply held beliefs.

I have to commend people like hackuser, whose patience is not only commendable, but astounding! I truly hope the sealions don't wear him down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Well correlation is not causation.

is it y=f(x) or y=x(f)? aka is is warmer because of the higher greenhouse gases or is there more greenhouse gases because of the warmer climate (that could have been caused by things like leaving an ice age and approaching a warm period in Earth's life)

Just to clarify, i support green technology and I think this is definitely the way to go but I don't like the unjustified crusade using proofs that can be ripped apart in minutes.

<comment><USER50> So, where would you think the greenhouse gases came from?

<comment><USER49> Which one? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Greenhouse_gase...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Greenhouse_gases)

<comment><USER49> There is nothing ironic here, humans add more CO2 sources and kill the most CO2 sinks (forests) these activities would put any system off balance. People like to talk about how CO2 production is bad but they forget to mention that killing rainforest is equally bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> It's really depression to see such a large aggregation of smart people applying their abilities to nitpicking details of global warming instead of coming up with solutions.

</comment><comment><USER52> Very cool visualization and great way to display it.

As someone who refuses to trust authority and wants to understand things for myself before making a decision, global warming is very frustrating because nobody will answer my questions without personal attacks or appeals to authority. I don't have an agenda either way, I just have a very inquisitive mind. Have any of you felt the same?

Some of the questions I have that never seem to get an adequate answer:

1) How are the models validated? Is it like backtesting a trading strategy? Come up with a hypothesis that seems to fit historical data, then let it run with actual data, and see how accurate it is? If so, how have the models held up?

2) How do they account for confounding factors and how do they separate causal correlations from mere correlations?

For example, at 95% of fires firemen were present. Firemen and fires are strongly correlated. But nobody would say firemen are the cause of fires.

Cholesterol was thought to be a causal factor for heart problems because it is strongly correlated but they later found it is not a causal factor. Something else causes the heart disease and cholesterol raises when heart disease is present. They can use it as a predictor of heart disease but it is now understood that cholesterol doesn't actually cause the problem.

3) It seems to me that for a model to be trusted it must have predictive capability, and it must fit a physical model of our current understanding. How do the various models hold up with these criteria? It seems like climate is still a very complex field that we don't fully understand.

</comment><comment><USER53> My only problem is that the planet is over 4 billion years old and as this shows, we've been collecting climate data for a little over 100 years. The natural skeptic in me isn't ok with establishing a trend based on 1/40,000,000 of the available data, the sample size is simply too small. Am I completely off-base with this?

<comment><USER54> Its actually irrelevant whether this has happened before. Its happening now, impacting us, and maybe we can do something about it. The Pollyanna approach "Its natural" doesn't help us when cities are going underwater.

<comment><USER55> Maybe we can do something, but what? Do we build walls around the cities so they don't flood, or do we set up a scheme where developing countries pay a ransom to rich countries so they can continue to pollute, while rich countries starve their poor citizens of affordable energy while funnelling tax money into companies owned by rich citizens to do R&D work on energy sources that won't be viable on a large scale for decades, if ever?

I'm all for the walls, but the money that drives governments don't seem to agree.

<comment><USER56> The issue that I have with the folks who advocate anthropogenic climate change is that near as I can tell there is no way to preserve the standard of living on the planet (feed, clothe, power, etc) and end climate change soon enough, the only way to get even a 50% cut of emissions within a decade is effectively managing to reduce the population of the planet by a similar number.

I think we'd be better off figuring out how to cope with climate change and generally reduce our consumption of natural resources, rather than focusing to tightly on one evil (carbon).

<comment><USER54> ...and just let it continue. How convenient. Pretend nobody's responsible, and its inevitable, and just insulate your house and hunker down I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Reading (audio book) Nate Silver's book on prediction, he looks at the predictions made by James Hansen in 1988 and IPCC a few years later.

He says the predictions were generally pretty good, maybe IPCC was a bit on the high side compared to what happened.

</comment><comment><USER58> It would be a really nice visualisation of the factors if it worked properly. It was impossible to read and navigate for me.

<comment><USER59> On my MacBook Pro using Chrome, it was even worse. Impossible to read at least tells me that something is wrong, but using the trackpad to scroll through the options in a natural flicking way actually skips over multiple entries at a time with only the barest flicker to indicate that it happened. I got almost to the end before I realized I had only seen about one third of the information they were trying to present.

I have nothing against clever visualizations like this, but god damn it web designers, stop co-opting standard UI interactions to make it happen. There is _no_ reason to hijack window scrolling here. None. All you accomplished by doing this was make it harder to figure out how to read the thing, and break it badly for a lot of people. What's wrong with buttons? You can even look for swipes on touchscreen devices. That's pretty standard! But quit stealing the scrollers!

<comment><USER60> Eccch. This is the second Bloomberg article in as many days (the first was on Paul Krugman) to co-opt scrolling. I read a BBC article yesterday that did the same thing.

Jesus, webdevs. Stop this shit now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> It's impressive to see the size of the spikes that volcanic activity causes in this graph, as an event that has no correlation with human activity.

</comment><comment><USER62> Real question: how did they observe land-ocean temperature in 1880?

Edit: and how does it compare to how it's observed now?

<comment><USER63> "The period for which reasonably reliable instrumental records of near-surface temperature exist with quasi-global coverage is generally considered to begin around 1850. Earlier records exist, but with sparser coverage and less standardized instrumentation.

The temperature data for the record come from measurements from land stations and ships. On land, temperature sensors are kept in a Stevenson screen or a maximum minimum temperature system (MMTS). The sea record consists of surface ships taking sea temperature measurements from engine inlets or buckets. The land and marine records can be compared.[13] Land and sea measurement and instrument calibration is the responsibility of national meteorological services. Standardization of methods is organized through the World Meteorological Organization and its predecessor, the International Meteorological Organization.[14]"

Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_recor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_record#Global_record_from_1850)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> After reading these comments, it is clear that the ones who have their mind made up and are not open to debate are the warmists. The fact that merely asking questions incites such aggression suggests only one thing. They just don't know and are scared to admit it to themselves. This is the exact same behavior seen among religious cultists. They have not read all the evidence or most of it themselves, but follow the high priests unquestioningly because 1) It makes them feel better and morally superior and 2) The burden of proof is not on them. They can always evade and say "all the experts/high priests agree" or "read the IPCC" etc

<comment><USER65> Have you read the IPCC report? There's nothing I can write in an HN comment that would make a better argument than that.

<comment><USER64> Which draft of which assessment? Be more specific.

<comment><USER65> Any of them? I'm certainly not going to give you flak for being a year or two out of date. If you want an argument, that's the canonical one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Agreeing on the provenance of the warming seems to be a red herring when we urgently need to figure out how climate change affects us. Which areas will be flooded, which areas will become inhabitable, will we be able to grow more food or less, how many more people can we expect to starve, how many jobs will be created and lost, how will it affect life expectancy? I realize such research is going on -- I'd like it to be promoted better. The world is already an inhospitable place for many people and we already don't respond well enough. Currently I don't see why we would respond any better if things get worse.

</comment><comment><USER67> Wasn't the start of this timeline the end of the little ice age?

</comment><comment><USER68> From all the credible data I've been able to find, the main global warming is just from the coolest times of The Little Ice Age.

For the past 100 years, I see little credible evidence of any significant warming, and what there is may just be that we are still pulling out of The Little Ice Age, e.g., slowly warming the oceans from the cooling they got in The Little Ice Age.

The best data I found is in

Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, National Research Council, _Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years_ , ISBN 0-309-66264-8, 196 pages, National Academies Press, 2006,

available at

[http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11676.html](http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11676.html)

There as I read the graphs, as of 2006, the temperature was essentially the same as in the year 1000, and the increase in temperature over the past 100 years was much like that from year 900 to year 1000.

For the climate model predictions, all the data I've seen have the predictions very significantly different and all significantly higher than the actual temperatures.

For the title here "What's Really Warming the World?", from all I can tell from credible sources, so far, to any significant extent, nothing.

</comment><comment><USER69> CO2 is not strictly human emissions and to imply so is so dishonest is ridiculous. of course any gross simplification of the environment as done in this presentation is explicitly to deliver a message decided before the numbers were assembled.

the primary co2 process is ocean to atmosphere exchange, the earth to atmosphere, and then to mammals respiratory activity. So then you get down to how much CO2 is man pumping into the atmosphere beyond that point and which sources are direct versus indirect.

finally since their numbers only are observable to 1880, how accurate can we assume them to be? If were are extrapolating we could do it further back than 1880 to periods where man was present in significant numbers and thew world was warmer

There is climate change, never has been a period of time where it hasn't, but junk presentations are just that. Take numbers out of context, put in easily to dismiss arguments along side, and it appears to make your point beyond reproach (its like say, the sky is blue and you agree, don't you? the going off to explain why something indirectly related is bad or good)

<comment><USER70> > CO2 is not strictly human emissions and to imply so is so dishonest is > ridiculous.

That was never implied. In fact, they made a point of comparing human driven emissions (which includes things like transportation and agriculture) to natural sources (eg volcanoes).

> the primary co2 process is ocean to atmosphere exchange, the earth to > atmosphere, and then to mammals respiratory activity

Well, you're missing some stuff in there. Like plants n stuff.

> finally since their numbers only are observable to 1880, how accurate can we > assume them to be?

This chart has data back to 1880. Ice core samples, tree rings, whole hosts of other parts of science go back much farther than 1880. All of it seems to corroborate each other.

> If were are extrapolating we could do it further back than 1880 to periods > where man was present in significant numbers and thew world was warmer

> Take numbers out of context, put in easily to dismiss arguments along side, > and it appears to make your point beyond reproach

Hm, sort of like simplifying the CO2 cycle to a few words, missing a bunch of it, and then somehow pretending to think that that explains things much better than hundreds of scientists who have given us the science that shows that this is mainly due to human causes.

Head up to the Arctic. Talk to people whose families have lived there forever and see for yourself. I think that's the only way to convince people like yourself.

<comment><USER69> yet today we also have articles noting that "natural cooling" of the sun will not be sufficient to offset other sources of warming, the same sun this article here dismisses as having any real influence.

this is the problem with the current climate science industry and don't mistake for a moment, this is an industry with great profits at stake for both government researchers and private industries.

They never have a consistent message. We had dire declarations since the turn of the century and many lined up behind those. This particular article is a gross simplification that attempts to dismiss common arguments against by associating them with frivolous arguments. It seeks to minimize without informing. Its pretty but not accurate. There are hundreds if not thousands of scientists who all apparently have different views on what contributes, how much it does, and so on.

So yeah the climate is changing, but it has been doing so forever and there have been historically proven changes greater that what we are seeing now and with man here as well.

Simply put, we don't know all the variables and those who declare we do are more ignorant than those who deny any effect.

<comment><USER23> "...don't mistake for a moment, this is an industry with great profits at stake for both government researchers and private industries."

Do you really think that there is a wide-reaching global conspiracy for environmentalists, researchers, and scientists to propagate a myth solely for their own well-being and job security? That no one would blow the whistle?

"Simply put, we don't know all the variables and those who declare we do are more ignorant than those who deny any effect."

Who has said "we know all the variables"? The current scientific consensus is: A) the climate is changing (you and everyone agrees) B) We're the most likely cause (most denialists and the IPCC conensus agree) ... and C) we have reason to believe that carbon dioxide / greenhouse gases are the leading contributor.

"There are hundreds if not thousands of scientists who all apparently have different views on what contributes, how much it does, and so on."

Wikipedia lists 27 scientists that have published studies claiming natural causes for climate change. (A very quick search shows that at least 2 of them were paid/funded by the Heartland Institute) A couple dozen others fall into "the concerns are overstated" or "we don't know the causes." On the other hand, the 2007 IPCC report had 619 contributors lending their support. A small amount of scientists working on different theories, or being paid to discredit others shouldn't negate a global scientific consensus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Deforestation? They reject this because we replace forest with light reflecting materials which they claim causes slight cooling. Last time I checked, it's way cooler in a forest than standing in a parking lot. Nature uses the energy from sunlight to create biomass. Anything else either reflects it or turns it to heat.

<comment><USER72> > Last time I checked, it's way cooler in a forest than standing in a parking > lot.

Perhaps you forgot to account for the shade and humidity? (As an aside, I believe forests generate heat, just like any biological system. The best it can be seen during spring, the snow patches around plants will melt sooner.)

<comment><USER71> Nope. From a thermodynamic analysis, the energy is either reflected, turned into heat, or used to do work. Forests use more for work than any static object. The only open question in my mind is how much so. You do raise the point of emitting water vapor which adds a lot to the complexity. Also the rotting biomass will produce a lot of heat. But the production of dirt is probably still a net use of the energy. Remember, coal is old biomass and contains a lot of energy that came from the sun.

>> As an aside, I believe forests generate heat, just like any biological system.

You would be wrong in that. All chemical processes in the forest are ultimately powered by sunlight. Your body produces heat, but that's due to chemical reactions that primarily amount to burning fuel (fats are essentially hydrocarbons and the primary products of their "burning" is CO2 and H20 which exit through the lungs). Animals turn chemical energy into heat, but plants turn energy from light into chemical energy.

<comment><USER72> > Animals turn chemical energy into heat, but plants turn energy from light > into chemical energy.

They do, but the heat is byproduct of that conversion. From the 2nd law of thermodynamics there will always be some residual heat (probably quite a lot, efficiency is given by the ratio of absolute temperatures between the heater and cooler, which is quite low in plants). And don't forget that plants also burn sugars to feed their processes. As I said, you can see for yourself in early spring that plants do indeed generate more heat than surrounding dead objects, such as rocks.

In any case, forests have, I believe, lower albedo than deforested landscape, so deforestation should cool the planet if anything. And one of the big arguments for global warming is that we observe more warming during the night, during the winter, towards poles and stratospheric cooling, which is again indicative that the problem is outgoing radiation being recaptured rather than more incoming radiation being reflected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> I don't deny man made climate change, but this argument seems to be weak. Just because two factors go up at the same time doesn't mean one caused the other. See [http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious- correlations](http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations). It is necessary but not sufficient to show that greenhouse gases went up in concert with global temperatures.

Not that one expects them to lay our a sweeping, thorough case for man made climate change in such an article, which would be an unfair expectation. It seems more like a showcase for the bit of javascript razzle dazzle than anything else, as other commenters pointed out, surely no one involved with this article expected it to change anyone's mind one way or the other.

<comment><USER41> The fact that trace amounts of greenhouse gases can heat the atmosphere is physics. With numbers and everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Notably absent is con-trails. The jury is still out, but there is strong evidence that they can have a significant effect. The rise of jet travel has also coincided with hydrocarbon use. Water vapor is also a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2.

<comment><USER74> Con-trail data would match the CO2 and temperature line. It would show another correlation that might call into question the validity of the absolute undeniable fact that CO2's correlation is causation.

There are people with simple minds that would then question CO2's role in Global Warming. We can't give those deniers anything else to hang their hat on.

It's the same reason we need to use the "Land Use" data instead of deforestation data. It would just confuse the non-believers. It's better to keep it simple and stay on message.

<comment><USER75> > We can't give those deniers anything else to hang their hat on.

Is this sarcasm? I can understand this kind of nonsense on r/politics but we should be speaking plainly and of facts at HN. I hope HN isn't turning into another propaganda machine hivemind.

<comment><USER74> Sarcasm? Yes it was; I was just testing a social hypotheses I had.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> The deforestation graph only seems to account for the difference in emissivity between forest and grassland.

Surely the CO2 absorption and the effects of forestation on cloud cover would have a non-negligible effect.

</comment><comment><USER77> There are three things that bother me about climate science.

1\. Certainly in years past, anyone who even dared question that global warming wasn't real or wasn't man made was lambasted. That's not science. That's religion. Even just asking questions gets you labelled a denier. These, to me, have been and are reasonable questions to ask:

\- On what basis are we saying the earth is warming? Datasets for the last 1-2 centuries are still pretty narrow compared to how old the earth is and how hot and cold it has been at various points;

\- Is that warming, if proven, man-made? It's reasonable to investigate other possible factors that may well add to the effect caused by man;

\- Can we even do anything about it if it is? How expensive will it be?

\- What, if any, are the good effects of climate change? It can't be all bad but it just bothers me when I see things talking about how it will hurt, say, North America. But will it makes other parts of the world, currently largely uninhabitable, more hospitable?

I'm actually genuinely curious about these and other questions and it bothers me that even asking them is a problem.

2\. The lack of transparency. This goes beyond climate science actually but any published thesis or study on the subject should make data sets publicly available and--this one is really important--make any code for any computer models open source. Transparency and reproducibility are at the heart of scientific method are they not?

There have been incidents (eg climategate) where no scientific misconduct was found but the text of certain emails really leaves a bad taste in my mouth because it reads very much like "here's the conclusion, now let's prove it".

3\. The history of climate predictions has been pretty terrible and each time we're told "no trust us, this time it's totally different".

It's not that I don't believe in man-made climate change. I actually think whether or not it's true it's probably largely irrelevant. There are simply too many of us and we're running out of too many things in the coming centuries that this will be corrected one way or another in such a way that climate change--true or not--will be the least of our problems.

One of the interesting and depressing explanations for the Fermi Paradox is that the sphere of influence of life is ultimately capped by the speed of light, which is geometric, and life expands exponentially. Life always catches up eventually.

You see this in nature where algae blooms for example will explode in rivers killing all other life until they themselves can't survive and they all die. In more balanced ecosystems there are other factors to keep any one species in check. It really seems like nothing is keeping up in check now so are we just another algae bloom?

<comment><USER41> > On what basis are we saying the earth is warming?

Physics.

> Can we even do anything about it if it is? How expensive will it be? > \- > What, if any, are the good effects of climate change? It can't be all bad > but it just bothers me when I see things talking about how it will hurt, > say, North America. But will it makes other parts of the world, currently > largely uninhabitable, more hospitable?

These are great questions, but they have nothing to do with the reality of what's happening. Unfortunately, we're distracted from this very important conversation if we do not agree on the basic facts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> What about agricultural water output?? Inverse of the deforestation curve already shown is also potentially convincing.

If you want to go spurious, you could also run a correlation between wind power generation.

</comment><comment><USER78> The documentary Merchants of Doubt (2014) provides a great look into paid shills on US media. They aim for confusion and they've been doing this kind of work for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER79> By no means suggesting CO2 isn't responsible for global warming - <USER2> frankly I have zero idea, I just try listen to what the experts say. However, this article in particular is pretty offensively stupid. It shows some graphs that indicate a correlation between CO2 and heat increase. That's by no means scientific evidence for a _cause_. Again, not saying there isn't any evidence CO2 is the cause, it's just this article is incredibly misleading.

</comment><comment><USER80> So what they are saying is that we should be pumping large amounts of Aerosols into the atmosphere?

I think we need less confirmations that there is a problem and more solutions to the problem.

</comment><comment><USER81> I am not a scientist but I've always had a sneaking suspicion that blacktop converting light from the sun into heat had something to do with it. I'd actually LOVE to hear what a scientist thought of this hypothesis.

I also wonder if all the coal we material we burned for heat (coal and such) didn't have a cooling effect - particularly in the cities where a lot of the accurate temperature measures were taken. Again, not a scientist - <USER3> curiously.

</comment><comment><USER82> GHG seems to match Temperature quite well. But GHG is cut-off at the year 2000. I wonder if the closeness of the fit continues?

Also, what's up with the error bars around GHG's? Is there really that much uncertainty surrounding CO2 concentration in the atmosphere? I thought readings were accurate to ~1ppm where the trend is currently +3ppm/year so why are the observations (in the modern sensor era) uuncertain by about ~45ppm?

</comment><comment><USER83> I am not negating the global warming issue here, but what I see is just a correlation of two time series, much like the correlation between "US Spending on science, space and technology" and "Suicides by hanging, strangulation or suffocation" [1]

[1] [http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious- correlations](http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations)

<comment><USER84> This is going to sound harsh, but what you are doing is _exactly_ what climate denialists do.

You question on correlation of variables has not only been asked; it has been reformulated tens of thousands of times by climate scientists and experts in all sorts of related fields.

By asking a question like this you're directly undermining the quality of reasearch that has been _extremely_ solid on the matter. Correlation of variables would be an issue if we were just looking at data to infer an explanation. Physicists have known the effects of radiative forcing of CO2 and methane because it has been observed in laboratory settings, and that knowledge has been extrapolated to models of the entire world.

The equation of "heat in, heat out" corresponds exactly as predicted. Of course, the Earth's atmosphere and ocean are so complex that this effect is not seen uniformly. The challenge is in accounting what heats up and how quickly. We know, for example, that the oceans hold far more heat than the atmosphere. We're in the process of understanding how ocean currents affect and are affected by that. But overall there is no possibility of debate as to how CO2 affects the atmosphere and oceans. The thing is that the nuances are so significant for having a useful understanding of climate that many details are still missing. What we _do_ know has been extremely useful and clarifying of how these events are going to play out.

<comment><USER83> >>> This is going to sound harsh

By no means.

Note that I am not a climate denialist, but I generally find very little critical thinking when scientists presents climate forecasts for the next 20, or 50 or 100 years.

Please see my response to drjesusphd below for a more balanced response to this particular NASA chart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> [http://i.imgur.com/NZbqqEl.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/NZbqqEl.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER86> It would be helpful to know more specifically what the final green line is actually representing; 'shows the influence of greenhouse gases' is a pretty major divergence from the specific quantitative measurements used in every other line.

</comment><comment><USER87> Note that these graphs explain the factors of the simulation model, and is not comparing data to data.

From the FAQ:

"The colored temperature lines are the modeled estimates that each climate factor contributes to the overall temperature."

</comment><comment><USER88> Slightly off-topic - can anyone explain the tool utilized for these graphics?

</comment><comment><USER89> Unrelated, but this part amused me in that it was probably intended to be an argument _for_ the quality of the model:

>ModelE2 contains something on the order of 500,000 lines of code, ...

</comment><comment><USER90> Scroll-to-page for this vis is horribly broken on Firefox - there's a very narrow gap in the scrolling where the header paragraphs are visible.

<comment><USER91> Agreed, I can't actually read this article at all using my mouse scroll wheel. There's no way to get some of the text on the screen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> Re the past proxy data, and possibly the recent data, why is the assumption that causation follows gas->temp and not temp(unknown_var)->gas?

</comment><comment><USER93> Honest question: This data is correlational, and I always thought it was important to distinguish between correlation & causation?

<comment><USER94> Generally causation and correlation can only be distinguished by running experiments. Given that we only have 1 earth climate, long time needed to gather reliable results, and the quite apparent correlation, which experiment would you like to run for next 50 years, slow down co2 output to see if climate warming slows down, or continue increasing co2 output, and see where that leads?

Infact, increasing co2 output would be kind of boring experiment, we've tried that already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> What exactly are they measuring for the sun's data? Observed temperature? Is the frequency/intensity of CME's included?

<comment><USER96> my question too. a small change in the measure for solar could be more impactful than a large change in greenhouse gases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> So CO2 it is. Can we use nuclear power now? Surely its problems are easier to solve.

</comment><comment><USER98> I'm just so utterly amazed that they could measure temperature with such precision for so many years. I'd imagine rooms full of temperature calculator people crunching numbers from their precise temperature measuring instruments. Bravo!

</comment><comment><USER99> At this point, any rational person understands the problem. Ok. We get it.

So how do we fix it? It seems like everyone is focusing on proving that it is caused by humans, but where is the solution?

<comment><USER75> With taxes of course.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading)

<comment><USER99> Ok, so they collect a massive amount of taxes. Then what?

<comment><USER100> Enact the rest of the left's policy goals, of course. Don't ask why. IT'S THE SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS you denier.

<comment><USER99> Oh come on. I'm trying to have a legitimate conversation here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> That's one way for NASA to lose funding.

</comment><comment><USER102> This is a great simple UX to have the conversation.

</comment><comment><USER103> How can mankind, overnight stop exponential (that famous hockey stick everyone likes to see) oxygen growth? Very suspicious. There are some pretty bad sources of information out there about oxygen over time. Here is one I trust: [http://dk6qunh1hkthr.cloudfront.net/content/nips/25/5/272/F1...](http://dk6qunh1hkthr.cloudfront.net/content/nips/25/5/272/F1.medium.gif)

</comment><comment><USER104> So, a graph and no units. Wonderful. As far as I know we're talking squirrels per cubic meter equivalent production of CO2 lol

</comment><comment><USER105> And, since we are allowed to use graphs rhetorically rather than discuss complicated topics like adults... what's _really_ causing the murder rate to decline?

[http://gizmodo.com/5977989/internet-explorer-vs-murder- rate-...](http://gizmodo.com/5977989/internet-explorer-vs-murder-rate-will-be- your-favorite-chart-today)

<comment><USER106> Are you really going to suggest that data suggesting causation that has been contributed by hundreds and reviewed by literally thousands of scientists shares equal validity as an obviously facetious graph created to make a point about not suggesting causal relationships lightly?

</comment></comment><comment><USER107> i read an article a while back on the economist which suggested that if you look at a longer span (much longer than 1880) you will find that this is a natural cycle that the Earth/Sun go through. We just happen to be at that point in the cycle. i really doubt we humans can affect climate changes in any way. An interactive colourful plot doesn't convince me.

<comment><USER108> Indeed.

Didn't Feynman say that the real measure of science is experiment?

Show me the experiments otherwise we have merely observations and conjecture.

They might be right, but at the moment we've established hypothesis and nothing more.

<comment><USER109> We humans are right now conducting the experiment. Despite empirical evidence, data, modeling, and application of our knowledge the effects of green house gases we continue to pump them into the atmosphere on a massive scale. In another 30 - 40 years the experiment will yield conclusive results. Then I suppose global warming deniers like Rush Limbaugh will shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, we now have our experimental evidence."

<comment><USER108> I look forward to the results however I'm not sure they stand as an unbiased controlled experiment and are as factually devoid as the methodology.

Many things are observable but the difference between correlation and causation are somewhat more subtle.

Please note, I'm no denier and think that we should reduce our emissions as they have secondary benefits, fully acknowledge that there is a slight raise in global temperature but to assign a cause is a little premature.

Add to that the incidental political involvement, funding and the 'facts' (of incidentally we have none, nor many viable theories) leads to a logical conclusion that "mu" (neither yes or no) is a better stance to take.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


General Motors says it owns your car's software - <AUTHOR> http://www.autoblog.com/2015/05/20/general-motors-says-owns-your-car-software/ <comment><USER2> So am I going to have to wipe any car's software after purchase and install open source, as I do with laptops now?</comment>


Mixpanel Introduces Query-Time Sampling - <AUTHOR> https://mixpanel.com/blog/2019/06/01/query-time-sampling <comment><USER2> (founder of mixpanel here)

I'm really excited about this release - sampling has been necessary to support some of our largest customers for many years, but has a bunch of issues, as Vijay points out in this post.

I love the fact that moving sampling to query time lets us beat the tradeoff - we get something like 90% of the speedup of ingestion time sampling with none of the downsides, and the only incremental cost is storage which is cheap. It's a big win.

</comment><comment><USER3> For an analytics engine, this seems impressive. I wonder how it compares to memsql's speed of querying.

Also Mixpanel's pricing page seems to employ some dark patterns. How much does it really cost? So complicated.

Why not simply charge based on data and compute used. like GCP, AWS, & Azure billing?</comment>


Uber for Grandparents - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Yuval_Halevi/status/1135535320215302144 <comment><USER2> My dad is 93 and can no longer drive independently. He lives in a semi-rural area that is not well served by traditional taxi companies, and so he is severely limited in terms of getting around.

I think there may be some opportunity to serve elderly people like him, but the fact is, there is a wide range of technical ability among the elderly. Even in his 70s and 80s, my dad could barely handle the complexity of a flip phone.

And while there are other elderly people who are more tech-savvy, I think the big shift is going to occur when self-driving cars become available. That's going to open up a lot of mobility for people who can't drive because of age, disability, etc.</comment>


Inside Harvard Business School - <AUTHOR> http://www.hulu.com/watch/59462/cnbc-originals-the-money-chase-inside-harvard-business-school

<comment><AUTHOR> I know this is a long video, but I submitted this thinking the discussion at HN would be really interesting.

Is a HBS MBA necessary to become a "true player?" Bill Gates didn't get one. Warren Buffett didn't get one. In fact, some of the people who DO have them have struggled far more than the people who haven't.

What do hackers think?</comment>


Ask HN: How to ask for feedback without spamming - <AUTHOR> I've built an application, I think it's really cool. Now, I want to start asking for feedback, but when I tried posting on sites like reddit I got flagged down, because they say it's spam. Can I post references to my project here on HN and expect it will not be considered spam? Any special places on the web that are specifically meant for posts like this? Any special techniques I should apply to make it less spammy? <comment><USER2> If it fits the rules, you could post a Show HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/show](https://news.ycombinator.com/show)</comment>


Facebook publishes your friends' private messages as wall posts - <AUTHOR>

I can't find an English link to submit but it's a issue that's been confirmed in France at least http://rezonances.blog.lemonde.fr/2012/09/24/facebook-bug-et-rend-publics-les-messages-prives-de-ses-membres/
Check your wall. For me it was 2009 and earlier.
The worst part is probably the fact that the messages that YOU sent to friends are currently on their wall right now, and there is no easy way that I know of to delete them.
EDIT: quickest way to hide all of your friend's posts on your wall http://cl.ly/image/0s1e093Q0s1m
EDIT: it's now the top story on LeMonde.fr (biggest paper in France) http://lemonde.fr and on TF1 (biggest private TV channel) http://lci.tf1.fr/high-tech/facebook-des-messages-prives-publies-sur-les-timeline-7545127.html It's happening to all of my French friends and a lot of US people too (I've been living in the US for almost 2 years…) <comment><USER2> Um it was on mine... I just had to go hide them all. WTF FACEBOOK.

*edit: I'm in the U.S.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure I had this issue - changed a bunch of my privacy settings, and tried to go find specific posts that were in fact DM's from the past, publicly displayed on my timeline, but couldn't. Also saw this response from FB on TC:

A spokesperson told Constine:

"Every report we've seen, we've gone back and checked. We haven't seen one report that's been confirmed [of a private message being exposed]. A lot of the confusion is because before 2009 there were no likes and no comments on wall posts. People went back and forth with wall posts instead of having a conversation [in the comments of single wall post.]"

Previously Facebook issued the statement:

"A small number of users raised concerns after what they mistakenly believed to be private messages appeared on their Timeline. Our engineers investigated these reports and found that the messages were older wall posts that had always been visible on the users' profile pages. Facebook is satisfied that there has been no breach of user privacy."

</comment><comment><USER4> just saw it on my profile, for the year 2008, had to go hide it all. I am in the US

</comment><comment><USER5> Crazy, everyone has stop working at the office ;p

</comment><comment><USER6> Just checked, this not happening. At least not for my profile and I am in Canada.

</comment><comment><USER7> No way this is true, or you wouldn't need to post some obscure French source to prove it - it would be on CNN.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually it's the top story on Le Monde, the #1 paper in France <http://abonnes.lemonde.fr>

Screen: <http://cl.ly/image/3i300I0Y2a3Z>

<comment><USER8> Note that this is a screenshot of the article, not a screenshot to leaked FB messages.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What should I learn to create my project? - <AUTHOR>

I have an idea that I want to transform into a MVP, but I can't properly code. I know the very basics of CSS+html, Javascript and I did a functional SaaS in C# with a lot of help from Visual Studio. Just enough to know that I am capable of learning to code. I want to know not only what language and framework to learn, but what should I use to actually deploy and publish my product (it is a SaaS, more on the idea below). As I see on regular beginner's learning platforms - codecademy and etc - this is a most overlooked field. Should I use AWS, a server on Digital Ocean, some Platform as a Service that I don't know yet but is more user friendly? In all of this the only thing I know is how to buy a domain. After that, i need to learn.
The idea:
It is a tool that transforms a list of links on a visual board.
Imagine you ask a friend to help you learn about quantitative finance and he emails you back with a list of links to pages where you should begin to learn. Among these links there is a diversity of pages: a wikipedia article, 2 youtube videos (one is a lecture, other an interview), 3 books' Amazon pages, 4 twitter accounts to follow, 2 blogs, a podcast, a particular post of another blog and a project's github.
I would like to build a tool that take that list of links and transform into a one-page visually attractive and didatic board, summarizing and giving a small taste of all the resources.
Just as Facebook do to individual links when you post on your timeline: youtube videos can be seen on the spot, twitter accounts are shown the avatar and description, blog posts are shown some thumbnail image and the beginning of the post text, wikipedia is shown the title of the article and first paragraph. You get the idea. Most are just the <title> and <description> of the linked page, a few relevant sites get special treatment (as Youtube or Vimeo).
The MVP would allow anyone to transform your hyperlinks into a public, temporarily available board. <comment><USER2> You need a language with a lot of power (less lines of code) and ability to interface easily with a database. I would pick Ruby on Rails as my first option { or you could use Python }

Both Ruby on Rails and Python you will need to know some of the fundamentals you mentioned like html,css, and javascript certainly helps.</comment>


Stages of learning Go, with code examples - <AUTHOR> https://sourcegraph.com/blog/live/gopherconindia/112025389257 <comment><USER2> Just wondering, does Go finally has a package manager with proper versioning of modules?

 _Edit: Somebody is heavily downvoting me on every reply, I would love to know why. I like Go and want to get into it since a few months but the missing package manager held me off. So what is wrong about my question?_

<comment><USER3> You really don't need a package manager for Go. Honestly, the main reason you need them for node, python, etc is because you're deploying source code to your production environment. You don't do that with Go. You deploy a binary, which has everything wrapped up in itself. Think of it as a self-contained virtualenv that requires zero effort on your part :)

In Go, code is packaged via source control repos. If you want a different version, you need a different repo. There are some tools to mitigate this, so that you can get away with a different branch per version (see [http://gopkg.in](http://gopkg.in)), which can make it a little nicer for the maintainer to deal with multiple branches. To the consumer, it still looks like a different repo (i.e. every different version is a different URL to a repo).

Note that because Go is a compiled language, the only time versioning comes into play is a _development time_. As long as your developers are using the right version, you never have to worry about versions during deployment.

Now, if you're concerned that your project depends on code repos from external sources, then there are several tools that can insulate you from third parties doing stupid stuff. The most complete and best one is called godep, which basically has two modes - reliable and paranoid. The reliable mode insulates you from changes made to a repo you depend on by recording the exact VCS revision your project is using and always checks out that commit. That way, if an upstream repo checks in a breaking change, it won't affect you (and you control when you update to newer commits in that repo). Paranoid mode actually copies all the code from your dependencies into your own repo. This insulates you from upstream repos getting deleted. And of course, this gives you the ability to test out upstream changes before integrating them into your project. The tool makes it easy to copy all of your dependencies at once with a single command, so it's not a huge hassle to do (which it would be if you had to do it by hand).

<comment><USER4> > You really don't need a package manager for Go. Honestly, the main reason > [...] is because you're deploying source code to your production environment

Not sure if I would agree with that. A full-fledged package manager automates the process of installing, upgrading, configuring and removing software packages in a consistent manner. Dependency management and semantic versioning is an important part to provide this consistency. Wether you deploy source code or binaries does not make any difference why a package manager is always good to have.

<comment><USER5> We really don't need any more _binary_ package managers - that should be the responsibility of the platform you're deploying on. dpkg/rpm/etc on Linux systems, MSI on Windows, APK on Android, etc.

<comment><USER6> One reason I love package managers, is that as developer I don't want to produce a dpkg/rpm/tgz/apk/msi/ipa/p5i/depot multiplied by the different locations of include files, libraries, documentation across the said OS.

Specially in commercial software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Where does this idiotic idea cames from that being "idiomatic" is some kind of virtue?

Idiomatic Java was the FactoryProxySingleton EE-wank fest from Apache, SUN, Spring and co.

It was by changing those idioms around (e.g. how the Play framework wrote Java), that saner alternatives emerged.

The de-facto idiom of PHP before 2010 was messy code.

It started getting more coherent after that, but the preffered idiom now (e.g. for Zend, Synmphony, Laravel) is still a tedious, verbose, copy of the Java circa 2006 style (large class hierarchies, singletons, "Facades", DI, etc).

Idiomatic JS pre-Cockford was ad-hoc BS. After Cockford it got a lot better, but then it changed again (can't say for the worse) with all sort of functional tricks and patterns that weren't in vogue before.

In all of those cases, if they have stuck to the same "idiomatic" way from the start, it would have been worse.

Within a single project, sure, enforce some idiomatic way of doing things.

But within a whole language people should be able to experiment and not be called upon for being "unidiomatic" all the time. This is exceptially disturbing and often in Go, where there's some cargo cult in many advocates that they have found the be-all end-all way to code.

It seems to me this push for "idiomatic" is also related to the Blub paradox. Blub programmers know a couple of ways of doing things (the "idioms" of their language) and cannot understand why someone might want to program with higher (or just different but convenient) concepts he learned in another language.

<comment><USER8> The lower the standard of your team, the more you will appreciate idiomatic code. I don't work in SV, blue chips, or anywhere that could use Scala. A couple of us at my last place had a hard time moving the team from Source Safe to SVN, Git was out of the question. "What's the point of commit messages if you only commit every three months?" \- not kidding, not a junior. Lines thousands of characters long, literally. I saw a pattern once. Once. CIO was one of these copy/paste VB devs, common in London, an unfair generalisation, but necessary as a warning sign. Some people become developers without any interest in development, completely oblivious to *nix/open source world, simply as a job, 9 - 5, and might have flipped a coin between development and accountancy. Some places don't give a shit about software development, or the idea of engineering - "just get it done!". Resharper, fxcop? Yeah, right. Degrees don't all teach compiler design, some just Java OO and a bit of Glassfish. If Go replaced C# in all of these arbitrary SMEs there would be far fewer WTFs. But people would struggle without Visual Studio debugging and a big run button. I'm being harsh, and seriously, not suggesting anything about MS devs, who include the world's best as well as the world's worst, but I find people on this site are often, to their fortune, oblivious to what working in the 99% can be like (the figurative 99%). Long live idioms, gofmt, golint.

<comment><USER9> Are you making the argument that Go is finally the magic language that can make bad devs write good code ?

Let me be the realist here : it isn't.

Go is just a very young language that, for the moment, only has developers that are curious and therefore either good or willing to learn. This has the additional consequence that for the moment the mailinglist is very helpful. History teaches us that both effects have nothing to do with the language and are temporary (unless the language never sees any "real" acceptance, like Haskell).

You can look messages from some years back showing the same sentiment for Delphi, Visual Basic, Java, Python (especially Python had lots of people making this argument), ... And when those messages were posted, they were true. It didn't last long for any of them.

> But people would struggle without Visual Studio debugging and a big run > button.

Sadly this is being used as an excuse for making language with substandard (to put it mildly) debugging facilities and editors.

And of course, like for every other argument, the Go team itself is just being extremely arrogant about this. "Why do you want this ?" type responses, or just dead silence, or outright declaring the people asking the question to be substandard developers or some such.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Phase 4 (the expert): You understand the design choices and motivations > behind the language. You grok the philosophy of simplicity and > composability.

In what way is Go code composable?

<comment><USER11> You probably were sarcastic, but in case you are not there's a brilliant article from Rob Pike about using and composing functions to create flexible APIs: [http://commandcenter.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/self- referential...](http://commandcenter.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/self-referential- functions-and-design.html)

There is countless proof about Go's composability through functions and interface, but I keep coming back to that one document.

<comment><USER12> _There is countless proof about Go 's composability through functions and interface_

I can't tell if you're serious or sarcastic yourself. The article proposes this snippet, presumably copy/pasted for every option:

      // Verbosity sets Foo's verbosity level to v.
      func Verbosity(v int) option {
          return func(f *Foo) option {
              previous := f.verbosity
              f.verbosity = v
              return Verbosity(previous)
          }
      }

If that's what Go composability looks like then...uh... No thanks.

<comment><USER13> > presumably copy/pasted for every option

To be fair, there is "go generate" now that can generate functions that would otherwise require tedious copy/pasting. If you are familiar with the preprocessor in C++ expanding template definitions, this tool can provide similar functionality but is more generalized.

I think embedding [0] is the real big composability win in Go.

[0] [https://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#embedding](https://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#embedding)

<comment><USER14> > To be fair, there is "go generate" now that can generate functions that > would otherwise require tedious copy/pasting. If you are familiar with the > preprocessor in C++ expanding template definitions, this tool can provide > similar functionality but is more generalized.

Comparing to C++ templates is a rather generous comparison. C++ templates provide a rich type system that allows type checking and prevents errors, and integrates with the rest of C++'s type system.

Go generate is a lot closer to C/C++ macros, the only improvement being that the generation is done in a turing-complete language instead of by text substitution.

In C-like languages this problem is typically solved with generics, but the go team has decided to ignore 20+ years of language development and try the same thing that didn't work so many times that it motivated the creation of generics.

"But," you say, "Generics slow down compilation!" To which I respond that the first step to compiling code is creating code that does something worth compiling.

<comment><USER13> I agree, it is a generous comparison, which is why I only compared "go generate" to expanding template definitions (albeit, in hindsight, even that is generous). Macro expansion is definitely a better comparison. In no way did I mean to insinuate "go generate" is on par or better than C++ templating language features.

Edited for clarity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's a tool, not a religion. Don't try to turn it into a cult.

<comment><USER16> As the speaker I couldn't agree more, actually check slide 39 [https://speakerdeck.com/campoy/gophercon-india-evolution- of-...](https://speakerdeck.com/campoy/gophercon-india-evolution-of-a- gopher?slide=39)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What do GOPATH, the project folder structure, package management, and package versioning all have in common? The go command. Not the linker, not the compiler -- the `make` replacement.

If you want to fix the most broken parts of Go -- its ecosystem management tooling -- just replace your `go` command.

I have, and I love working on a project with a proper top-level src folder, with vendor-able packages discoverable in a top-level lib folder pinned to known-good commits.

There are literally dozens of go replacements, but the winning combination for me is using Goop [1], Makefiles, and symlinks to subvert `go get` and the naive way it parses import declarations [2].

[1] [https://github.com/nitrous-io/goop](https://github.com/nitrous-io/goop)

[2] [https://golang.org/ref/spec#Import_declarations](https://golang.org/ref/spec#Import_declarations)

<comment><USER3> You don't have to replace the go command to do that. The only thing that needs the GOPATH and expects import paths to be URLs is "go get". You can very easily make a go project that uses all relative import paths and put it anywhere you like. Dependencies then just get copied into whatever path you like using whatever name you like.

However, your code will be unusable by anyone who follows the normal Go way of coding, so you'll be missing out on working with the rest of the community. If you're writing proprietary software, that might not matter too much. But if you're writing open source code, it will be a huge hindrance to getting contributions from outsiders.

<comment><USER17> > However, your code will be unusable by anyone who follows the normal Go way > of coding.

Well, that's not really true given the major projects using tools like Godeps [1], so while that argument certainly sounds good, it doesn't actually seem to be a problem in practice.

[1] [https://coreos.com/blog/godep-for-end-user-go- projects/](https://coreos.com/blog/godep-for-end-user-go-projects/)

<comment><USER3> Actually, CoreOS is using the version of godep that rewrites import paths, so that most developers _can_ use "go get". The only time you need to use godep is when you're updating one of the vendored dependencies. That's actually the awesome thing about godep - it keeps your repo go-getable.

> the simplicity it presents to regular contributors and users used to _go > get_ make it worth the additional effort

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > _Don't wait until you become an expert in the language to make your voice > heard._

You can do anything!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSjLiQxEZlM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSjLiQxEZlM)

</comment><comment><USER18> "If you think the Go standard library is not powerful enough to do what you want to do, you might be wrong."

or not...

The standard libraries are not perfect. They do have very useful building blocks, but they are far from complete or perfect.

Take the http library, for example. There's no built-in context:

type HandlerFunc func(ResponseWriter, _Request)

type Handler interface { ServeHTTP(ResponseWriter, _Request) }

This resulted in a complete mess when it comes to http middleware because everybody is solving the context problem their own way (including google itself).

</comment><comment><USER19> If they just made the page wider, I might be able to read their code samples with minimal effort...

</comment><comment><USER20> Can someone recommend some good books on Go?

<comment><USER21> Summerfield's "Programming in Go" is several years old but still the best I've come across. Below is a review regurgitated from Barnes and Noble if you're interested:

...The author spends his time away from the libraries, covering the core of the language. By the nature of this approach the matter is dense, but it also gives the author ample time to discuss best practices, for instance:

"...[i]ncidentally it is a Go convention that functions that have channel parameters have the destination channels first, followed by the source channels [in the function definition]..."

Many of these best practices stem from conventions found in Go's own source code, which happily, the author is well acquainted with. Learning a language by isolating its syntax and analysing idioms and conventions is effective for those willing to persevere, and "Programming in Go" abounds in such detail.

Ideally, "Programming in Go" should be paired with a textbook which focuses on use-cases. Balbaert's "The Way to Go" is such a book, but sadly, is not nearly so well written as Summerfield's. In any case, "Programming in Go" is the book for those searching for a solid understanding of Go's fundamentals.</comment></comment>


Package Managers – Linux's Killer Feature? - <AUTHOR> http://www.adrianmouat.com/bit-bucket/2009/08/package-managers-linuxs-killer-feature/

<comment><USER2> I totally agree. The biggest thing I noticed my first few months of switching from windows to Ubuntu was that all my applications were managed through a secure pipe called the repository. The repository was filled using applications from a trusted source list which can be signed using a key. All my apps get security and functionality updates and I don't have to check every application provider to stay up to date. Nor do I have to hassle with more than the latest version crowding my hard disk.

If I had to make a top 5 list of linux features over other operating systems, #1 would be the package manager.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this is one area that Linux, particularly Debian Linux, has really innovated. Sure, there were software installation standards before, but one tool to find, install, fetch dependencies, and upgrade everything at once was pioneered by Debian.

But the innovators don't always end up being the successes. The iPhone and Android both have Debian-like package managers, with improvements to the discovery process. It wouldn't be unlikely that Apple would implement an App Store for OS X too, and Microsoft to follow suit.</comment>