EPA: Pruitt will launch program to 'critique' climate science
eenews.net
eenews.net
Unfortunately in practice this likely ends up being the government sponsoring the same sort of bullshit that the oil companies have been putting out for ages, and not real critique. Red team/blue team is also a unfortunate name given the political connotations...
The kind of critique that routine happens within the scientific community, over time. Scientists are highly motivated to prove the majority wrong, because that's how you make your career, by finding something new that everyone else missed.
By contrast, the EPA 'critique' will be a political charade, a circus of crackpots and shills assembled by the administration to rationalize its predetermined policy decisions.
I don't disagree on this likely be(com)ing a political charade.
[0] http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-...
In the case of the psychology replication crisis (note that I'm NOT talking about climate science here), the problem was the result of a few factors:
1. the lack of incentives to replicate others' work
2. the use of p-values to determine what gets published
3. the low probability of a true positive
These factors are not part of the critique process of peer review. That is, reviewers are looking at whether the methodology is valid. "Did the scientists follow proper procedures? Do the results match up with what they claim?" While these questions can identify methodological errors, they cannot identify when an experiment is a statistical fluke.
Suppose the true positive rate is 5% and the false positive rate is 5%. That means that only 10% of experiments will give results that suggest publishing. But if you look at published papers only, the probability that the paper is false is not 5%, it's 50%!
The solution to this problem is not to throw out peer review, it's to fix the three issues above. We must create a system that incentivizes replication. Perhaps 1st-year grad students will be required to attempt to replicate existing work. (This would be more interesting for the grad student than taking an additional class!) Perhaps we should move away from p-values (but what do we replace that with?)
However, the replication crisis is not really the problem of bad science or corruption -- it's mostly the result of bad incentives and false positives.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/#pa...
My old boss at Google used to run the data science program for Search - this is basic business intelligence, not even the natural sciences. He gave an hour and a half long presentation once on all the ways our experiments can and have gone wrong. It included everything from browser bugs disrupting logging, to service outages that happened in the middle of the experiment, to current events that change the normal traffic pattern, to software bugs that trigger failsafes that shut off the experiment but don't affect the control. By the end of the presentation, engineers were asking "So how is it that we actually get anything right?"
My brother-in-law is an actual scientist - he does cancer research, studying gene expression within head & neck tumors. The time it takes to get one rigorous, publishable result is measured in years. And it can be derailed by months by something as simple as a tech mixing up lab samples.
The thing is, when people use examples of these techniques going wrong as examples of why science is untrustworthy, they forget that normal human reasoning doesn't even bother trying. It's basically a given that most of the stuff you "know" is false. What would be the reproducibility stats for an everyday human belief like "vaccines cause autism" or "the economy does better under Democratic presidents" or "vitamin C prevents colds"?
The virtue of science is in being less wrong, it's not in being right. Which, given how often the average human is wrong, is something I'll happily take.
A bit funny that you have to tell this, considering where this originated from..
"We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that ..."
But the number did eventually converge to a consensus, though it took many years to get there.
Don't romanticize the scientific establishment too much.
Yes, you want to find something that everyone else missed and publish it. However, you don't really want to "prove the majority wrong" (they, after all, review your paper and speak often with people on funding committees) in any kind of funding- and career-invalidating way. What you really want is a detail your colleagues overlooked in their largely-correct approach to a problem. This kind of thing - generating results and techniques that your colleagues can integrate into their own research, citing you - is what makes careers.
Partly this is because (I honestly believe) the majority of people in my field (plasma physics) are competent and conscientious researchers, so "proving them all wrong" is the futile quest of a crank.
However, my point remains - as a junior scientist I do not want to stir up any shit with senior scientists, nor do I want to challenge any narratives that funding agencies like. I mean, I might want to, but it would be counter to my own interests in a big way.
The role of government is to respond to those truths with estimates of the negative impacts and estimates of the cost of mitigation and then come to a consensus around actions.
This is just obfuscation designed to drive a wedge between accepted science and policymakers. Obfuscaters just want to avoid making the hard arguments over their desires to have either zero mitigation or to actively accelerate human caused climate change.
It's a perfectly fine position to hold that climate change is happening but that you don't care. It's not fine to lie about it happening purposefully create and spread lies in the public space.
Just make the argument that the money would be better spent elsewhere.
"Contaminants in our air and water cause X billion dollars of added health care costs and lost productivity to Americans every year. Rising sea levels and extreme weather patterns cause Y billion dollars of damage to real estate and crop yields every year. What is the EPA going to do to control these losses?"
I really want this anti-science conservative to answer the question about what he really cares about: the wallets of people who own lots of things. His side doesn't care about "good science" or objective truth, and they don't care about the public's well being. They care about money above all else and I think that's where the discussion should be focused.
We have no idea what global warming related Y is yet, so we can't give him that number.
But Pruitt isn't someone who is going to listen to reason anyway, he is paid to protect the fossil fuel industry.
Not universally true, some plants will be negatively affected by the co2. Either way its not the case that we are going to get amazing plants or that plants will grow to solve the situation.
I have followed this debate closely, and I haven't seen anyone on either side put forth detailed policy proposals other than voluntary carbon caps. In my opinion, advanced technology will solve this problem before any major policy changes are needed.
Vested interests have vested interests. Reviews of publications doesn't change that.
The entire point of scrutiny is to discredit and of course it's going to be biased. That's the point. If the science is solid, it'll withstand the scrutiny. And if it's not, it won't.
Any kind of scrutiny or inquiry should be encouraged, regardless of where it comes from.
Once the news cycle has chewed through the "EPA says climate change is not real" headlines and that's soaked in, it will be regurgitated for years to come. No matter how biased the scrutiny.
Biased scrutiny is the best kind. Scrutiny needs to occur and I would rather the people doing it sincerely believe that community at large is wrong rather than someone playing devil's advocate. They should make the best possible case against climate change they can.
And that's why this discussion is pointless, because they are exactly the people who will be fooled by a flawed and untruthful study and are exactly the people who a) will suffer most due to climate change and b) are able to take action to stop it.
At no point. That's how science works. Those who are opposed will bring up the best arguments available, even if those arguments aren't new. They'll get evaluated, rebuffed, accepted, etc. That's how it's supposed to work.
Many of the ideas you currently believe in were at some point rejected and ignored, frequently for decades and sometimes centuries. Bringing stuff up again, over and over, is a good thing.
If you are so thoroughly convinced that you are right, that is the surest evidence that you're doing it wrong. Always allow for the possibility that whatever you believe may be off and can be improved, even by ideas that aren't new.
No, this is not how Science works.
Repeating ad nauseaum the same debunked arguments is not how science works.
Or perhaps you think that is still valid to bring the Thomson atomic model today? Or the flogistum hypothesis?
The only thing those are doing is mudding the waters to stop the actions, nothing more.
Read Blaise Pascal's work where he demonstrated how to create a vacuum experimentally. At the time, everyone thought that was impossible. Pascal calmly addresses tons of detractors (many of whom had real skin in the game). If climatologists can't do that, then their work SHOULD be questioned.
Conservatives get a talking point, people who don't know what a P value is and wouldn't read any of the publications that would cry fowl about this are now a little more sure that it's all a liberal Chinese hoax designed to take away hard won profits from nice American oil companies.
There is no way that's compatible with such a complicated, subtle, and slow-moving field of study like climate science.
Only if both parties to the debate are acting in good faith. In this case, one party has financial and ideological incentives to push for a certain outcome.
After all, you cannot convince someone of something if their paycheck depends upon them not understanding it.
Thing that is false, if there is no climate change thwy still we be studying the climate
There's no way to know if that will happen, you're just blindly hoping the magic technology fairy will fix the problem because you hate taxes or liberals or both. Every ton of CO2 we spew into the atmosphere today will stay there for centuries. And there's a lag of decades between the spewing and the feedback effects to be felt, so there's little market pressure to fix the problem now.
"Critiquing" the same hypothesis by sea-lioning ("We're just asking some questions," when the questions have been well answered a hundred times), over and over again for years on end, is very much "anti-science." It's the same minimally-within-the-rules strategy used by the Holocaust deniers, Gamergate shitlords, and the neo-Fascists. It's not debate in good faith, it's a strategy of attrition, an attempt to waste human resources.
You missed a carbon tax, in my opinion the mechanism most likely to make a difference.
> In my opinion, advanced technology will solve this problem before any major policy changes are needed.
I agree with you to this extent: with the current state of affairs, only advanced (and as yet untried) technology can avert disaster. I don't think it is at all likely to happen, and major policy changes were needed twenty years ago.
He only cares if those people pay him off, like the fossil fuel industry did: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
[0]: http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/22/media/john-oliver-coal-king-...
“Aye, and”—to quote Scotty—“if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon.”
It's not like Pruitt and his boss haven't already staked out a definitive position on climate science, or like Pruitt would structure (or his boss would tolerate him structuring) this in any way not assured to support that position.
It didn't help.
Brings to mind Gingrich and his "Mueller is an excellent pick" tweet a few months ago, only to completely flip his position a few weeks ago. These people are unredeemable.
>The program will use "red team, blue team" exercises to conduct an "at-length evaluation of U.S. climate science," the official said, referring to a concept developed by the military to identify vulnerabilities in field operations.
Is US science any different to European or Japanese etc. science?
"The administrator believes that we will be able to recruit the best in the fields which study climate and will organize a specific process in which these individuals ... provide back-and-forth critique of specific new reports on climate science," the source said.
So they will recruit "the best in the fields which study climate" which basically means they will recruit a few of those "scientists" who get paid to reject climate science and put them on the "red team" or whatever, and that team will be listened to exclusively by the administration.
The article title is technically correct, in that at least one of those teams will be on the "critique" side. It is also substantially correct, germane, and honest in implying with its scare quotes that this new effort is superfluous, unless it is an effort to gum up the works with climate denial.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4674659/franken-vs-perry-clim...
China is a good example. It's not in the top 10 of CO2 emitters per capita, but only because it's still pretty poor. When you adjust for that, it jumps into the top 10, and the U.S. falls out of it. In other words, if you cut economic output by 1 unit in the U.S. (to lower CO2 production), and increase it by 1 unit in China, world total CO2 output will go up.
Your per-capita consumption is more than 4 times that of China, and for a long time you had the most emissions in the world. Your way of life isn't sustainable in more ways than just emissions. You have to accept that.
That distorts a lot because there is a lot of CO2 production outsourced to China
And American companies send high polluting industries to China, so it goes to their account.
China has fewer emissions per capita, and the US has fewer emissions per dollar of GDP.
The obvious solution is to move all the people in the US to China, and all of China's economic activity to the US!
Edit: downvotes, but no comments? Nice. Care to point out why I'm wrong?
It's as if we reincarnated oil barons from the early 1900s and appointed them all to lead the government without telling them it was 2017.
The weirdest part of it all is how these folks are now on the sharp end of capitalism. They're rapidly being dismantled at a more local level by on-site generation, which simply needs less global infrastructure to meet demand.
So now we have these folks with massive empires largely based on the promise of future capital, with heavily leveraged current holdings. They have incentive to act against efficiency and the market to preserve the investments they made. In any other scenario folks would probably say that they "deserve to lose".
We can't wait for them to accept the science, we should be pushing for the economic incentives to do the right thing to get better.
I wish the climate change alarmists could realize that 90% of what they're freaking out about is a non-problem. It'd just take a small amount of focused investment (cogeneration and AC time-shifting tech, etc) to make the energy industry obsolete.
The energy industry is fighting against both economics and ecology to maintain dominance. It does so for lots of reasons. It has no right to exist.
It's a dying industry that will die out for the normal reasons - economic forces - regardless of what the federal government does.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Climate_Alliance
"Carbon capture and sequestration does not work. It's a pseudonym for 'no coal,'" Murray said while waiting for a ride outside DOE headquarters. "It is neither practical nor economic, carbon capture and sequestration. It is just cover for the politicians, both Republicans and Democrats that say, 'Look what I did for coal,' knowing all the time that it doesn't help coal at all."
So "clean coal" is BS just like I thought? Is this guy trying to shoot himself and Trump in the foot or what?
To the average person, myself included, the arguments made by both "sides" (ACC exists, ACC does not exist) are equally convincing. That is, both seem logical and well-argued at the superficial level we can understand without training.
To the average person, myself included, both "sides" have a profit motive in fudging the numbers. (If ACC exists, the energy industry will fight because it ultimately harms their profits. If ACC doesn't exist, the academic lobby will fight for their prestige and grants)
Both sides are, ultimately, dirty, due to politicization if nothing else.
Both sides, ultimately, cannot be simultaneously correct.
And so I ask: Who should be trusted, why, and how, given the limited number of hours in the day available to people who aren't directly involved in climatology as their day job?
For bonus points, do any of the answers to those questions not boil down to the genetic or appeal to authority fallacies?
(The snark below in response to a legitimate, good-faith question is leading me to believe this topic cannot be discussed among reasonable people)
It would be better for "the academic lobby" to peddle the idea that climate science is unsettled, which would create more of a need for grants to study the issue.
I subscribe to 'Science' magazine which is one of the most respected publications among scientists (along with 'Nature' magazine). The consensus among scientists is settled: ACC is real. ACC deniers do not get published in respected science magazines because their peers do not respect their results.
Scientific results should be settled by the peer group of scientists, not by politicians or the general public (see vaccine conspiracies for example).
Here's one example:
https://www.insidescience.org/news/scientific-consensus-almo...
I trust majority in science because it is rarely wrong. I'd need a bit more than "majorities have been wrong before!" to switch sides.
The CAGW builds upon following argument: increased concentration of CO2 reduces the EM radiation's emission in frequencies that CO2 absorbs, ergo the surface temperature should rise in order to keep Earth's thermodynamic balance.
Increased temperature clearly affects the formation of clouds which have both positive and negative effects: they deflect incoming solar radiation, but also deflect surface radiation. The net effect is unclear, unfortunately.
I'm also quite puzzled by apparent lag between CO2 and temperatures in Vostok ice core data. Contrary to CAGW, temperature rises first, and CO2 follows.
My layman understanding is quite limited, of course, that's why eventually I go to the scientists for their expertise. I don't believe that all opponents of CAGW theory are shills; some of them are very respected people: Lindzen, Spencer, etc. My only conclusion is that science is not settled and CAGW is still an unconfirmed hypothesis.
Cloud formation is not related to CO2. CO2 is the primary factor driving the greenhouse effect. In fact research is beginning to show that a warmer planet may have lower cloud cover [1][2]. There is no cloud controversy, you are literally making that up.
[1] https://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1912448,... [2]https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/clouds/question.jsp
Have you read your links?
"One of the biggest questions in climate sensitivity has been the role of low-level cloud cover. Low-altitude clouds reflect some of the sun's radiation back into the atmosphere, cooling the earth. It's not yet known whether global warming will dissipate clouds, which would effectively speed up the process of climate change, or increase cloud cover, which would slow it down.
But a new study published in the July 24 issue of Science is clearing the haze. A group of researchers from the University of Miami and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography studied cloud data of the northeast Pacific Ocean — both from satellites and from the human eye — over the past 50 years and combined that with climate models. They found that low-level clouds tend to dissipate as the ocean warms — which means a warmer world could well have less cloud cover. "That would create positive feedback, a reinforcing cycle that continues to warm the climate," says Amy Clement, a climate scientist at the University of Miami and the lead author of the Science study."
That's one study that recorded the cloud data for subset of Earth.
Read about clouds feedback issue here, it's very pro-CO2-CAGW site: https://www.skepticalscience.com/clouds-negative-feedback.ht...
Your first statement is proving my point, CO2 contributes to the greenhouse effect, causing warming on average. Human activity is the cause of historically high CO2 levels.
"A group of researchers from the University of Miami and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography studied cloud data of the northeast Pacific Ocean"
Study from your first link recorded cloud cover data over subset of Earth's atmosphere. It doesn't say anything about whether clouds feedback is positive, or negative. Local data is not very useful evidence, global data would be preferable.
Here is an explanation of what is cloud feedback: increase of temperature has effects on cloud formation. If feedback from changes in cloud formation is positive, it will lead to even more warming. Negative feedback would mean that changed cloud formation actually reduces warming.
cloud data of the northeast Pacific Ocean — both from satellites and from the human eye
So, basically, yes, they are all bought and paid for, or, they simply have no credentials or knowledge of the field in question.
"Shills" is an insult, not an argument.
Lindzen retired only in 2013. I don't see how this makes his opinion about CAGW less valuable, especially given the fact that he was skeptical about CAGW hypothesis for a long time.
"Judith Curry also used to be a scientist and quit her academic job; presumably being a shill pays WAY better." - where's the proof that she is a "shill"?
Roy Spencer is a renowned scientist in my book: "Roy Warren Spencer is a meteorologist, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA's Aqua satellite. He has served as senior scientist for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center."
Again, where is the proof that he is oil industry's shill?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_denialism
Climate change denialism is no different from AIDS denialism.
"Climate change denialism" - what's this? Is there any scientist out there who thinks that Earth's climate is stable in the long run?
Call it "climate science denialism" if you prefer. It's no different from AIDS denialism.
Thabo Mbeki, President of South Africa in 1999-2008, listened to the denialists' views about the AIDS outbreak. He had an AIDS advisory panel staffed with consensus critics -- just like Trump and Pruitt are doing. The estimated number of premature deaths due to Mbeki's counterproductive actions is around 300,000.
The parent post gave an example of a case where some credentialed scientists continued to dispute the HIV-AIDS link well after the balance of evidence was against them.
Many people would say there was a "consensus" on the HIV-AIDS link despite the continued skepticism of some scientists, and that this scenario has parallels with climate science.
Can you offer a counter example, where a holdout group of scientists who disagreed with consensus in their field were proved right?
here you go
What do you see as the paradigm shift that turns climate science on its head and proves the consensus wrong?
Good thing, isn't?
Judith Curry doesn't disagree with AGW, she disagrees with the scale predicted. That would mean less immediate, strict action, but action nevertheless.
Freeman Dyson isn't a climatologist, he also says himself "[m]y objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have." He also believes in AGW.
It's good to have sceptics, and in particular being sceptical about the scale of AGW is very reasonable. The IPCC predictions actually have a wide variance for these reasons. These scientists don't really speak against the moderate action currently proposed, they aren't backing for Trump's position.
Yes, Dyson's rhetoric on climate moved a bit towards "alarmist" side, but he still doesn't believe in catastrophic consequences:
"The good news is that the main effect of carbon dioxide … is to make the planet greener, [by] feeding the growth of green plants of all kinds [and] increasing the fertility of farms and fields and forests."
And it's not like this is some conspiracy theory. Unspoken social consequences don't require people getting together and stroking their goatees cartoon-villain style.
The "consensus among scientists", looking at the psychology thing, can and has been wrong, so holding the concept up as if it makes error impossible doesn't seem to wash.
You might as well give up now if your entire view of reality has been up-ended as you claim...
* Both are experts in their field
* Both have prestigious journals
* Both are supposed to have a peer review process that prevents bogosity from being published and accepted.
Yet in one field, the peer review process, the ultimate guard that's supposed to prevent junk science from being published, failed. Is failing. Repeatedly. For a long time. It's not one failure, it's a chain of systemic failures.
That tells me that the entire concept of peer review is not immune to degenerating. And if it can happen in one field, it can happen in another, especially one that's harshly politicized (which psychology isn't, at least not anywhere near the same insane degree).
When some of the ones talking about the irreproducibility can give any proof that climate science has the same problem, perhaps we can start to talk.
Politization occurs almost only in the US.
Are you accusing the scientists of being politized?
Do you have any argument for your claims of not reprodicibility in climate science?
Do you have any argument for doubting the data that has been used for more than 40 years?
Do you have any argument apart of your political views?
Are you saying that climatology is immune to bunk being published despite peer review?
Your post is a lot of whataboutism that doesn't answer the questions posed.
Of the data we have, climate change being human caused is MUCH more preferable. The alternative is that the climate is changing and we aren't responsible.
That's a risk many are not willing to take.
Maybe.
Some of them just wound up there because they were the only people in the department with the Fortran chops to get the models working.
Understanding climate change requires high degrees of expertise, the collection of large amounts of data, the use of large mathematical models, and the cooperation of a large number of scientists. A large number of scientists work very hard to track the state of climate change, and their assessment is that "climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities" [0].
> If ACC doesn't exist, the academic lobby will fight for their prestige ang grants)
Please see the list of scientific bodies and their statements on climate change [1]. The idea that a large majority of all scientists with knowledge pertaining to climate science in the world would be corrupted, falsify results, and make false statements over many years to fund further studies seems exceedingly unlikely.
> And so I ask: Who should be trusted, why, and how, given the limited number of hours in the day available to people who aren't directly involved in climatology as their day job?
You should trust what 97% (or more) of all climate scientists agree upon. Arguing that a group of experts of a domain should be trusted is not logically fallacious.
[0] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048...
Keep in mind that I never even mentioned deception, that was something you just set up and knocked down on your own. I have no doubt that most climatologists are doing exactly what they should be doing and aren't Saturday morning cartoon villains,
But if there's a more meta issue involved, such as bad data, I argue that it'll never see the light of day given the political incentives.
(In other words, the politicians are the villains, not the scientists running the data)
> But if there's a more meta issue involved, such as bad data, I argue that it'll never see the light of day given the political incentives.
This is why single studies alone should not be the basis for large changes in policy. The current consensus in climate science is based on a large number of studies from different universities, science bodies, countries, using different sources of data, using different methods, and over a period of time. All of these factors makes it likely that the consensus is something which we should believe, and which should guide our policies.
> Keep in mind that I never even mentioned deception, that was something you just set up and knocked down on your own.
You stated that scientists have a profit motive for fudging their numbers, which if they did would be deceptive behavior.
Anyone who has passed a freshman physics class is equipped to (with significant effort) verify Newton's law of gravitation.
Any middle school student with a stopwatch and a tower can drop things off and determine that there are laws describing the ways that unsupported objects move downward.
Everyone who ever lived has been in a position to independently observe many of the properties of gravitation without needing to trust even a single statement or datapoint provided by another person.
In order to even understand the theory of ACC, much less test it, requires a person to first have a ton of education and then to navigate a substantial amount of academic literature.
You assume that so-called "freshmen physics" is a legitimate source of material and that middle school students are being taught legitimate science to begin with, when it could all be part of a pro-science agenda put forth by academic science thumpers promoting self-interested concepts of scientific ideology so that these people can continue to be employed and earn upwards of $40,000 per year as science propagandists. Let's not ignore the fact there's a lot of money at stake on these issues here, and for the involved parties getting you to believe in concepts like middle school science of freshmen physics are entirely based on a monetary incentive, despite what the evidence may show and even against contradictory evidence.
Also you assume that gravitation is proven beyond a theory or a concept, which is demonstrating your pro-gravity bias. The understanding of so-called "gravity" is based on nothing more than a theory, but general relativity and quantum theory are entirely incompatible with one another which basically debunks the entire thing as many leading scientists would agree, but again this assumes that any of the so-called "science" or the basis of any of this is even legitimate in the first place.
Finally, and this is very important, all of this completely disregards what religions might say too, and we need to hear each of the arguments of each individual religion and belief system and what their opinions and thoughts are on so-called "gravity", which, by the way, is not even mentioned in any holy books or writings whatsoever. That "gravity" is left out of every religious teaching entirely is very telling, and it demonstrates that from a theological standpoint that "gravity" has absolutely no basis in truth whatsoever, otherwise it obviously would be a subject of these belief systems and written about endlessly if it were a real thing. Can you really dispute or discount the words of supreme beings, let alone every God and belief system?
I would say that AGW theory has not yet met that standard.
[1]https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/0...
1) Describe a difficulty or gap in scientific knowledge, a "general problem", clearly defined, and show that the problem needs to be addressed.
2) Formulate a hypothesis, a "tentative theory", addressing the general problem, stated as clearly as possible in the language of science, which is mathematics.
3) Try to invalidate the tentative theory, and apply a certain scientific ethic described by Richard Feynman in his famous essay "Cargo Cult Science"[2]
I'm not sure the "general problem" has even been established. From 1880 to 2015 the Earth's temperature has gone from 288 K to 288.8 K, a 0.3% increase. So first of all you need to prove that the Earth system is not able to keep the climate stable.
Then you need to prove that recent increases in temperature are fundamentally different from past increases in the same system, i.e. the current interglacial period of the last 10,000 years. Again, this is not conclusive at all.
Then you need to prove that CO2 plays a huge part in the recent temperature changes. Correlation does not imply causation. Two independent variables can both increase and you have not proven that they are causally linked (beyond the first-order effects of course). All we have so far are computer models which, so far, are no more than best-fit lines on observed data.
In order for a computer model to be a good enough piece of evidence to favor dropping the null hypothesis and accepting the basis of the model, you would have to leave the model alone and see how well it predicts climate going forward. So far the models have not done well predicting actual climate [3].
QED.
[1] https://www.scribd.com/document/23499288/Lord-Monckton-Caugh...
Based on my best understanding climate scientists have pretty well proven that CO2 plays a huge part in the recent temperature changes. Perhaps an actual climate scientist lurking on the forum could weigh in.
"The academic lobby"? Christ. If ACC doesn't exist why wouldn't they just go and get grants to study something else?
Yeah, this is almost entirely wrong. I'm sure there is slightly more public funding available in the Earth sciences because of the urgency of climate change, but not much- NSF funds for Earth science projects have been pretty steady for the last 20 years [0] and before that too. If climate change simply didn't exist, researchers would just get grants to work on the plethora of other important Earth science issues- human water usage, the ozone layer, ocean acidification, forest fires, coral bleaching, agricultural runoff, glacier retreat. There was no shortage of important Earth science problems- why on Earth would researchers go to such (impossible) lengths to fabricate one? The idea that international researchers have created some conspiracy to increase funding in their field is bizarre and incoherent and just demonstrates a lack of understanding of how science funding works. It also doesn't explain the international consensus on climate change- how has every major scientific organization and metereological society agreed upon it, when all of them have completely different funding situations? And if they have, well then surely they would have realized that this plan has not drastically increased their public funding in 20 years and given up on it by now! But in all seriousness, this idea is just insulting to the scientists and the fact that it's popular amongst American conservatives is pretty telling of how scientifically ignorant that ideology is.
[0] https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/CJS%20NSF%2015hc.jp...
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/oceans/critica...
The process seems fairly simple. Oceans absorb a high proportion of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels. This changes the pH levels of oceans, which then alters the environment that marine animals live in, causing a necessity to adapt. You could perform water pH experiments to prove the effects on marine life if you needed to convince yourself (though I wouldn't want to promote animal testing if there was another way to reach clarity on this).
[1] http://blog.dilbert.com/post/154082416051/the-non-expert-pro...
Why climate scientists won't have grants if there is no climate change?
Climate doesn't need to be studied?
> Both sides are, ultimately, dirty, due to politicization if nothing else
Please, give me examples of climate scientists dirty by politization.
> For bonus points, do any of the answers to those questions not boil down to the genetic or appeal to authority fallacies?
Well, if you think that Theory of Evolution is appeal to authority, yes.
When the big majority of a field have consensus, you have to look at the motives and arguments of the minority dissenting, not saying that the majority appeals to authority
As shorthand in the following I will say that everyone, on this issue, can be classified as an "agnostic", an "alarmist", or a "denier", and I will trust you not to take those labels to insinuate anything about who is right or wrong (I myself am mostly in the alarmist camp).
IMO, the alarmists win A LOT of points (maybe not quite the whole game) for having a coherent, universally accepted, physics-based theory of the temperature of planets which correctly predicts observations from a variety of planets and requires radiative forcing from greenhouse gases in order to do it, while the deniers (as far as I can tell) do not propose an alternative theory or even generally agree on which part of the alarmists' chain of inference is broken. In, fact, until I see such a theory presented by the deniers (why are the planets we know the temperatures that they are, and what is the relationship between those temperatures and atmospheric GHG concentrations?), I really think the only sane stances to take are that of the alarmist or that of the agnostic.
Now, if you doubt that people can agree on the current surface temperatures and atmospheric compositions of Venus, Earth, the moon, and Mars, and are unwilling to spend the time to convince yourself that they do, then you're likely doomed to agnosticism. Same deal if you doubt that we can agree on the amount of CO2 we're emitting as a species on an annual basis.
Even then, you'll have to remain agnostic unless (1) you're willing to accept an appeal to authority or (2) you're willing to spend tens (but probably not hundreds) of hours understanding the basic theory of ACC, which holds that a doubling of the earth's CO2 concentration will result in an increase of 3C (plus or minus 1.5C) in the Earth's equilibrium temperature.
If you want to spend those tens of hours, you could start with this article[1] or this video lecture[2] or the wikipedia articles on "Planetary Equilibrium Temperature", "Radiative Forcing", and "Climate Sensitivity". The trick to not spending more than tens of hours is to remain laser-focused on understanding what those three terms mean, how they're related, and how one can try to measure climate sensitivity. In particular, a lot of discussions about prehistoric climate, on feedback mechanisms, and on the specific effects of global warming on specific regions of the globe will lead you astray if you let them.
If you don't have even a few hours to dig in on climate science, all I can say is that appeals to authority become a lot less unpalatable when the authorities appealed to are sufficiently numerous. Even if you think it not unlikely that NASA, NOAA, the EPA (all of whom are definitively, officially in the alarmist camp according to their websites) are in conspiracy with faculty at dozens or hundreds of universities, what about the 197 nations that were engaged in negotiating the recent Paris Climate Accord, or the 84 signatories of the Kyoto Protocol?
Lastly, just out of curiosity, in what form do you tend to see the genetic fallacy applied for or against ACC? I'm not sure I've encountered it.
Generally, a saying that because group X funded the study, or that person X that has Y beliefs did the study, that it's automatically invalid (without even trying to actually examine the claims in the paper).
You can see examples of that in this very thread. A variant of adhom, basically.