the existence of climate change caused by humans is settled science. no amount of wall street journal editorializing or smears by conservative politicians is going to change that.
Burt Rutan a scientist? Edward David (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_E._David_Jr.), an engineer who spent 8 years as a research director for Exxon? J. Scott Armstrong (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Scott_Armstrong), an advertising and marketing professor?
It's a freaking joke. Compare the publication records, science activity, and career impact of the people on the other side. These tend to be people who have spent their lives seriously measuring and analyzing climate, not just dilettantes with a grudge. (E.g., http://science.jpl.nasa.gov/people/Miller/, who's the science PI of a satellite designed to measure CO2, and a contributor to the fourth IPCC report.)
Asbestos removal a leftist plot, telling a Nobel Prize winner in physics that atmospheric drag doesn't affect the speed an object falls, etc.
Nothing is settled science until you can prove it beyond reason of doubt - i.e. see it in action.
If the earth does warm dramatically in X years, then we can measure the temperature difference against our CO2 output and past warm periods like the Medieval Warm period. That is REAL science. Anything else is speculation or...wait for it...a HYPOTHESIS.
Keep in mind, even minorities can be right, even when it seems completely foolish or counter-intuitive. Remember when everyone thought the earth was flat, and that we lived in a geo-centric or helio-centric universe?
I think it's a false equivalence to claim that it isn't a conservative vs. liberal issue when denial is almost entirely confined to one side, and that side is massively biased.
Reasonable doubt
I agree that seeing it as a conservative versus liberal issue is unhelpful.
That would really overturn settled science. But to do so is going to require more than 16 people writing an op/ed saying that the results were correct and the effect was real. It's going to require more than articles in newsmagazines.
The scientists behind the original results have examined their work for mistakes, and rerun the experiment controlling for possible confounding issues. The apparent effect remained.
Now other labs are going to try to produce a similar result.
If you want to overturn "settled science", you need data to clearly back up your claim. It's not enough to have a contrary interpretation of existing data. You need more data to support your interpretation as the correct one.
Evidence to the contrary. Or, failing that, a lack of the traditional continual build-up of supporting evidence is often enough to cast a theory into doubt.
I feel like I should note: I know next to nothing about climate science, and this comment is meant neither in support or in denial of any related theory. I'm merely defending science as a whole. (Remediating the sad state of my knowledge about climate science is high on my todo list.)
Huh? Theories that are backed up by enough evidence are generally regarded as "settled". That of course doesn't mean they can't be "unsettled" if some truly remarkable data shows up, but it's still a useful heuristic to concentrate on things that are more uncertain.
More so, the subject at hand is the evolution of a chaotic system with literally thousands of different influencing variables. This is not something as simple as gravity, electromagnetism, or even evolution. And the science of climatology is still very much an open debate. If the evidence of AGW actually was overwhelming then it'd be easy enough to present it and move on, as happened with the ozone hole. Instead the evidence is rather more subtle and has very significant error bars. If you believe that AGW requires bold action to avoid catastrophe then shutting down debate is an enormous mistake, because all it does is leave people who are unconvinced even less convinced while it forestalls the advancement of climate science and potentially the strengthening of evidence in support of that theory.
Gravity saw a heavy modification within the last 20 years with the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe (dark energy forces).
The changes in our understanding of gravitation that have occurred in our generation do not make it advisable for you to walk off the edge of a building. That's what is meant by settled science.
I mean, clearly the models are wrong, so it wasn't that. They've utterly failed to predict the lack of temperature rise in the last decade or so. Come to think of it, besides the models, what makes anyone think it's real? Oh yeah, settled science. So... it's like phrenology, then?
[1] http://www.climateinstitute.org.au/index.php?option=com_cont...
Here's an example of a temperature chart that does show "the last 10 years":
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:2001/to:2011/norma...
(the "WoodForTrees Index" is a composite created from the mean of HADCRUT3VGL, GISTEMP, RSS and UAH, offset by their baseline differences.)
I guess we'll know in ten years. My money's on serious revisions to the model.
>We did not wish to mislead the public into thinking that scientific issues
>are decided by who has the longer list of scientists!
I mean, for or against, global warming, both sides are filled with blowhards.
It just makes it a frustrating endeavor to get at real data.
the editorial does not question that. it questions the need for drastic action to reduce carbon emissions.
The writer (Claude Allegre) is, in fact, a climate-change denier. He's not merely trying to foster more scientific investigation into climate change or slow the pace at which we adapt to it (although it looks like that's what he wants you to believe here). He doesn't believe that humanity is causing climate change at all (a view that flies in opposition to the long-settled science on this subject), and therefore he's trying to get you to believe that simply slowing down our response to climate change is perfectly OK. But this just isn't the case; it's a recipe for permanently hosing the environment.
At the end of the day, there's an Occam's razor test you can apply to this kind of thing. If this were real science, it'd be published in a peer-reviewed journal, not a conservative mouthpiece of big business like the Wall Street Journal.