Why delegating comprehension of climate science is a bad idea

So what criteria does Obama use to select best scientists from not best scientists? Can he do it on his own or does he always have to have others tell him? Does he have a single opinion that belongs just to him? Will the real Obama stand up!

Obama is doing his part the best way possible… which is an embarrassment, true, but there are only two ways of doing it. If you are into (C)AGW, either you claim total ignorance or you refuse to engage. He’s opted for the first.

In his latest global warming speech, Obama wasn’t trying to convince anyone. Instead, he was sending signals to his supporters on what “all right thinking people” should be saying. This is classic in-group/out-group communication. Obama was setting up the lingo and talking points for his in-group to use to determine who can be considered part of the tribe and who should be mocked for being outside of it.
Obama is a bellweather; the sheep with the bell that the other sheep follow. Bellweather is not a derogatory term, it’s a descriptive term. Rush Limbaugh is an example of a Right bellweather. The job of a political bellweather is to indicate the position that the followers should take in their conversations. Obama’s speech was a position paper for the delegates of all right thinking people. You meet these people at work, church, school, at the coffee house, etc. The delegates will mirror the President’s message to identify other in-group members, normalize beliefs and mock out-group members.
One of the main themes of Obama’s speech is shame. Shame on those who aren’t right thinking people. Shame that they aren’t as intelligent and capable as “us.” That type of smugness is almost impossible to penetrate. When a skeptic questions a delegate’s view on global warming/climate change, the delegate hears something vastly different than what the skeptic is saying.
A skeptic might say, “The models don’t match the actual measured results.” What the warmist hears is how stupid deniers are because that’s what John Stewart told him he should think. If the warmist doesn’t prove that he thinks skeptics are stupid then he might be confused for a denier! And no one wants to be identified with being a denier because they are mocked, don’t get tenure and don’t get invited to the right parties. No amount of science can penetrate the ROI the warmist has internalized in believing in CAGW.
Many of the warmist delegates are running on pure rational ignorance. Rational ignorance is a belief that the cost/benefit to researching every issue is slow low as to be a net negative in time utilization. Thus the ignorance is rational. People who are rationally ignorant about global warming look to bellweathers that support their basic stance on the issue. For warmists they would look to the President, mockutainers and warmist scientists.
Penetrating Rational Ignorance is tough because the position warmists have taken isn’t based on logic. Their position is actually based on an appeal to authority. To question the rationally ignorant warmist is to question the field of science as a whole (to be a science denier) or to question the leadership of their favorite bellweather personalities in politics, science and entertainment. The rationally ignorant might point to their favorite bellweathers and say, “Who am I to doubt all these intelligent people?” It’s intellectually offshoring. It’s lazy. It’s human nature.
The scientific method rejects outright bellweathers, rational ignorance and in-group/out-groups. A scientist is supposed to follow the results not rig the data to ensure he gets invited to a party with the right people. But science has a poor track record on controversial topics. It often takes decades to accept new theories that are clear winners (e.g., continental drift).
The problem is that scientists are still social animals. Social animals follow hierarchy and incentives. If you really want to win the debate on global warming, change the opinions of the bellweathers. Change the economic incentives for the global warming scientific paper mill. Otherwise you’re stuck debating only the people who are unable to change their minds because it would cost them personally to do so. Rare is the person intellectually honest enough to bite the hand that feeds.

You don’t have to be a scientist to know that the policy response is misconceived, since even a schhol child would quickly appreciate that the policy response does not result in the reduction of CO2 (leaving aside the scientific issue as to whether rising levels of CO2 cause significant and dangerous warming).
First of all carbon credits/carbon trading merely shift the location of where CO2 is emiited, they do not reduce overall global emmissions and since it is claimed that CO2 is a well mixed gas, it matters not that the US or UK may reduce their CO2 emissions if these emissions are essentially outsourced to China or India or another developing country.
Infact, relocating industry off-shore may well increase global CO2 emissions since it may be that more transport of raw materials and finished articles is involved in the manufacturing of the product and getting the product to market, so carbon credits/carbon trading etc does nothing to reduce global CO2 emissions and may well slightly increase them.
Second, given that renewables are intermittent and presently there is no practical storage method to store energy when the sun does not shine or the wind does not blow, sloar farms and wind farms do not result in the reduction of any significant amounts of CO2 because of the need for back up from conventional powered fossil fuel generation.
The evidence suggest that typically on average windfarms are about 21 to 25% efficient, and are capable of producing about 21 to 25% of their nameplate output. However, whilst at first blush one might imaginge that this will result in a reduction of CO2 by about 21 to 25%, however this is not the case. The conventional backup required has to be operated in inefficient ramp up/ramp down mode and operating power generation in this manner results in nearly as much CO2 as if the fossil fuel generator had simply been used in steady state mode at its designed operational capacity.
The inefficient working of ramp up/ramp down is well known to anyone who has a car. The freeway consumption (say steady 55 to 60mph) of a car is significantly better than the urban consumption. Every one who owns a car knows that the car uses about 30% more fuel when driving in the city compared to the fuel used on a run (some cars use twice as much fuel in city/town driving compared to teh fuel consumption on a freeway/motorway run).
So it is easy to understand why ghiven the need for conventionally powered back up which has to be run in inefficient ramp up/ramp down mode that there is no saving in CO2 emissions by rolling out renewables in the form of wind farms and/or solar farms.
Even the President of the US ought to understand that but I guess that it is a long time since he last filled up a car with petrol!

re: “we can look at other areas where non-expert managers have to manage specialists with arcane knowledge,”
In this case hopefully arcane knowledge isn’t needed, and skeptics need to try to stop letting them obfuscate that issue by delving into technical details to snow the public (easier said than done since they try to avoid admitting simple realities). There are two bits of knowledge that are needed, one was mentioned in the post, that: “We do know that climate models to date have a dismal track record of prediction.” The other bit is to understand that to make a claim that a scientific prediction is accurate, a theories predictions need to match reality, as explained in this 60 second video from nobel laureate Richard Feynman I’m sure those here don’t need to be reminded off
https://youtu.be/5v8habYTfHU
“The Essence Of Science In 60 Seconds (Richard Feynman)”
A claim made by a theory which doesn’t match reality isn’t “scientific” even if the person making the assertion claims to be a scientist, no amount of special pleading changes that, nor does attempting to obfuscate things by pointing to a stack of climate papers and talking about how much work they’ve done. There is no “A” for effort in science that makes a claim “scientific” merely because many man hours went into it. Admittedly climate types will try to defend the models, but there are enough of them that admit to the hiatus and others looking for “missing heat” or claiming they have found it to indicate that there is something wrong with the models even to those who don’t pay much attention to the issue. They didn’t predict the pause (even if some claim that in retrospect its within the bounds of some models), and they have no “consensus” explanation for it (since they claim to value “consensus”) nor updated models that match reality (as we grasp is the only “consensus” that is important). Arcane knowledge about the details of climate science don’t need to be known in order to grasp that the models don’t work, there is no need for non-scientists to try to understand the details of the models, merely to grasp there is no magic exemption for climate research to make it exempt from the way science works in other fields. The difference between validation in this field vs. others, and the lack of credible error bars (since real ones would call into question whether they can make any claims) need to be emphasized somehow without letting them obfuscate things with their rationalizations for why they shouldn’t be held to the standards&approaches of other fields. Unfortunately it is true they’ll try to obfuscate, twisting statistics to try to show model validation, but some model matches don’t matter if the models disagree with reality according to other analyses.
Some climate types will try to pretend the models aren’t needed, just some claim of “climate sensitivity”. A look at a long term graph should show that there isn’t a direct correlation between CO2 and temperature over the long run. They (and even some who are skeptical of models) try to estimate a linear trend based on recent past data, and then pretend that they can assume that “sensitivity”, that linear trend will continue. That is like gamblers that argue based on a trend in some random data. A curve fit isn’t the same as a model and there is no apriori reason to be sure a linear fit will continue when the long term data shows that it isn’t actually a linear trend. Climate sensitivity values may in some cases be a “reality check” on models, but I think even some skeptics fall prey to giving them too much credence and forgetting that with feedback loops and cycles that only an eventual validated model could even potentially someday lay claim to perhaps being able to make meaningful predictions. Of course we need to undermine the “precautionary principle” claims by explaining that at this stage we know so little that for all we know our emissions could actually be keeping us from an even more damaging ice age. CO2 emissions shouldn’t be the subject of government regulations until we know more.
Then of course we all know that another issue that can be dealt with at a high level is that even were climate model claims accurate, that doesn’t automatically imply that we should change anything. Attempting change may do more harm than good. The assessment of potential cost/benefits of adapting vs. prevention all suffer from problems of being in a real subject to major difficulties predicting the future as well, and the assessments as to adaptation or prevention differ based on the claimed warming.

“…lab coat made of tax dollars.”

Don’t forget, this is really all about campaign contributions, money, political power, control and grants. Can be all boiled down to money and power, no science is really involved.

From Obama’s perspective he has no reason to engage, he has no reason to be interested in the science or the evidence.
All that matters to Obama and Democrats is weaving tales about Climate Change that can be used to drive and support their political purpose. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan wars all used false pretenses to force our involvement. Climate change is just another false pretense to drive a political agenda while the media stands stupidly by.

Never before have I seen commenters on this site so consistently miss the point. None of this is about climate science. All of it is about POLITICAL science. The true genius of the AGW hucksters, years ago, was in discerning that they could point to something occurring in nature, suggest it was dangerous, and sell people on the idea that they were causing it. The hucksters understood that this would have people running over each other to submit to higher taxation, intensified regulation, and an even more intrusive government, all in exchange for the reassurance that they are virtuous (and those who don’t submit are evil and a threat to all that s good). Or am I just being too cynical?