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Comment by alexyes | Hacker News Reader

Not a very scientific approach. The article starts with a conclusion and then tries to leverage the findings to explain it.

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I don't understand your comment - this is a news article. They tend to lead with the most important information, and explain that information as the article goes on. When a news article is about a scientific article, it will tend to start with the conclusion.

But I also don't understand your comment when compared to actual scientific articles. The high-level conclusions tend to be in the abstract and the introduction. Scientific papers aren't structured as mysteries, they try to front-load the important lessons up front.

Don't confuse articles about science, or papers by scientists explaining their findings, as the scientific process itself.

Thanks for your point. You're right. My fault

The order in which a paper is written does not necessarily reflect the order in which the work was done.

Actually, it does in this case. People seem to forget that in climate science (like cosmology, ect.), you can't use the normal scientific method because you can't really do meaningful experiments, just observations.

What you do instead, is look at available information, intuit an explanation, then systematically compare the implications to known results. If all goes well, you might then do a simulation or predict other effects that can be observed. However, the process is very dissimilar to other fields of science.

Sounds like climate scientists need to read a lot into the epistemology of economics. (It may well be that "economic science" is an oxymoron, but the work that has been done to try and make it one...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_quasi-experiments

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_discontinuity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_variable

etc. etc.

One problem with all of these approaches is they require more then one subject. Unfortunately we only have one earth, so there is no way to have a natural control without CO2 rising, or an earth where the CO2 rose at a different time.

FTFA:

"The authors dug up historical data to show that the cooling in the three decades between 1945 to 1975 – which caused people to worry about the start of an Ice Age – was during a cooling phase. (It was thought to have been caused by air pollution.) Earlier records in Central England show the 40- to 70-year cycle goes back centuries, and other records show it has existed for millennia."

This is why you can't extrapolate from a cyclical process.

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