Quote of the Week – it's a travesty of the blandities

Why not just designate one “scientist” to decide what the consensus will be? Think how much more streamlined that would be. Like Stalin & Lysenko.

”With the links between weather and climate for instance – we know they are there, but the specific numbers need work,”
And Kev worries about the next IPCC report being blander?

As a manager of technical projects, I understand KT’s disappointment. After you have talked things out, have given your presentations and thoughts, got general agreement, you want to “get on with it”. You recognize that you can’t get uncertainty lower, you’ve done all you can to get comfort higher (note that uncertainty and comfort are not the same thing), and there is nothing further you can do to determine the outcome other than proceed. And yet the critical authorization doesn’t come. You sit, you stir the pot carefully, but you are at the end of your powers. The decision is not up to you.
But unlike KT, I understand what the problem is: the uncertainty, both of cost and outcome. You want the comfort level to rise sufficiently such that the downfall is considered survivable (politically as well as economically) while the outcome is considered desirable (in the same two ways), but the uncertainty won’t let that happen. And you can’t do anything about it.
In geology and geophysics, we identify features we wish to test because (in my case) we think they may hold good oil or gas reserves. But what we mostly do is determine the shape of the feature. It’s prime feature, its hydrocarbon content, is only determinable by drilling. We can shoot more seismic, we can reanalyze the core and chip samples, but whatever we do will only sharpen the outline of what we are looking at. There is no other way outside of Star Trek scanners to determine what we might have until we have it. So it is with the Global Warming narrative.
We have CO2 rising, we have temperatures rising in fits and starts at the same time, we have a story to put it all together. And we have the problems with the story. Regardless of what we do, we can’t get rid of the problems – the assumptions, the non-supportive observations. Even if the CAGW theories were dead-on, we would still have these problems as no simple story represents the complex world.
AR5 or AR10, the endpoint was back in AR3 or AR4. The fundamentals were determined, both the positives and the negatives. Nothing done since or now is addressing the weaknesses in either theory or observation. The shape is clear, but the shape of what? The limits to knowledge, as some call it, has been reached. Uncertainty will not be reduced by more discussion, and it would appear that comfort with going forward requires less uncertainty.
What KT, Hansen, Suzuki and (being generous that he is legitimate) Gore don’t want to admit is that the cost of going carbon-neutral or carbon-free right now is horrendous. It is not just finding alternative energy sources that don’t exist in reasonable amounts or at all in some ways. It is that giving >6 billion people a first world lifestyle as they want with or without eco-green energy will still “destroy” the planet as they see it. In order to “save” the planet, as they wish, anti-carbon tactics must also reduce the demand for energy; an 80% reduction with a 4X demand is still 0.8 of what we are doing today, without taking in other resource depletion issues into account. And 0.8 won’t cut it under their catastrophic viewpoint. There have to be less of us.
That is the horrendous cost. Not just the non-economic energy alternatives that make the first world step away from their pleasures, and the non-developed world stop in its tracks. But the whole shift in national independence, the pursuit of a world order for resource allocation and use, tied together with a global oversight and compliance of population control. Those are the items in the actual cost. And that cost is what creates the whole discomfort with going forward.
If global warming were just about reducing our fossil fuel portion of energy use by substituting cost-effective and AVAILABLE technologies, such as solar, wind or fusion, we’d be on the way right now. Tax it, replace it, moving on. But it is not. The CAGW enthusiasts have let the beast out of the bag in their guilt-ridden, Garden-of-Eden angst rhetoric. Responding to global warming the way they propose changes civilization, not just Civics.
Which is good reason for non-comfort.
KT: here’s the bit. Show CAGW is happening. Not in 2100 or 3000, but now. Don’t say the seas will rise rapidly before 2060. Show that it was rising at 3.4 mm/yr (even that is questionable, KT, but let’s let that one pass), and now it is rising at 4.0 mm/yr (and not just on Tuesday, dude). Show the mid-tropospheric hot spot with normal data, not with a tortured, selected dataset that eliminates comparison with historical data (and weather balloons). Show that normal salty seawater pHs of 8.0 somewhere in the world have killed off all its wet sea life. Stop conjecturizing and start pointing so that nobody who can tell black from white can disagree. Do that and I guarantee that the self-interest of world’s leaders and voters will work in your favour.
Or accept the fundamental weakness of your honourable position, go home and take a Valium. Time will out, as they say. If what you say is true, then we will know soon enough. And in the meantime we can end this back-and-forth bickering while you continue to publish papers on the injustice of history. Just do it more quietly, if you please.

The science is solid sullied.