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Ask Dr. Bryan Killett About Climate Change and GRACE
Bryan Killett is a physicist working on the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. GRACE is a joint mission of NASA and the German Aerospace Center which collects satellite data to learn about Earth's changing gravity field, specifically the high frequency changes associated with ocean tides. As the high tide comes in, more water is present, so gravity in that location is temporarily strengthened. These changes are detected with GRACE and used to improve ocean tide models. Dr. Killett provides the open source (GPLv3) code used to process GRACE data on his home page. Bryan has agreed to take a break from measuring gravity fields and answer your questions about GRACE and the climate changes it has revealed. Feel free to ask as many as you like but please confine your questions to one per post.
Didn't even click the link. Didn't present your own findings. Trolling concluded.
To respond to your request:
Pseudoscience displays an indifference to facts:
DOES NOT APPLY climate change, as data driven observation is at the core of the argument. New facts brought up by critics are addressed with data.
MAY APPLY TO "skeptics", depending on exactly what they are skeptical of. It is an undeniable fact that, for example, temperature measurements are going up quite rapidly year-to-year.
Pseudoscience "research" is invariably sloppy
Given the criteria listed in the linked article: DOES NOT APPLY to climate change. An opinionated counter-argument could be given, if one were unwilling to examine the definition listed with any seriousness. Global examination of carbon/temperature data with a wide variety of tools, cross-indexed with each other, tabulated, peer reviewed, and published in complete detail does not qualify as sloppy. Sorry.
ALSO DOES NOT APPLY to "skepticism" in any meaningful way.
Pseudoscience begins with a hypothesis—usually one which is appealing emotionally, and spectacularly implausible—and then looks only for items which appear to support it.
COULD BE CONSTRUED TO APPLY to climate change: I think we can agree "we're all going to burn due to our negligence" is an emotionally appealing hypothesis. I don't really think the hypothesis came before the climatological observation, looking at the early papers in google scholar, though. Lower temperature years are included in every single report on global warming, in spite of the fact that, at face value, that would appear to a layman to undermine the hypothesis.
COULD BE CONSTRUED TO APPLY to "skeptics": I think we can also agree "we don't have to change anything because we're not doing anything wrong" is also emotionally appealing. Being that this is the null hypothesis position, it's fair to say that the "hypothesis first" doesn't really apply. However, selective examination of data IS an extraordinarily common argument from this camp, and to treat it as a non-component would be disingenuous. (i.e. "it was cold in winter")
Pseudoscience is indifferent to criteria of valid evidence.
DOES NOT APPLY to climate change. Not in the slightest. "stories" do not make up the basis of support for the theory, known thermodynamic effects, and temperature trends do.
MAY APPLY to some forms of "skepticism". As per above "winter is cold" type arguments, are strictly anecdotal, and do not actually examine the temperatures in winters globally compared to previous years.
Pseudoscience relies heavily on subjective validation.
DOES NOT APPLY to climate change. The verification comes entirely in the form of statistical analysis of temperatures versus previous predictions. Relatively accurate, but requiring improvements in predictive techniques.
DOES NOT APPLY to "skepticism" BUT IN A VERY BAD WAY because no counter claims or predictions to test. The null hypothesis of "no change" is clearly invalidated, but no valid alternate predictions are given instead. This is a serious sign of pseudoscience.
Pseudoscience depends on arbitrary conventions of human culture, rather than on unchanging regularities of nature.
DOES NOT APPLY TO EITHER, if you examine the listed definition in my link, this is about data being purely subjective and prone to multiple understandings depending on cultural factors like language.
Pseudoscience always achieves a reduction to absurdity if pursued far enough.
DOES NOT APPLY TO EITHER. Feel free to contest this if you want.
Pseudoscience always avoids putting its claims to a meaningful test.
DOES NOT APPLY to climate change, predictions from 10,20, and 30 years ago are all being tested and examined today.
APPLIES TO "skepticism". "Skeptics" tend to hide behind vague claims such as "it's a natural cycle" without providing assertions about what that means in terms of cl