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Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

This thread is relevant to my interests.

On the subject of the "diamond" planet, I'm actually surprised to see the lead author of the paper in question referring to it as a "diamond planet". I thought that was just a media label. I read the paper when it came out, and all that was indicated was that an extremely large (Jupiter-mass) extremely dense (much smaller than Jupiter) body was detected orbiting a pulsar. The density was consistent with something reasonably close to diamond, but I would have thought that there always has to be some other elements in there... and in any case I wasn't convinced that the vast majority of the interior would be cool enough to be crystalline rather than liquid carbon. So while I'm very confident that there's some extremely massive, extremely dense planet orbiting that star, I'm yet to be one hundred percent convinced that "diamond" is the correct label for it.

Which brings me neatly to the actual point of the article, on climate change. I'm somewhat out of my field here, but no more than the author is. The reason I'm skeptical about the hypothesis "burning fossil fuels is likely to cause significant and disastrous climate change in the future" is that it's all based on simulations which can't be tested against experiment. And I do simulations for a living, so I know enough about them to be very skeptical whenever confronted with simulations in the absence of experiment. Maybe it's true, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were, but I'm certainly not willing to talk about it as if it's as strongly supported as... well, the vast majority of other stuff that we mean when we talk about 'science'.

The strength of a scientific theory is (and I'm still working on figuring out exactly how to phrase this) determined by the question of "If this turned out to be false, how much experimental data would suddenly be very difficult to explain?" If evolution were false, then pretty much all of biology is suddenly very difficult to explain. If the hypothesis "big dense planet thing orbiting PSR J1719−1438" turns out to be false, then there's a bunch of measurements which are very hard to explain. On the other hand if the hypothesis "diamond planet orbiting PSR J1719−1438" is false then it's not at all difficult to explain. And if the hypothesis of significant anthropogenic climate change turns out to be false, then this makes very little difference to our ability to explain existing experimental data.

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For one thing, the article is not suggesting that the climate change hypothesis is based on some random simulations that someone came up with (it's based on an incredibly rich amount of observational data, see final point below). He's talking about a hypothetical discovery, and he uses very careful words to describe it:

"Let’s say we studied computer models of the influence of excessive greenhouse gases, verified them through observations, then had them peer-reviewed and published in Science." (my emphasis)

Secondly, I don't find your counter-argument to climate change very convincing:

- There is overwhelming evidence that the world is heating up dramatically and at an accelerating pace, whether or not you agree that the cause is man-made (cf. Gruber, http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/09/07/krugman-shape-of...). If it's due to some other cause, what is said cause? Why has no one suggested any credible alternative?

- If you are of the "it's not us, it's something else" camp, this website does a great job laying out the reasons why so many scientists (~95%) believe that climate change is human-caused: http://www.skepticalscience.com/its-not-us-basic.htm (already linked somewhere in this thread).

In science, a majority means very little. There have been many cases throughout history where one person was right and everyone else was wrong. The majority of people in China believe that eating shark fins prevents cancer - it does not mean they are right.

I implore everybody to at least take a look at the arguments from the other side. Mind you, these are all very smart people, not just yahoos:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the...

Please, please, take at least a little bit of time to read some of their quotes. I'm not asking you to agree with me, I am asking you to form your own opinion on the matter.

In science, a majority means very little. There have been many cases throughout history where one person was right and everyone else was wrong.

That is a plain old crap argument. Yes, there have been such cases, but they are far and away the exception rather than the rule. For every Einstein that was right when all of his peers were wrong, there are a thousand morons with websites that claim that Einstein was wrong, and they make plenty of noise and harass the hell out of scientists all over the place. The fact that Einstein's theories are now accepted is no reason to lend any more credibility to the "Einstein is wrong" theories, in fact, the ultimate acceptance of Einstein's theories is evidence that truth eventually wins out over fancy in science.

For the most part, if you want to know what's true in a scientific field, you do accept the consensus opinion. There are brief periods where the consensus is wrong, but if there's actually enough evidence to prove it, these periods end rather quickly and the truth wins out. Scientists are not random people in China, they have actually spent their lives studying their fields, and truly care about finding truth. The bulk of a scientist's training is about methods of separating truth from fiction, and I would not be so quick to assume that people brought up with that ideal are willing to disregard it because - what? - it doesn't match their politics?

I agree with you - it is often the exception rather than the rule, but that does not mean we can discount skeptics because they are a minority. In this case, there are enough skeptics, and enough sound logic behind them, that there is reason to be skeptical (again, go through all the quotes in the wikipedia entry I linked and see if you can dismiss all of them).

I would never propose that we should or should not believe in AGW. What I propose is that we should be skeptical to both sides until we have the hard, undeniable data. Again, I would emphasize there is a huge difference between a fact and a hypothesis. Many studies have already been proven wrong, temperatures have not risen as dramatically as expected.

In the long run though it makes little difference either way as I have stated. Regardless of AGW, we should pursue green technology because we are running out of non-renewable energy, and advancing energy research is perhaps the most important scientific field at this point in time.

One key difference between Einstein's theories and the matter of climate change. Einstein's work has stood the test of several decades of analysis, time that allowed the skeptics to be turned. The same can't be said of the argument around climate change yet. People shouldn't draw conclusions so easily.

The main difference is that relativity has been tested experimentally, over and over, to extremely high precision. Climate change models have been tested once-ish, to low precision, without necessarily filtering out the other effects.

I just want to re-emphasise, since this is an area in which people love to misinterpret, that nothing I say should be taken as an argument that anthropogenic climate change isn't happening. The preponderance of evidence, in my flawed estimation, indicates that it probably is. I'm merely here to argue against believing things with an excessive degree of confidence.

The mere fact that a majority of scientists think X rather than Y is a poor argument for why you should believe it too. You also need to know why they believe that and how strong their conviction is.

For instance, if the available evidence suggests that X is probably true (with, say, 90% confidence), then a poll taken of scientists will find that 99.9% of scientists will say "Yes, X is probably true". But of course there's still a 10% chance that X is false -- information well known to those scientists, but completely lost in the opinion poll.

So you admit that you're out of your field but then go on to opine about how the scientists that actually are in the field are doing something wrong, and denigrate the predictions they're making as "just simulations" without any experiments. According to you all those smart scientists working on climate change have never thought about the problem with computer models, have never run an experiment, have never thought about statistical confidence intervals for their predictions.

I think you keep bringing up the nitpicky point about diamond to make this guy look dumb. But just like you can call out this guy on the diamond thing climate scientists call each other out in peer reviewed articles when they make weak assertions, that's the scientific method. Among the scientists that actually know what they're talking about a consensus has formed and they are trying to ring the alarm bell. It is dumb and arrogant to ignore them.

I am a climate expert either, but I can easily identify a fallacy or bad experiment when I see one. I think hugh3 has written one of the most rational posts I have ever seen on HN. I think it is everybody else who is unclear on the scientific process. Being peer-reviewed DOES NOT constitute to the scientific process. Remember when every person and their peer believed that the earth was flat and it was the center of the universe? Guess what, it turns out popular assumptions are often wrong. Being peer-reviewed does very little when your peers are so eager to approve your work.

The scientific process is as follows:

1. Ask a Question 2. Do Background Research 3. Construct a Hypothesis 4. Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment 5. Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion <-- this is where people are messing up; insufficient data, jumping to conclusions, fallacies, etc. 6. Communicate Your Results

> I can easily identify a fallacy or bad experiment

Please give an example of a bad experiment or logical fallacy by a climate scientist.

Remember the hockey stick graph? The graph that the entire AGW community rallied around for years? Yeah, it was wrong:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11646-climate-myths-th...

I can give you more examples if you wish, but I think that alone speaks pretty strongly about how inconclusive/false some research is.

That's pretty funny. That article is about climate myths. The article is saying the opposite of what you think it says. The hockey stick graph has not been proven wrong.

Haha, that will teach me to throw in links late at night ;)

Here is a better link: http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/hockey.htm

That argument reduces to:

* The medieval warm period was warmed than today, which is false; thus * Solar activity might be the cause of large climate changes, which is doubtful, more so because the premise is wrong.

Not enough to explain ocean acidity, why climate change is global, why there's a hole in the Antarctic's atmosphere...

"the medieval warm period was warme[r] than today, which is false"

Why is that false?

There are many possible explanations for the latter anomalies - our CO2 output likely is part of influence, but hardly the only. Global temperatures, ocean acidity, and the ozone layer have all fluctuated dramatically over time, even long before humans existed. In fact, in the Archaean period and earlier, earth did not even have an ozone layer.

Not to mention the melting of the permafrost, glacial retreat and the fact that Arctic ice levels are (yet again) reaching historic lows:

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/12/arctic-ice-levels-hit-h...

Theories of anthropogenic global warming pre-dated and predicted all of these developments.

Funny, I think it depends on what propaganda you are swallowing ;)

According to many studies, polar ice is actually increasing.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/04/18/2059204/Antarctic-Ic... and http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13...

You must have me confused with someone who doesn't know the difference between the Arctic and Antarctic.

The raw data on Arctic ice thickness comes from the Canadian Ice Service, Norwegian Meteorological Service daily satellite images: Arctic Mosaic of the LANCE-MODIS System, University of Bremen archive of sea ice concentration maps, ECMWF weather forecasts and radar images of Greenland from the Danish Meteorological Institute. So satellite photos basically, and you are right that I don't consider them propaganda.

http://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/

I haven't looked at the data behind the articles you cite since they aren't available as best I can find, and even the summaries merely claim that Antarctica is at best a wash with gains in one metric in one region possibly compensating for significant losses elsewhere. Thanks for playing though.

Antarctica is also losing ice mass (http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/20100108_Is_Antarc...). Articles suggesting it is gaining ice use selective measurements of sea ice rather than ice mass as a whole.

While I've seen arguments about the robustness of the hockey stick graph under different data analysis assumptions regarding bristlecone pine core samples from California, I've also seen retorts that say that the hockey stick remains. I don't know what to think about this anymore.

But I do know that it can't be called an obvious "fallacy or bad experiment", so I don't know why you named it as an example. Even if it happens to be wrong, it's not an example of a bad experiment or scientific fallacy. It's an example of a screwup that you certainly could NOT have identified at a glance.

Just a historical note: common Western belief in a flat earth is a nineteenth-century myth popularized by Washington Irving and Antoine-Jean Letronne. Since Pythagoras, to my knowledge only Lactantius (c. 245–325) and Cosmas Indicopleustes (first half of the sixth century) publicly argued that the earth is flat. Lactantius was considered a heretic for his Manichaean worldview and Cosmas did not intend his model, which was sharply criticized by his contemporary John Philoponus, to be taken literally.

Remember when every person and their peer believed that the earth was flat and it was the center of the universe?

This is simply not true. It was a popular position at one stage, but it wasn't "everyone thought it so".

Also, your scientific process does not allow for fields such as taxonomy or anatomy - you don't construct a hypothesis nor test it in fields like this.

Science is about rigorous observation. Peer-review provides a strong part of that rigor.

You seem a bit unclear about the scientific process as it applies to climate change.

Firstly, here are the undisputable facts - facts that can be reproduced in a laboratory without relying on simulations.

a) Sunlight bouncing off the Earth's surface is red-shifted.

b) CO2 and other greenhouse gases absorb red light more than other forms of light, which they re-emit, often back towards the ground / lower atmosphere.

c) The amount of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are increasing, as directly measured

d) this increase correlates with calculations associated with how much CO2 we are emittting through the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.

Those are the facts. Looking at those facts, it seems pretty clear that the null hypothesis for climate change is that the temperature of the lower atmosphere should be increasing. We would expect the temperature to rise, unless there is some process that we don't know about that is affecting the numbers

When we put the hypothesis to the test - is the temperature increasing? - we see that it is indeed increasing, which confirms the model.

Now, about those simulations. Yes, they are not as reliable as the science I just when through above. We know that. But they all agree with the null hypothesis that the temperature will rise if we keep increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. If you want to throw that result into dispute, you need to show that there is some process going on that we didn't know about, and hence haven't been included in the models, or you need to show that the simulations themselves are actually wrong.

What you can't do, if you want to be scientific about, is just state that you are skeptical about the simulations, and therefore we shouldn't act/create policy based on those simulations. I mean, sure, you can hold to that, but you have to admit that you are just being irrationally skeptical, and not scientific at all if that's the position you wish to hold.

You seem a bit unclear about the scientific process as well. Take hugh3's example and throw out anthropogenic global warming. Do the facts still hold?

The earth had dramatic warm and cool periods long before humans, and will continue to despite us.

No one is questioning whether or not humans or CO2 have an impact - we all know that we do. The question is whether or not we have a SIGNIFICANT impact. That is, enough of an impact that we should actually give a damn, given we probably wont be using fossil fuels in 100 years anyway.

If the case for anthropogenic global warming is so strong, why are scientists falsifying data like in ClimateGate?

Much evidences suggests that we are headed into another "Little Ice Age" like in the 1700s. But few people talk about this for some reason.

"The earth had dramatic warm and cool periods long before humans, and will continue to despite us."

Ok, what you're trying to do here, in the context of my first post, is make a case for one of those 'unknown processes' that I talked about. Now, I'm all for that, I'm not closing any doors, but if you want me to accept that there is some other, natural, process going on, you're going to have to show some evidence for it. Show me that the sun's output has changed and is causing the rise in temperature, or that the real culprit is volcano emissions, or amoeba farts, or whatever.

"If the case for anthropogenic global warming is so strong, why are scientists falsifying data like in ClimateGate?"

There have been I don't know how many independant investigations (about 5 or so at last count) into "ClimateGate", and they have all cleared scientists of lying or falsifying data. So I throw your question back to you - if this is all a big put on by scientists, why can we never catch them lying/falsifying the data? I mean, we should be able to if this is a coverup, right?

"Much evidences suggests that we are headed into another "Little Ice Age" like in the 1700s. But few people talk about this for some reason." Well, the reason that we don't talk about it is because there isn't any evidence that we're heading back into a mini Ice Age. But again, apply the scientific process to this. Your hypothesis is that we are heading back into a mini Ice Age. Well, the last time that happened, we saw a drop in CO2 levels, which is what you would expect to see according to modern climate models. This time round, CO2 is rising and temperatures are rising. Bearing in mind the facts from my first post, I don't see how you can possibly expect that we are about to head into another mini Ice Age, unless you are once again proposing some mysterious cause that we haven't yet detected that is going to force the climate into a colder state. Once again, I'm willing to listen, but you're going to have to back your position up with some evidence if you want me to accept the hypothesis.

>why are scientists falsifying data like in ClimateGate?

You've repeated this accusation several times in this thread. Can you back this up? I've asked people many times, nobody ever produces anything. They just assume that it was proved, without ever actually checking their hypotheses.

Here's an example of what scientific misconduct looks like, from my field:

http://www.economist.com/node/21528593

The researchers screwed up through basic sloppiness, then refused to correct their errors after they were pointed out. Has there been anything this bad in the the leaked climate emails? BTW, as a scientist I know that "trick" has more than one meaning, particularly when it comes to problem solving, so if you think that the use of the word "trick" is rock-solid proof, please explain how deception was perpetrated rather than clever problem solving.

Really, ClimateGate is the least of my concerns as far as "bad science" goes - most of the bad science is not being hidden behind conspiracies, it is in our face.

To be honest - I do not know if the researchers really hid or falsified data, and I do not know what attempts were made (if any) to further cover this up. But I do know that it did come into public light, and that raises my suspicions a little bit. But regardless if they did hide anything or not, I am more concerned with the fact that scientists are so eager to prove that AGW has a major impact and seemingly hesitant to try and prove the opposite.

Smoke and mirrors, smoke and mirrors...

The hypothesis testing approach to statistical inference, which is what most of the scientific community uses, explicitly demands researchers try to prove that, say, AGW has no major impact, before reporting on their failure to do so.

The hypothesis of a major impact is suggested because negligible impact cannot be, in the face of data. The popular Neyman-Pearson test doesn't even account for failing to detect an effect - it concerns itself strictly with not seeing ghosts.

Demallien -

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/14/ice_age/

Here you go :)

I would emphasize that there is no more proof that we are headed into an Ice Age than there is that we are headed into a particularly warm period, I only mention the Ice Age because so few people talk about it. Weather is very difficult to model - we can barely model next month's weather accurately, let alone the next hundred years.

In particular, here is the major fallacy: Even if weather did sharply rise over a century, there is no telling what that might mean for the following century. In fact, if you look at most temperature spikes, they are usually followed by cool periods. It is like saying that because tomorrow is hot, and the next day hotter, that we must be headed into a really hot period. It simply does not work like this.

As for ClimateGate, I'm not really into conspiracies, but it would not surprise me if some scientists had their asses covered. Imagine the people who would look stupid for handing a Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore. Not that hard to pull strings on these so called "investigations" - everyone has a price.

We learned about the ice ages coming in cycles in school, 25 years ago. It is common knowledge - I think the climate researchers have probably heard about it, too. Honestly, I am so tired of hearing this oh so clever counterpoint.

I guess we should just ignore all counterpoints, because you are tired of hearing them. That's real science!

No, because they are invalidated on the grounds of being common knowledge.

I think your conspiracy should falter if it's details are being told in high school. What kind of conspiracy would that be?

Tichy - I do not think there is any conspiracy around ice ages - all that data is readily available. There is, apparently, willful ignorance though.

Do you have evidence that any climate researchers ignored the cycles of the ice ages?

Tichy (won't let me reply directly, think its nested too deep) - "Do you have evidence that any climate researchers ignored the cycles of the ice ages?"

Yes, actually. If you look at 99 percent of studies, they are based on temperatures from maybe 1500 (at the earliest) to present. In geological time, this is the blink of an eye.

Here is a relevant quote from Tim Patterson, paleoclimatologist and Professor of Geology at Carleton University in Canada:

"There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years. On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?"

I don't see any mentioning of ice ages in that quote.

If you want to argue that no meaningful science can be done with data from 1500, then of course the answer of the effect of human CO2 output has to wait for a couple of million years. The whole research is then impossible in your opinion. I don't know about that...

As for Patterson's claims, I am no climatologist, so I can't comment. I don't think CO2 is generally thought to be the only thing affecting temperatures. Ok, off the top of my head: it is known that ice ages affect temperatures. That must probably be independent of CO2 (ice ages are not driven by CO2 changes), otherwise Patterson's remark would make no sense. So there is clearly at least one other known factor (the one that brings about ice ages), which Patterson conveniently forgets to mention. What do you say?

Sorry, but did you just argue that there is a slow cooling effect that cannot be seen, but that explains or will soon negate the rapid warming effect that has been detected?

Ice ages appear in cycles, that much is known. Sorry it was 25 years ago that I learned about it, so I forgot about the causes. However, the cycles are rather slow, so it seems possible that warming catches up with us faster than the next ice age. IANACS, though

That article doesn't say what you seem to think it says. Or at least, the Register, in their usual slip-shod journalistic style, have been very fast and loose about the sources of different pieces of information in the article. NASA notes that their measurements indicate that the Sun is going into a low-activity period. They also note that the last time we saw this, it correlated to the Little Ice Age. They do not make any claim about a causal link between the two, simply noting that it something that is perhaps worth investigating. The Register then go on to wildly speculate that this could mean that we are heading into a Little Ice Age. I hope you don't mind if I don't take the opinion of a journalist at The Register as a serious scientific exposition.

There are major problems with this hypothesis. Firstly, it doesn't fit with our reductionist understanding of how the climate interacts with the Sun. For example, this period of 'low activity' corresponds to a drop of just 0.1% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation) of the Sun's output - a drop that is too small to produce the Little Ice Age all by itself.

Secondly, even if the Sun's output of energy drops, there is the question of whether it's lower output can offset the calculated rise in temperature due to the extra CO2 in the atmosphere. The answer there is a resounding 'no', based on our current understanding of how greenhouse gases work. So once again, you're trying to argue for an unknown deus ex machina to save the hypothesis.

If you haven't noticed, each objection to climate change finishes in that same way - they all rely on some unknown effect changing the results that simulations are currently showing. Not surprisingly, most scientists prefer to wait for some substantial evidence that such an effect exists before throwing out the explanation resulting from all effects known as of today.

Also, if you really want to rely on the Sun's output to save us from global warming, I have to note in passing that a) we can't control the Sun, and b) we can't even predict the Sun very well (no one anticipated the latest minimum, so we have no idea when it's going to change).

You can poke at anomolies all you like, but unless you can upset the basic reductionist science that I outlined in my original post, you aren't doing science, you're doing politics.

As science is done in big teams I'd say it would take a lot to cover someones ass. You usually have a professor, some scientists and a heckload of students of all levels, all interested in finding out the truth (more or less I guess).

I'm in climate research (as a Bachelor candidate, granted) and I wouldn't let anything like that slip, and I know I'm not the only one.

Like I have pointed out several times - there is no (known) truth. There are only hypotheses. You can easily cover up bad data, but you can't easily prove that someone covered up that data.

You say it's easy. I don't think so, for several reasons:

- If you collect raw data, everyone in the group knows. You can claim instrument failure, of course, but then you'd have everyone around trying to help.

- From the raw data alone it's hard to say what to dismiss. So you'd have to do the long-term analysis first and then decide what to ditch - harder then because your data will be on backup, and you will probably have talked about things with people - because it's a group.

- You're most probably not the only person using this data. As I said, there are students doing some work for you, other scientists in your group using your data.. and everyone would be happy to find something new.

- Additionally, I cannot think of a single professor who wouldn't love to find that global warming is not true.. but I could have misjudged here, of course.

demallien has already pointed out what we know and what we think, so I won't go into this.

Demaillien:

I completely agree with you on this:

"If you haven't noticed, each objection to climate change finishes in that same way - they all rely on some unknown effect changing the results that simulations are currently showing. Not unsurprisingly, most scientists prefer to wait for some substantial evidence that such an effect exists before throwing out the explanation resulting from all effects known as of today."

We can create all sorts of models but the harsh truth is that they are all very rough estimates. We know that solar fluxations cause temperature change, we know that CO2 does, etc. The problem lies with the measurements. We cannot accurately measure our future CO2 levels, we don't know exactly how much CO2 is getting transformed by trees and at what rate, and we do not know how much CO2 is coming from under-sea vents and how much methane from cow farts. In fact, our models have already been proven wrong many times over, inside and outside of climate research. In fact, 60 percent of all scientific studies done have been wrong. We have a tendency (as humans) to make invalid assumptions and jump to conclusions about data without accounting for all of the dependent and independent variables. There are a ton of variables, and no accurate way to measure all of them yet.

Arguing for or against climate change is like trying to tell a religious person that God does not exist. You cannot prove or disprove it, so it is kind of fruitless either way.

At the end of the day, there is one take-away: differentiating facts from hypothesis. We have a lot of hypotheses, but very few facts.

In fact, 60 percent of all scientific studies done have been wrong.

84% of all statistics are pulled from thin air.

This is why we have statistical inference

"why are scientists falsifying data like in ClimateGate?"

Um, they didn't. There wasn't really a ClimateGate, either, only some people wanted to fabricate one.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017393/...

The scientists admitted to these emails.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7...

Everybody seems to love dismissing ClimateGate, rather than at least becoming a little suspicious.

As far as I remember, there was an official investigation into this, which found no misconduct. The quotes are out of context and rather ridiculous ("I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.") - uh oh, they used a "trick"!!! They must be cheaters. The trick could actually just be some clever idea, which is what scientists tend to come up with to make progress, but people hear what they want to hear.

Becoming a little suspicious is exactly what the skeptics want you to become, hence the attempts to blow those emails out of proportion.

It might also be worth noting that attacking the science based on those emails is not actually scientific criticism, it is merely ad hominem. If you wanted, you could perhaps draw some conclusions from the skeptics resorting to such attacks, rather than science. But lets not go there...

Edit: for completeness sake, here is a random result from Google about the investigation: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/24/climategate-investi...

There was an official investigation into the $2.3 trillion that Pentagon could not account for 10 years ago. They found nothing, conveniently. There are billions of dollars riding on green energy, government grants, and reputations on the line. I don't think it would be hard to do a "similar" investigation to the one done on the Pentagon.

Well I think the emails are public in their entirety, which is a distinction to the oval office accounting books? So everybody can do an investigation. Where are the results from skeptics (other than out of context quotes)? I am sure they invested in analyzing those emails?

In any case, you chose who you trust. Of course the impression that you can not trust anybody in the climate discussion is also beneficial to some parties (it is called FUD).

What do you think an average climate scientists earns, btw? I mean, what would be their incentive for faking it all?

I do not think that everybody is faking it - at most, there were a handful of scientists who covered up some bad data (if that even happened). Most scientists are benevolent - they are proposing hypotheses they honestly believe in. The problem is that they get attached to the consensus because it is the easiest thing to believe, and do not address all of the factors that could be wrong with their hypothesis. Being skeptical against AGW is much harder - I should know. For the first 25 years of my life, I was a die-hard AGW proponent.

What does AGW stand for - is it not the belief that no global warming is happening?

Anyway, this is all just guesswork (what scientists are doing, I mean). More interesting are your motivations for believing certain things. Maybe you need the self-image of being a skeptic?

You suffer from selection bias. You'll believe any source, no matter how tenuous, when it detracts, but refuse to believe one that supports, citing some kind of nebulous conspiracy. You're behaving in a profoundly unscientific manner.

If only those four factors would affect climate, you'd have a point. Alas, weather is extremely complex system, and it is pretty difficult to say for sure what is correlation, what is causation. And I am pretty sure, that by tweaking some variables in your models you can get any outcome you want.

I don't think you have understood my point at all. I am not claiming that this is a demonstration of human-caused global warming. I'm explaining why scientists now consider human-caused global warming to be the null hypothesis. Which is to say that unless some currently unknown factor comes into play, they expect the planet to continue to warm as we release more and more CO2 into the atmosphere.

Why is that important? Well, it basically means that if you want to claim that something other than substantial global warming is going to occur, then the onus is on you to demonstrate that there is some other process in play that the current model has failed to take into account.

So sure, there may be other other major factors that affect climate. I have no problem with that possibility. But those factors are a bit like those old maps with "Here Be Dragons" marked when the map-maker didn't know what was really there. As we explored more and made better maps, those blank areas disappeared until there were none left (and we never did find any dragons!)

Maybe this time we will find dragons, and there really is some other factor that balances out our increased CO2 emissions. But for the time being, no-one has discovered any such factor. Is it really reasonable to base public policy on the bet that this time, we really will find dragons?

But you have completely hand waved the argument and its consequences. You have made an argument that CO2 means that it is likely to be warmer.

So? What's the problem? I like the summer.

Obviously the problem is not that it will be slightly warmer. The problem is that ice caps will melt, the weather will change, sea levels will rise, farm land may be harder to come by, species may die, etc etc etc. All of that could end up being very bad. If it is that bad then it is worth preventing.

But how do you go from 'CO2 traps heat' to 'We're screwed!'. That's the part people disagree with. All of these effects are way harder to show in an experiment than simply that CO2 absorbs heat. How do you do a full-scale experiment with cloud formation or the increased hurricanes we're supposedly going to see? You simply can't do an experiment.

This is not to say the models are wrong, just that saying CO2 can be shown to trap heat is not the answer people are looking for. That is well understood. The 2nd and 3rd order effects are what really get called into question.

Ok, firstly: "But how do you go from 'CO2 traps heat' to 'We're screwed!'"

Honestly, I don't know, that's why I didn't do that!

That said, with our current understanding, not just that CO2 traps heat, but how much heat a certain concentration of CO2 traps, we are able to anticipate a certain rise in temperature. Yes, there is maybe some unknown process that will interrupt this rise in temperature, but for the time being we know of no mechanism that will do so. Do you want to bet the planet on the idea that there is an unknown process, for which we have no evidence, that is going to stop the planet from warming up dramatically, as our models predict it will in the absence of such an unknown factor?

If I were to say to you "Hey, our current projections show that if we continue fishing Blue Fin Tuna at the current rate, they will go extinct in 15 years", do you consider it a reasonable response to say "Tuna population change is a complicated phenomenum. Maybe there's something that we've missed which means that the tuna population will bounce back, regardless of our fishing levels. Therefore, let's keep on fishing as we always have."? Because that's pretty much what you seem to be arguing for with respect to climate change.

That's not what I'm arguing at all.

These models show that temperatures are going to rise.

Your tuna model shows that tuna populations will fall after overfishing.

At the end of my climate model, I have a world with a higher average temperature. At the end of your tuna model, we have a world with no tuna. I fully agree with both of those.

But the consequences are a lot less clear. Obviously a world with no tuna is one where I don't like the menu at a sushi restaurent as much. I want to avoid that, I see a negative consequence there directly related to the model, no other models required.

What is the negative consequence of higher average temperatures? There are models showing things like more storms, higher sea levels, drought, etc etc etc. Those are definitely things we want to avoid. But those secondary models are a hell of a lot less concrete than the temperature models. We might have more drought in some places but more crop yield in others. If we have more storms obviously there is more cloud formation - won't that be a negative feedback on temperature? Those things are a lot harder to show and thats what I don't think has been sufficiently proven.

We aren't really concerned with the change in temperature. We are concerned with the consequences of the change in temperature on the world's weather. That is a significant difference.

Thank you for being rational rather then being distorted to one view or the other.

I very much agree with your skepticism when it comes to believing the results of large scale simulations of complex systems. I personally think many people incorrectly transfer the certainty that we have of the underlying phenomena to the results of these complex simulations. No rational person disputes the direct effects that CO2 has on the absorption and re-emission of IR but once this is included into hugely complex simulations, I believe a very large degree of skepticism is warranted.

However for almost exactly the same reasons I maintain some skepticism over the simulation results, I am personally very strongly in favor of minimizing man's impact on the environment. Precisely because it is a hugely complex system and I don't believe we can predict the effects of any changes we make to the environment.

Depressingly, it seems that the chances of persuading America to really embrace a serious reduction in its CO2 emissions (especially if the Republicans get any more power) is extremely small. And even if America were on-board getting world-wide consensus would still be difficult in the extreme.

It may very well be that the only option we have is deal with consequences of climate change as they arise. This will likely be more expensive than if we were investing in reducing our impact now but the way politics works the world over means that people are very reluctant to take short-term pain for long-term gain. And it should be remembered that even if the climate changes even faster than has been predicted, it will still be a gradual process, and countries will adapt to it the best way they can as and when it is required. By this I merely mean to dispel the idea that some people seem to have of utter catastrophe if action is not taken.

At its core, the CO2 argument is an energy balance argument and many of the details are unnecessary. To determine long-term, global temperature rise, you just need to know the energy in and energy out, which can be done in principle without knowing anything about climate.

The problem is that some things that affect the radiation balance, chiefly changes in water vapor and clouds, are products of the local conditions, and it is to estimate the effects of those that you need simulations.

The problem is that people seem to transfer their skepticism of the global climate simulations to the basic energy balance argument. Humans ARE affecting the climate, it's just that we may be affecting it in such a way that the net warming is hard to estimate because there are fairly large forcing terms that cancel.

The reason I'm skeptical about the hypothesis "burning fossil fuels is likely to cause significant and disastrous climate change in the future" is that it's all based on simulations which can't be tested against experiment.

There are also empirical observations - such as the facts that burning fossil fuels release measurable amounts of CO2, that CO2 behaves as a greenhouse gas, that CO2 content of the atmosphere observed over many years has been rising steadily, and that this correlates with the historical record of fuel consumption.

Frankly I'm sick to the back teeth of 'let me explain what skepticism means' arguments. I've been interested in climate change for something like 15 years now, although I am not an activist of any kind. And all I ever hear from the 'skeptic' lobby is that they 'need more data,' but never any willingness to state what sort of confidence intervals they would find acceptable or why their models are any more reliable, or even any predictions of their own. About the climate that is. For some reason, almost all skeptics feel qualified to declare that climate mitigation efforts of any kind will be a huge economic disaster without presenting even the most rudimentary economic argument for why this should be so.

This is how we end up with would-be presidential candidates who intone platitudes very similar to yours about falsifiability and standards of proof in between holding prayer meetings asking god to send more rain and revive the national spirit.

And if the hypothesis of significant anthropogenic climate change turns out to be false, then this makes very little difference to our ability to explain existing experimental data.

Fine, with so many alternatives it should be no trouble to make some clear and testable predictions that will blow the anthropogenic theory out of the water and settle the debate. We have plenty of satellites and observation platforms measuring solar output, cosmic rays and so on.

>The reason I'm skeptical about the hypothesis "burning fossil fuels is likely to cause significant and disastrous climate change in the future" is that it's all based on simulations which can't be tested against experiment

I'm skeptical that this is your true reason. Many, if not most, fields of science are built in areas where it's hard to run a true physical simulation of the model. For example, take machine learning, where nearly every method is developed without novel collection of new data, but is run entirely on data that has previously been collected and been analyzed over and over again.

If you run simulations, you should already know ways to test them without collecting new raw data, particularly if you have a large corpus of data from the real system.

What's your true reason? Is it that you just think that humans can't impact the climate?

I'm skeptical that this is your true reason.

What's your true reason? Is it that you just think that humans can't impact the climate?

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but please don't accuse me of lying about what I actually think.

I don't think you're lying, but I do think that there's a different reason you are skeptical that is deeper and probably harder to express.

"You can't rerun the climate" is a common enough sentiment, but when I hear that from technical people and probe them the same way, most will admit that it's not a logical reason to distrust scientific reasoning, and will come up with some other reason.

Never tried it online though, so maybe I come across like too much of a jerk without vocal tones.

Skepticism is a good thing. Where would we be without it? The earth would still be flat. Why does he have to have some alternative motive for being skeptical? Skepticism is the basis of real science - trying to prove a hypothesis wrong to make sure that it is bullet proof. If it cannot be proven one way or the other, then it is not a fact, it is just a hypothesis.

The danger is when skepticism becomes a positive force that has specific ideas it holds dear, like Man-made Climate Change being a myth or the fact that the world is entirely material. Then it ceases to be skepticism and becomes just another ideology trying to protect itself against the others.

> What's your true reason?

It's always good to throw out a nasty insinuation.

> Is it that you just think that humans can't impact the climate?

How about fact that none of the proposed "solutions" actually address the supposed problem, but instead just give control over to a bunch of folks who were demanding that kind of control long before anyone thought of AGW?

Then there's the rent-seeking.

Then there's the fact that almost none of these people act like it's a serious problem. They want me to pay, but their only change is to line up to collect a check.

You see, this is often the true reason that someone is "skeptical." It's not a problem with the science itself, but potential implications if one were to accept the science.

Edit: just to be clear, I'm not saying that this is hugh3's reason, I don't know what that is. I just know that his stated reason is pretty plainly false by the usual standards of engineers and scientists, it's a common enough reason, and when I discuss this with engineers the true underlying reason for skepticism are precisely the sentiments that anamax presented.

> It's not a problem with the science itself, but potential implications if one were to accept the science.

Actually, it's skepticism about "the science" as well. I'm pointing out that AGW advocates don't care about the science, that they're just looking for an excuse to do what they want to do.

Every time I've pushed, I've found holes, overreaching, etc, in the science. AGW advocates don't care - they just jump to another "data point".

When someone says "X proves Y", you then prove not X and their position doesn't change, it's pretty safe to assume that they're shilling for Y and that reasons don't matter.

"I'm pointing out that AGW advocates don't care about the science, that they're just looking for an excuse to do what they want to do"

Which of course is largely the case with the AGW detractors, too.

> Which of course is largely the case with the AGW detractors, too.

Maybe, but AGW detractors and advocates are not mirror images even though both groups put on their pants one leg at a time.

For example, the AGW detractors don't want to restrict my choices, impose taxes on me, etc. The AGW detractors are largely weath creators while the AGW advocates are largely rent-seekers. The AGW detractors have never said that AGW advocates should be jailed for taking their position. And so on.

Well there's an unbiased view...

In my opinion, depriving you of the freedom to live in a non-ruined environment is a much more fundamental lack of freedom than the choices you are talking about being restricted. And the wealth "creators" you talk about seem a lot more like "cost externalizers" than "wealth creators" to me.

The AGW advocates also haven't called AGW detractors "jihadists" for taking their position. And so on.

There are ideologues who don't know the science on both sides. But attempting to include the scientists who have reached a conclusion based on scientific results among them helps no one. Taking a position based on actual data is not an ideological statement, regardless if whether there are other people for whom it is.

> In my opinion, depriving you of the freedom to live in a non-ruined environment is a much more fundamental lack of freedom than the choices you are talking about being restricted.

You're assuming that the restrictions will make a difference between ruined and non-ruined. I disagree.

I have good company. Even the AGW advocates pushing the restrictions admit that the proposed restrictions won't have that effect.

Even if you believe in AGW, why do you support restrictions that do nothing to address it? More to the point, shouldn't you actually oppose such restrictions because they cost money that might be used to fight AGW?

Yes, I'm serious. Look at what the folks pushing the restrictions have predicted about the effects of said restrictions. They've predicted no benefit.[1] If you're assuming that those predictions are wrong, why?

> But attempting to include the scientists who have reached a conclusion based on scientific results among them helps no one.

Which scientists are you referring to?

Note that most of the "scientists" who have weighed in actually haven't looked at data.

[1] Yes, those advocates have also predicted that AGW will have huge costs. My point is that the proposed restrictions won't reduce those costs.

I've done research in speech recognition, a branch of machine learning, and analyzing the same data over and over again is the classic blunder. It is called "testing on the training data" and it over-estimates accuracy to an uncontrollable degree.

People do try to avoid this by splitting their corpus into two, training on one half and testing on the other half, which works the first few times. Pretty soon though you have tuned your methods to get good results on the second half of the corpus and it is used up as a source of new data for an independent assessment of accuracy. There is a technique called "jack knifing" that sometimes helps a little.

If the Vapnik–Chervonenkis dimension of your model is low enough then success on the training data does guarantee success on fresh test data. This never works in practice. Getting decent results always requires lots of tunable parameters and your VC dimension ends up way too high. Machine learning only works, to the extent that it works at all, because many of your parameters only affect part of your model. You have an effective VC dimension much lower than the parameter count indicates, so you do get some generalisation, but if you want to know you have to gather fresh test data.

If you are doing research in machine learning you have to have a rolling program of data collection so that you can do genuine forecast testing. Hindcasting, that is to say "testing on the training data" is only really useful for finding bugs in your software. You should always be able to get good hindcast accuracy by dialing up the model dimension. If you cannot, you will never get good forecast accuracy. If you can get good hindcast accuracy that basically means that your software has passed one kind of bug test. You don't know your forecast accuracy until you gather fresh data.

There is a human side to this. Doing research in machine learning is a ordeal of perpetual disappointment. Your research runs ahead of data collection. So you measure your hindcast accuracy. It is great. You have broken through. Then fresh data comes and you measure your forecast accuracy. Terrible disappointment. Science is hard!

It's probably wrong to call climate scientists "scientists", just like it's wrong to call rocket scientists "scientists". They are probably more like engineers, but "engineer" is almost a protected title (except in software).

No, they don't have a crystal ball. But just as nuclear weapons required a little forethought and co-ordination between nations, so does the ability to inflict colateral damage on the biosphere in a way that has never been done before.

Unlike the last 5000 or so years of human history, we are making new and significant discoveries every year, and are able to roll them out across the whole world. The cost is we need to be a little cautious about them.

Civilizations have collapsed before. New technology might be a factor - the ability to suddenly exploit a new resource can cause that a massive expansion, then a crash as the new resource becomes depleted. And more complex civilizations can be less able to survive a crash, as specialists are forced to become generalists in order to survive - doctors driving taxis or trapping gophers are much less productive.

Sometimes scientists get worried for no good reason (Y2K?), and sometimes they have a good cause (radium), but there's no way to be sure. Not everyone should listen to all the doom and gloom (from reputable sources), but world leaders certainly should. And sadly, they only seem to listen when wide-eyed protestors shout slogans outside their offices. It's kind of depressing.

<i>If evolution were false, then pretty much all of biology is suddenly very difficult to explain.</i>

There are plenty of areas of biology that would survive evolution being 'cancelled'. Biology encompasses a lot more than heredity. Heredity is a very important section of biology, but you're moving the goalposts here - claiming biology is 'pretty much' totally dependent on evolution when it's not.

I don't see how the man-mad warming camp can make-such-matter of fact assertions such as in http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/09/07/krugman-shape-of... when the evidence does not seem to be conclusive. It's even more alarming that the other side is belittled.

Surely there must be something more compelling than "An Inconvenient Truth" on the matter?

http://www.skepticalscience.com/its-not-us-basic.htm is what you are after.

See also http://www.skepticalscience.com/its-not-us-intermediate.htm and http://www.skepticalscience.com/its-not-us-advanced.htm depending on the level of discussion you like.

How do human CO2 emissions compare to natural CO2 emissions? http://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natur... is also related

The whole site is rather good. You can pull up your objection and erad the discussion: http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php

John Cook is my hero I've referenced his site in so many arguments with people on friend's facebook statuses[1].

[1] This is a hobby of mine, many friends of friends seem to work in the coal mining industry and therefore need the cognitive dissonance of climate change denial (not skepticism you will note, denial) in order to operate.

That's a fairly good site, actually.

However, when the position taken up by one side is "There is no room for skepticism about what my model predicts will happen in the future!" and the position taken up by the other side is "There is some room for skepticism about what that model says will happen in the future" then the no-skepticism side has already lost.

If only these folks would phrase it as a balance-of-probabilities issue rather than an absolute-certainty issue then they'd have me on their side. But as it is, I'm forced to side with the skeptical side.

Nothing could be worse for science than to try to make "skepticism" a dirty word.

>"There is no room for skepticism about what my model predicts will happen in the future!"

Can you show me an instance of someone espousing this position?

Would you like it in those exact words, or would you settle for something functionally equivalent?

If you want those exact words then it'll probably take me a while to dig up. If you want something functionally equivalent go watch Al Gore's movie.

al gore, for one, has said climate change skeptics are comparable to racists, and are peddling bullshit.

http://www.mediaite.com/online/al-gore-compares-climate-chan...

i grew up in the conservative midwest and was exposed to near lethal doses of rush limbaugh as a child. it took me FOREVER to consider that maybe global warming was real, becuase i was only hearing about it from people who were clearly motivated more by political concerns than anything else, and who insulted me for daring to disagree.

i have a BS in physics, and although this in no way makes me qualified to assert climatologists are wrong, it does give me more insight into the situation than someone with no such background. i grew tired of trying to explain concepts like the physical mechanisms of heat transfer, emission / absorption spectra (which are ostensibly at the root of anthropogenic warming), the statistical mechanics definition of temperature, the idea that the atmosphere has layers, &c &c, to people who had no idea what i was talking about, and clearly didn't care. they always gave me the "pascal's wager" argument: that it didn't matter of the science was wrong, because on the chance it was right, we're fucked.

i'm still not sure how i feel about global warming, but i do know this: if you want to convince people that they are wrong about something, telling them they are racist morons probably isn't going to do the trick.

I asked a question about scientists who say their models can't be questioned. Is this related in some way?

In the interest of burning karma, let's change the subject to the interesting topic of near lethal doses of politics (as in potential loss of life). My colleagues get firebombed in their homes from morons on the leftist side of the political spectrum. In a similar manner to the filth that you linked, they are riled up by demagogues that lie and misrepresent in any way to smear their target. These followers are not bright, but they want to feel as if they are enlightened and as if the world is crazy. They just want to belong. They want to believe fervently in something. Believe that they're fighting the good fight. You can tell they're getting riled up when there's an increase in graffiti that says things like "Humans Suck" at the bus stops, or if there are fliers in scruffy coffee houses listing biology professors' home addresses. Fortunately these losers are as terrible at firebombing as they are at reaching a larger audience. In Southern California they don't even make the news due at the behest of the University. In Northern California, there's a local news article, the scientists hold a 15 minute vigil at 5:30pm and share encouraging words, then head back to their labs to squeeze in one more DNA purification or to feed the cell cultures, and the terrorism has had zero lasting effect, other than some terrified kids that crawled out the rope ladder in their room because the front door was on fire, and some FBI guys that get to sit in cars on the street for the next couple months. These aren't the "enviros" that cut power lines, harass gold miners, or tree sit, but they are friends with them. Perhaps if they had grown up in the conservative west and weren't incompetent, their terrorism would cause permanent damage to life.

It doesn't matter which side of the political spectrum they come from, those who deliberately misrepresent the truth and pander to the most base and violent instincts, those who are driven by ideology rather than observation and reason, are poisoning the intellectual well. They can't be ignored, as they are more dangerous when they can play their dirty tricks in the dark, but they can't be encouraged. Very frustrating. What's the solution? I have absolutely no idea.

No person in their right mind would read the quote in the linked article and think that Al Gore called climate skeptics racists. A person in their right mind would think that Al Gore was using the largest cultural shift in recent history to illustrate his prediction of another cultural shift, in Al Gore's typically goofy and easily mocked fashion. But frame the quote in the way you did, and a person is already too riled up to read it in their right mind. And maybe they don't want to be in their right mind, maybe they want to feel justified in the contempt for the political Other. It's a perfectly human reaction to circle the wagons when under attack. And thus is perfectly rational human instinct subverted to the detriment of all.

But back to my question, is there any climate scientists that has said that there's no need for scientific questioning of their models? Because the impression I'm getting is climate science is fraudulent because of Al Gore. Just like when he invented the Internet, that Al Gore is getting too big for his britches. And he doesn't have Vint Cerf to bail him out this time.

Edit: sorry if this came across as rude, I didn't mean to. I didn't understand your point, and then just started riffing on the great idea of a lethal dose of Rush Limbaugh.

Skepticism is good, and there are no absolute-certainties, but here I think skepticism is the wrong word.

It is remarkably similar to the evolution "debate". The theory of evolution fits all the evidence seen and makes predictions that can be tested successfully.

I accept the theory of evolution and I'm not sceptical about it. However, if a new theory came along that explained things even better I'd be happy to accept that change. The fact I'm prepared to change doesn't make me sceptical.

It's the same with climate change. If a new theory came along that explained the climate behaviour better than what we have now then I'll accept that.

There is a point where balance-of-probabilities becomes so strongly weighed one way that you end up in a discussion more about the nature of "a fact".

Realistically your scepticism is probably better reserved for things like predictions of the details of what climate change will mean. There isn't consensus about that yet (beyond "not good"), and the range of predictions is quite striking.

But the position of the other side here is not that there is room for skepticism, it's that industry should not be disrupted for any reason, and that any amount of money necessary should be thrown at funding research that is guaranteed to cast doubt on the idea of global warming. Maybe that's not your position, but it's sure as hell the position of the sources of most of the money that's spent doing "skeptical climate research" and lobbying against emissions reductions (which, btw, are in all likelihood an extremely good idea even if AGW is not true, based on all the arguments that environmentalists used to focus on before debate was shifted exclusively to AGW, which IMO is rather the red herring here...).

I'd have a lot more sympathy for these guys if they weren't largely allied (and I'm using "allied" rather loosely, half the time it's actually the same groups) with the fucktards that spend millions every year funding "research" aimed at convincing the public that evolution is a myth. When you throw in with morons, you lose credibility, and the anti-AGW crowd correlates too damn close for comfort with the anti-evolution crowd, so I just don't care what they have to say, or what their researchers have done.

And I'll admit: that's despite the fact that I actually have some real scientific concerns about the degree to which AGW has been proven, and I'm not 100% convinced (though I'm absolutely convinced that just about any of the measures that people suggest to fight global warming are more than justified on other grounds). If it wasn't for the bad rep of the primary forces behind the anti-AGW PR campaigns, I'd probably be far more skeptical here, but the fact is, I've seen these guys play really dirty in a field that I know very well (evolution), and that leaves a terrible taste. They're so seriously wrong on evolution, and I see exactly the same psychological tactics used against AGW (how often have you heard complaints about little more than the scientific establishment "suppressing the truth" re: global warming?), so I take it as a pretty strong Bayesian signal that unless I know a lot about the field, I'm probably best off betting against these dudes by default.

FTFA: Climate change may or may not be occurring. But there is no dispute that 98 percent of climate scientists believe that it is happening and is man-made.

The problem is in the phrasing of the question. Questions like "are global average temperatures increasing on a decade-to-decade timescale?" and "is climate change at least partly due to human activity?" are very different questions to "is the observed change in climate due primarily to anthropogenic factors?" and "to what extent is this likely to be a problem in the future" and "is it time to agree to [random policy proposal X that might help to cut CO_2 emissions slightly]?" -- but all these questions are treated as if they're the same question.

I'm so glad I work in an area of science where politics rarely intrudes.

are global average temperatures increasing on a decade-to-decade timescale?" and "is climate change at least partly due to human activity?

Yes. See page 3 of http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/2009/bams-s...

"is climate change at least partly due to human activity?" "is the observed change in climate due primarily to anthropogenic factors?"

These might be different questions but the answer is the same. Yes. See http://www.skepticalscience.com/its-not-us-advanced.htm, in particular these quotes:

The late-twentieth-century warming can only be reproduced in the model with anthropogenic forcing (mainly GHGs), while the early twentieth-century warming is mainly caused by natural forcing in the model (mainly solar).

Our results show significant anthropogenic warming trends in all the continental regions analyzed.

I don't believe that there is consensus around how bad a problem this will be in the future (beyond "bad").

Do you mind saying why you don't find thousands of scientific articles published in a wide variety of journals compelling?

I lean towards the man-made position but am disappointed in how the evidence is presented and the knee-jerk dismissal of any and all contrary information. Also, I am not aware of 1000s of (independent) articles.

Have you investigated the literature in such a way that you would expect to be aware of "thousands of articles" if they were really there?

Yes. I would be very surprised if there were thousands of original articles.

The original comment merely referred to "thousands of scientific articles". You've now said you'd be surprised if there were thousands of "independent" articles, or if there were thousands of "original" articles, without indicating what you mean by "independent" and "original" or why only thousands of "independent" or "original" articles are the right thing to look for.

If you're implying that the great majority of published climate science research is literally plagiarized, then that's an extraordinary claim and I'd like to see your extraordinary evidence.

But I'm guessing you mean something else -- e.g., that most papers (in that or any other field) aren't startlingly creative, or that most papers make some use of other earlier research rather than doing anything from scratch. In that case you owe us an explanation of why it's a problem.

Do you know of thousands of "independent", "original" articles supporting general relativity or the Standard Model or particle physics or evolution or, well, anything?

(I think "dependent", "unoriginal" work is vital, both for scientific progress and for providing evidence. Consider: One paper introduces a brilliant new idea and provides some experimental support for it. Ten other papers explore its theoretical consequence. Ten more report on experiments done using the ideas in the original paper and those ten successors, getting results consistent with the theory. If the research in those papers is sensibly chosen and competently done, we now have much more evidence for the original brilliant idea than after the first paper, even though that's the only "original" one.)

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