…that Slate refused to publish:
The argument I made was that climate change has benefits as well as costs and that the benefits are likely to be greater than the costs until almost the end of the current century. I maintain that the balance of evidence supports the conclusion that up to a certain level of warming — about 2 degrees Celsius — the benefits of climate change will probably outweigh the costs. Plait admits that there will be benefits, but he assumes that they are smaller than the harm however small the warming and that I am somehow foolish for not sharing his assumption. He gives no source for this claim, which flies in the face of peer-reviewed sources.
Sadly, that’s Phil’s style. His claims are essentially faith-based.
[Update a few minutes later]
Climate moron David Suzuki doesn’t even know what the data sets are.
I always harp on the fact that if a little warming and a little cooling are both claimed to catastrophically bad, it means everyone on Earth was living in a climate utopia regardless of their local climate, which is absurdly medieval religious thinking. Garden of Eden, don’t you know.
Popular Science shut down their comment sections, whining that consensus science shouldn’t be questioned. They were getting hammered in comments and simply couldn’t defend the garbage they were publishing, which was apocalyptic ecclesiastical doctrine that had only a vague surface resemblance to actual science.
PopSci is still on Facebook. Have at ’em!
Rand
So is your position that “The Climate isnt’ changing and anyone who says it is wrong or lying or stupid”
or is your position “The climate is warming but it will be good for humans”
DCG
I’m not rand but it’s not your either or straw man. The climate has been warming at differing rates. It’s indisputable that CO2 is increasing and most likely human activities have contributed, in my view considerably. However, this does not lead to the climate hysteria with predictions that have already been falsified. And the data certainly does not support the oft-touted compute models which are based on empirical assumptions about positive feedback multipliers, not based on simply physics equations.
No.
Rand I guess that leaves
“The climate is warming and it will be bad for humans ”
or
“The climate is cooling”
You only “guess” that because you lack both logic skills and imagination.
Rand
You could always try explaining your position.
dn
I’d say that “Robin Goodfellow” has explained my position pretty well.
The continental US has states whose temperatures vary by 30 F. So which states’ residents are suffering, and which aren’t?
I’m not Rand either, but the way I see it, the climate is always in flux and always has been. There are only two possibilities going forward: It can get warmer, or it can get cooler. The one thing we can be certain about is that it will not stay the same.
Historically, warmer climates have been better for humans. Prolonged cold spells have been associated with famine and disease. Perhaps even war too, at least in the pre-industrial era. I’m not claiming that there’s a straight correlation between climate and war, but it stands to reason that we would expect to see more conflict over increasingly scarce resources.
And there’s no question that more CO2 is better for plants. More plant growth > better crop yields > more food for both people and animals.
Most of the world could survive the large decrease in wheat and grain production that an extended period of global cooling would cause (such as from a Maunder or Dalton minimum), except the Middle East, which imports large amounts of grain from far outside the region. Egypt is likely to be especially hard hit.
The situation is really quite astounding. On the one hand you have climate models which claim to be from-first-principles extensions of the laws of physics on the one hand but in reality are incredibly messy systems which are mostly governed by a handful of empirically derived parameters. Meanwhile, you have temperature and sea level records which nobody on Earth apparently knows how to properly calibrate. The best satellite based sea level records have more variation from instrument to instrument than there is variation in the data, and then the records are merely pegged to harbor tide gauges while still perpetuating the fantasy that the data is still somehow more accurate than the tide gauges, which are not at all very accurate. And the reconstructed temperature records changes from year to year depending on who’s doing it, what method is used, and which parts of the data are thrown away and which other parts are magnified in importance. And land-based temperature records with modern instrumentation are no better. Weather stations are typically poorly sited to measure climate change and are typically subject to urban heat island effects, especially over the latter half of the 20th century when we want the most accurate data.
And every little bit of data from every source is subject to extremely questionable renormalization and adjustment. Adjustments which very rarely are subject to the intense scrutiny they deserve but which often make up the vast majority of the “signal” that is looked for. All of this we are to take on faith and ignore because climate scientists know what they’re doing. Yet we see how much the climate models change from year to year and decade to decade, we see how much even the allegedly perfect climate record changes from year to year, and we see how much the predictions of the climate models diverge from reality as time goes on.
Yet we shouldn’t question. The gods of climate science clearly know what their doing. No, this is not an immature field that should be host to intense debates on the proper way to reconstruct climate records or the fundamentals of climate modeling, this is obviously settled science. Despite all the evidence to the contrary the data is perfect and the models are perfect and you should shut up.
No references?
All Robin has said is that he has a opinion, great! Now maybe he should provide some evidence to support it.
“All Robin has said is that he has a opinion”
No, he has an observation.
Now maybe he should provide some evidence to support it.
Tisk. Without even so much as a “please.” Maybe you should make a case why he should indulge you.
I thought we were having a discussion not a debate. As for references, how about you go first eh?
Besides which, most of these things are well known and widely accepted in the literature, but not much openly debated in terms of calling into question the precision of climate science. It’s thoroughly acknowledged that there is no thoroughly objective calibration for satellite sea level measurements. We have abundant opportunities for significant amount of overlap of observations of sea level from different satellites (especially Jason-1 and Jason-2) and there has not been found a way to fully account for the discrepancies in sea level measurements between them. So what do climate scientists do? They stitch the data together. And yet somehow we’re supposed to believe that this stitched together data retains a high level of accuracy? Worse yet, they run this data through the wringer, by renormalizing it, adding adjustments, pegging it to tide gauges, etc. This data shows different trends than the raw data, yet somehow we are to trust all these adjustments on faith? In truth these problems in satellite observations mean that long term sea level trends (which span several satellite data sets) are only as reliable as tide gauge data, which is not reliable at all.
Similar stories play out when you look at temperature reconstructions and even temperature records. The vast majority of the Earth is covered in water, yet the vast majority of temperature records come from land near urban areas. And the impact of poor siting typically on temperature variation is often much larger than the temperature trends across the lifetime of these stations. And even so the temperature records from these sites are never used in climate studies unmodified, there are always renormalizations and adjustments, though often these adjustments don’t make any sense given the expect adjustments relative to urban heat island effects. Moreover, these adjustments are fundamental to temperature history yet they are very rarely debated. When you look at proxy based temperature reconstructions you see the same old story yet again. Lots of questionably accurate data (e.g. are tree rings measuring temperature or are they also measuring precipitation and so on), chopped up, filtered, renormalized, adjusted, and baked into a delicious and immaculate temperature reconstruction.
In any other scientific discipline the details of these reconstructions, renormalizations, adjustments, and so on would be ripped to shreds by the community. Yet in climate science it’s swept under the rug. Note carefully the famed “hockey stick” paper. That study was based on utterly faulty science. Faulty filtering of data, faulty analysis, the whole works. It’s been shown that the methodology used in that study would produce the expected results even if you feed randomly generated data into it. In short, it’s been debunked. In any other scientific discipline this would have happened loudly and publicly. Look at cosmology, biology, or materials science, when old theories are found to be erroneous it’s a very public matter, and the scientists are proud of their findings. Scientists love to prove each other wrong. Except climate scientists. Theories in climate science are overturned with as little fanfare and with the greatest degree of circumspection possible. No one in climate science has ever put forward an incorrect theory, and yet new, better theories keep coming about.
The fact that any branch of science operates this way is a travesty. The fact that a branch of science that works this way is attempting to have a major impact on the day to day activity of every member of the human race is just outrageous.
I think we should understand the climate, I think we should be careful about the impact of human activity on the Earth in general including the climate. But the current state of climate “science” seems to be hindering our understanding of climate as much as it is elucidating it.
What you overlook is that sea level is a constant. It’s always exactly at sea level. What changes is the planet’s measured diameter at sea level (or the height of Mt. Everest above sea level, etc). That bounces all over the place. ^_^
But yes, the tide gage data shows an annual sea level rise of 0.3 +- 10mm per year, while the satellite data shows that it’s 0.3 +- 90mm per year. The 0.3mm is of course the correct value because it comes from gut instinct.
The modelers themselves have provided all the evidence required, for any who don’t chose to be blind.
What Robin said. 🙂
It’s too bad about Plait. I remember back when he was a force for rationality & sense, working against the astronomy kooks. He used to be a regular read for me.