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Australia Cuts 110 Climate Scientist Jobs: "The Science is Settled."
An anonymous reader writes: With an ax rather than a scalpel, Australia's federal science agency last week chopped off its climate research arm in a decision that has stunned scientists and left employees dispirited. Why? Because the science is settled, there is no need for more basic research, the government says. No doubt many will experience a case of schadenfreude as they see those who have long claimed "the science is settled" face the inevitable and logical consequence of that stance.
Proof is for mathematics and liquor. The fact that you don't know that shows you know fuck all about science.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
From TFA:
Marshall wrote in the memo that climate change is now settled science, and basic research is no longer needed.
“The question has been answered, and the new question is what do we do about it, and how can we find solutions for the climate we will be living with,” he wrote.
CSIRO would now focus on a path where “climate and industry can be partners, now we must walk that path to prove our science.”
Achille Talon
Hop!
All models are wrong. Some are useful. All climate models are wrong, particularly since this is really complicated stuff we don't understand as much as we'd like, but we can make some predictions fairly reliably and have confidence that they'll happen more or less as we predict.
There is no such thing as proven science. The best we can get is science sufficiently solid that the overwhelming consensus of involved scientists would be astonishment if it were to break, and we've had that happen before. If we speak of settled science (which is relative, not absolute), we speak of science that has a pretty much universal consensus.
AGW is a theory, not a hypothesis. It's not only a collection of observations, but has explanatory power and ties into other well-established science. Like any other scientific theory, it's got holes and almost certainly has some wrong assumptions. We know that the planetary surface is warming up, and we know that we're causing a lot of that, and therefore AGW is happening. We're fuzzy on a lot of details.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The climate models developed thus far have generally been worthless in terms of prediction after more than a few years. We've got a long way to go with climate science before we can create models that are useful for the types of situations you're describing.
Now we obviously still need to do some funding to reach that point, but if you're country has other needs you can let other countries subsidize all of that learning for you.
So tell me, what do yuo consider science?
Taking data, analyzing data, making models, verifying models, refining models, taking more data, taking more data.
All the stuff that climate scientists actually do, and climate deniers don't.
I work in the field, and I don't know any climate scientist out there whose sole job is to prove it's real - the measurements have been out for years empirically showing that the global warming is real. But "real" is a low-level, qualitative conclusion. Right now it's all about understanding and quantifying the causes and consequences, given the empirical data we have and the models we choose to employ.
The models generally agree on certain things (like warming), but there is a huge amount of variation between them in other ways. If anyone doubts that, I invite them to take a look at the abstracts from the most recent Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), or even better, attend it. There's no "right" model, and certainly no "right" + plug-and-play model. IMHO I don't see that happening for a very long time.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Except that "verifying models" step. None of the climate models are making better predictions than the null hypothesis,
About all I can say to that is "sorry, but you are wrong.".
or for that matter than the "lgw blindly asserting it's getting colder" model. Global temperatures have been remarkably steady for the past 19 years or so,
Sorry, but you are wrong. Here is the data from four groups on three different continents: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/resea... temperatures have not been "remarkably steady for the past 19 years or so" - they have been rising. and while that's within the error bars for most of these models, it's better predicted by the null hypothesis, and within the error bars if you take any of these models and put a "-" in front on their predicted temperature change. So, yeah, the negative of the models predicts as well as the models right now.
Not an argument that they're all wrong, but an argument that there's no reason to think any particular one is right, either. The "science" part is ongoing, but hasn't verified any of the models.
The "Government" didn't sign it. Obama did.
Without enabling legislation or ratification as a treaty, it's fancy toilet paper from a legal point of view.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It would help if any of the climate models demonstrated some degree of predictive ability. The difference between model projections and reality have grown to ridiculous proportions.
Let's look at that. The very first numerical greenhouse effect model was Manabe and Wetherald 1967-- That's the classic, the model from which pretty much all current climate models stem. Since the paper was submitted in 1966, that's 50 years ago-- definitely long enough to see how well the prediction worked. They predicted that the climate sensitivity to CO2 (assuming constant relative humidity) was 2.3C. Comparing that to the actual carbon dioxide, for the rise from 320 ppm to 400 ppm (here) using the Arrhenius relation, we get 0.74C for the temperature rise from 1966 to 2015. The measured temperature rise (here) is 0.7C, with the error bars in the figure 0.1C.
Looks like not merely a good prediction, but an outstandingly accurate prediction.
For comparison, the current IPCC 5th Assessment report estimate of sensitivity is that it is the range 1.5C to 4.5C with "high confidence", so Manabe and Wetherald's value of 2.3 is still is the range of current estimates.
It isn't until you get to the last paragraph that TFA finally gives you the underlying cause of this astonishingly shortsighted and imminently disastrous decision:
“Climate science becomes secondary to business; business comes first
So there you have it. The ability to make money trumps EVERYTHING. Kind of answers the question of why we never see aliens. If all intelligent species tend towards a capitalist society, they all end up committing environmental suicide.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***