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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.
Sure, we know the answer is "The world is getting hotter and it's all our fault" - but there are still a heck of a lot of questions that need to be answered. "How Fast?" and "Will the extra CO2 help crops or weeds grow faster?" and "What can we do about it?" and "Will such-and-such course of action have enough effect to avoid such-and-such consequences?"
We need those guys even more than we did before the original question was answered.
www.sjbaker.org
Anyone that tells you the science is settled is not a scientist.... they are a politician wanting to shutdown inquiry on an issue and install dogma in its place.
Science is not dogma, and if someone who is a scientist tells you that "The science is settled"; that is really just their personal opinion on the topic, And it should be taken to assume that the research results they produce might be accidentally (or maliciously) biased to reflect results consistent to the bit of science they would claim to be "settled".
Which is why I test gravity every day by jumping off of the Empire State Building.
At a certain point you have to get off the shitter and act on the information you have. Sitting around while you go from 99.99% certainty to 99.999% certainty is inefficient.
Sorry, "smoking leads to lung disease" isn't dismissable as religion, and simply denying it isn't 'skepticism'. The current crop of oil-company-shill climate denialists are no different than the tobacco company liars of a generation ago.
No one in climate science is interested in answering those questions. It's all "X is caused by global climate change", where X can be literally anything,
If you read what actual climate scientists say, and not the hype in the press, they in fact don't say "It's all "X is caused by global climate change", where X can be literally anything," Over and over, they say things like, no particular storm can be attributed to global warming-- it's a long term global effect. Over and over and over. But the press likes disaster stories. They'll keep looking until they can find a way to write the story that makes it a disaster story, and bury the "other scientists caution that there's not enough data to attribute X to climate change" on page 2.
with pictures of polar bears in the background.
I've read a lot of papers by climate scientists, and never seen one with "pictures of polar bears in the background." I think I can safely say that if what you're reading has pictures of polar bears in the background, you're reading the popular press, and not a scientific paper. Even the paper (one paper-- count it, one) that talked about dead polar bears in the arctic didn't have pictures of polar bears in the background.
Science is based in SKEPTICISM and PROOF.
That's true... but what I've noticed is that far too often, the people who call themselves climate skeptics aren't skeptical at all; they are absolutely credulous-- to anything they hear that denies the reality of global warming. Garbage articles that could be debunked in two minutes of thinking get picked up and passed along with notes of "see? it's all a HOAX!"
One-sided skepticism isn't skepticism at all. Skepticism doesn't consist of "I don't care what you say, I won't believe it, but I'll believe anything the other guys say, no matter how goofy." If you want to say you're a skeptic: be equally skeptical of both sides.
Real science doesn't consist of repeated skepticism, in fact; that goes nowhere. Real science consists of getting better data and improving understanding.
It's a turn of phrase in this case, but we know that man's emissions cause some aspect of the climate change we're seeing.
"Some aspect" where the exact amount is undefined.
Oh, and the total amount of warming we'll see is undefined.
Oh, and the amount of warming that is harmful is undefined.
Oh, and the benefits to the world from a warmer climate are undefined.
Oh, and the mechanism that triggers an ice age is undefined.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
With no "climate scientists", when every single prediction from the models come out wrong again, who will go back, adjust the models, and then retro-predict real life?
Seems the lessons of history must be learned over and over. Mixing up politics and science, religion and science or even politics and religion is generally always a bad idea. How soon we forget and each subsequent generation repeats the same mistakes..
Well, at least we know what to expect..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
And those climate models have been created and are available as software. It's now just a question of applying them.
The global climate models are there, and are getting pretty well validated-- although you do know that the error bars are still plus or minus fifty percent, right? But the more you want fine-grained data, though, the more you're still going to need to do a lot more work.
"Overall, things are getting slightly warmer at a pace we know to within a factor of two"-- that's something we know. "Australia is getting hotter"-- that's slightly harder to say with certainty: Australia is not the world. "These detailed results will be the result"-- that's getting very hard to predict.
The devil is in the details.
Most skeptics couldn't tell good science from bad science if their life depended on it, they're just borderline conspiracy theorists who has decided that the establishment or mainstream media are pushing an agenda with cherry-picked data, flawed models and spurious reasoning to give a false, but plausible impression. And because they've found some whack jobs contradicting it they think they're part of a small elite who haven't bought into the lies. They're just as much sheep as the sheep they despise, just going in the opposite direction of the herd.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Horseshit. CO2 is rising. By simple laws of radiative physics this must result in warming. What alternate possibility do you imagine exists?
No one is debating how CO2 works. What's the cost-benefit analysis on human action going forward? What are the feedback loops, in both directions, and how much does this matter? What's the dominant factor in determining future temperatures on Earth? (Hint: it's yellow)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.