Climate scientists: it's time for 'Plan B'
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
Taking our chances with nature is hardly an option, if it ever was. Nature's solution to excess CO_2 is mass die-offs.
Worrying about these projects after what we've been doing to the atmosphere seems like eating week-old junk food until you hurt and then refusing to take an aspirin because it might be tainted.
(That's not to say they're all great ideas. Some of them will probably turn out to be foolish. But I don't see anything wrong with the principle behind them.)
One thing lost in all the global warming hype is that if you ignore the screeching and look at the situation with open eyes, an Ice Age is, quite simply, the worst case scenario, with no feasible amount of warming ever, ever coming close to how bad an Ice Age is. It's not even close. I would be very, very, very, very leery of people engaging in large-scale cooling efforts.
I'm sure all those 'stupid' scientists with their 'screeching and hype' aren't completely blind.
No amount of, yes, hype can change this fact. It is unscientific babble that has you convinced they are at 80-95%. The massive-warming models are by their own predictions on their last legs, not on the verge of being vindicated.
> By their own standards, by their own confidence intervals, the models from several years ago are at 5%-ish and dropping.
I'm not sure which models you are speaking of. Would you care to provide a reference. It would surprise me if any well respected model from a few years ago had such a tight confidence interval as to be demonstrably wrong already.
You keep saying things like 'unscientific babble' and 'hype' but you don't even seem to dispute that most scientists do in fact hold global warming to be a fact. When most of the worlds experts agree on something then it is up to the deniers to come up with actual scientific evidence and not to throw around unsubstantiable insults. You could also refer to evolution or quantum physics as unscientific babble but what does that achieve.
Frankly if any group should be accused of unscientific babble or hype it is many of the climate change deniers.
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/slides/05.24.htm
Which just show temperatures going up and up and up, with error bars that just go up and up and up even on the low end. Every climate prediction I've seen from global warming alarmists looks like that, that is, I've never seen one that does not have that characteristic, and I'd like to see the one that does. (Which I know we have not had, I'm saying I've never seen a chart that permits it.) Those error bars are the fudge factor you're talking about in your first paragraph.
In order for you to be able to use that argument, it should have been built into the graph, with big fat error bars over the first ten years that inexplicably got narrower as time went on. (Which is obviously gibberish when you actually put it that way.) To account for weather, the error bars should be drawn so it fits in there. It's no good using the argument in English but leaving it out of the actual model being proposed.
Not being able to predict the weather tomorrow may not mean you can't predict the climate 50 years from now, but not being able to predict the climate 5 years from certainly does. 5 or 10 years is not "weather", and if it is, so is 100.
No amount of song and dance from any scientist can change this. No model predicted cooling on any time scale. No model that failed to do (by excluding the possibility) so is correct. Period. That is the scientific answer, regardless of how many "scientists" line up against it.
The graph isn't quite large enough to gauge the precise expectations but it seems that if you believe that the climate has cooled in the last 10 years it would disagree with that graph. However this is not necessarily the case as is argued in the following article
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14527
I'm sure that as you are reading the article the words 'babble' and 'hype' will be crossing your mind. But the fact is that science involves a great many complexities and a often this invloves a great deal of thought, consideration and - yes - 'words'.
> Not being able to predict the weather tomorrow may not mean you can't predict the climate 50 years from now, but not being able to predict the climate 5 years from certainly does.
It is quite easy to come up with a function that defies this explanation. Try this
T = N*2 + 5R
Where R = random number between -1 and 1 (different for each year)
and N = the number of years from the start
For N < 5 the effects of the random factor 'R' can predominate. However as N rises the true nature of the relationship with Y will become aparent. 'Signal plus noise' situations like this are very common in science.
It is a good thing that there are those who disagree with the majority view on issues. However without solid scientific arguments it is easy to see how those views are disregarded.
I am having a hard time separating fact from fiction. But if some combination of what seem to be relatively mainstream predictions are correct, this is probably a real choice. A way of buying an extra 10-20 years.