BBC staff ordered to stop giving equal airtime to climate deniers

Plenty of blogs say economics is not a science. Climate scientists say otherwise.

What exactly differentiates one statement from the other ? Aside from the fact that one is popular opinion and the other is not (although that's debatable and differs by person and by region).

No one suggests there has been no warming at all and a measure of this will reasonably be due to CO2 emitted by man. The argument is about the extent. It's also about spending billions (follow the money! Who, specifically wants to stop that?) to 'prevent' a rise in temperature. Using IPCC figures, it can be shown that whatever Britain does (to take an example) even if it went back to the stone age, the effect on global temperature would not be measureable. Meanwhile the old and poor die in the winter while their increased charges for power subsidize useless wind turbines.

Every industry has participants who are just in it for the money. But that doesn't mean some of those people are not also passionate about research and scientific integrity. On television, truth doesn't matter. All that matters is whether you can command people's attention.

Just like advertisements for prescription medication, the goal is not a direct sale. The goal is to convince the viewer to learn more from someone well educated in the field. And then get their money.

My hypothesis is that opportunities to challenge establishment thought increase as new sources of funding flow into an industry. For software, more funding means more startup failures, and more disruptive tech that somehow avoided failure. For research, more new funding means less reliance on the university hierarchy or government grant proposals, and enough new publications that not even Elsevier could possibly swallow all of them.

Climate science has lots of sides in reality. There are many, many problems and the only thing that's really quite agreed upon is that we've had warming for 150 years. Yes that it's has something to do with increased levels of co2 is pretty agreed upon, but not what caused what, for example, or how much of a feedback loop it is (see further on).

Keep in mind what climate science is. Essentially it's a very, very new kind of science. We are measuring reality, using statistical "best fit" rules, and assuming they represent natural laws that will continue in perpetuity. And then, of course, mix that in with what we know to be true (e.g. locality of changes), until you arrive at something that vaguely looks like reality.

And like any science "the consensus" is "whatever works". Now keep in mind that this is not necessary works in the traditional sense. It is that, but there is some truth to the fact that climate science is getting a lot of funding within academia (one part of it is, as usual, and it's not the part improving the statistical methods)

But of course, there's lots of problems here

1) is this approach valid at all ? Getting statistical approximations of laws and treating them as holy cows ... (e.g. one could make the observation that the IPCC ARs, as far as we know, are wrong. If you go back to 1990, take AR0's "95%" values for global temperature for their best fit ... well, we're outside of that range. Same for AR1 and AR2 and pretty close to the edge for AR3, so it's not like there are no reasons to question the whole thing).

2) does statistics apply to climate variables at all ? Specifically temperature is a big problem here. (Statistics cannot be -correctly- applied to variables that don't follow the central limit theorem. Correctly is in there because most of statistics can be blindly applied to any time series, it just doesn't predict anything. There is the small issue that there was some historical work stating that statistics won't work on climate, and nobody's bothered to revisit that. Temperature is gasses does not follow the central limit theorem, so measuring the "average" temperature of a gas is not possible in the general case).

3) Even if this approach works, it doesn't predict stuff it hasn't seen before, because of how it works. This is not science that's coming from first principles (and even that has limits to how far it applies, e.g. extreme cold or heat). But climate science is worse than other sciences where this is done because the theory is really only based on the values seen. The problem here is what consists of a "new" situation ?

If temperature were to determine what is "normal" then we've been in a new situation at least a few weeks on a yearly basis for 150 years now. And likely there is some point where it really will be a new situation.

There are known problems with this approach as well, like it is considered "normal" that this theory, being based on 150 years of data, predicts unbounded warming. Given the method, I agree that this is normal, but it's also obviously wrong. No matter how far in the future, climate is never going to warm to 1000000 degrees surface temperature, even though the climate models do predict that will happen. A learned rule that has been "trained" on only-ever-warming climate keeps going up.

4) And of course, the popular explanations for climate change are wrong. Climate science DOES NOT claim that increasing CO2 exhaust will cause the athmosphere to heat, well it does, but that part is not having much effect at all.

What it really predicts is that a little bit of warming will cause more warming. E.g. little warming -> more water vapour -> more athmosphere insulation -> a little more warming. Feedback loop. Now repeat for water, methane, co2 itself (non-human co2), co, ... That, not human co2 exhaust, is what is claimed to be causing global warming.

What I also don't understand is how climate agreements are considered reasonable. Lowering co2 output will only slow down the warming, it won't stop it even if humans stopped co2 output entirely. Which brings the question : what do all these climate accords achieve ? They achieve nothing, even if they somehow magically start working. A delay of a decade at best, maybe two or three if you're wildly optimistic.

It may mean that cooling will work similarly (yes the theory does not predict cooling ever, but any sane human being knows perfectly well that the planet will cool again no matter what we de, look at the 1 million year temperature graph if you're not convinced). If it works like the warming did, then once it starts cooling a little bit (like 0.1 degrees should easily do it), that by itself will cause more cooling. So the graph will reverse at some point, and the reverse, the temperature drop, should be as unstoppable as warming has been.

5) Now the kicker is when will this reversal happen ? Historically it has been up to ~3 degrees warmer than it currently is, and then we consistently saw rapid declines of about 10 degrees ("rapid" meaning a millenium or so, but with most cooling happening in 2-3 centuries). This has happened dozens of times in the past. Problem is, we don't know what causes it. For a few cases we can point out simple things that change at the hinge point, but they never explain a 10 degree drop.

It is pretty unique that we have had a temperature rise at anything but the very last years of an interglacial. Usually when the temperature was warmer than it is now, it shot up to warmer than it is now at the end of an ice age, and then stayed high for millenia, to suddenly drop again.

But we are at the end of an interglacial. An ice age is "about" to start (again look at the 1 million year temperature graph). Now when will that happen ? Well, somewhere in the next few thousand years would expected. But if you did what climate science does, you take historical lengths of interglacials and create a 95% confidence interval, we're already in that interval (though early times, not yet at the mean, the mean is about 280 years in the future, with a standard deviation of a little over 3 centuries. But there certainly have been interglacials shorter than the current one, meaning there would be nothing remarkable in the graph if it started today).

A news outlet does have the power to silence debate. Ask any "true Scotsman" libertarian (viz. not Paulians or Tea Partiers) during any election season. Ask Occupy Whatever about why no one actually addressed their grievances. Ask any number of people with legitimate but unheard issues why 24-hour news channels will choose to report deeply on shallow topics rather than broadly on a wider variety. Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone haven't accumulated vast media empires because they want your voice to be heard by more people.

The actual scientific debate is not going to appear on air. The news segments would simply get people interested in learning more and contributing in some way. If you shut the consensus contrarians down now, you may be stifling future climate efforts, because the research industry has to continually struggle for funding for anything that does not have a direct and obvious military application. Any mention of science on radio or on television or in popular fiction is an advertisement for more science. The crackpots and loons give the scientific establishment an acceptable target to talk down to that will not offend the general public. That informs the public while recruiting them emotionally.

It is a rhetorical tactic, essentially making a strawman of an actual person, and not true argument, but I'm not certain rational, scientific personalities realize that the majority of research is ultimately funded by folks who couldn't tell the difference between a beaker and an Erlenmeyer flask if you make them watch Breaking Bad from start to finish. Someone has to be the pitchman for legit, non-politicized research. Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku and Stephen Hawking can't be the only science celebrities.

You really do want as many actual researchers in front of the cameras as you can get, so you can find out who can both defend a thesis before their peers and effectively convey understanding to laymen. You want people to be able to name more professional theorists and researchers than Kardashians. It doesn't advance the body of knowledge, but it helps pay for salaries and equipment, and helps fill the education pipeline to keep retirement and emigration from endangering ongoing work.

"Satanic Ritual Abuse" aka Satanic Panic also had a field-day in the courts, if not the legislature.

The tide seems to be turning, but until quite recently, it was an article of faith (literally, on occasion) among many conservatives that climate change was a liberal-media bogeyman. This was true even among the more respectable conservative publications and commentators, and not just the wackos.

Additionally, (and this is just a personal feeling), but something about top-down "reducing airtime from fringe views" feels very wrong. Who decides what a "fringe view" is? By that rubric, Creationism is perfectly legitimate since it's widely held.

I think we'd all be better served, morally as well as practically, by letting the loons be loons and let people make their own decisions rather then trying to explicitly control who gets airtime. Bring on the denier and let them get annihilated in a debate against someone who knows what they're talking about. This has the benefit of not invoking censorship boogeymen (which may or may not actually exist) and doesn't hand over the "we're being oppressed" card to them.

Just so we're clear what will not be accepted as an answer : here is an experiment as to how the greenhouse effect behaves in a gas volume. You see a greenhouse effect starting at zero concentration. 90% of the effect is visiable at 300ppm. 95% of the effect is visible at 350ppm. (co2 forcing is exponentially decreasing, and levels off at around 350ppm to eventually converge (at 100%, or 1000000ppm) to about 6% higher than it is at 350ppm) [1]

And yet athmosphere temperature is not behaving like this at all. Warming is accelerating, not slowing down (350ppm was reached in 1990, currently at 415-420). Yet warming is accelerating. Given that this is pretty much the only experiment you can do without a spare planet, and it obviously is very different from observed behavior, this will not be accepted.

So do tell : how to reproduce climate change ?

Alternatively: what is the conclusion if "steps leading to said truth" cannot, in fact, be reproduced ?

[1] IPCC AR3, Chapter 6: Radiative Forcing of Climate Change. (section 6.3.4) Total Well-Mixed Greenhouse Gas Forcing Estimate

Edit: if you're going to down vote at least have the balls to explain your position.

Aristotelian physics was superseded by Newtonian Physics.

That's science.

I'm not suggesting that anyone will come up with a different conclusion but there's no excuse for this stupid dogma and religion getting in the way of rationality.

Feynman is doing 500rpm in his grave...

It is hard to sell "we need global socialism or we're all gonna die!" when your whole argument amounts to "when I press this button, the computer predicts the future". Appealing to empty formalities like peer review, consensus and other social-engineerable groupthink mantras simply doesnt cut it if you want money, which is what the warmists are primarily after. They want insane amounts of money and the only way they prove it is by repeatedly asserting their authority to the point that now journalists have to be bullied into obedience.

Worship thy sky daddy to prevent evil demons sent from hell to colonise the earth!