Scott Adams explains why he accepts it, even though it’s probably wrong:
when it comes to pattern recognition, I see the climate science skeptics within the scientific community as being similar to Shy Trump Supporters. The fact that a majority of scientists agree with climate science either means the evidence is one-sided or the social/economic pressures are high. And as we can plainly see, the cost of disagreeing with climate science is unreasonably high if you are a scientist.
While it is true that a scientist can become famous and make a big difference by bucking conventional wisdom and proving a new theory, anything short of total certainty would make that a suicide mission. And climate science doesn’t provide the option of total certainty.
To put it another way, it would be easy for a physicist to buck the majority by showing that her math worked. Math is math. But if your science depends on human judgement to decide which measurements to include and which ones to “tune,” you don’t have that option. Being a rebel theoretical physicist is relatively easy if your numbers add up. But being a rebel climate scientist is just plain stupid. So don’t expect to see many of the latter. Scientists can often be wrong, but rarely are they stupid.
…I accept the consensus of climate science experts when they say that climate science is real and accurate. But I do that to protect my reputation and my income. I have no way to evaluate the work of scientists.
If you ask me how scared I am of climate changes ruining the planet, I have to say it is near the bottom of my worries. If science is right, and the danger is real, we’ll find ways to scrub the atmosphere as needed. We always find ways to avoid slow-moving dangers. And if the risk of climate change isn’t real, I will say I knew it all along because climate science matches all of the criteria for a mass hallucination by experts.
It does indeed.
[Late-evening update]
The Scott Adams post was via Judith Curry, who has related links from other “heretics” (i.e., they “believe” in AGW, but aren’t hysterical about it) Roger Pielke and Matt Ridley:
The truly astonishing thing about all this is how little climate heretics – such as myself, Roger Pielke, and Matt Ridley – actually diverge from the consensus science position: RP Jr. hews strictly to the IPCC consensus; Matt Ridley is on the lukewarm side of the IPCC consensus, and I have stated that the uncertainties are too large to justify high confidence in the consensus statements.
RP Jr and Matt Ridley provide appalling examples of the personal and arguably unethical attacks from other scientists, journalists, elected politicians and others with government appointments.
Scott Adams provides some genuine (and as always, humorous) insights into the psychology behind the dynamics of the climate debate.
As to the question: to be or not to be a climate heretic?
I’m planning a climate heretic blog post shortly after the first of the year. After seeing RP Jr’s title, perhaps I will title it ‘Happy Heretic’ (stay tuned). Here’s to hoping that the Age of Trump will herald the demise of climate change dogma and acceptance of a broader range of perspectives on climate science and our policy options .
I’ll personally be looking forward to it.
I am not scared that human-caused climate change is going to destroy us, but I am quite concerned that all so-called “remedies” for this “consensus science” are relentlessly authoritarian and are designed to collect and preserve sociopolitical power. As far as showing the numbers, well, it’s been shown over and over that the numbers either don’t add up on the AGCC cultists’ side, or where they do add up, it’s usually because the numbers were internally generated by models that recursively generate sympathetic datasets.
When confronted with the deficiencies and fraud in the AGCC community, they just shift tactics and develop new doctrine. It’s absolute madness.
Scott Adams roughly fits the label of lukewarmer.
I roughly fit the label of lukewarmer.
Roughly, I think that CO2 gas in the atmosphere could cause some warming. Or I think that CO2 gas in the atmosphere doesn’t cause any significant cooling. Or I choose to rule out that CO2 causes cooling and I don’t choose to rule out that CO2 could cause a significant amount of warming. A significant amount of warming or cooling means it’s might be possible to measure some amount, for instance a doubling of CO2 concentration might some day be measured to be .5 C -/+ .1 C.
So I don’t think that in the infinite future, a doubling of CO2 would decrease global temperature by something like .5 C -/+ .1 C., whereas I think it possible it might cause this amount of warming
I personally have limit that a doubling of CO2 has upper limit of about
1 C increase in global temperature, or CO2 doubling might warm by near zero amount up to about 1 C and within last 10 years I lowered the upper limit from 2 to 3 C, down to at most 1 C of warming caused by CO2. And I didn’t think 3 C of warming from CO2 was a “problem” that require trillions of wasted dollars to prevent or I think global temperature on Earth at the moment is too cool and I think living on Earth if had average temperature of 20 C rather 15 C would be fine- or far better than global average temperature of 10 C.
Earth average temperature has been warmer than 20 C and cooler than
10 C. And I think Earth at 20 C was better world than when Earth was at 10 C or colder. An Earth with average temperature of 10 C would have huge ice cap in North America.
We are currently in an Ice Box climate, and have been for last few million years and from around 8000 years ago we have downward trend in global temperature. Within last 10,000 years earth has been for centuries of time been about 3 C warmer than the present average temperature and within last 20,000 years we had time periods with average global temperatures being around 10 C [and also lasting centuries]. And during our Ice box climate most of the time has been glacial periods [10 C average temperature- and having vast ice cap covering North America- and sea levels being +100 meters lower than presently].
Earth has never been like Venus and can never become like Venus. Also Earth has never been planet completely frozen- snowball Earth is bunk. And Venus has never been like Earth. Nor has Mars ever been like Earth, nor can it be transformed into being like Earth.
A major factor of involved with glacier and interglacial periods is probably related to Earth orbital changes and probably nothing to do with global temperature changes caused by CO2 concentration.
But roughly I agree with Scott Adams- basically we don’t know exactly what causes climate change. But before we went to the Moon, we didn’t know an impactor probably killed the dinosaurs and we really had accepted global plate tectonic. And so it might take a while to get things understood better- science is a slow process.
“And so it might take a while to get things understood better- science is a slow process.”
The problem being that political activism is a process that *requires* fear of what is happening *right*now*, which requires the possibility of fast action by the climate, requiring faster action by politicians, requiring tyranny to move people and resources at politically useful high speeds. Thus, the panic mongers in the AGW movement have no more use for you than for the rest of us.
You simply cannot expect the EPA to generate enough fear of being drowned in mine wastes in enough places to coerce enough communities into accepting the funding to finance a new water supply. A water supply controlled, of course, by the EPA. The Colorado event simply cannot be replicated anything like often enough for political control, so it must be fear of something happening worldwide.
Adams hits things fairly squarely; if it becomes a big problem, we can sic some remediation technology on it; we’re adaptable critters. If it is a small problem, we can manage the changes as we go rather than slow the world economy to a crawl to try and slam on the AGW breaks; that assumes that the plans would actually work and not have so many loopholes and free-riders (China, India) sucking off any effectiveness.
It is especially evident that they frame the problem as having only one solution – abandoning our sinful ways or we all either die of heat or drown under the rising seas.
The existence of Phoenix says we can’t all die of heat, and the predicted sea level rise is slow and minor.
In fact, anyone here could trivially design a system of pumps to drop the sea level below its current location just by pumping water onto land, especially in places where we can let it freeze miles thick to push the problem off to people who won’t be around for another 10,000 years.
The power required is about the same as the output of new coal plants China will build in a three year period.
But that would solve the problem, moving the focus, and all the funding, from hippy academic scaremongers over to engineers in hard hats, and that would be a disaster for the scaremongers. They don’t want solutions. They need the dire threat of an imaginary apocalypse because what they want is power and control.
“we all either die of heat or drown under the rising seas.”
Shortly after An Inconvenient Truth came out, Al Gore bought a $4 million condo in San Francisco within walking distance of the ocean. Even Al Gore doesn’t believe Al Gore.
Did he just say that most climate scientists are dishonest, corrupt bastards who say what they do to conform to the herd and keep their jobs?
Well I do have the education and training to know what is going on. I even personally collected some ( a very small part) of the data that has gone into the climate record. IMO if we can measure the average surface temperature of the planet or any significant region to +/- 1 deg C we are doing very well indeed. Likewise the historical ocean temperatures before Argo and I’d be a LOT happier about Argo if the data massaging/quality control wasn’t in the hands of those with an agenda. Before Argo, canvas vs wooden buckets vs cooling water intake temperature anyone?
No we don’t know what causes “climate change” but 20,000 years ago SOMETHING gave the land/ocean/atmosphere system a mighty whack and we’re seeing the slowly damping oscillations in the physical variables we can measure as we slide back into the next ice age. The ice will be back soon enough.
I guess the Hockey Stick had an influence on me.
I watched the PBS documentary on the Hockey Stick and omigosh, the climate had been just chillin’ for over a thousand years and then, zoom, the temperature starts climbing in the 20 century like one of those spectacular airshow demonstrations of the Boeing 787.
How can you dispute that? One way or another, we are on the way to getting cooked.
And then this Steve McIntyre guy shows up. And as a matter of fact, he is not a Climate Scientist ™, but he is the guy who used his statistics knowledge to call the bluff of BreX, a high-flying mining company that apparently was “salting” mine samples and fooling investors. Again, I am relying on knowledge outside my immediate expertise, but I do know what a Principal Components analysis is.
The inference is that the straight stick part of the hockey stick is just one example out of a bin of such sticks, one of them being straight and others being quite crooked or wavy indeed. And then the blade of the hockey stick was from entirely different data with different statistical properties and it was just pasted on.
And then there are those Climate Gate e-mails. An Electrical Engineer colleague, a person with conservative leanings, shoots guns and hunts, but fancies himself on the right side of environmentalism gave me this “nothing to see there, move along” face when the topic came up.
OK, maybe there wasn’t any blatant wrongdoing revealed, and maybe the Volkswagen engineers who rigged the emissions control algorithm of their diesel car didn’t break any laws — has this ever gone to court, and does a strict reading of the statute explicitly forbid their “hack”?
But there is such a ‘tude on display — are all scientists such, what is the word that I won’t use because Rand’s fine place should stay safe-for-work and family friendly?
And then there is the principle of how the defenders of Climate Change start hyperventilating and name-calling in response to any questioning or criticism. I get this feeling if the people act like the faculty in a “soft science” discipline, the underlying science is also “soft.”
Finally, there is my experience with a technique for measuring the energy efficiency of my house. I read this in a government publication — you measure the indoor humidity, the outdoor humidity, run a dehumidifier to keep the indoor humidity constant, and the amount of water you empty from the bucket tells you how much air is leaking into your house.
Never could get that method to work. Leaving aside that a blower door test deliberately forces a high level of infiltration to control for the effect that natural air infiltration is highly variable with wind conditions, there are large reservoirs of moisture in the building materials making up your house such as cement, wood, and gypsum wallboard.
Not only that, I observed that the house got less humid when it cooled off at night and got more humid (in terms of dewpoint temperature calculated from tables) when the sun warmed the house. This is Clothes Drying 101 — heating up the house drives moisture out of its structure, and cooling it allows it to sop up moisture. Could never control enough variables to make the humidity method in any way reliable to measure house energy efficiency — given sources and sinks such as oceans and terrestrial plants and soils that are large in relation to the atmosphere, and given the large natural flows back and forth, how do you control for all of that? Same for temperature variation in relation to ocean currents.