I simply have to show that Oreskes' selection criteria resulted in numbers that were significantly different from the numbers for all papers about climate.
So let me get this straight. You are asserting that Oreskes' would have failed to show a consensus if she'd actually used the search term exactly as stated in her paper?
Even though there really is a consensus?
Even though you would need stupendously huge sample bias for her figures to be wrong? (Given that there really is a consensus -- who would have been publishing these papers?)
Given that nobody has actually been able to show that there really was a sample bias?
Because my original comment was that citing Oreskes was not exactly a credible thing to do.
And I quite clearly stated that it is a mathematical absurdity. A sample of 1000 can predict the mean of a sample of 1000000 with very high fidelity. When the variance is small. For Oreskes study not to be credible, you have to show that 3% of non-AGW-supporters (which include neautrals) publish a vastly larger proportional number of studies in the period, all aligned, and using "climate change" in the abstract, but for some reason not using "global climate change". This stretches credulity.
I also pointed out that it is an empirical question, and some denier tried to show this but back-peddled when their study re-affirmed Oreskes' study. (Look it up, it is a total double standard.)
But i'm the one who doesn't understand, right?
I heard ya, and answered ya. Naomi was right. We checked the references, and you were wrong.
But instead of talking about the veracity of Naomi's work, you want to talk about how consensus suddenly doesn't matter.
You have done nothing but misunderstand, then claim that means you "win". You're an idiot
I am a cognitive scientist by training, with backgrounds in psychology, religion and artificial intelligence. I have studied the ego defense mechanisms very precisely over many years. I am fascinated by how the ego protects what buddhists call "ignorance" -- something that is vividly alive in the paranoid and political mind. In itself it is really amazingly stupendously crazy and wonderful and bizarre. So, I look into 9/11 conspiracies, moon landing conspiracies, alien stuff, people against vacciness, GMOs, the biological basis of behaviour or sexual identity or gender identity. And of course, the denial of AGW. It is all amazingly similar.
I mean no disrespect when I say -- drop AGW for a while, and study the nature of political discourse. How do you know what is right? To understand that, you have to question everything at first, just like Descartes does in his famous method. My mind almost exploded when I went through this process over a period of years, because I discovered that almost everything I knew was wrong. And now I really do know something about epistemology.
Denial and projection are precisely the ego defence mechanisms most commonly active in AGW "skeptics", and if you study these mechanisms, you will discover that nobody ever knows that they are in denial, or that they are projecting. So there are some cognitive tricks you have to employ to figure out what your mind is doing.
First you say that Naomi failed to show a consensus. But when you demonstrate that there is a consensus, somehow the topic moves on to consensus doesn't matter.
If you look way back, you'll see the original claim was to follower references on the Oreskes study.
One (of a few) key mechanism of denial to to constantly change the topic. We can't go around admitting that Oreskes correctly pointed out that there is a scientific consensus, and that criticisms of her work are baseless.
No, once we've established that there is a consensus, we just change the topic, and FORGET what we were talking about before.
In this way, the mind can endlessly fool itself that it knows something, when it is wrong about pretty much everything.
No, I really do mean that AGW isn't happening, or it isn't a problem, or there is nothing we can do about it in terms of *mitigation*.
Be honest with yourself. All (97%) of the scientists believe AGW is happening. But you're just smarter then that, right? No.... you just don't think there is anything that can be done. Don't WANT to think. That is what I see.
if one is really desirous of being pessimistic
I don't desire to be pessimistic, and I am not. Republicans are being obstructionist scumbags on the issue, but we will find some solutions regardless. We'd all be better off is there was a mature discussion on the topic. But that will never happen.
You know, and I know, Monckton is fighting a straw man.
Monckton has a huge following of rabid denialists. He isn't fighting a straw man, he/is/ the straw man. It is absolutely laughable. Monckton also believes he has a cure for cancer, aids, graves disease and multiple-sclerosis. He is constantly contradicting himself (as the need arises). There is a hilarious conversation between Monckton and Peter Hadfield on WUWT. Search for all the references for Thatcher for a truly mind-numbing example of fantasy land.
As for your solutions -- I'm not sure drilling for oil is going to solve the coming energy crisis. We have been using exponentially more energy for a long time. If we double every 20 years, then that means we will use more energy in the next 20 years then we have used since the beginning of civilisation. Obviously something is going to break there eventually.
The price of energy should reflect its future availability. Markets get this wrong. E.g.: scientists warned that we should not be using trawlers back in the 70s, because it is not sustainable. Only took 20 years for the North Atlantic fish populations to tank, and we needed a moratorium on fishing. The investors in the 70s walked away with the cash, and the fishermen lost their livelihood and their towns.
Same thing will happen with a "drill-baby-drill" mentality. We will hit a brick wall due to exponential growth, the investors will walk away, and the government will be forced to do something. (And then Republicans will complain about the big arm of government.)
"Look, we don't think human CO2 has any measurable effect on natural climate change, but even if it did, nothing we can possibly do will stop it now. If people want to start focusing on adaptation (designing hurricane proof shelters, planning dikes, raising people out of poverty to they can survive natural weather disasters), great. Mitigation is a non-starter."
This is perfect example of how stupid the debate is. You complain that AGW isn't happening or it isn't a problem. But what you really mean is that you don't want to do anything about it. Hence the attack on the science. This is an obvious misdirection, and it is very dishonest and frustrating, and scientists are well aware that this is the score. Their work is attacked because lassez-faire fundamentalists don't want to deal with the reality of what their work might say. The evidence just doesn't matter. This is perhaps the most well studied phenomenon in all of human history.
So just be honest and say: "Yeah AGW and perhaps CAGW could happen, but I don't think that there is anything that can be done about it except adapting to whatever happens." That is a perfectly valid opinion to have. Denying the science is just counter-productive.
Personally I don't think anything will ever happen because it is hard enough to get people to save up for their retirement. Just remember what you said and where you stood today, and tell it to your grand-children, when you give them sage advice about politics. (I imagine you will say that the science just wasn't settled, when this is just a lie that you tell yourself.)
Also, remember, we can ship coal everywhere - you can't ship wind everywhere:)
Well, in Europe they ship wind everywhere.
Obviously you think that we shouldn't do anything about AGW. It either isn't happening, or it isn't a problem, and you are completely certain about that, even though 97% of scientists who study it disagree. There is no solutions to talk about, and you are not in denial.
Have a good life. And don't forget to tell your grand-children exactly where you stood on the issue. (Oh I'm sure you'll spin up something so that you're the good guy.)
Wind energy was subsidized until last year. Historically, the subsidy had to be renewed each year, and Republicans just recently axed it. The wind industry needs the subsidy to be on parity with oil/coal subsidies. The wind energy lobby would like all the subsidies removed (oil/coal and wind), so the free market can decide. (You know, like, what Ayn Rand was talking about.) Instead, we have huge oil/coal subsidies which end up making coal energy marginally cheaper then comparable wind turbines at present technology.
The Europeans and Asians will end up owning this market if the Republicans keep subsidizing big coal/oil. It is all rather ironic and sad. But that what you get form knee-jerk hatred of environmentalism.
"Breaks"? Without a clearly falsifiable hypothesis statement, no matter what I find, you'll claim some other ad hoc special pleading (ice melting in other parts of the world, for example).
Well that's not true. Monckton thinks he's "broken" the science. If his claims were supported by the evidence (or indeed his references), then he would be correct. He/would/ have falsified the AGW argument. Fact is, that his claims do not stand up to even modest scrutiny. It's all pretty laughable actually.
But onto the paper you link. Again, no big deal. We're looking at a hypothetical forcing that might occur, and that warrantees further investigation.
And just think about this for a moment. A negative forcing means that the lowering clouds make the earth cooler. And what goes down must come up. (Presumably the clouds will not eventually settle on our heads.) So at some stage we could predict that clouds will raise again, and this will warm the earth. So the lowering clouds is "storing" heat in some way. (If the clouds don't raise again, then we'll have incurred a one-time cooling effect from cloud lowering.)
Pretty cool, but there is nothing there which would challenge the consensus on climate change.
"ZOMG, sea levels are gonna get crazy high because ice in Antarctica is all gonna melt!"
I know people who speak like this. It is really annoying. But I don't hear many scientists talking like this -- not climate scientists anyway. Yet they all (97%) agree that AGW is happening. Not CAGW. Just AGW.
My guess (and it is a well-informed layman's guess) is that we have a 10% chance of CAGW, 30% of nothing problematic, and 60% somewhere in-between. In my book, that warrants talking about solutions. Not marxism. Not world government. Not crippling regulations and taxes. That doesn't solve any problems. I'm talking/solutions/. Practical.
But when you look at Fox News,/and/ the Republican primaries -- we get a blanket denial that there is any problem at all! 100% certainty that there is no problem. (Belief in climate change is correlated with degree of partisanship.) Not one Republican primary contendor can even admit that AGW is even happening! (Gingrich and Huntsman both back-peddled.) The fact that it has become such a black-and-white partisan issue with the Republican base should tip you off that the AGW debate is actually characterised by shrill-paranoid-anti-environmentalism. Not environmental alarmism, but a blanket denial that anything needs to be done at all.
I am *sure* that there are some great solutions that conservatives can come up with, and am ready to have that conversation.
Okay, you've got lots of stuff in your post. I think the most relavent thing is this:
Any attempt to decarbonize our energy system by its very definition will increase poverty by replacing cheap energy with expensive energy. Economics 101.
Well, this is a different question as to whether AGW is happening and what the risk is. I have heard no "skeptic" ever talking about risk. Perhaps you'd be the first, but I think not. You did suggest that you'd insure the world against CAGW for $350. This is not helpful for discussing what the risk is. It seems that you (and every other "skeptic") just doesn't want to talk about risk.
And to speak to this point directly, it is not economics 101 at all. Wind energy is already about on parity with coal power generation -- and that R&D effort occurred on the cheap, with huge subsidies going to oil companies. Despite much information from conservatives on electric/hybrid cars, they do show promise for a future technology. See here for a short video on some future technologies that we may use.
But again, this is simply a conversation that "skeptics" just don't want to have. For the "skeptic", we simply have: four-legs good, environmentalism bad. We don't talk risk. We don't talk technology. We don't talk solutions. We just have denial of the problem, because even admitting climate change is occurring would be against the group think.
But my point (which I stated more than once) is that it wasn't representative of the body of papers on climate at the time
.
I got it. And I responded. You're making an assertion, but I am saying that this is really an empirical question.
The rest of the post is about whether there is consensus about AGW. Aside from the fact that/all/ respected scientific professional bodies in the world agree -- your own sources agrees.
Now, you might thing that your source is rebutting that 97% of scientists agree about AGW. But it doesn't. (Read it again, it is stating the 97% of scientists doen't believe in CAGW, which is a different study -- typical slippery goal posts.)
Should I point out the very sentence and line where your sources agrees with the 97%-AGW figure? Would it make a difference?
And you say this doesn't matter, but that is just absurd. We are talking about the veracity of Oreskes' study here. I asked you to post the references, so that we could follow them. And that is what we've done. We have discovered that Oreskes failed to describe the search term (she said "climate change" when she in fact used "global climate change"). For this to make a difference, then those 97% of scientists who agree with AGW mustn't be publish very much, and the 3% must be publishing daemons - and/all/ of them against AGW (not on the fence), and/all/ of them failing to use the term "global climate change" in the abstract. (But still using "climate change".)
So we followed the references, you exposed this little canard. In typical denier fashion, you're trying to change the scope of the discussion onto something else. This always happens when people feel the ground beneath them starting to slip.
I think I am done with this conversation.
"A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest." (Simon and Garfunkel)
she would have been examining well over 10 times as many papers.
True.
I daresay a whole order of magnitude is important. And those papers would have been much less likely to support any "consensus" on climate change.
This is clutching at straws. A sample of 1000 is sufficient to estimate the variance in a population of millions. (Look up the central limit theorem.) Depends on the variance, of course, but the variance was for her sample was/tiny/.
For your statement to be true, you'd have to argue that there is a much greater chance that a paper would be against the consensus if it included "climate change" but not "global climate change" in the abstract. (A lot of those papers may not mention global climate change at all, and thus irrelevant.)
I don't expect to convince you. You've got your logic and "evidence" already worked out. It is, however, an empirical question.
consensus -- even where it really exists -- is not science.
This is additional information. There is a consensus (or set of) treatments for cancer. Would you go find the doctor who believes some research done on homeopathy? After-all, science isn't conensus -- the homeopathist could be correct! (Such studies exist.) This is a precise analogy to AGW.
Every respected professional body of science in the world, including NAS and the Royal Society, support the consensus on climate change. But somehow, in bizarro world, no consensus exists.
As for your wall-street journal link, this only proves my point that there is consensus. According to your own source , 97% of actively publishing climate scientists agree with AGW. That's a consensus baby. YOUR OWN SOURCE.
So, obviously, the fact that there is a consensus on AGW is not in dispute... right?
Okay, I read the original materials, and agree that Oreskes said "climate change" in her article, and later clarified that she searched for "global climate change".
I wouldn't make such a big deal about self-selection. Scientists trying to disprove something to do with climate change would probably put "global climate change" in their article, since they want it to be read by people who study global climate change.
Anyway, it is an empirical question whether the majority of climate scientists support the consensus on AGW. There are some flaws in this single study that Oreskes did. Some will take that to mean that/everything/ she does is flawed, which is the incorrect conclusion. You gotta look at these things.
And there is consensus. There was in 1979. The NAS investigated the matter then, and declared that there was a consensus view. Here is the current NAS document.
What if there was a 1% risk of catastrophic results from AGW, 30% chance of nothing unusual, and 69% chance of something good? Would that be enough reason to second guess policy responses that require creating energy poverty around the world?
Well, nobody is talking about creating poverty. If we could agree on the science (or rather, with the scientists), then we could have that discussion. That is the correct discussion to have. What is the risk, and how much are we willing to spend to mitigate the problem.
1% risk is enough for pretty much everybody to buy fire insurance. How much does your insurance policy cost? (Mine is ~$350 per year.) That is an acceptable amount for 1% risk.
Steve Schneider puts the risk for CAGW at ~10%, and he didn't just pull that out of his ass like you just did.
Astrology is supported by hundreds of hypotheses, too.
Astrology makes predictions and is falsifiable. (There are some great studies, go look it up.)
As for the list you presented. There are some good points in there. But I should point out that the little ice age and medieval warming periods were not global events. (Re-read your post.) Also, the effects of AGW are more speculative; however, the vast majority of deniers start much lower, at denying that warming is occuring at all -- or even that CO2 levels are rising. (Where you get that from, what a joke!)
Also, global warming currently predicts decreased cyclonic activity, but more violent "big" storms.
Anyway, I doubt there is anything that will convince you at all. Seen too many shifting goal-posts in these debates, and "falsifiable hypotheses" is a red flag. Every substantial scientific theory is built from an argument on many hypotheses. The key is a consistent argument that explains as much of the available evidence in as simple terms as possible. New evidence breaks the argument, but...
science is bigger then null-hypothesis significance testing, which is merely a tool.
Well, the results of Lenaerts et al. (2012) really aren't that surprising. Plenty of ice melting in other places of the world. Antarctica is huge and benefits from increased precipitation (from warmer oceans) enlarging the entire ice sheet.
You gotta find something on Watts' site that actually/breaks/ the science, not some minor detail that really makes not difference to the overall picture.
As for the stuff on Gleick. Whatever. Got nothing to do with the evdience on AGW.
Oh, and the Ozone hole, ocean acidification, smoking causing lung cancer (that's an old one though), the biological basis of gender and sexual identity ('cause it's not Adam and Steve), a slew of research in criminology (lets get rid of the war on drugs, mandatory sentences, etc.). Gee that's just off of the top of my head.
Democrats have their hobby-horses where they deny the science, but the list is much shorter. (But equally bizarre.)
Neither party is against science, it's ridiculous to think otherwise. Both parties want the US to be the center of learning and scientific breakthroughs.
Yeah right. "Neither party is against science". This is just cowardly thinking./Both/ parties are against science. The Republicans are against any science that interferes with their ideological positions: AGW, Environmental-anything, research on gender and sexual identity, stem-cell research, evolution (which essentially covers the biological sciences). The Democrats are against anything that shows a biological basis to gendered behaviour and research on genetically modified foods.
This is not a black and white statement. I am just talking about statistical tendencies.
By and large, the Republicans are easily more anti-science then the Democrats, as evidenced by the Bush administration removing scientists from positions of power, and replacing them with republican-christian ideologues. And the AGW farce.
Huntsman himself warned that the Republicans are in danger of becoming widely known as the anti-science party.
Been there, done that, and pretty impressed by the references of Watts and his guest posters.
Well, this is almost certainly bullshit. For the sake of anybody reading this, why don't you find one of these Watts talking points with impressive references, and we can lay out the reference chain and then others can make up their mind.
Note that this is a very bold statement on my part. I am not trying to point out what Watts gets wrong -- I am giving you a chance to point out ANYTHING substantial that Watts gets right.
If there was a 10% risk of catastrophic results from AGW, 30% chance of nothing unusual, and 60% in between, would that be enough risk to think about making a policy response? This is the type of question which is never talked about by those who want a grand falsifiable hypothesis.
The AGW argument is supported by hundreds of hypothesis. There are several key hypotheses which can be disproven which effectively disprove the entire argument.
If I gave you a hypothesis, you would just squint, and say that you want more. This video summerises the argument concisely. The IPCC reports give the details. If there was a problem with the argument, then somebody would point it out.
This simply hasn't happened. There is just a vast echo chamber of baseless claims (follow the references).
The "study" she did on "scientific consensus" was shown to have used search terms that self-selected for papers that supported her premise.
Oh yeah, suppose we should just take your word on that. Which "study" are you talking about (provide a reference), and where is the refutation (also a reference).
99% of people can usually see through the bullshit when you actually go back to the original sources. (A true ideologue will say black is white and mis-read what is in front of them.)
I'm going to make a punt and say that your references will not support your assertion, and that you will not be able to admit it. But at least other people reading this post will have a chance to verify your claim.
You should source some of the claims that Anthony Watts makes. Then compare them to what Watts says about them. It is pretty easy to work out that he doesn't know what he is talking about. But this doesn't matter since he is talking to people like you -- presumably Republican ideologues terrified of any government intervention is the free market.
All ya gotta do is follow the references. It is shockingly easy to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes you linked to Peiser. He says he found 34 abstracts that go against the consensus.
/not/ change the fact that there is a consensus (so Naomi is correct). That is less then 3%.
Note that 34 does
Care to dig up these abstracts to go through them? That should be another exercise is arguing black is white.
Should make you really, really, mad. Since that is one defence mechanism of denial.
Go ahead. Call me stupid.
I simply have to show that Oreskes' selection criteria resulted in numbers that were significantly different from the numbers for all papers about climate.
So let me get this straight. You are asserting that Oreskes' would have failed to show a consensus if she'd actually used the search term exactly as stated in her paper?
Even though there really is a consensus?
Even though you would need stupendously huge sample bias for her figures to be wrong? (Given that there really is a consensus -- who would have been publishing these papers?)
Given that nobody has actually been able to show that there really was a sample bias?
Go ahead, call me stupid again. What a joke =0>
Because my original comment was that citing Oreskes was not exactly a credible thing to do.
And I quite clearly stated that it is a mathematical absurdity. A sample of 1000 can predict the mean of a sample of 1000000 with very high fidelity. When the variance is small. For Oreskes study not to be credible, you have to show that 3% of non-AGW-supporters (which include neautrals) publish a vastly larger proportional number of studies in the period, all aligned, and using "climate change" in the abstract, but for some reason not using "global climate change". This stretches credulity.
I also pointed out that it is an empirical question, and some denier tried to show this but back-peddled when their study re-affirmed Oreskes' study. (Look it up, it is a total double standard.)
But i'm the one who doesn't understand, right?
I heard ya, and answered ya. Naomi was right. We checked the references, and you were wrong.
But instead of talking about the veracity of Naomi's work, you want to talk about how consensus suddenly doesn't matter.
Change of topic == denial mechanism =0
You have done nothing but misunderstand, then claim that means you "win". You're an idiot
I am a cognitive scientist by training, with backgrounds in psychology, religion and artificial intelligence. I have studied the ego defense mechanisms very precisely over many years. I am fascinated by how the ego protects what buddhists call "ignorance" -- something that is vividly alive in the paranoid and political mind. In itself it is really amazingly stupendously crazy and wonderful and bizarre. So, I look into 9/11 conspiracies, moon landing conspiracies, alien stuff, people against vacciness, GMOs, the biological basis of behaviour or sexual identity or gender identity. And of course, the denial of AGW. It is all amazingly similar.
I mean no disrespect when I say -- drop AGW for a while, and study the nature of political discourse. How do you know what is right? To understand that, you have to question everything at first, just like Descartes does in his famous method. My mind almost exploded when I went through this process over a period of years, because I discovered that almost everything I knew was wrong. And now I really do know something about epistemology.
Denial and projection are precisely the ego defence mechanisms most commonly active in AGW "skeptics", and if you study these mechanisms, you will discover that nobody ever knows that they are in denial, or that they are projecting. So there are some cognitive tricks you have to employ to figure out what your mind is doing.
Just saying. I don't think you are an idiot.
First you say that Naomi failed to show a consensus. But when you demonstrate that there is a consensus, somehow the topic moves on to consensus doesn't matter.
If you look way back, you'll see the original claim was to follower references on the Oreskes study.
One (of a few) key mechanism of denial to to constantly change the topic. We can't go around admitting that Oreskes correctly pointed out that there is a scientific consensus, and that criticisms of her work are baseless.
No, once we've established that there is a consensus, we just change the topic, and FORGET what we were talking about before.
In this way, the mind can endlessly fool itself that it knows something, when it is wrong about pretty much everything.
No, I really do mean that AGW isn't happening, or it isn't a problem, or there is nothing we can do about it in terms of *mitigation*.
Be honest with yourself. All (97%) of the scientists believe AGW is happening. But you're just smarter then that, right? No.... you just don't think there is anything that can be done. Don't WANT to think. That is what I see.
if one is really desirous of being pessimistic
I don't desire to be pessimistic, and I am not. Republicans are being obstructionist scumbags on the issue, but we will find some solutions regardless. We'd all be better off is there was a mature discussion on the topic. But that will never happen.
You know, and I know, Monckton is fighting a straw man.
Monckton has a huge following of rabid denialists. He isn't fighting a straw man, he /is/ the straw man. It is absolutely laughable. Monckton also believes he has a cure for cancer, aids, graves disease and multiple-sclerosis. He is constantly contradicting himself (as the need arises). There is a hilarious conversation between Monckton and Peter Hadfield on WUWT. Search for all the references for Thatcher for a truly mind-numbing example of fantasy land.
As for your solutions -- I'm not sure drilling for oil is going to solve the coming energy crisis. We have been using exponentially more energy for a long time. If we double every 20 years, then that means we will use more energy in the next 20 years then we have used since the beginning of civilisation. Obviously something is going to break there eventually.
The price of energy should reflect its future availability. Markets get this wrong. E.g.: scientists warned that we should not be using trawlers back in the 70s, because it is not sustainable. Only took 20 years for the North Atlantic fish populations to tank, and we needed a moratorium on fishing. The investors in the 70s walked away with the cash, and the fishermen lost their livelihood and their towns.
Same thing will happen with a "drill-baby-drill" mentality. We will hit a brick wall due to exponential growth, the investors will walk away, and the government will be forced to do something. (And then Republicans will complain about the big arm of government.)
"Look, we don't think human CO2 has any measurable effect on natural climate change, but even if it did, nothing we can possibly do will stop it now. If people want to start focusing on adaptation (designing hurricane proof shelters, planning dikes, raising people out of poverty to they can survive natural weather disasters), great. Mitigation is a non-starter."
This is perfect example of how stupid the debate is. You complain that AGW isn't happening or it isn't a problem. But what you really mean is that you don't want to do anything about it. Hence the attack on the science. This is an obvious misdirection, and it is very dishonest and frustrating, and scientists are well aware that this is the score. Their work is attacked because lassez-faire fundamentalists don't want to deal with the reality of what their work might say. The evidence just doesn't matter. This is perhaps the most well studied phenomenon in all of human history.
So just be honest and say: "Yeah AGW and perhaps CAGW could happen, but I don't think that there is anything that can be done about it except adapting to whatever happens." That is a perfectly valid opinion to have. Denying the science is just counter-productive.
Personally I don't think anything will ever happen because it is hard enough to get people to save up for their retirement. Just remember what you said and where you stood today, and tell it to your grand-children, when you give them sage advice about politics. (I imagine you will say that the science just wasn't settled, when this is just a lie that you tell yourself.)
Also, remember, we can ship coal everywhere - you can't ship wind everywhere :)
Well, in Europe they ship wind everywhere.
Obviously you think that we shouldn't do anything about AGW. It either isn't happening, or it isn't a problem, and you are completely certain about that, even though 97% of scientists who study it disagree. There is no solutions to talk about, and you are not in denial.
Have a good life. And don't forget to tell your grand-children exactly where you stood on the issue. (Oh I'm sure you'll spin up something so that you're the good guy.)
There's a reason why we stopped using windmills :)
Well, perhaps if you think wind-turbines aren't windmills. The USA has been investing hugely in wind energy. Does "stopping" mean "exponential increase" in your world?
Wind energy was subsidized until last year. Historically, the subsidy had to be renewed each year, and Republicans just recently axed it. The wind industry needs the subsidy to be on parity with oil/coal subsidies. The wind energy lobby would like all the subsidies removed (oil/coal and wind), so the free market can decide. (You know, like, what Ayn Rand was talking about.) Instead, we have huge oil/coal subsidies which end up making coal energy marginally cheaper then comparable wind turbines at present technology.
The Europeans and Asians will end up owning this market if the Republicans keep subsidizing big coal/oil. It is all rather ironic and sad. But that what you get form knee-jerk hatred of environmentalism.
"Breaks"? Without a clearly falsifiable hypothesis statement, no matter what I find, you'll claim some other ad hoc special pleading (ice melting in other parts of the world, for example).
Well that's not true. Monckton thinks he's "broken" the science. If his claims were supported by the evidence (or indeed his references), then he would be correct. He /would/ have falsified the AGW argument. Fact is, that his claims do not stand up to even modest scrutiny. It's all pretty laughable actually.
But onto the paper you link. Again, no big deal. We're looking at a hypothetical forcing that might occur, and that warrantees further investigation.
And just think about this for a moment. A negative forcing means that the lowering clouds make the earth cooler. And what goes down must come up. (Presumably the clouds will not eventually settle on our heads.) So at some stage we could predict that clouds will raise again, and this will warm the earth. So the lowering clouds is "storing" heat in some way. (If the clouds don't raise again, then we'll have incurred a one-time cooling effect from cloud lowering.)
Pretty cool, but there is nothing there which would challenge the consensus on climate change.
"ZOMG, sea levels are gonna get crazy high because ice in Antarctica is all gonna melt!"
I know people who speak like this. It is really annoying. But I don't hear many scientists talking like this -- not climate scientists anyway. Yet they all (97%) agree that AGW is happening. Not CAGW. Just AGW.
/solutions/. Practical.
/and/ the Republican primaries -- we get a blanket denial that there is any problem at all! 100% certainty that there is no problem. (Belief in climate change is correlated with degree of partisanship.) Not one Republican primary contendor can even admit that AGW is even happening! (Gingrich and Huntsman both back-peddled.) The fact that it has become such a black-and-white partisan issue with the Republican base should tip you off that the AGW debate is actually characterised by shrill-paranoid-anti-environmentalism. Not environmental alarmism, but a blanket denial that anything needs to be done at all.
My guess (and it is a well-informed layman's guess) is that we have a 10% chance of CAGW, 30% of nothing problematic, and 60% somewhere in-between. In my book, that warrants talking about solutions. Not marxism. Not world government. Not crippling regulations and taxes. That doesn't solve any problems. I'm talking
But when you look at Fox News,
I am *sure* that there are some great solutions that conservatives can come up with, and am ready to have that conversation.
Any attempt to decarbonize our energy system by its very definition will increase poverty by replacing cheap energy with expensive energy. Economics 101.
Well, this is a different question as to whether AGW is happening and what the risk is. I have heard no "skeptic" ever talking about risk. Perhaps you'd be the first, but I think not. You did suggest that you'd insure the world against CAGW for $350. This is not helpful for discussing what the risk is. It seems that you (and every other "skeptic") just doesn't want to talk about risk.
And to speak to this point directly, it is not economics 101 at all. Wind energy is already about on parity with coal power generation -- and that R&D effort occurred on the cheap, with huge subsidies going to oil companies. Despite much information from conservatives on electric/hybrid cars, they do show promise for a future technology. See here for a short video on some future technologies that we may use.
But again, this is simply a conversation that "skeptics" just don't want to have. For the "skeptic", we simply have: four-legs good, environmentalism bad. We don't talk risk. We don't talk technology. We don't talk solutions. We just have denial of the problem, because even admitting climate change is occurring would be against the group think.
But my point (which I stated more than once) is that it wasn't representative of the body of papers on climate at the time
.
/all/ respected scientific professional bodies in the world agree -- your own sources agrees.
/all/ of them against AGW (not on the fence), and /all/ of them failing to use the term "global climate change" in the abstract. (But still using "climate change".)
I got it. And I responded. You're making an assertion, but I am saying that this is really an empirical question.
The rest of the post is about whether there is consensus about AGW. Aside from the fact that
Now, you might thing that your source is rebutting that 97% of scientists agree about AGW. But it doesn't. (Read it again, it is stating the 97% of scientists doen't believe in CAGW, which is a different study -- typical slippery goal posts.)
Should I point out the very sentence and line where your sources agrees with the 97%-AGW figure? Would it make a difference?
And you say this doesn't matter, but that is just absurd. We are talking about the veracity of Oreskes' study here. I asked you to post the references, so that we could follow them. And that is what we've done. We have discovered that Oreskes failed to describe the search term (she said "climate change" when she in fact used "global climate change"). For this to make a difference, then those 97% of scientists who agree with AGW mustn't be publish very much, and the 3% must be publishing daemons - and
So we followed the references, you exposed this little canard. In typical denier fashion, you're trying to change the scope of the discussion onto something else. This always happens when people feel the ground beneath them starting to slip.
I think I am done with this conversation.
"A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest." (Simon and Garfunkel)
/is/ madness, and madness /is/ tiresome.
The AGW
she would have been examining well over 10 times as many papers.
True.
I daresay a whole order of magnitude is important. And those papers would have been much less likely to support any "consensus" on climate change.
This is clutching at straws. A sample of 1000 is sufficient to estimate the variance in a population of millions. (Look up the central limit theorem.) Depends on the variance, of course, but the variance was for her sample was /tiny/.
For your statement to be true, you'd have to argue that there is a much greater chance that a paper would be against the consensus if it included "climate change" but not "global climate change" in the abstract. (A lot of those papers may not mention global climate change at all, and thus irrelevant.)
I don't expect to convince you. You've got your logic and "evidence" already worked out. It is, however, an empirical question.
consensus -- even where it really exists -- is not science.
This is additional information. There is a consensus (or set of) treatments for cancer. Would you go find the doctor who believes some research done on homeopathy? After-all, science isn't conensus -- the homeopathist could be correct! (Such studies exist.) This is a precise analogy to AGW.
Every respected professional body of science in the world, including NAS and the Royal Society, support the consensus on climate change. But somehow, in bizarro world, no consensus exists.
As for your wall-street journal link, this only proves my point that there is consensus. According to your own source , 97% of actively publishing climate scientists agree with AGW. That's a consensus baby. YOUR OWN SOURCE.
So, obviously, the fact that there is a consensus on AGW is not in dispute... right?
None of this is science.
Okay, I read the original materials, and agree that Oreskes said "climate change" in her article, and later clarified that she searched for "global climate change".
/everything/ she does is flawed, which is the incorrect conclusion. You gotta look at these things.
I wouldn't make such a big deal about self-selection. Scientists trying to disprove something to do with climate change would probably put "global climate change" in their article, since they want it to be read by people who study global climate change.
Anyway, it is an empirical question whether the majority of climate scientists support the consensus on AGW. There are some flaws in this single study that Oreskes did. Some will take that to mean that
And there is consensus. There was in 1979. The NAS investigated the matter then, and declared that there was a consensus view. Here is the current NAS document.
What if there was a 1% risk of catastrophic results from AGW, 30% chance of nothing unusual, and 69% chance of something good? Would that be enough reason to second guess policy responses that require creating energy poverty around the world?
Well, nobody is talking about creating poverty. If we could agree on the science (or rather, with the scientists), then we could have that discussion. That is the correct discussion to have. What is the risk, and how much are we willing to spend to mitigate the problem.
1% risk is enough for pretty much everybody to buy fire insurance. How much does your insurance policy cost? (Mine is ~$350 per year.) That is an acceptable amount for 1% risk.
Steve Schneider puts the risk for CAGW at ~10%, and he didn't just pull that out of his ass like you just did.
Astrology is supported by hundreds of hypotheses, too.
Astrology makes predictions and is falsifiable. (There are some great studies, go look it up.)
As for the list you presented. There are some good points in there. But I should point out that the little ice age and medieval warming periods were not global events. (Re-read your post.) Also, the effects of AGW are more speculative; however, the vast majority of deniers start much lower, at denying that warming is occuring at all -- or even that CO2 levels are rising . (Where you get that from, what a joke!)
Also, global warming currently predicts decreased cyclonic activity, but more violent "big" storms.
Anyway, I doubt there is anything that will convince you at all. Seen too many shifting goal-posts in these debates, and "falsifiable hypotheses" is a red flag. Every substantial scientific theory is built from an argument on many hypotheses. The key is a consistent argument that explains as much of the available evidence in as simple terms as possible. New evidence breaks the argument, but...
science is bigger then null-hypothesis significance testing, which is merely a tool.
Well, the results of Lenaerts et al. (2012) really aren't that surprising. Plenty of ice melting in other places of the world. Antarctica is huge and benefits from increased precipitation (from warmer oceans) enlarging the entire ice sheet.
/breaks/ the science, not some minor detail that really makes not difference to the overall picture.
You gotta find something on Watts' site that actually
As for the stuff on Gleick. Whatever. Got nothing to do with the evdience on AGW.
But... think of the pure entertainment value.
Oh, and the Ozone hole, ocean acidification, smoking causing lung cancer (that's an old one though), the biological basis of gender and sexual identity ('cause it's not Adam and Steve), a slew of research in criminology (lets get rid of the war on drugs, mandatory sentences, etc.). Gee that's just off of the top of my head.
Democrats have their hobby-horses where they deny the science, but the list is much shorter. (But equally bizarre.)
No, they correctly think that if you can change opinions in your favor, then reality doesn't matter (or at least is someone else's problem).
So true. So sad.
/amazes/ me that smart people -- Republicans -- don't revolt against the weasel words.
Karl Rove explicitly said as much, and it
Neither party is against science, it's ridiculous to think otherwise. Both parties want the US to be the center of learning and scientific breakthroughs.
Yeah right. "Neither party is against science". This is just cowardly thinking. /Both/ parties are against science. The Republicans are against any science that interferes with their ideological positions: AGW, Environmental-anything, research on gender and sexual identity, stem-cell research, evolution (which essentially covers the biological sciences). The Democrats are against anything that shows a biological basis to gendered behaviour and research on genetically modified foods.
This is not a black and white statement. I am just talking about statistical tendencies.
By and large, the Republicans are easily more anti-science then the Democrats, as evidenced by the Bush administration removing scientists from positions of power, and replacing them with republican-christian ideologues. And the AGW farce.
Huntsman himself warned that the Republicans are in danger of becoming widely known as the anti-science party.
Been there, done that, and pretty impressed by the references of Watts and his guest posters.
Well, this is almost certainly bullshit. For the sake of anybody reading this, why don't you find one of these Watts talking points with impressive references, and we can lay out the reference chain and then others can make up their mind.
Note that this is a very bold statement on my part. I am not trying to point out what Watts gets wrong -- I am giving you a chance to point out ANYTHING substantial that Watts gets right.
If there was a 10% risk of catastrophic results from AGW, 30% chance of nothing unusual, and 60% in between, would that be enough risk to think about making a policy response? This is the type of question which is never talked about by those who want a grand falsifiable hypothesis.
The AGW argument is supported by hundreds of hypothesis. There are several key hypotheses which can be disproven which effectively disprove the entire argument.
If I gave you a hypothesis, you would just squint, and say that you want more. This video summerises the argument concisely. The IPCC reports give the details. If there was a problem with the argument, then somebody would point it out.
This simply hasn't happened. There is just a vast echo chamber of baseless claims (follow the references).
The "study" she did on "scientific consensus" was shown to have used search terms that self-selected for papers that supported her premise.
Oh yeah, suppose we should just take your word on that. Which "study" are you talking about (provide a reference), and where is the refutation (also a reference).
99% of people can usually see through the bullshit when you actually go back to the original sources. (A true ideologue will say black is white and mis-read what is in front of them.)
I'm going to make a punt and say that your references will not support your assertion, and that you will not be able to admit it. But at least other people reading this post will have a chance to verify your claim.
You should also read what Gleick has to say about the leaked memos.
You should source some of the claims that Anthony Watts makes. Then compare them to what Watts says about them. It is pretty easy to work out that he doesn't know what he is talking about. But this doesn't matter since he is talking to people like you -- presumably Republican ideologues terrified of any government intervention is the free market.
All ya gotta do is follow the references. It is shockingly easy to do.