A section of culture has made it fashionable to "deconstruct" critics of climate change science, and politics, as being "deniers", "nutcases", etc., and where that culture overlaps with academia, they write it into papers, for other academics who are also into that fashion to read.
So the paper links them to people who believe faked moon landings. If you ask the Chairman of the IPCC, he'll point you to people who still believe the Earth is flat.
It doesn't of course talk about real cases of mass fraud and corrupt cultures, as you so rightly point out.
OK but which things do you say we don't need? 50 pairs of shoes is unnecessary, but what about air travel, central heating, fridges, and TV? Are those non-essential? Which things should be cut?
Yes the politics comes in when people with different outlooks or values, try to decide what to agree to do. Say your dog keeps relieving itself in my garden. Should I spend the money to improve the fence, or should you keep the dog under control? Now take that simple example and multiple the complexity up to, if the climate shifts, and rain belts move, glaciers feeding rivers retreat, some forested areas increase, some storms reduce, some farmland becomes too cold, some warms up for better crops, etc. etc. how do you decide who is responsible and who should pay to act? Some people say, it doesn't matter if China is emitting more CO2 than anyone else, it is the moral responsibility of the West to set the good example. Or even Germany, people say Germany should do the right thing, even if it'll make a negligible impact. And that is also weighed up against all the other problems, like disease in Africa, and so on. There's a value judgement that doing something about the climate is more important. Or not. Depends on you.
Yes sure, but there's a lot of room for how you interpret what they say. The original paper says "conspirators" are defined as making a "secret plot by powerful individuals or organizations", and then the paper gives an example and says that the tobacco industry had a view that it was being attacked by powerful conspirators, ie. the tobacco industry had a conspiratorial mindset. But today people often say there is a conspiracy by big oil, just like the tobacco industry had a conspiracy. It seems all sides are conspirators, and conspiracy crackpots, depending on how you interpret them. So it goes nowhere fast.
There are just lots of people out there in society who by their millions, have different ideas about what is the good life and what they want. An environmentalist told me, it doesn't matter if CO2 isn't a problem, because by forcing people to reduce emissions, you force them to reduce production and consumption ––and then with a thoughtful pause she added, "It is about reducing greed." And I see that kind of view a lot, just like the free enterprise competitive types like Burt Rutan says the data doesn't add up and it is verging on fraud.
It saddens me as I used to vote for the Green party but it just seems to fracture into left vs right wing ideologies. It fails their own stated goals of making a just world –– "climate justice" ––when a shack in Kenya that's supposed to store medicines and have a bed for the sick, has to choose between either keeping the fridge on, or the fan and lights, because the solar panel they have can't do both. And that's "climate justice" ???? So just so say before someone interprets me as some USA type right wing neo con yahoo.
Let's all remember the study was objective and measured what people are thinking. Reality! Those conspiracy nuts better put on their tinfoil hats because the scientists know who they are!
Let's all forget that what we do about climate change is a political process and people's political views play a part on all sides.
Howard Bloom thinks cycles of boom and bust are natural parts of biology at all scales. We alternate between exploration (buying the most idiotic speculative stuff) and consolidation (panicking, cutting the crap, and institutionalising what little works). They are drives of mass emotion, hence "depressions". So the Keynes thing isn't just about spending, it needs to be about driving emotional confidence into new exciting unexplored territory. Not just fixing broken windows, but daring to dream new adventures, like mining asteroids, which would actually bring new levels of material progress. Humans are emotional, and any economics that forgets that will be doomed to fail. At least the Austrians don't bother trying to make numerical all the feely stuff that can't be digitised. Anyway, Bloom suggests nothing was to blame for the recession, they happen anyway. The bankers are selfish idiots but it is the loss of confidence NOW that made it a recession. And NOW happens to be a roughly 80 year cycle between "charge!!!" and "fall back, run away run away!!!" Just like a slime mould grows in every direction looking for food, then at some point switches automatically to cutting all the useless parts, letting them die off, and consolidating its network to just the bits of food it found. Anyway, I know next to nothing about economics, but through the Bloom angle was interesting.
Is it just USA that has turned this into a huge Democrat v Republican thing?
I'm not from USA. My own politics is that the world needs to move to a global integrated yet differentiated (i.e. not the UN) system of universal empathy and compassion for all beings, before we blow ourselves up in another major war. I never understood the political side that believes we can do something useful over climate change. The USA, or is it California and Germany, just seems to have this very narrow mindset. But I don't mean all USA, just the way the climate change thing becomes so political as if it would save the world. Show me that climate change is a bigger problem than nuclear proliferation amongst competing poor countries in the next 10 years, and I'll worry more about the issue.
A small side point: the idea of "balance" in environments and ecology goes back to Jan Smuts and those early ecologist who believed that nature must be in balance just like the British Empire (at the time the dominant force in the world) was a balance, a balance and stable order of things.
Naturally this just meant that everyone had to find their proper place, so in South Africa this was applied and they came up with Apartheid –– the whites just had to occupy their natural place at the top of the order of things.
Jan Smuts coined the term "holistic".
The idea of balance harks back to those old notions about Empire. It becomes very suspect when applied to keeping the planet population in "balance" even if it means poor Africans can't have cheap electricity. Just a thought.
Well it is the details. Some claim it is "incontrovertible", "reality", and "truth", when part of what they're talking about is predictions/scenarios stretching 50 years into the future. Question it and they say "it is science!" like because science is so highly respected. And why do we respect science so much? Because it is so rigorous and self-correcting. But that sounds more like: make hypotheses; test hypothesis; correct; etc. steps. Ie what the other poster was quoting. So yeah we can call the field broadly a science, but there's always the question, what specific things did you do to arrive at this specific result?
When the Chairman of the IPCC was asked, what about the scientists who disagree with the human caused catastrophic climate change scenario, he said to a public audience, there are still people who deny the Earth is flat. Now how does he go so easily to such an absolutist position?
Is it science to label all your critics as holocaust deniers and superstitious infants from the dark ages?
So it is healthy to remind ourselves, ok, the scientific method at its best has this rigorous checking, and if you're not doing that, perhaps because it is a very hard thing to check, like human diet, very hard to figure out what's healthy because you just can't experiment on people like lab rats keeping them in a cage and controlling all they eat for generations -- yet we're all told that nutrition is a science and we should take the experts seriously.
The question is always, how do they know? What did they do to arrive at that result?
Well the computer model says the plane is fine so let's just start building a production run and not bother with test pilots.
A lot of stuff is called a science, and generally it is, but the real question is, how high are their standards of quality? If your objective is to study the music of people 6000 years ago, well you can make hypothesis, but as none of their music was written down, if you want to maintain a high standard, you'll have to just say, we have no idea what it sounded like.
Claiming that your model is good for 100 years out when it is still hard to differentiate between it being correct and a lucky guess amongst a flock of simulation runs all with different parameters, and it sort seems to not be too far out today, compared to current climate, does not sound like a high standard.
Asserting climate is the average of weather over the long term, again sounds wooly and not a high standard. It begs the question, why assume you can average the weather over the long term, eliminating chaotic effects? Where's your rigorous testing for that assertion?
In your example, the asteroid is a risk. Maybe a 1 in 100 chance. Then you have to estimate what it'll cost. And which nations will be most affected. The is some politics in how you decide to handle those decisions.
It isn't just the facts (asteroid will hit) and then personal values (we value saving the world and helping everyone, or we value just saving our own nation and letting everyone else sink), there are also the unintended consequences (do you announce the facts, and wash your hands of the consequences of that announcement, ie. panic and war?)
See, you can easily find comments by climate change activists that it is "irresponsible" to tell the public about the scientific uncertainties, because the evil capitalist types will seize on the uncertainties to discredit the notion that we have to act. Doesn't that strike you as very political -- deciding for other people what they should and shouldn't know, on the basis of your own evaluation about what is good for them?
I would really prefer it if people did state the facts with all the uncertainties made clear. Like how cloud cover is a big uncertainty. But often someone will object that, like, you're just giving ammo to the tobacco companies to downplay any correlations between smoking and cancer. (It was just a correlation, just a really big one and too hard to ignore -- not so with the links between man and climate).
Most of the people who think man made catastrophic climate change is a fact have already been living in this bubble of politicised messages. And yes the right wing types also politicise it, but then so will the man in the street who reads that his energy bill has to rise to pay for the wind farms. He might think, I just want cheap energy regardless, or he might think, our children's children will be paying for our crappy infrastructure decisions. Different values, each a different mix with the facts. If you can get the facts, plain and clearly, with their uncertainties.
But I hear people stand up at conferences and say that it is "irresponsible" to let people read the original technical reports because of how they might "misuse" them (ie. to challenge the building of a wind farm). Because of course the reports contain no facts that need checking, like how the background noise levels were measured not where the wind farm was due to be sited but in a noisier and further away location.
Unfortunately, everything we do as humans contains some amount of politics, of working together to agree and disagree and check each other's stuff. In the mix there are also experts, but you have many types of experts -- another fallacy about climate change is that only climate scientists are worthy of being consulted. No there are social, economic, statistical, risk, business, security, etc. implications. A climate scientist is not an expert on civilisation or how modern economies work or how the techno-industrial base supports a level of rational ethical development in children.
And we all act on our personal values, which in the larger sphere means politics. Why did someone become an environmental scientists rather than a business person? Maybe their core values were more about a global cooperative world, rather than a competitive one. In the UK some expert social workers removed kids from a family because the family belonged to a particular political party. The party is legal by the way, it is just quite right wing in its views, and social workers as a body tend to be left wing, and they actually expertly decided that the kids were being harmed by their parent's association with that party. Well, if you can find me a climate scientists who has no political views, neither left or right, neither progressive or conservative, none whatsoever, and who never has to decide whether one theory or another is worth investigating further, but merely follows every data point concretely and objectively, then you've probably found a 6 year old science genius. By the time you are adult, you are a political animal, you have values, you have y
Well that's an interesting point: the Institute of Forecasters (they do studies on the types of things which tend to lead in practice to successful forecasts and models, and the things which tend to lead to wrong forecasts) complain that climatologists don't consult them.
Climatology relies on things like modelling and forecasting and statistics, yet often we hear professionals in those fields complaining that climatologists don't consult them.
Isn't an 8C rise part of the spread of scenarios? Yet we seldom hear "warming less than expected."
To be fair we did hear there's been no significant warming for 16 years, but with the caveat that 16 years is still too short to mean anything.
There are basically a lot of different ways to analyse the data and make a case for filtering out this or that signal depending on whichever theory one is applying.
If it doesn't warm enough, you can filter that out by invoking a natural cycle.
Cloud cover can both help warming or help cooling at the same time depending on many things, and it is part of the feedbacks. Now which caused which and in which direction and by how much? Calling it undeniable is pointless. We can easily fuck ourselves acting against problems we little understand, eg. invading Iraq.
Related to that, one idea is, when people wonder, why is there poverty? or why is there this or that problem? the left blames the system, whereas the right blames the individual. So the left wants to fix the system, make it more fair, whereas the right wants to fix the individual, make him or her more capable.
Add the older or newer strategies, like pre-modern and modern, or 'conservative' or 'progressive', and you can have a oldy style right winger who says religion is the moral guide to stamping out personal sins of lazyness and lust, or a new style right winger who is liberal with sex and money but is clear that the individual has to work hard to earn it in free competition. So typically, reduce taxes to increase incentives, and don't mind too much who ends up losing.
Meanwhile the oldy style left might also be pseudo-religious in wanting people to come together to give and eradicate poverty, help the needy, etc., or a modern style lefty who is into deconstructing phallo-logo-sexist-racism in society, is a feminist campaigner, anti-big-business, or anti-corporations, or anti anything that oppresses someone unfairly, even if it means siding with very obese people suing restaurants.
I'm not saying this covers every combination but it is one way of looking at it. So you can kinda see why an environmentalist might think that Chinese authoritarianism is a good thing, because it gives the government the draconian powers to force people to stop consuming, force a one child policy, etc., which is more of a pre-modern left stance, ie. religiously fix the system, even if it means abolishing modern democracy. Meanwhile the pre-modern right wing environmentalist might prefer to get rich enough to move to a quiet pretty privileged village and keep the riff raff out and keep their precious view, so they'd be against windfarms, but "pro rural conservation", so long as the feckless fester in the cities.
Oh I know people who think like that. The caveat is that people should rationally think for themselves. Obviously, part of that is self-doubt and self-questioning. It does NOT mean ignoring everyone else. But when the Chairman of the IPCC sits at a conference and says that anyone who disagrees with catastrophic global warming is a "flat earther", then HE is not thinking rationally, he is not upholding reason and self-doubt and questioning, presenting himself as "conveniently" always right.
When some Indian scientists questioned the story about Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035, the Chairman of the IPCC called them "vodoo scientists". But after some time, the story came to light that it was a claim based on a phone interview which got misquoted and they printed the wrong year, which was out by 300 years, supposedly more like 2350. But did the IPCC Chairman think to investigate or bother to tell someone to check? No, he just called them "vodoo scientists". That is the problem. "We're the experts, nobody questions us."
Sooner of later the people who can't question themselves or maintain standards will lose credibility. Pity it had to happen to the IPCC. And instead people lament the lack of political will and blame people for being lazy and whatnot. If scientists overstate their case and confidence, rational people are going to notice.
Funny you invoke diet because that's another area of huge controversy. You can think of the body as an energy balance, but there's an argument that whilst true (laws of physics) it misses the key pertinent point: the body decides how to use the energy, not you. Ie. your body decides whether to store energy as fat or whether to use it for metabolism and exercise. If that sounds wacky, consider: does a child grow because he is overeating, or is he overeating because he is growing?
Hormones control much of this stuff, and WHAT you eat affects your hormones. Regarding weight gain, insulin is the big one. Now some foods have the effect of driving your body to produce more insulin, and insulin tells your body (fat cells) to store the energy as fat. So if you eat foods that drive up your insulin, your body will do, guess what, store those calories in fat cells. But if you don't drive up your insulin, you'll be satisfied after a meal more easily (not hungry) and use your energy more usefully. You'll probably also eat less naturally. That's the basis of high-fat-low-carb lifestyles (lifestyle because you can eat this way all your life).
So whilst there has to be an energy balance, the causality is all wrong. People don't get fat because they are overeating, they overeat because they are getting fat ie. their high insulin is telling their bodies to keep eating so as to store the fat. When an animal is in "put on weight" mode before winter, you can deliberately starve it in the lab at a time when it normally puts on weight, and what its body will do is start to eat up its own muscle tissue and store it as fat. You end up with an animal that dies starved, and obese, with heart failure.
There are precious few studies that demonstrate that the usual "eat healthy carbs and increase your exercise and avoid fat" diets have any positive effects in the end. But rather than question this model, people keep prescribing it and sighing that the patients must be too lazy or something, because why else wouldn't it work?
Maybe it doesn't work because it misses key processes in the body.So whom to listen to? Just let's be reminded we take a lot of this info on faith, so if one can try it for oneself, and see what results it gives, that would be wise. And look around you.
If you assume there are boundaries then sure, like the snow globe's glass, for example. You can assume "climate" is the long term average of the weather, with upper and lower boundaries, maybe it'll warm 2C, maybe 8C. But what if it isn't? What if 15 years out your models still aren't getting the average even in the right ballpark? Just wait longer? 30 years? 60 years? How long do you assume you can wait? On average, in the end, we're all dead.
Besides, some of the big arguments are not around boundaries, but around whether clouds are a result of CO2 forcing, or whether natural variation in clouds are causing the changes that we interpret to be CO2 forcing at work. Clouds are still a huge unknown process. But a few percent change in coverage can explain a lot, if you'll let it. See it is a big argument around the direction of causality. The problem is feedbacks. There's no feedbacks in your snow globe, but there's plenty in climate. That's how you get from a 1C warming due to CO2 alone, to an eventual 3C or 5C or 8C warming because of feedbacks. But feedbacks are not easy to understand. The direction of causality may be mistaken. Hence many think that the climatologists have got a bit overconfident with fitting their models to data.
Not really. There's "expert bias" which means experts tend to get the predictions wrong more often than the man in the street, as the man in the street usually knows he doesn't know. This pattern was empirically demonstrated by the Institute for Forecasting.
There's a lot of overlap on why different diets seem beneficial, confounding factors and all. From a high-fat-low-carb (HFLC) point of view, it is the sugar -- anything that has you eating more sugar is detrimental, anything that reduces that is good. So the junk in the burger is the bun and the fries and the coke. The meat and the fat and the salad is fine. There's complexity in there, like whether the body is preferentially burning sugar or fat (if there's no sugar available, then it gets to burn fat instead) so even doing a particular diet can have different results based on how much of any food group you happen to end up eating. Is it a vegetarian heavy in potatoes, or heavy in fish, or heavy in beans? A vegetarian who drinaks a lot of fruit juice, or a vegetarian who drinks a lot of water? All these things matter. Satiety also matters, so again, the fries increase appetite because carbs raise blood sugar and appetite, whereas just eating the meat and its fat on their own is more satisfying and doesn't leave you hungry, even though it seems like you ate less. Anyway, lotsa info out there, YMMV.
Slashdot Mirror
A section of culture has made it fashionable to "deconstruct" critics of climate change science, and politics, as being "deniers", "nutcases", etc., and where that culture overlaps with academia, they write it into papers, for other academics who are also into that fashion to read.
So the paper links them to people who believe faked moon landings. If you ask the Chairman of the IPCC, he'll point you to people who still believe the Earth is flat.
It doesn't of course talk about real cases of mass fraud and corrupt cultures, as you so rightly point out.
OK but which things do you say we don't need? 50 pairs of shoes is unnecessary, but what about air travel, central heating, fridges, and TV? Are those non-essential? Which things should be cut?
Yes the politics comes in when people with different outlooks or values, try to decide what to agree to do.
Say your dog keeps relieving itself in my garden. Should I spend the money to improve the fence, or should you keep the dog under control?
Now take that simple example and multiple the complexity up to, if the climate shifts, and rain belts move, glaciers feeding rivers retreat, some forested areas increase, some storms reduce, some farmland becomes too cold, some warms up for better crops, etc. etc. how do you decide who is responsible and who should pay to act?
Some people say, it doesn't matter if China is emitting more CO2 than anyone else, it is the moral responsibility of the West to set the good example. Or even Germany, people say Germany should do the right thing, even if it'll make a negligible impact. And that is also weighed up against all the other problems, like disease in Africa, and so on. There's a value judgement that doing something about the climate is more important. Or not. Depends on you.
Yes sure, but there's a lot of room for how you interpret what they say.
The original paper says "conspirators" are defined as making a "secret plot by powerful individuals or organizations", and then the paper gives an example and says that the tobacco industry had a view that it was being attacked by powerful conspirators, ie. the tobacco industry had a conspiratorial mindset. But today people often say there is a conspiracy by big oil, just like the tobacco industry had a conspiracy. It seems all sides are conspirators, and conspiracy crackpots, depending on how you interpret them. So it goes nowhere fast.
There are just lots of people out there in society who by their millions, have different ideas about what is the good life and what they want. An environmentalist told me, it doesn't matter if CO2 isn't a problem, because by forcing people to reduce emissions, you force them to reduce production and consumption ––and then with a thoughtful pause she added, "It is about reducing greed." And I see that kind of view a lot, just like the free enterprise competitive types like Burt Rutan says the data doesn't add up and it is verging on fraud.
It saddens me as I used to vote for the Green party but it just seems to fracture into left vs right wing ideologies. It fails their own stated goals of making a just world –– "climate justice" ––when a shack in Kenya that's supposed to store medicines and have a bed for the sick, has to choose between either keeping the fridge on, or the fan and lights, because the solar panel they have can't do both. And that's "climate justice" ???? So just so say before someone interprets me as some USA type right wing neo con yahoo.
Let's all remember the study was objective and measured what people are thinking. Reality! Those conspiracy nuts better put on their tinfoil hats because the scientists know who they are!
Let's all forget that what we do about climate change is a political process and people's political views play a part on all sides.
Thanks
Howard Bloom thinks cycles of boom and bust are natural parts of biology at all scales. We alternate between exploration (buying the most idiotic speculative stuff) and consolidation (panicking, cutting the crap, and institutionalising what little works). They are drives of mass emotion, hence "depressions". So the Keynes thing isn't just about spending, it needs to be about driving emotional confidence into new exciting unexplored territory. Not just fixing broken windows, but daring to dream new adventures, like mining asteroids, which would actually bring new levels of material progress. Humans are emotional, and any economics that forgets that will be doomed to fail. At least the Austrians don't bother trying to make numerical all the feely stuff that can't be digitised. Anyway, Bloom suggests nothing was to blame for the recession, they happen anyway. The bankers are selfish idiots but it is the loss of confidence NOW that made it a recession. And NOW happens to be a roughly 80 year cycle between "charge!!!" and "fall back, run away run away!!!" Just like a slime mould grows in every direction looking for food, then at some point switches automatically to cutting all the useless parts, letting them die off, and consolidating its network to just the bits of food it found. Anyway, I know next to nothing about economics, but through the Bloom angle was interesting.
Out of interest, how's the compromise usually discovered?
Is it just USA that has turned this into a huge Democrat v Republican thing?
I'm not from USA. My own politics is that the world needs to move to a global integrated yet differentiated (i.e. not the UN) system of universal empathy and compassion for all beings, before we blow ourselves up in another major war. I never understood the political side that believes we can do something useful over climate change. The USA, or is it California and Germany, just seems to have this very narrow mindset. But I don't mean all USA, just the way the climate change thing becomes so political as if it would save the world. Show me that climate change is a bigger problem than nuclear proliferation amongst competing poor countries in the next 10 years, and I'll worry more about the issue.
A small side point: the idea of "balance" in environments and ecology goes back to Jan Smuts and those early ecologist who believed that nature must be in balance just like the British Empire (at the time the dominant force in the world) was a balance, a balance and stable order of things.
Naturally this just meant that everyone had to find their proper place, so in South Africa this was applied and they came up with Apartheid –– the whites just had to occupy their natural place at the top of the order of things.
Jan Smuts coined the term "holistic".
The idea of balance harks back to those old notions about Empire. It becomes very suspect when applied to keeping the planet population in "balance" even if it means poor Africans can't have cheap electricity. Just a thought.
Well it is the details. Some claim it is "incontrovertible", "reality", and "truth", when part of what they're talking about is predictions/scenarios stretching 50 years into the future. Question it and they say "it is science!" like because science is so highly respected. And why do we respect science so much? Because it is so rigorous and self-correcting. But that sounds more like: make hypotheses; test hypothesis; correct; etc. steps. Ie what the other poster was quoting. So yeah we can call the field broadly a science, but there's always the question, what specific things did you do to arrive at this specific result?
When the Chairman of the IPCC was asked, what about the scientists who disagree with the human caused catastrophic climate change scenario, he said to a public audience, there are still people who deny the Earth is flat. Now how does he go so easily to such an absolutist position?
Is it science to label all your critics as holocaust deniers and superstitious infants from the dark ages?
So it is healthy to remind ourselves, ok, the scientific method at its best has this rigorous checking, and if you're not doing that, perhaps because it is a very hard thing to check, like human diet, very hard to figure out what's healthy because you just can't experiment on people like lab rats keeping them in a cage and controlling all they eat for generations -- yet we're all told that nutrition is a science and we should take the experts seriously.
The question is always, how do they know? What did they do to arrive at that result?
Well the computer model says the plane is fine so let's just start building a production run and not bother with test pilots.
A lot of stuff is called a science, and generally it is, but the real question is, how high are their standards of quality? If your objective is to study the music of people 6000 years ago, well you can make hypothesis, but as none of their music was written down, if you want to maintain a high standard, you'll have to just say, we have no idea what it sounded like.
Claiming that your model is good for 100 years out when it is still hard to differentiate between it being correct and a lucky guess amongst a flock of simulation runs all with different parameters, and it sort seems to not be too far out today, compared to current climate, does not sound like a high standard.
Asserting climate is the average of weather over the long term, again sounds wooly and not a high standard. It begs the question, why assume you can average the weather over the long term, eliminating chaotic effects? Where's your rigorous testing for that assertion?
Adama snarls "There will be no networked computers on this ship while I'm still in command" or words to that effect
In your example, the asteroid is a risk. Maybe a 1 in 100 chance. Then you have to estimate what it'll cost. And which nations will be most affected. The is some politics in how you decide to handle those decisions.
It isn't just the facts (asteroid will hit) and then personal values (we value saving the world and helping everyone, or we value just saving our own nation and letting everyone else sink), there are also the unintended consequences (do you announce the facts, and wash your hands of the consequences of that announcement, ie. panic and war?)
See, you can easily find comments by climate change activists that it is "irresponsible" to tell the public about the scientific uncertainties, because the evil capitalist types will seize on the uncertainties to discredit the notion that we have to act. Doesn't that strike you as very political -- deciding for other people what they should and shouldn't know, on the basis of your own evaluation about what is good for them?
I would really prefer it if people did state the facts with all the uncertainties made clear. Like how cloud cover is a big uncertainty. But often someone will object that, like, you're just giving ammo to the tobacco companies to downplay any correlations between smoking and cancer. (It was just a correlation, just a really big one and too hard to ignore -- not so with the links between man and climate).
Most of the people who think man made catastrophic climate change is a fact have already been living in this bubble of politicised messages. And yes the right wing types also politicise it, but then so will the man in the street who reads that his energy bill has to rise to pay for the wind farms. He might think, I just want cheap energy regardless, or he might think, our children's children will be paying for our crappy infrastructure decisions. Different values, each a different mix with the facts. If you can get the facts, plain and clearly, with their uncertainties.
But I hear people stand up at conferences and say that it is "irresponsible" to let people read the original technical reports because of how they might "misuse" them (ie. to challenge the building of a wind farm). Because of course the reports contain no facts that need checking, like how the background noise levels were measured not where the wind farm was due to be sited but in a noisier and further away location.
Unfortunately, everything we do as humans contains some amount of politics, of working together to agree and disagree and check each other's stuff. In the mix there are also experts, but you have many types of experts -- another fallacy about climate change is that only climate scientists are worthy of being consulted. No there are social, economic, statistical, risk, business, security, etc. implications. A climate scientist is not an expert on civilisation or how modern economies work or how the techno-industrial base supports a level of rational ethical development in children.
And we all act on our personal values, which in the larger sphere means politics. Why did someone become an environmental scientists rather than a business person? Maybe their core values were more about a global cooperative world, rather than a competitive one. In the UK some expert social workers removed kids from a family because the family belonged to a particular political party. The party is legal by the way, it is just quite right wing in its views, and social workers as a body tend to be left wing, and they actually expertly decided that the kids were being harmed by their parent's association with that party. Well, if you can find me a climate scientists who has no political views, neither left or right, neither progressive or conservative, none whatsoever, and who never has to decide whether one theory or another is worth investigating further, but merely follows every data point concretely and objectively, then you've probably found a 6 year old science genius. By the time you are adult, you are a political animal, you have values, you have y
Well that's an interesting point: the Institute of Forecasters (they do studies on the types of things which tend to lead in practice to successful forecasts and models, and the things which tend to lead to wrong forecasts) complain that climatologists don't consult them.
Climatology relies on things like modelling and forecasting and statistics, yet often we hear professionals in those fields complaining that climatologists don't consult them.
Isn't an 8C rise part of the spread of scenarios? Yet we seldom hear "warming less than expected."
To be fair we did hear there's been no significant warming for 16 years, but with the caveat that 16 years is still too short to mean anything.
There are basically a lot of different ways to analyse the data and make a case for filtering out this or that signal depending on whichever theory one is applying.
If it doesn't warm enough, you can filter that out by invoking a natural cycle.
Cloud cover can both help warming or help cooling at the same time depending on many things, and it is part of the feedbacks. Now which caused which and in which direction and by how much? Calling it undeniable is pointless. We can easily fuck ourselves acting against problems we little understand, eg. invading Iraq.
Catastrophe projections are predicated on feedbacks.
Related to that, one idea is, when people wonder, why is there poverty? or why is there this or that problem? the left blames the system, whereas the right blames the individual. So the left wants to fix the system, make it more fair, whereas the right wants to fix the individual, make him or her more capable.
Add the older or newer strategies, like pre-modern and modern, or 'conservative' or 'progressive', and you can have a oldy style right winger who says religion is the moral guide to stamping out personal sins of lazyness and lust, or a new style right winger who is liberal with sex and money but is clear that the individual has to work hard to earn it in free competition. So typically, reduce taxes to increase incentives, and don't mind too much who ends up losing.
Meanwhile the oldy style left might also be pseudo-religious in wanting people to come together to give and eradicate poverty, help the needy, etc., or a modern style lefty who is into deconstructing phallo-logo-sexist-racism in society, is a feminist campaigner, anti-big-business, or anti-corporations, or anti anything that oppresses someone unfairly, even if it means siding with very obese people suing restaurants.
I'm not saying this covers every combination but it is one way of looking at it. So you can kinda see why an environmentalist might think that Chinese authoritarianism is a good thing, because it gives the government the draconian powers to force people to stop consuming, force a one child policy, etc., which is more of a pre-modern left stance, ie. religiously fix the system, even if it means abolishing modern democracy. Meanwhile the pre-modern right wing environmentalist might prefer to get rich enough to move to a quiet pretty privileged village and keep the riff raff out and keep their precious view, so they'd be against windfarms, but "pro rural conservation", so long as the feckless fester in the cities.
Oh I know people who think like that. The caveat is that people should rationally think for themselves. Obviously, part of that is self-doubt and self-questioning. It does NOT mean ignoring everyone else. But when the Chairman of the IPCC sits at a conference and says that anyone who disagrees with catastrophic global warming is a "flat earther", then HE is not thinking rationally, he is not upholding reason and self-doubt and questioning, presenting himself as "conveniently" always right.
When some Indian scientists questioned the story about Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035, the Chairman of the IPCC called them "vodoo scientists". But after some time, the story came to light that it was a claim based on a phone interview which got misquoted and they printed the wrong year, which was out by 300 years, supposedly more like 2350. But did the IPCC Chairman think to investigate or bother to tell someone to check? No, he just called them "vodoo scientists". That is the problem. "We're the experts, nobody questions us."
Sooner of later the people who can't question themselves or maintain standards will lose credibility. Pity it had to happen to the IPCC. And instead people lament the lack of political will and blame people for being lazy and whatnot. If scientists overstate their case and confidence, rational people are going to notice.
Lookup the Institute for Forecasting and their research. Then compare, think about it and decide for yourself.
Funny you invoke diet because that's another area of huge controversy. You can think of the body as an energy balance, but there's an argument that whilst true (laws of physics) it misses the key pertinent point: the body decides how to use the energy, not you. Ie. your body decides whether to store energy as fat or whether to use it for metabolism and exercise. If that sounds wacky, consider: does a child grow because he is overeating, or is he overeating because he is growing?
Hormones control much of this stuff, and WHAT you eat affects your hormones. Regarding weight gain, insulin is the big one. Now some foods have the effect of driving your body to produce more insulin, and insulin tells your body (fat cells) to store the energy as fat. So if you eat foods that drive up your insulin, your body will do, guess what, store those calories in fat cells. But if you don't drive up your insulin, you'll be satisfied after a meal more easily (not hungry) and use your energy more usefully. You'll probably also eat less naturally. That's the basis of high-fat-low-carb lifestyles (lifestyle because you can eat this way all your life).
So whilst there has to be an energy balance, the causality is all wrong. People don't get fat because they are overeating, they overeat because they are getting fat ie. their high insulin is telling their bodies to keep eating so as to store the fat. When an animal is in "put on weight" mode before winter, you can deliberately starve it in the lab at a time when it normally puts on weight, and what its body will do is start to eat up its own muscle tissue and store it as fat. You end up with an animal that dies starved, and obese, with heart failure.
There are precious few studies that demonstrate that the usual "eat healthy carbs and increase your exercise and avoid fat" diets have any positive effects in the end. But rather than question this model, people keep prescribing it and sighing that the patients must be too lazy or something, because why else wouldn't it work?
Maybe it doesn't work because it misses key processes in the body.So whom to listen to? Just let's be reminded we take a lot of this info on faith, so if one can try it for oneself, and see what results it gives, that would be wise. And look around you.
If you assume there are boundaries then sure, like the snow globe's glass, for example. You can assume "climate" is the long term average of the weather, with upper and lower boundaries, maybe it'll warm 2C, maybe 8C. But what if it isn't? What if 15 years out your models still aren't getting the average even in the right ballpark? Just wait longer? 30 years? 60 years? How long do you assume you can wait? On average, in the end, we're all dead.
Besides, some of the big arguments are not around boundaries, but around whether clouds are a result of CO2 forcing, or whether natural variation in clouds are causing the changes that we interpret to be CO2 forcing at work. Clouds are still a huge unknown process. But a few percent change in coverage can explain a lot, if you'll let it. See it is a big argument around the direction of causality. The problem is feedbacks. There's no feedbacks in your snow globe, but there's plenty in climate. That's how you get from a 1C warming due to CO2 alone, to an eventual 3C or 5C or 8C warming because of feedbacks. But feedbacks are not easy to understand. The direction of causality may be mistaken. Hence many think that the climatologists have got a bit overconfident with fitting their models to data.
Not really. There's "expert bias" which means experts tend to get the predictions wrong more often than the man in the street, as the man in the street usually knows he doesn't know. This pattern was empirically demonstrated by the Institute for Forecasting.
You know, there's a reason "think for yourselves" was a groundbreaking value to kickstart modernity.
There's a lot of overlap on why different diets seem beneficial, confounding factors and all. From a high-fat-low-carb (HFLC) point of view, it is the sugar -- anything that has you eating more sugar is detrimental, anything that reduces that is good. So the junk in the burger is the bun and the fries and the coke. The meat and the fat and the salad is fine. There's complexity in there, like whether the body is preferentially burning sugar or fat (if there's no sugar available, then it gets to burn fat instead) so even doing a particular diet can have different results based on how much of any food group you happen to end up eating. Is it a vegetarian heavy in potatoes, or heavy in fish, or heavy in beans? A vegetarian who drinaks a lot of fruit juice, or a vegetarian who drinks a lot of water? All these things matter. Satiety also matters, so again, the fries increase appetite because carbs raise blood sugar and appetite, whereas just eating the meat and its fat on their own is more satisfying and doesn't leave you hungry, even though it seems like you ate less. Anyway, lotsa info out there, YMMV.