My Unhappy Life as a Climate Heretic

'X is false'

'X is not proven to be true or false'

are all different statements. He is committing the fallacy of the excluded middle.

If OTOH he wishes to claim X is false he should say it was proven false. But I infer he didn't have such evidence, just that the committee had found no supporting evidence.

Of course, in science truth is a probabilistic concept, but here we don't have the figures.

I'd also like to read a response from other climate scientists or journalists to see if there's a part of the story he's omitting from his framing here.

The reason that droughts don't appear to be getting worse overall is that the rain is moving from one place to another. So some places that used to get more water are now getting less, and places that used to get less water are now getting more. But this is still a problem because it's very hard to move agricultural infrastructure to chase the rain.

We can't be sure from this data, but there is a very plausible causal model that leads from drought to fires. It just seems highly plausible that drought over woodland would result in more fires. But I don't have access to that data at the moment. Anecdotally I can tell you with high confidence that the Gatlinburg fire, and most of the recent mega-fires in California, as well as the one up in Canada that made the papers a while back, were all associated with not just drought, but historic drought. That might just be a coincidence, but until someone actually runs the numbers you can't assume that.

In any case, it is pretty clear that something has changed. Do you have a better theory to offer?

If what you care about is how many trees there are (and that's what I care about) then the number of acres burned is clearly the metric that matters.

The trend has been a transition from a lot of little fires to a few huge ones. One of the reasons that the number of fires has dropped is that by the time the mega-fires are brought under control there is nothing left to burn.

> The key point here is that you and I should be able to openly debate acres burned vs total number of fires without me trying to track you down and get you fired, or you having me banned from HN.

That is certainly true. But there is nothing wrong with firing an academic for doing sloppy and possibly politically motivated research. I don't know if that's what this was, but I do have some actual data that indicates that it could be the case. And this data is not obscure nor was it particularly hard for me to find, so it seems likely that when I have the bandwidth to do a more thorough search I might find more evidence that this guy's research was in fact sloppy and politically motivated.

The fact that he published this piece in the WSJ, whose biases are well known, is another indication that this is not a clear-cut case of political correctness run amok. It could be, but it's far from a slam-dunk.

[UPDATE:] More evidence of bias: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13099156

I can think of scientific theories that have been proven wrong after a long time, but they haven't been proven wrong because it was impossible to prove them wrong immediately. Only because it took so long to come up with an experiment / better theory which in insight could have been done on day 1.

This is not the same as telling everyone "I have a model, my back-testings are telling me it works, I will only be able to prove it right (or wrong) in 30 years, but you need to take actions now based on what this model says".

To the best of my knowledge, a better scientific experiment would be having ~30 earths with 1 climate policy, ~30 earths with another climate policy, and yet another control group.

There's a big difference between saying "we scientifically know emitting pollutants into the atmosphere has certain unintended/undesirable consequences, and we're uncertain of the harm so we should stop," and "we know global warming will create extreme weather patterns that will destroy the world's economy and kill billions of people"--I have heard people tell me of these doomsday scenarios, even here on HN.

Politics always exist to serve self-interests. Ask yourself whose are served by this movement.

Reality is that the current temperature anomaly is -far- below IPCC 1990 predictions. So ... falsified ? It is, in fact, so that the temperature anomaly is below every IPCC prediction of more than 5 years back, best case scenarios, with the lone exception of the 2010 report's optimistic prediction for last year (2016 however is out of the 95% interval of that one too, unless something drastic happens).

There are reasons for this. Such as that there was a bit of a pause in global warming from late 90s to late 00s. But the fact that the models failed to see this coming, and only incorporated it afterwards of course is further indictment of those models. It kept warming, mind you, except perhaps for 1 year, just way, way slower than predicted.

There is a joke that the IPCC now must be correct for the next 22000 years. Why ? That's the only way to make their 95% certainty predictions actually be true in 95% of the cases, given one prediction every 5 years. And this is not the only consideration. Obviously things like the Kyoto accords were based on these predictions. They turned out wrong. So should we now abandon those accords and laws, at least until the evidence can be examined ? That would be very scientific, or at least, it would be very scientific the way I was taught statistics. To say that this would be politically problematic, a lot of work and very, very, very impractical is an understatement.

And of course, more recent science cannot be used until there is enough evidence to support the correctness of the model. Normally one would say, half to validate, half to be used. The problem is that you cannot trust researchers who've seen (and evaluated) against all data they've seen. So you need to use future data to validate models, but of course all IPCC models so far have crashed and burned in that comparison. So you cannot just say "let's just use the 2015 predictions", because if you just put down the temperatures from last year for the next 100 years you would have done better than the IPCC, so far (meaning even outirght climate deniers' models would easily have 95% accuracy one year out).

And that then violates intuition. The graphs show a clear and consistent rising of temperature for coming up on 160 years now. Obviously the truth is that we don't know why, or at least, not to the level of detail required to predict the effect of policies we implement. Now of course, both cause and effect seem obvious - BUT the models fail to predict effect given cause, so technically a mathematician should use the notions taught in philosophy of science, as applied to statistics, and reject the models. One would be obliged to point out that maybe the models are wrong because their assumptions are wrong, or at least inaccurate.

I would say that we should just train everyone in how to analyze the data, but I realize it's not very practical. Plus it would actually mean climate change would be tempered (one would hope that policies would be moderated given that the predictions they're based on turned out to be overly pessimistic).

All this is ignoring theoretical problems, the most obvious one is that these models are based on statistics. Statistics that studied cause and effect in a situation ... that no longer exists and very likely will never return. We are using models to predict the future based on values that lie outside of the range they were modeled on (predictions out of range is one of the statistical fallacies: you cannot model based on data between 0 and 10, then have confidence in predicting what happens at 15. Everybody does do that of course, but it's wrong, as obviously the distribution of your source data is different from the prediction data. But we don't have data with the same distribution, because the situation is new). Technically that means they're wrong, period. What do we do with that ?

Problem us either is HN and Ars Technica are very political or techies and science lovers has started abandoning their love for evidence to participate in "troll hunting" not just blatant trolls but also anyone who asks any critical question.

And, as a former sceptic: from the outside climate science seems cult-like :-/

(That said, even as a former sceptic, I have advocated cutting the dependency on fossil, I do have all my shares in solar etc.)

But I cannot take seriously the UNFCCC agreement in Paris, where countries were negotiating fractions of a degree celcius like if it was something tangible and deterministic.

Or politically inconvenient?

If you want to say that the research is no good, that it misrepresents the facts, or that journalists handled the material fairly, that would be material.

However, if you say that we should dismiss it because it is being used by people we don't like in ways we don't like, you may as well admit the denialists are right, there is a conspiracy to suppress (oh sorry, just exclude, dismiss, and ignore!) any science that doesn't fit the narrative, and that you don't trust the public to evaluate anything for themselves.

This is the attitude and the behavior that makes people distrust climate science.

If you put a veneer of falsehood and spin on a mountain of truth, don't be surprised when people assume the falsehood goes all the way through.

Re: carbon tax being useless, how so? Of course the level of the carbon tax matters too, but it doesn't make sense that directly taxing something wouldn't reduce the amount of it.