Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
The title question is rarely, if ever, asked of people who are skeptical of human-induced global warming and climate change…for obvious reasons. If persons are skeptical of a future filled with climate catastrophes, regardless of whether they are caused by nature or by emissions of manmade greenhouse gases, then there should be few reasons for them to be fearful of future climate.
For example: some persons may most fear the future possible rise in sea levels, understanding that surface temperatures are above the threshold at which the seasonal mass losses from glaciers and ice shelves exceed those of seasonal mass gains and that those temperatures have been above that threshold since the end of the last ice age; but they temper that concern with an understanding that even the UN’s political report-writing entity, the IPCC, acknowledges the oceans will continue their inland march regardless of whether or not we limit the emissions of manmade greenhouse gases…that it’s just a matter of time. (See Figure 13.27 on page 68 of 80 of Chapter 13 of the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report. The blue curve is for the “optimistic” RCP2.6 emissions scenario and the red curve is for the worst-case RCP8.5 scenario.)
What scares me?
My fears are that:
- activist climate scientists and agenda-driven politicians who fund climate science have tainted all related fields with unjustifiable certainty of a future filled with pain and suffering,
- to manufacture those predictions of gloom and doom, the sole focus of climate science has been and continues to be on human-induced, not naturally occurring, global warming and climate change,
- the climate science community will come no closer to understanding the natural contributions to global warming and climate change until there is a total change of mindset, and
- it will take decades of that completely new mindset to overcome the present groupthink.
With that said, what are your fears about global warming and climate change?
My fear is that the remedies for global warming weaken the technologically advanced societies so much that we are unable to respond to the real problems that will come up.
My fear is increased energy poverty for the poor via energy policy created from modeled opinion based faux science.
I fear the impact on our young people of those without portfolio that dismiss Scientists and the Institutions of Science as ‘corrupt’, ‘fraudulent’, or ‘in a conspiracy to defraud the public’, while nominating themselves as Galileo or Einstein.
I suggest the remedy is for them to submit their writings to a peer-reviewed Scientific Journal. Since there’s nothing from them in the literature, they must conclude their ‘research’ could never pass critique by Scientists working in the field.
Who chooses the “editors” and who chooses the “unknown review team” of anonymous star-chambers of judges who rule the careers and budgets of EVERY government-paid so-called “scientist” who gets paid a Big-Government salary from unknown Bog Government bureaucrats distributing Big-Government money ONLY to those who publish the desired Big-Government policy papers?
You worship at the “pure” untarnished white marble tomb of the “scientists” and their anonymous unbiased judges in the official “peer-reviewed” paper industry. Just like the original Olympic sponsors and their modern equals who worship the pure, marble-white vision of untainted amateur “collegiate” athletes only “playing for the love of the sport.”
In 100,000 person stadiums for teams of 24 coaches who earn $4,000,000.00 per year for 12 games of football that last only 60 minutes each. In front of 60 million TV viewers each weekend.
But no, “peer-reviewed papers” from Big Government-paid writers are the only “Truth” in your world.
Your post fits the bill rather closely.
warrenlb
Your reply to RACookPE1978 xsays in total
No, the bill is presented to all of us in the form of the destruction of science and its replacement by the pseudoscience you support.
Richard
warrenlb has only claimed to be afraid that people don’t blindly follow scientific pronouncements, rather than being the least worried about subversion of proper scientific method in support of political agenda.
warrenlb: You say ‘I suggest the remedy is for them to submit their writings to a peer-reviewed Scientific Journal. Since there’s nothing from them in the literature, they must conclude their ‘research’ could never pass critique by Scientists working in the field.’
This is a standard issue ‘warmist argument’.
Here in the UK, if you’re going to get a paper published, you’ll need for example a first (Bachelor) degree in a relevant subject. Then a course of study for a research degree – perhaps initially a Master’s, then a Ph.D. You’re going to have to get a placing somewhere – your interests and views will have to be broadly in line with the department or organisation that’s funding you. Then, if you find something interesting in the course of your work, you might, with your project supervisor, write up your findings and submit them to a journal of your choice. Such a paper may well be rejected – so then you shop around until you find a journal that will publish it, if you’re lucky.
None of this means that your work is necessarily going to stand the test of time. It’ll be open to challenge – and that’s what happens in blogs like this. You have all sorts of people discussing the issue – physicists, engineers, statisticians, biologists, geologists and many more – many of whom have experience relevant to the CO2/ climate story, but are not going to be able to get their views published because of the way the system of peer review (some call it ‘pal review’) works.
Their arguments are laid out on this and other websites very clearly. Why not challenge them with your own data?
Why not challenge them with your own data?
Because warrenlb has no credible data. He really has no data at all. But what he has, he uses constantly: ad hominem attacks and his ever present appeal to authority fallacy.
Take those logical fallacies away, and he’s got nothin’.
My biggest fear? After blowing trillions of dollars to no effect, we’ll find we’re still not warming and I’ll continue to see winters with average snowfalls of +95″ and a couple months with average high temps kissing 0°C.
The diffefrence between me and a “climate scientist”? I can look out the window and see the bitterly cold reality for what it is … cold.
That should be difference …
It must be a sad existence led by those incapable of looking out the window; or going out into the garden every day even.
Mr. Tisdale lists as his first concern:
I’ll go along with that, but I’m a helluva lot more concerned with the fact that these “activist” catastrophe-caterwauling quacks and goons have effectively destroyed sound scientific method in meteorology, “climatology,” and all allied disciplines ranging through geology, oceanography, etc.
What we have right now in the vaunted “peer-reviewed literature” throughout the hard sciences are the effects of unsupported (and unsupportable) assertions as to the nature of physical reality having been taken as reliable evidence underpinning conclusions and recommendations for amelioration. That is unspeakably pernicious, and anyone who has ever participated in new investigatory work (or, indeed, who has simply written a review article for publication) knows that the foundation of all inquiry is a review of the existing literature.
Well, if that’s “tainted,” just where the hell d’you think that subsequent work is going to go?
We’ve seen this in clinical medicine forever, particularly as pharmaceuticals and devices manufacturers produce (and then pick-and-choose among) the “peer-reviewed literature” to gain promotional leverage in the advertisement of their products, or – more invidiously – to minimize prescribers’ appreciation of those products adverse effects (wiki up “rofecoxib” sometime), so any physician worth a tongue depressor would tend to be highly skeptical of the preposterous catastrophism among “the climate consensus” charlatans pretending to be le dernier cri in the physical sciences.
Hell, we’re taught to recognize quackery, and we have a professional responsibility to do so.
Therefore no one reading here should ever lose focus upon the pernicious effects of this “climate consensus” quackery – all of it politically motivated by the left-“Liberals,” mind you! Utterly damnable! – in degrading the investigatory and critical methodology which had made of the sciences a hitherto-reliable “bullshit detector,” and has enabled the grasping progtard sons of bitches in governments all over the world to suppress the error-checking mechanism in those same sciences and thereby foist upon the general public a program of legal plunder” on a scale that beggars belief.
The real question is when to do quacks recognize their own quackery? I see the Dunning-Krueger effect on full display .
warrenlb- I see your endless string of logical fallacies as nothing more than hateful propaganda. Yes, I used the words hateful and propaganda. I am fully aware of the hundreds of thousands of premature deaths around the world which are due to implementation of policies designed for just that purpose, but wrapped in the green camouflage cover of saving the world from climate catastrophe.
My biggest fear is going out in public….
..according to this survey, half the people I run into out there are total F’in loons
Indeed…
My fears don’t even rise to the level of concern, but if I were concerned, my concern would be for those who are “concerned”, that they might become overly concerned and thus concern themselves with others’ business, which would turn them into meddlers, meddling in other people’s lives to such an extent that their concerned meddling would trigger the exact type of response which should really cause them concern. But then, some can only learn things the hard way, so that might be what it takes for the “concerned” to finally figure it out, which would make the world a better place, so no worries.
Overpopulation, leading to catastrophic famine and global war.
Population will keep rising for as long as we keep so many nations in poverty, it will stabilise or even fall slightly once everyone is reasonably rich. This would normally be no problem, as we have many decades.
But the AGW true believers and their associated NGOs are blocking economic growth, so I fear people in much of the world will get poorer rather than richer, leading eventually to unsustainable population levels and appalling violence.
“… as long as we keep so many nations in poverty…”
———————
Who are you calling “we”?
Are they not the same elites who promote and profit from the most dangerous idea that mankind has ever faced, the notion that too many human beings exist?
Thanks for asking, Bill. Like others, it’s not the climate I’m afraid of, but the people.
They induce a sense of fin de siècle for The Enlightenment (in the Anglophone countries, at least). The dawning of the age of stupid and the bastardization of scientific method in the service of “green” politics.
The question “what is it you fear?” is an excellent one, but I think that many of the comments here miss the mark. I think that the real fear of those who fear climate change goes something like this: “When people significantly alter the natural environment, the results are bad. The larger the area affected, the worse it is. So altering the global environment is really terrible.” The first two statements are not irrational, given history that those of us who are baby boomers (and older) remember first hand. The error lies in drawing a universal conclusion from a number of particular cases.
Once you have acquired the above fear, all of the disasters claimed to result from global warming are readily accepted as the inevitable consequences of messing with Mother Nature. The details really don’t matter, so you will make no headway arguing with alarmists over them. If you actually want to change minds, you need to address the underlying fear.
One way of doing that might be to point out the various ways in which warming and more CO2 is beneficial. That is, if you can get an alarmist to listen long enough. Good luck with that.
Perhaps a way in might be to point out that a corollary of the argument in quotes above is that the Earth was in an optimum state before humans arrived on the scene and screwed everything up. Then ask the alarmist to explain why we should believe that.
Not that I actually know. To date I have succeeded in changing exactly one mind on this subject. Mine.
Very good Mike M. I thought I made a mistake once, but I was wrong.
My fear is to see a repeat of the 7 years I saw of the Food to Biofuels initiatives. I was in Latin America, and I saw a lot, a LOT of poor people in 3rd world countries either starve to death, become desperate turning to crime, and I saw the Poor and Middle class families get hammered by skyrocketing food prices, all because 1st world climate activists wanted to drive their cars without guilt. I saw families unjustly deprived of low cost energy that could heat and cook their food, keep their medicine from deteriorating, and money that could’ve been saved and spent on basics, like sanitation and clean water, get spent on f–king solar panels to run CFL bulbs. I saw hectares of land taken from poor people and turned into “Carbon Credits”, monocultures of eucalyptus trees (which sucks massive amounts of water out of the soil) just so Climate Activists could look “green”. I saw food prices shoot up by 200% in 1 week. And who can forget one of the primary mottos of the Arab Spring, about bread?
http://i.guim.co.uk/static/w-620/h–/q-95/sys-images/Observer/Columnist/Columnists/2011/7/13/1310570494405/bread-helmet-007.jpg
Do you think Climate Activists and the IPCC will apologize for the death and destruction that their policies pushed? Oh F–K no. The day I give any idea of respect to the IPCC or to Climate Activists is the day I see every one of those goddamn scientists go to every single poor family in every single 3rd world nation, get on their knees, and apologize with, “I’m sorry you lost your loved one from starvation so that our 1st world activists could drive their cars without guilt.”
Till then, I reserve my right to SPIT on every single climate activist I see. They are truly my enemies.
[“image” html tags removed so link will process. .mod]
And for any climate activists who are reading this, because from my experience interacting with your ilk, almost none of you have ever done volunteer work with the poor, for your reference, here’s the IPCC 2007 recommendation.
Climate Change 2007: Working Group II: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability
And here’s what happened next.
Biofuels Might Hold Back Progress Combating Climate Change
FAO report links high food prices to biofuel demand
“This week crowds of hungry demonstrators in Haiti stormed the presidential palace in the capital, Port-au-Prince, in protests over food prices. And a crisis gripped the Philippines as massive queues formed to buy rice from government stocks.
There have been riots in Niger, Senegal, Cameroon and Burkina Faso and protests in Mauritania, Ivory Coast, Egypt and Morocco. Mexico has had “tortilla riots” and, in Yemen, children have marched to draw attention to their hunger.
The global price of wheat has risen by 130 per cent in the past year. Rice has rocketed by 74 per cent in the same period.”
The other global crisis: rush to biofuels is driving up price of food
I had to watch and experience this on a personal, and visceral level when I sojourned Latin America. This is what I fear the most from “Climate Change.” Not the climate change itself, it’s the god awful, inhumane policies these activists and scientists push. To this day, I still want to kick the crap out of every Climate Activist or Scientist I see.
Thank You, SAB!
At 8:26 AM and with further explanation at 9:28 AM on 30 January, SABicyclist does a superb job of keeping us mindful of the hideous perversity that is the leftard “Watermelon” ‘viro movement’s direct and indirect attacks upon the lives and general well-being of the poorest of the poor, in the already-racked and ruined Third World particularly, all in the name of “sustainable” practices such as the diversion of grain crops into the manufacture of fuel ethanol.
Hm. It’s apparent from a Web sweep that the “progressive” leftards still don’t understand the significance of that “bread helmet guy” (one of many) appearing so strikingly during the Tahrir Square protests in 2011.
The cereal grains provide the bulk of daily calorie uptake in the Middle East and the Arabic-speaking world generally. Bread is a symbol to these people, and the “bread helmet” is a symbol that the leftard “Liberals” neither understand nor want to understand. Raise the prices of food enough in these marginal (at best) economies, and the lower class – faced with real starvation – as well as the middle class (who see their quality of life going to hell as they’re forced to spend more and more of their disposable income on food) are going to move against the government upon which they depend for the “regulation” of their economy.
The whole “Arab Spring” process basically began as food riots.
And all for the collective good: man does that sound like a familiar refrain…
http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2010/02/the-legacy-of-mao-zedong-is-mass-murder
Sorry, Bob. I was also agreeing with a comment by Bill.
My greatest fear is government rat-hole projects enforced by blinded zealots.
I have noticed with interest that our usual pro-AGW visitors have *** nothing *** to say about the OP’s questions. I would be interested to know what their fears were (I can predict what some of the talking points would be). Would they accept authoritarian control of their lives in return for some assurance by the “scientists” that all would be well climate-wise?
Do I read your comment correctly? That your rejection of the conclusions of all the world’s Institutions of Science are driven by your fear of imagined solutions, rather than the Science itself?
warrenlb, You quite obviously made pretense of a lack of reading comprehension in order to make another personal attack, as well as committing other logical fallacies. Personal attacks, thin logic and lies… no wonder you remain anonymous.
Fair question – you should remember that the science of climate is not an all or nothing proposition. There are in fact many principles and conclusions we all agree on. What I reject are the manic pronouncements by certain science zealots (and many less knowledgeable lay persons/activists) that if we don’t do X, Y, and Z then our climate will be “destroyed”. We humans don’t have that power.
No, the rejections are driven by 35 years of failed predictions.
Do you place your trust, standard of living, and future in Tarot cards? They are as good as climate science theories so far at this point.
@warrenlb:
Oh, not that nonsense again. warrenlb is a one-trick pony. He has no credible facts. He has no corroborating data. He has no empirical observations to support his mindless position. All he ever emits is the ‘appeal to authority’ fallacy.
What a naive individual. Prof Richard Lindzen states unequivocally that a handful of enviro-activists has corrupted the institutions warrenlb refers to, and Lindzen names names. [see Sec. 2]. But warrenlb assumes that the simple majority of the boards of those groups cannot be corrupted.
I’ve served on executive boards before, and I can state for a fact that it is easy peasy to get them to adopt positions inimical to their charters. All it really takes is one individual willing to make friends and trade votes.
The corruption of professional bodies has been a deliberate process, and very effective. But people like Lindzen easily see through it. Only the credulous like warrenlb presume that it doesn’t happen. Which as we see, works on the clueless. <—[lookin' at you, warren]
You see, above I presented a peer reviewed paper, if you regularly read WUWT you know about it. One of the authors ,Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, routinely got criticized for not publishing, however what he did instead was to quote directly from work published by others. Skeptics can do that because the published works tend not to actually support the notion of dangerous global warming do to increased CO2. The belief that most published paper support the idea dangerous global warming is based on dubious claims like the 97% claim that has been destroyed by WUWT nine ways to Sunday.If you want to educate yourself look it up.
Now there a few alarmist papers out there that are just wrong, a those have been refuted and yes the counter arguments have been published.
There are a wide range of threats to our future which rank higher in my mind than the risks of climate change. This reflects concerns also expressed in surveys which due to their immediacy have a much higher ranking and relatively high probability – eg: terrorism, jobs, food supply, clean water, nuclear threats, war, economy, epidemics, environmental degradation etc. There are also a number of lower probability but potentially very high impact events – asteroid strike, tsunami, volcano etc.
Risk of climate change is far less of a concern as it will impact largely beyond current lifetimes and at a pace which could be substantially mitigated through adaptation strategies. If other threats materialise within climate change timescales (50 – 100 years) then it may become somewhat academic anyway.
This is not to suggest that many of the changes that the alarmists are imposing are futile – minimising use of fossil fuels and developing alternative technologies to generate power and increase efficiency makes very good sense environmentally, economically, and reduces long term vulnerability.
A simple objective analysis of threat, associated risk and potential impacts discounted (in some way) for time may demonstrate that expenditure directly and indirectly attributed to climate change could be much better targeted.
–
The fearful amounts of money spent on this through wind turbines etc and the lining of peoples pockets.
The fact the UK is the only country with the CCA.
No dissent is allowed, because of crass statements like ‘the science is settled.’
I fear that decades of mis-allocation of public resources have not addressed the true threats to our society’s survival: nuclear war, massive solar flares, and truly unsustainable government spending.
If solar scientists are right, we might just not see another massive solar flare for the next half century or more.
Science liberated me when I was young. I was naturally drawn to it. It became my belief that the rational analysis of the natural world had elevated the human race at an accelerating rate in the past several centuries, and would continue to do so.
Now, it seems that the practice of science has been bastardized into another political tool. Given my background and accomplishments, I am always amazed when some guy in a tye-dyed tee shirt on the street corner who couldn’t take the derivative of x with respect to x lectures me about “what the science says.”
My greatest fear is the squandering of this fantastic tool, and the human race pulling back into a fearful luddite existence in order to satisfy the dolts and the politicians.
The phrase I’ve used for some time is – science prostituted to politics.
What has driven this country to what it is today, IMHO, is a combination of incompetence and greed. These terms pretty much cover everything. We are seeing these two patterns playing out today with climate science.
The next time someone lectures you about “what the science says” – ask them just what the science actually consists of that shows man made CO2 to be a significant factor in any current warming. If their belief is strong, either it is a belief based on some knowledge of the science behind the claims, or it is just another religious belief. I can pretty much guarantee you that they will not know that “the science” consists of people sitting in front of computers playing SimEarth. And that those people are using optimization to arrive at “sensitivity factors” to amplify the known effects of CO2 on temperature. And that the wide range of these “sensitivity factors” makes it evident that the physics is far from being “known.” *Every time* they use the historical data to “verify” their models, that historical data becomes less and less out-of-sample. How many times have the models been “verified” since the late 80s? It is clearly an exercise in curve-fitting. Many of us are well aware of how ridiculous this is when done to make projections in a coupled, non-linear chaotic system (as defined by the IPCC). The emperor truly has no clothes.
What scares me? That the environmental benefits of higher CO2 levels are either 1) not studied, or worse 2) thrown out due to political inconvenience.
#2 it is
#1 – http://www.co2science.org/education/reports/reportarch.php
My fears are that:
1) The already cold climate in Canada will get colder, making food production more difficult
2) Alarmists will [successfully] introduce [crippling] carbon tax that will destroy the economy of Alberta (much like Trudeau did in the late 1970s and early 1980s)
I`m with you Jeff, Our Ontario premiere is hell bent on dragging our economy further into the economic hole by continuing Dalton McGinty`s incompetence and blessing us with a Carbon Tax and Cap`n Trade!
God help us.
Washington State USA as well…
I too remember the NEP (National Energy Program) of LaLonde and Trudeau. From 487 rigs actively drilling for oil to less than 150 in under than a year. A carbon tax will do much worse to a lot more people.
It seems B.C is doing quite well with their carbon tax. Last time I checked, their economic growth rate exceeded Canada’s average.
Bob Tisdale in his WUWT lead post asks, “What are Your Fears about Global Warming and Climate Change?”.
I have no new fears due to the start and evolution of the Climate Change / Global Warming movement in the past ~40 years.
I have no new fears specific to Climate Change/ Global Warming because the movement is just another of the endless playing outs of the ~2,500 year old main intellectual issue of all of Western Civilization. That main intellectual issue for ~2,500 years for Western Civilization is the fundamental intellectual debate / dispute over individual versus collective. That basic intellectual debate / dispute will always confront every new generation of human beings and I don’t fear it. I relish the intellectual dispute and it is glorious to pursue.
No Fear
John
I view the ‘2500 year old intellectual issue’ as the forces of darkness being driven out of the public sphere by the Enlightenment and the demonstrable results of the Scientific Process, i.e., our modern way of life. Now we see a smattering of regression by those who cannot accept the conclusions of Science that as long as Man burns fossil fuels the Climate will continue to warm. Perhaps because it upsets their worldview, or perhaps because they imagine disastrous solutions, or perhaps they imagine a takeover by some amorphous ‘threat’ to their way of life, while ignoring the real threats to their grandchildren.
I relish seeing how evidence and the Scientific process always wins.
But that would mean your side loses.
Go and tell that to the worldwide poor who starved and lost loved ones in the last seven years from the IPCC policies that your “scientists” advocated and pushed for with claims that their “science” supports to solve a “problem” that their “science” claims to support.
Every
Single
One.
I DARE YOU.
You want to claim scientific legitimacy?! Then BE F–KING ACCOUNTABLE TO THE CONSEQUENCES OF WHAT YOU’VE ADVOCATED.
Not much chance. So far it’s peer-reviewed Science 99.9 to 1: jamespowell.org
Oh, that’s rich, warrenlb, your link goes to a Bill Maher episode… that’s sciencey, for sure.
You did let slip a bit of truth though, when you answered “not much chance”…to SABicyclist’s injunction for you to be accountable for your advocacy of policies which have lead to miserable consequences for many of mankind’s less fortunate.
LOL It’s called the Scientific Method, not the “Scientific Process”.
Quite funny that you make disparaging stereotypes of those who actually have understanding of Science and the Scientific Method, when you demonstrate a complete ignorance of it.
To sum up and answer the question: I fear people ignorant people like you, who want to return to the Dark Ages of belief.
Warren the hiatus proves beyond reasonable doubt that carbon dioxide is innocent of the charges laid against it, which leaves us with a huge psychological mess.
So many people have been brainwashed into accepting the AGW theory and when temperatures begin to slide in a few years the effect on groupthink will be extraordinary.
Mass delusion is terrible to behold, thankfully its only a first world problem.
wlb: “Now we see a smattering of regression by those who cannot accept the conclusions of Science that as long as Man burns fossil fuels the Climate will continue to warm.”
You must have missed this…..if after reading you have data to refute come back and present.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/28/global-warming-is-still-on-the-great-shelf/
Re James Powell:
Too bad he wasn’t specific about how much warmer it would be in 2014, because I suspect he had in mind a much greater rise than has occurred. The divergence between IGPOCC’s projections and the actual record is what has risen, not the temperature.
=================
Here are my comments on a survey by James Powell, posted online in various sites last year (2011?), of 13,950 papers dealing with climate change. It analyzed their abstracts and “found” that only 24 rejected manmade global warming. I posted the following critical comments on the site below (not the main place it was posted). I suspect it was this survey that inspired what Cook is up to now (5/2013):
http://oilprice.com/The-Environment/Global-Warming/Contrary-to-Popular-Belief-Scientists-are-United-on-Climate-Change.html
The article states:
How many papers that “explicitly state that the theory of global warming is false” would get by peer review with that phrase intact? How many would even be submitted to peer review if they included that phrase? They therefore tend to be more circumspect and merely cite a discrepancy, some flaw (minor perhaps only in the author of this article’s opinion), etc.
Here’s a link to 1100+ peer-reviewed papers supporting skeptical arguments critical of ACC/AGW alarmism:
http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html
========
Strawman. The claim is not that skeptics are 100% “prevented” from being published, but that that it is difficult (and hence rare) to get them published, or to get them published without being watered down, as I hinted above.
==========
IOW, an article will be classified as skeptical only if it presents hard evidence. BUT an article will be counted accepting/endorsing even if it presents no hard evidence, but merely implicit opinion:
Denial must be explicit, but acceptance may be implicit. This double standard biases the results of this article. By how much is unknown. For that, the author should have indicated how many fall into the “implicitly accepting” category.
==========
But the weakness of the warmist case isn’t in the “hard evidence” so much as in the inferences drawn from that evidence, the selectivity applied in deciding which evidence is the most relevant, the inferences drawn from those relevant bits of evidence, the assumptions made, etc. It is at those matters where the main thrust of skepticism has been directed.
But journals want to publish “findings.” This biases them against publishing wide-ranging, argumentative critiques. (To be fair, they rarely publish similar argumentative essays from the warmist side either.) They have a just-the-facts attitude. But the facts don’t speak for themselves. Argumentation has therefore moved to other venues.
What’s needed is an online venue where viewpoints can be argued among credentialed scientists, with the peanut gallery roped off into a separate section where their comments won’t disrupt the discussion, but can be drawn upon by the participants if desired. (Seen but not heard, IOW.) This is what has finally gotten underway with the establishment this month of the Climate Dialogue site, at http://www.climatedialogue.org/
==========
So what? (Irrelevant thesis.) Skeptics don’t deny that. What they deny is that this warming will continue at its current pace; that it would be very harmful if it did so—or even harmful on balance at all; and that there are amplifying factors that will accelerate the current trend. The alarmists’ case rests on the assumptions of strong positive feedbacks and the absence or weakness of negative feedbacks. That’s where their case is weakest.
Hmm . . . There’s nothing in that list by the following skeptical scientists, at least half of whom have presumably published papers properly classified as skeptical:
Syun-Ichi Akasofu, Claude Allègre, John Christy, David Douglass, Don Easterbrook, William M. Gray, Richard Lindzen, Nils-Axel Mörner, Fred Singer, and Roy Spencer.
I took their names from Wikipedia’s “List of [35] scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming
Here are four other names, half of whom I presume wrote articles that were missed: Zbigniew Jaworowski, Augusto Mangini, Nathan Paldor, and Richard Tol.
It might already be too late and that should be, but oviously is not, the concern of the science denying souls. Science is loaded with mechanisms for checking, rechecking and verifying the experiments and work of others. That’s how it works, that’s how man has progressed technologically.
At 2:43 PM on 1 February, we have p. Clahane speaking to
…in vituperative condemnation of scrupulously scientific critics ever-so-effectively debunking CO2-demonizing quacks and Gruberoids pushing the proposterous bogosity of “man-made global climate change” as he goes on to blather:
Egad. Not only reification of an abstract (“Science,” as if “it” had flesh and blood and halitosis), but also thought-blocking on all of human thought and artifice prior to the development of scientific method as if no culture had ever “progressed technologically in all the millennia hitherto (big news to Clovis man, eh? not to mention the city fathers of Ur and Thebes).
Be warned that turning the spigot on this kind of yutz’s personal fund of knowledge wouldn’t moisten your windshield wiper.
warrenlb
What caused the Enlightenment in Western Civilization? It was the Renaissance in Western Civilization. What caused the Renaissance? It was the reintroduction of Ancient Greek and early Roman knowledge that was sequestered from light by the ‘total society’ authorities in power during the late Roman, Dark and Medieval Ages. Science is just one of humankind’s manifold uses of applied reasoning. It was the reintroduction of the basis of applied reasoning from circa 2,500 years ago that has enabled our modern freedom of individuals to pursue unrestricted applied reasoning where such individual applied reasoning cannot be thwarted by any efforts of a collective of men trying to claim a self-presumed authority on applied reasoning. The only authority on applied reasoning is objectively observed reality.
Climate focus: What we are seeing is significant applied reasoning by separately acting independent individuals on climate who show that the as observed climate is intrinsically and unambiguously inconsistent with your position that “the conclusions of Science that as long as Man burns fossil fuels the Climate will continue to warm”. We are seeing the triumph of independent and open applied reasoning (science) by that. I RELISH IT.
John
My main fear is that we will loose freedom and prosperity. Also that all science will become tainted as corrupt.
AGW alarmism is the greatest moral dilemma of our time. I fear that the next generation of children will need to undergo major decontamination to irradiate the stain of AGW brainwashing they have been subjected to. I have this uncomfortable feeling that when I have discussions with the next generation that I am undergoing some sort of early dimensia as evidenced by my climate change skeptism. The more I yell at them and say I can’t believe that they are so gullible the more that I get looked at as if I’m the one who’s mad. My biggest fear is that the warmists will win and inflict on the world a global genicide of a magnitude never seen before. They will send our world back to the dark ages. Human advancement will stop or reverse and a global green elite will control our lives as they control our minds.
If you fear that the global green elite will inflict mass genocide, then you must’ve been living under a rock to not notice what the IPCC Food to Biofuel initiative did to the poor world wide, and that was in the LAST SEVEN YEARS (2007-2014).
A lot of people starved from that god awful policy initiative. And some of us never forgot who started it, and who f–king pushed for it. The IPCC and the Climate Activists may think they can wash their hands now, but Karma’s a bitch.
The sad thing is that the narrative is not directed at the 40+. It is the brainwashing of the younger generations in knowledge that the aged generation won’t be around to offer any calibration to the past. The up and coming generations will have nothing to compare and accept that it “has always been this way.” The UN will succeed, using the AGW crisis of opportunity to build the NWO and mechanisms of depopulation. The question is can they sustain it? Human nature has already provided the answer in historical context. How pitiful and delusional are the High Priests of this movement, to think that social engineering will recode human nature.
Your fears are not unfounded David because it has happened before. I like to ponder some as to how much better the world would be today if it had not taken those steps backwards in the dark ages.
My biggest fear is of the people who are being stampeded by the cAGW fear narrative, they are trampling me in their irrationality. Fear narratives are very effective in causing people to stampede in the directions that profits the stampeder, like green energy businessmen, carbon traders, carbon taxers, politician saviors, scientist grant seekers etc etc. The cAGW fear narrative has way more profiteers than even the fear narrative of Sadam`s weapons of mass destruction, that narrative only profited the arms industry and other merchants of death.
My fear: The cooling comes, and everybody thinks its also caused by co2.