You haven't answered my question: what is the problem with the current situation?
Microsoft ship their browser (and a boat load of other tools) with their OS. Microsoft do not prevent you from installing other browsers. The other browsers play just fine in Windows. More to the point, it makes sense that Microsoft uses their own software, which they control and understand, as the default HTML interface on their OS. It would be absurd to expect MS to ship another browser in place of IE with their own product.
You seem to be hung up on the browser wars of a decade ago. I agree that MS acted badly back then. But that was then and this is now: it's a whole different world. I've always used Netscape/Mozilla in preference to IE because that's what I've been used to and it has simply never been an issue. Sure, there are sites that work better in one browser than another, but if you're trying to tell me that Netscape has been 100% standards compliant then you are seriously deluding yourself.
I really don't understand the problem with MS shipping a browser with their OS. I run Vista on both my home boxes, but I surf with FireFox and Chrome. Neither installation has caused me any grief at all. Given that anybody with thirty seconds to spare can install their browser of choice with a mouse click or two, just what is the problem?
The only way I can understand you believing everything is settled is if you only read one-sided sites like realclimate.org, who have a solid history of blocking dissenting commentary.
I would love to see this uncontestable experimental evidence of which you speak: it might convince me of AGW.
Speaking of ad hominem, have you *read* any of the stuff you post?
Anyway, I wasn't making an ad hominem attack. I was drawing a conclusion based on what you have written: you are dismissive, intemperate, and have this crazy idea that concensus trumps critical thinking.
Economists are generally far better trained in statistics than climate scientists, which would make them ideal judges of this aspect of climate research.
Indeed, climate science could learn much from economics about freely publishing data, methods, and source code.
Because many prefer to pretend that there is no debate, doesn't mean that there isn't one.
I'm a scientist, too, and it would be very convenient (albeit dishonest) if I could just dismiss alternative schools of thought as irrelevant crackpots. Without proof, the best I can say on any contentious issue is that opinion is divided.
Sorry, but you simply cannot put AGW on the same footing as any mature science. Concensus in, say, mainstream physics means having the ability to say, "I'm virtually 100% certain I can demonstrate such and such an effect." No such claim can be made for anything in AGW, regardless of what you or Oreskes believe about concensus.
There are few who doubt that the climate has warmed recently and most will agree that industrial CO2 may have contributed something to that. However, the "evidence" for the alarming projections comes entirely from computer models, which have NOT shown great predictive power (unless by questionable slight of hand you make the error bars on those projections so large as to include cooling). Computer models are not proof of anything.
Moreover there are (a) questions concerning the accuracy and significance of various global warming data and results, (b) at least plausible alternative explanations that merit consideration, and (c) real debate about what the right approach is even assuming some form of armageddon is upon us (e.g., read Lomborg).
It does nobody any good to resort to name calling, appeals to authority, or any of the other shabby tactics that are immediately employed whenever someone has the temerity to say "I'm not convinced" about AGW.
Good Lord, I can just see the spittle flying out of your mouth as you type this stuff. It's amusing that you can't countenance any debate on these issues (viz the astounding amount of bile you post here whenever the AGW faith is questioned); perhaps if you learned the difference between convincing evidence and repeated assertion you'd relax more and - who knows - manage to have a polite discussion on the topic.
(1) Get fit doing something interactive. Take up a sport or do aikido (it's the thinking person's martial art:-).
(2) Get a decent haircut. Learn how to dress. These can be managed by giving your credit card to a hot girl you know who is willing to take you shopping. Try the clothes on that she holds out for you, then buy them. She knows more about this than you do. Nobody cares what you think about fashion: don't fight the power.
(3) Learn how to make light conversation. Anything technical or involving Star Trek is right out. Conversation involves (a) participation and (b) taking turns. Don't try to correct people's opinions.
Where are you getting this information? Lucia's analysis shows that the models are under estimating the absolute temperature by around 1'C on average. She has another posting showing that models that take volcanism into account are worse predictors than those that don't. You might want to take model predictions with a grain of salt.
You have me confused: are you saying Wegman's testimony on the hockey stick should be ignored not because of what he said or his evident qualifications as an independent expert, but because of who asked him for the report?
Personally I find it hard to believe you really respect the scientific method when you (a) prefer to accuse people of playing politics rather than addressing the content of their argument and (b) argue against argument by authority (I didn't: I posted a link to Wegman's CV to point out that he is eminently qualified to judge the quality of the hockey stick's statistical basis) *after* having claimed that Mann et al. was authoritative because it got published in Science. Oh, and for the record, M&M did publish their criticism in journals after peer review.
By the way, *I'm* not trying to debunk the hockey stick: it's already been done by M&M and checked by Wegman and endorsed by the NAS. And please do continue your ad hominem against me, too: it's very entertaining.
You should read some statistics. Unlike you, I do recommend that people read key documents from different players in the debate rather than just take the party line from Real Climate (which I believe was started by Mann and his colleagues).
You might be interested in Wegman's CV before suggesting his findings on the Mann et al. hockey stick were constructed politically. There's this interesting entry in his CV, for example: Appointed Chair of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, National Academy of Science, 2004. A separate NAS report also criticised the hockey stick, albeit in a more mealy mouthed fashion - not that you would know that if you only read Real Climate, which somehow translated the NAS panel's conclusions into a ringing endorsement of Mann et al.
Of course, I don't actually expect you to read any of this stuff, but other people following this discussion might be curious.
Peer review is actually pretty weak. It's mainly effective at spotting obvious howling errors. Peer review is not the same as replication and, indeed, many reviewers don't bother to check the equations or data presented in a paper unless they are genuinely suspicious of the conclusion. Replication, not peer review, is the gold standard of science.
You've hit the nail on the head. For example, read the Wegman report into the Mann et al. "hockey stick" paper in the climate science debate. The right way to judge a result in science is not by the first paper on the topic, but by the number of independent follow-up studies, all of which support the result. The idea of independence is something you need to be stringent about: ideally it requires different (unconnected) researchers obtaining new data and performing their own analyses. People from the same research group rejigging old data is much less convincing.
I thought a short lifetime of Cl2O2 was a key point in the CFCs/ozone hole theory. Has Markus Rex' work been shown to be wrong concerning much greater longevity of Cl2O2?
Nobody has been able to refute the AGW hypothesis because the error bars are so honkingly large that the last decade's distinct lack of warming is still considered to be consistent, despite the IPCC's mid-line projection of 0.2'C. Now I don't dispute that humanity is probably having *some* effect on the climate, but I find it very hard to swallow phrases like "the science is settled" and "the evidence is conclusive" when even some global cooling is consistent with a prediction of disasterous temperature rises. Other fields of science would be rather more circumspect about making strong claims under these conditions.
Can you back this up with evidence? I'm genuinely interested in the answer, although personally I'm more concerned with the substance of an argument than in how the speaker gets paid.
You just can't help yourself, can you? Is it possible for someone to disagree with you without you questioning their integrity or intellect? Your charicature of skeptics is a hoot. (a) It's irrelevant who advances an argument, it's the content that counts. (b) I don't have a dog in this fight, dire AGW may indeed be the case, but I'm not convinced by the evidence as presented. (c) Is there any point in continuing a dialogue if you're simply going to dismiss sources of information with which you disagree as the work of crackpots on a mission? I believe my statement about the general absence of skepticism in the debate to be true. I apologise for using the term "alarmists". To avoid ruffling feathers I should have said, "people who believe it is probable that AGW is true and may well have catastrophic consequences".
Look, are we having a discussion here or is this just going to be a slanging match?
You come up with a bunch of weak and mostly wrong counterarguments and use them to incorrectly insist that the level of scientific uncertainty is much larger than is claimed, and then contrary to several decades of economic research you go on to mistakenly imply that this recommends a course of inaction. Of course you do it with sneering reference to "alarmists" to boot.
This is the kind oftedious, petulant ad hominem routine that makes dealing with pro-AGW individuals so different from any other scientific debate. In any other sphere, people seem able to politely discuss, and even disagree about, the evidence and the arguments without resorting to rhetorical attacks.
Now I'll return to the argument assuming we can treat each other with a modicum of respect.
(1) Can we at least agree that we are not in danger of increasing CO2 levels to poisonous levels?
(2) Society seems to have adapted rather well to a climate that was already changing (about half the warming this century seems to have happened between 1940 and 1970, and it didn't seem to bother anybody). Bjorn Lomborg's Copenhagen Concensus of eight world class economists started from the assumption that the IPCC's claims for future warming are reasonable and *still* concluded after a costs-benefits analysis that dealing with climate change via economic measures was a bad idea (climate change came in bottom of the list, after fourteen other proposals for improving the state of the world).
(3) I don't follow your argument that positive feedback *doesn't* result in a runaway process. You talk about reaching new equilibria, but that is what happens with *negative* feedback, not positive feedback. Your point w.r.t. CO2 getting us out of ice ages also has me confused. CO2 levels start to rise *hundreds* of years *after* some process has begun the warming at the end of the ice age. What is your explanation for this?
(4) My assertion that there is no from basics-to-result argument for the claimed climate sensitivity to CO2 is true. Yes, you can point to MODTRAN, but that has a rigid atmospheric profile which violates the idea that a warmer atmosphere will reach a new equilibrium; the rigid profile assumption inflates the climate sensitivity to CO2. There are similar problems with the other radiative transfer models (there was a good discussion of this over at Climate Audit). By the way, I never claimed there was no explanation of the greenhouse effect (please don't set up straw men). What I said was that there is no fully worked out derivation for climate sensitivity to CO2.
(5) How can you conclude that temperatures are rising faster than they should merely from the modern instrumental record? The current understanding of the climate simply isn't that good. The evidence for solar influence on the climate (e.g., as an explanation of the LIA) doesn't stack up unless you assign an unfeasibly large solar sensitivity to the climate (see Lief Svalgaard's work). You also mention that the models predict stratospheric cooling. So they do. But more important is they predict tropical warming as *the* fingerprint of AGW, which just has not happened.
(6) When I talked about the "unprecedented" warming rate, I was referring to what the IPCC said, not the poster to whom I was replying. Apologies for the confusion.
(7) There are no models of systems as complex as the climate which claim the same levels of accuracy. Orbital models are *hugely* simpler. Fluid dynamics models for, e.g., aviation, are only sound under highly constrained conditions. The current climate models aren't even convergent: they have to calculate the amount of extra/missing kinetic energy at the end of each time step and then just spread the difference evenly over the globe. They also cannot resolve extremely important atmospheric phenomena such as cloud formation. These are handled by "parameterisation", which is to say, by heuristics rather than a "physics-up" model. The tuning of the par
(1) CO2 is generally a Good Thing as far as biological processes go. What makes you think that life with previous high levels of this trace gas would be unpleasant for human beings?
(2) Your CO2 positive feedback loop argument doesn't hold water because we know that CO2 levels were higher in the past and yet the Earth did not turn into Venus and we still had ice ages afterwards. The other problem is that the argument that CO2 increases can cause the temperature to rise significantly has not been substantiated experimentally. Even theoretically, there is no "from the ground up" explanation (i.e., devoid of handwaving) of how this should actually happen.
(3) Saying temperatures are rising much faster than we should be suggests you're buying into the now comprehensively debunked hockey stick reconstruction. The hockey stick really is indefensible at this point. The evidence is simply not there for claiming the current rate of temperature rise is unprecedented.
(4) Your response to my point about negative feedback is a non sequiteur. You say that we appear to be speeding up some natural process (I'm not sure I buy that, but let's go with it for now) and that the consequences of this may be bad (especially if you believe climate modellers can do what they claim, which is pretty much way beyond what any other modellers claim to be able to do). So we ought to do something to reduce the effect we're having.
The problem with this is that it's argument for action from a position of ignorance.
The argument for inaction *now* goes like this: - we do not have convincing evidence that the current situation is our fault (e.g., the mean temperature hasn't changed much over the last ten years despite increasing CO2 emissions); - we do not know if the consequences will be bad (please don't mention tipping points and similar canards); - the consequences *may* actually be good (fewer people die of warm weather than cold weather and warm weather is associated with higher precipitation, not less); - if we do not take economically crippling action now based on the precautionary principle (cf. Pascal's wager), we will have substantially more resources available to us in the future to deal with any unfortunate consequences that do arise (plus, hopefully our understanding will increase over time in a way which will allow us to take effective, more directed action, if necessary).
What bugs me about climate alarmism is that people have such strong views on the subject, but don't want to subject the science to the same level of critical skepticism that is expected in all other branches of science. The alarmists may be right, but to date the evidence and arguments are not nearly as solid as is claimed.
I think we all get the TRUE meaning of your little posting here. "For the LOVE OF GAIA, we must all stuff corks up our bums!"
While we're talking about self-serving, you have seen the paleo research pointing out (a) that there have been times in the past with wayyy higher CO2 concentrations and (b) that historically CO2 raises happen *after* temperature raises and (c) some of the measured temperature rise (of course, you are suitably sceptical about those measurements as well, aren't you?) can be explained by the fact we're coming out of an ice age and (d) the fact that the Earth is neither a boiling Hellhole nor a ball of ice suggests that fairly effective negative feedback is at work in the climate?
Slashdot Mirror
You haven't answered my question: what is the problem with the current situation?
Microsoft ship their browser (and a boat load of other tools) with their OS. Microsoft do not prevent you from installing other browsers. The other browsers play just fine in Windows. More to the point, it makes sense that Microsoft uses their own software, which they control and understand, as the default HTML interface on their OS. It would be absurd to expect MS to ship another browser in place of IE with their own product.
You seem to be hung up on the browser wars of a decade ago. I agree that MS acted badly back then. But that was then and this is now: it's a whole different world. I've always used Netscape/Mozilla in preference to IE because that's what I've been used to and it has simply never been an issue. Sure, there are sites that work better in one browser than another, but if you're trying to tell me that Netscape has been 100% standards compliant then you are seriously deluding yourself.
I really don't understand the problem with MS shipping a browser with their OS. I run Vista on both my home boxes, but I surf with FireFox and Chrome. Neither installation has caused me any grief at all. Given that anybody with thirty seconds to spare can install their browser of choice with a mouse click or two, just what is the problem?
Honestly, were you born without the gene for irony?
The only way I can understand you believing everything is settled is if you only read one-sided sites like realclimate.org, who have a solid history of blocking dissenting commentary.
I would love to see this uncontestable experimental evidence of which you speak: it might convince me of AGW.
Speaking of ad hominem, have you *read* any of the stuff you post?
Anyway, I wasn't making an ad hominem attack. I was drawing a conclusion based on what you have written: you are dismissive, intemperate, and have this crazy idea that concensus trumps critical thinking.
Economists are generally far better trained in statistics than climate scientists, which would make them ideal judges of this aspect of climate research.
Indeed, climate science could learn much from economics about freely publishing data, methods, and source code.
Because many prefer to pretend that there is no debate, doesn't mean that there isn't one.
I'm a scientist, too, and it would be very convenient (albeit dishonest) if I could just dismiss alternative schools of thought as irrelevant crackpots. Without proof, the best I can say on any contentious issue is that opinion is divided.
Sorry, but you simply cannot put AGW on the same footing as any mature science. Concensus in, say, mainstream physics means having the ability to say, "I'm virtually 100% certain I can demonstrate such and such an effect." No such claim can be made for anything in AGW, regardless of what you or Oreskes believe about concensus.
There are few who doubt that the climate has warmed recently and most will agree that industrial CO2 may have contributed something to that. However, the "evidence" for the alarming projections comes entirely from computer models, which have NOT shown great predictive power (unless by questionable slight of hand you make the error bars on those projections so large as to include cooling). Computer models are not proof of anything.
Moreover there are (a) questions concerning the accuracy and significance of various global warming data and results, (b) at least plausible alternative explanations that merit consideration, and (c) real debate about what the right approach is even assuming some form of armageddon is upon us (e.g., read Lomborg).
It does nobody any good to resort to name calling, appeals to authority, or any of the other shabby tactics that are immediately employed whenever someone has the temerity to say "I'm not convinced" about AGW.
Good Lord, I can just see the spittle flying out of your mouth as you type this stuff. It's amusing that you can't countenance any debate on these issues (viz the astounding amount of bile you post here whenever the AGW faith is questioned); perhaps if you learned the difference between convincing evidence and repeated assertion you'd relax more and - who knows - manage to have a polite discussion on the topic.
(1) Get fit doing something interactive. Take up a sport or do aikido (it's the thinking person's martial art :-).
(2) Get a decent haircut. Learn how to dress. These can be managed by giving your credit card to a hot girl you know who is willing to take you shopping. Try the clothes on that she holds out for you, then buy them. She knows more about this than you do. Nobody cares what you think about fashion: don't fight the power.
(3) Learn how to make light conversation. Anything technical or involving Star Trek is right out. Conversation involves (a) participation and (b) taking turns. Don't try to correct people's opinions.
(4) On-line dating. Seriously. It's a hoot.
That is all.
Where are you getting this information? Lucia's analysis shows that the models are under estimating the absolute temperature by around 1'C on average. She has another posting showing that models that take volcanism into account are worse predictors than those that don't. You might want to take model predictions with a grain of salt.
You have me confused: are you saying Wegman's testimony on the hockey stick should be ignored not because of what he said or his evident qualifications as an independent expert, but because of who asked him for the report?
Personally I find it hard to believe you really respect the scientific method when you (a) prefer to accuse people of playing politics rather than addressing the content of their argument and (b) argue against argument by authority (I didn't: I posted a link to Wegman's CV to point out that he is eminently qualified to judge the quality of the hockey stick's statistical basis) *after* having claimed that Mann et al. was authoritative because it got published in Science. Oh, and for the record, M&M did publish their criticism in journals after peer review.
By the way, *I'm* not trying to debunk the hockey stick: it's already been done by M&M and checked by Wegman and endorsed by the NAS. And please do continue your ad hominem against me, too: it's very entertaining.
You should read some statistics. Unlike you, I do recommend that people read key documents from different players in the debate rather than just take the party line from Real Climate (which I believe was started by Mann and his colleagues).
You might be interested in Wegman's CV before suggesting his findings on the Mann et al. hockey stick were constructed politically. There's this interesting entry in his CV, for example: Appointed Chair of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, National Academy of Science, 2004. A separate NAS report also criticised the hockey stick, albeit in a more mealy mouthed fashion - not that you would know that if you only read Real Climate, which somehow translated the NAS panel's conclusions into a ringing endorsement of Mann et al.
Of course, I don't actually expect you to read any of this stuff, but other people following this discussion might be curious.
Peer review is actually pretty weak. It's mainly effective at spotting obvious howling errors. Peer review is not the same as replication and, indeed, many reviewers don't bother to check the equations or data presented in a paper unless they are genuinely suspicious of the conclusion. Replication, not peer review, is the gold standard of science.
You've hit the nail on the head. For example, read the Wegman report into the Mann et al. "hockey stick" paper in the climate science debate. The right way to judge a result in science is not by the first paper on the topic, but by the number of independent follow-up studies, all of which support the result. The idea of independence is something you need to be stringent about: ideally it requires different (unconnected) researchers obtaining new data and performing their own analyses. People from the same research group rejigging old data is much less convincing.
I thought a short lifetime of Cl2O2 was a key point in the CFCs/ozone hole theory. Has Markus Rex' work been shown to be wrong concerning much greater longevity of Cl2O2?
Fundamentals: "Purely Functional Data Structures" by Chris Okasaki. A short, extremely clear book which will explain why key data structures work.
Engineering: "The Mythical Man Month" by Fred Brooks (it won't be obvious how good this book is until you graduate and get your first job).
Nobody has been able to refute the AGW hypothesis because the error bars are so honkingly large that the last decade's distinct lack of warming is still considered to be consistent, despite the IPCC's mid-line projection of 0.2'C. Now I don't dispute that humanity is probably having *some* effect on the climate, but I find it very hard to swallow phrases like "the science is settled" and "the evidence is conclusive" when even some global cooling is consistent with a prediction of disasterous temperature rises. Other fields of science would be rather more circumspect about making strong claims under these conditions.
Can you back this up with evidence? I'm genuinely interested in the answer, although personally I'm more concerned with the substance of an argument than in how the speaker gets paid.
You just can't help yourself, can you? Is it possible for someone to disagree with you without you questioning their integrity or intellect? Your charicature of skeptics is a hoot.
(a) It's irrelevant who advances an argument, it's the content that counts.
(b) I don't have a dog in this fight, dire AGW may indeed be the case, but I'm not convinced by the evidence as presented.
(c) Is there any point in continuing a dialogue if you're simply going to dismiss sources of information with which you disagree as the work of crackpots on a mission?
I believe my statement about the general absence of skepticism in the debate to be true. I apologise for using the term "alarmists". To avoid ruffling feathers I should have said, "people who believe it is probable that AGW is true and may well have catastrophic consequences".
Look, are we having a discussion here or is this just going to be a slanging match?
Let me start with your final remark:
You come up with a bunch of weak and mostly wrong counterarguments and use them to incorrectly insist that the level of scientific uncertainty is much larger than is claimed, and then contrary to several decades of economic research you go on to mistakenly imply that this recommends a course of inaction. Of course you do it with sneering reference to "alarmists" to boot.
This is the kind oftedious, petulant ad hominem routine that makes dealing with pro-AGW individuals so different from any other scientific debate. In any other sphere, people seem able to politely discuss, and even disagree about, the evidence and the arguments without resorting to rhetorical attacks.
Now I'll return to the argument assuming we can treat each other with a modicum of respect.
(1) Can we at least agree that we are not in danger of increasing CO2 levels to poisonous levels?
(2) Society seems to have adapted rather well to a climate that was already changing (about half the warming this century seems to have happened between 1940 and 1970, and it didn't seem to bother anybody). Bjorn Lomborg's Copenhagen Concensus of eight world class economists started from the assumption that the IPCC's claims for future warming are reasonable and *still* concluded after a costs-benefits analysis that dealing with climate change via economic measures was a bad idea (climate change came in bottom of the list, after fourteen other proposals for improving the state of the world).
(3) I don't follow your argument that positive feedback *doesn't* result in a runaway process. You talk about reaching new equilibria, but that is what happens with *negative* feedback, not positive feedback. Your point w.r.t. CO2 getting us out of ice ages also has me confused. CO2 levels start to rise *hundreds* of years *after* some process has begun the warming at the end of the ice age. What is your explanation for this?
(4) My assertion that there is no from basics-to-result argument for the claimed climate sensitivity to CO2 is true. Yes, you can point to MODTRAN, but that has a rigid atmospheric profile which violates the idea that a warmer atmosphere will reach a new equilibrium; the rigid profile assumption inflates the climate sensitivity to CO2. There are similar problems with the other radiative transfer models (there was a good discussion of this over at Climate Audit). By the way, I never claimed there was no explanation of the greenhouse effect (please don't set up straw men). What I said was that there is no fully worked out derivation for climate sensitivity to CO2.
(5) How can you conclude that temperatures are rising faster than they should merely from the modern instrumental record? The current understanding of the climate simply isn't that good. The evidence for solar influence on the climate (e.g., as an explanation of the LIA) doesn't stack up unless you assign an unfeasibly large solar sensitivity to the climate (see Lief Svalgaard's work). You also mention that the models predict stratospheric cooling. So they do. But more important is they predict tropical warming as *the* fingerprint of AGW, which just has not happened.
(6) When I talked about the "unprecedented" warming rate, I was referring to what the IPCC said, not the poster to whom I was replying. Apologies for the confusion.
(7) There are no models of systems as complex as the climate which claim the same levels of accuracy. Orbital models are *hugely* simpler. Fluid dynamics models for, e.g., aviation, are only sound under highly constrained conditions. The current climate models aren't even convergent: they have to calculate the amount of extra/missing kinetic energy at the end of each time step and then just spread the difference evenly over the globe. They also cannot resolve extremely important atmospheric phenomena such as cloud formation. These are handled by "parameterisation", which is to say, by heuristics rather than a "physics-up" model. The tuning of the par
Okay, let's go through these one at a time.
(1) CO2 is generally a Good Thing as far as biological processes go. What makes you think that life with previous high levels of this trace gas would be unpleasant for human beings?
(2) Your CO2 positive feedback loop argument doesn't hold water because we know that CO2 levels were higher in the past and yet the Earth did not turn into Venus and we still had ice ages afterwards. The other problem is that the argument that CO2 increases can cause the temperature to rise significantly has not been substantiated experimentally. Even theoretically, there is no "from the ground up" explanation (i.e., devoid of handwaving) of how this should actually happen.
(3) Saying temperatures are rising much faster than we should be suggests you're buying into the now comprehensively debunked hockey stick reconstruction. The hockey stick really is indefensible at this point. The evidence is simply not there for claiming the current rate of temperature rise is unprecedented.
(4) Your response to my point about negative feedback is a non sequiteur. You say that we appear to be speeding up some natural process (I'm not sure I buy that, but let's go with it for now) and that the consequences of this may be bad (especially if you believe climate modellers can do what they claim, which is pretty much way beyond what any other modellers claim to be able to do). So we ought to do something to reduce the effect we're having.
The problem with this is that it's argument for action from a position of ignorance.
The argument for inaction *now* goes like this:
- we do not have convincing evidence that the current situation is our fault (e.g., the mean temperature hasn't changed much over the last ten years despite increasing CO2 emissions);
- we do not know if the consequences will be bad (please don't mention tipping points and similar canards);
- the consequences *may* actually be good (fewer people die of warm weather than cold weather and warm weather is associated with higher precipitation, not less);
- if we do not take economically crippling action now based on the precautionary principle (cf. Pascal's wager), we will have substantially more resources available to us in the future to deal with any unfortunate consequences that do arise (plus, hopefully our understanding will increase over time in a way which will allow us to take effective, more directed action, if necessary).
What bugs me about climate alarmism is that people have such strong views on the subject, but don't want to subject the science to the same level of critical skepticism that is expected in all other branches of science. The alarmists may be right, but to date the evidence and arguments are not nearly as solid as is claimed.
-- Ralph
I think we all get the TRUE meaning of your little posting here. "For the LOVE OF GAIA, we must all stuff corks up our bums!"
While we're talking about self-serving, you have seen the paleo research pointing out
(a) that there have been times in the past with wayyy higher CO2 concentrations and
(b) that historically CO2 raises happen *after* temperature raises and
(c) some of the measured temperature rise (of course, you are suitably sceptical about those measurements as well, aren't you?) can be explained by the fact we're coming out of an ice age and
(d) the fact that the Earth is neither a boiling Hellhole nor a ball of ice suggests that fairly effective negative feedback is at work in the climate?
Author Y's name wouldn't be an anagram of Cilliam Wonnolly, would it? :-)