Judith Curry says we can’t understand climate without understanding the underlying natural cycle. And we don’t.
It’s insane to be making policy decisions on the basis of our current state of knowledge.
[Update a while later]
“Science journalists are not science advocates, and scientists are not science.”
Yes, scientists are not science. Corollary: There is no such thing as a "science denier." https://t.co/WCPG64bmNu
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) December 30, 2015
I certainly think that there is such a thing as a “science denier”. I think it’s pretty common. We all have biases, and those biases can make it easier to make the wrong decisions on various hot-button scientific issues. Liberals on GMO and nuclear power. Conservatives on whether the planet has warmed in the last century. Liberals on whether such-and-such an extreme weather event was caused or worsened by global warming. Conservatives on global warming as a “hoax”. Liberals on global warming opposition as a conspiracy by Big Oil. Etc. It’s so common as to be no big deal, unless your opponents are the ones doing it.
You can disagree with some scientific result. That’s doesn’t make you a “science denier,” which is a demagogic and meaningless phrase.
“Climate change” as they’re calling it now is unfalsifiable. The Earth’s climate has been changing for billions of years. Some 12,000 years ago, a lot of the northern hemisphere was covered by very thick ice. Something changed and that ice melted – a true case of global warming. What cause the last major ice age to end or, for that matter, to even begin? Somehow, I doubt it was human activity. What cause the Little Ice Age to begin around 1300 AD and to end around 1870? We hear about glaciers melting but that’s nothing new. From the Glacier Bay National Park website’s history page (the National Park Service is hardly a right-wing organization):
Captain George Vancouver had sailed the area in 1794, and created a rough map that showed the bay filled with a single great glacier. Eighty-five years after Vancouver, naturalist/preservationist John Muir had visited the bay by canoe, and found the glacier receding as fast as a mile per year.
So, when John Muir visited the area in 1879, the glaciers were already receding. That was just a few years after the end of the Little Ice Age and there wasn’t an SUV or powerplant in sight.
The legitimate debate is whether human activities are causing additional change in the climate and if so, what to do about it. Since our understanding of the climate’s natural cycles seems pretty thin, it’s difficult to impossible to state with any certainty what change may be caused by human activity.
Humanity has survived much more extreme changes in the climate than the predicted (by models based on poor input data and poor understanding of what’s being modeled) 2 degree C by 2100. Instead of implementing a vastly expensive wealth transfer scheme, perhaps more effort should be spent to actually understand the climate and to study remediation/adaption strategies.
I have noticed that many pro-science AGW advocates think that all warming can be stopped with whatever policies are in favor at the time and that they don’t know there is natural warming taking place. Taxing carbon or reducing standards of living as a form of flagellation, will not have any impact on natural cycles.
For all the talk of being free from religion, the environmental movement uses the evolutionary fear of an uncertain future climate to demand sacrifices to appease a nature god. This is one of the earliest forms of religion and the use of sacrifices was very common. Then they attack religious people as being incapable of engaging in science and being inferior sub humans, while they do not even possess the self awareness of their own magical thinking.
I never get why the people who are upfront about their religious beliefs are more stupid, unenlightened, and less evolved than people who don’t even comprehend they are engaging in a religious movement.