The Climate Change Alternative We Ignore (To Our Peril) | Hacker News Reader

The Climate Change Alternative We Ignore (To Our Peril)

theethicalskeptic.com

1 pointbrutusborn10 comments

Climate denier denies climate.

He doesn’t deny anthropogenic warming, he denies that it is the only significant forcing.

No one predicted the current record temperatures, it fits with his model but not the IPCC estimates.

If he really has findings to share, he should take them to the IPCC. Writing 20+ pages (10 of which are just rhetoric or repeditie) about a pet subject on the internet is pointless by 99% of us don't have the knowledge to be sure or the power to do anything if we are sure. Add to that that the vast majority of these articles are just denialism and that it takes asymmetrically more time and energy to disprove BS that to create it and you understand people's refusal to engage.

Would you read my 50 page essay about a perpetual motion machine, that I, a no one else happened to have invented? No, and rightly not.

I did read about half and there are 2 key issues with this:

1. He commits the same mistakes he points out in others. He criticises Climate Change research because researchers don't stick to their own area of expertise. Because the field is so huge. But apparently he personally knows all these fields?

2. His key claim (that warming is not ONLY due to emissions but also sudden, extreme, geological change) is irrelevant. It does not really matter why the climate is suddenly violently changing. It matters how we stop it. If climate is because of emissions, we should stop emitting or take other action to counter the effect. If it is because of emissions AND geology, we should stop emitting or take other action to counter the effect. So who cares? If he has some amazing geological plan to stop warming then I am all ears. But he doesn't.

He's engaged in an academic exercise of "I know the deep hidden secret no one else does because I am smarter than the experts", only his secret is not relevant to policy even if it is (however unlikely) 100% correct.

I am sorry if this comes off as angry, but the science is in: we're in deep shit, and we need to move to the action phase. Not do more science. And we aren't, because action is painful and doing more science sounds better than pain so it's a good excuse. Like a cancer patient who keeps asking for more tests because Chemo / Radio / Surgery is a hard choice with no easy option...

Your point about policy is good, but if he is correct then that would mean geoengineering policies would become more attractive than lowering emissions (since lowering emissions would have a limited effect and is very hard).

I agree with the BS asymmetry. I don’t put this article in that category since he seems to have a clear hypothesis that explains the current record warming that is much higher than IPCC predictions. If the IPCC models are significantly wrong, this is important to know.

He has tried to contact climate scientists but he hasn’t got very far and I don’t think it’s because he’s schizo.

No worries about the tone, I understand the frustration. And to be clear, I don’t want more science per-se, but I worry we might be doing bad science.

It reads like the deformed love child of Joanne Nova and Anthony Watts.

He disagrees with both of them. Why resort to ad hominem attacks instead of attacking his argument?

He argues just as they do, with a surfeit of "And so too .." juxtaposition arguments.

North pole magnetic drift -> core is heating atmosphere (but why?) Internal rotation speed changes -> core is heating atmosphere (but why?) Selective time scales on graphs -> look at upticks! (but how are these connected?)

I looked, but clearly missed, his references for (deep under) ground up heating data for land and water over decades from exploration logs and ocean research.

But I did see an excess of the kind of persuasions used by both Nova and Watts.

He explains both your questions in detail, with references. He explains where his time scales comes from.

I’ll spoon feed you the abyssal heating data: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...

So what’s left of your criticism is you don’t like his ‘persuasions’ or ‘and so too.’

Please try to engage with his argument.

That's from 2016 and documents a continuum of warming transfering from the mantle upwards via the ocean.

It does not demonstrate any increase in that continuum of long cooling of the core via conduction outwards .. which is what the blog post asserts:- namely that recent increases in the surface layer temp. must (via some unexplianed mechanism) be due to an increase in the conduction that has already occurred since the earth formed.

He has no data that supports this, that paper you linked does not support this.

As an example of what would be required as minimal support would be (say) long term mining logs; exploration logs showng a mean increase in temp. at fixed depths for various locations over decades, or operation logs from very deep underground mines showing an increase in the energy required to cool deep working levels to a human workable range.

We should continue this when his blog post has been better written, better supported, and submitted to a peer review journal.

I agree you can’t conclude much from this data, but that is his point: we have terrible abyssal data and so might be missing a large forcing effect from our models. No one has seriously considered this, so we don’t have any of the data you suggest to disprove his theory.

The latest temperature records suggest the IPCC models are underestimating cooling. Alternative hypothesis are not explicitly considered.

I doubt he could get anything published alone, thus why he goes the blog post route.

I guess I don’t have much faith in peer review because it usually ignores any heterodox hypothesis and hides bias. Look at the % of fraudulent medical and psychology papers that pass peer review with flying colours. Climate science should be treated with skepticism because the models contain so many unknowns and the consequences of mistakes are so high.

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