On Sun, Aug 24, 2014 at 12:15 AM, David Roberson <dlrober...@aol.com> wrote:
This is exactly why so many question the science. A good scientist should > remain skeptical under these conditions and clearly the science is not > settled as some seem to believe. > One doesn't need a fully worked out science to feel grave concern for the world we're leaving our grandchildren. All that is needed is to pay attention to the few things we do know, and to have a reasonable sense that these things could feed back into a dynamic system with unwanted consequences. We know, for instance, that CO2 has increased dramatically over the last few hundred years: http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/5koomey.png We know as well that CH4 has similarly increased: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/features/200409_methane/core2.gif Perhaps some will be willing to question the attribution of these spikes to human activity. Personally, I would feel a little dirty trying to do so. What does CO2 do to the climate? Does it cause global temperatures to increase? (Include, here, as well, any other number of industrial byproducts that obviously go back to humans.) The scientists studying the topic generally think so. The temperature does not seem to increase monotonically. It clearly cannot increase without periodic behavior. But the average of the temperature appears to increase over a long enough window. This is what the people who have devoted years of their life studying the topic are trying to tell us. Will there be some huge compensating event that will shift the climate in an opposite gear? Perhaps. I know that the tundra in the arctic regions is thawing, and that there is a lot of methane that will be release as a consequence, which suggests that the opposite will occur -- that there's a risk that change towards higher temperatures could be shifted into a higher gear. It's a risk, in the sense that it is something whose consequences are not fully clear should it come to pass. But saying it's a "risk" isn't the same as saying it's a negligible risk. We can attack the climate scientists as being overconfident and their work as guesswork. In some ways their predicament is similar to that of physics at the turn of the last century. The physicists got some things wrong. But they got a lot of things right as well; enough to build a nuclear bomb and thermonuclear weapons. They did the messy, hard work of sorting through some very difficult-to-interpret data, and using what they learned they pulled these things out of thin air. They foresaw these technological developments years before they were actually created. Climate scientists are working with a similarly messy set of data and are trying to make educated estimates about where things are going. They will no doubt get some important things wrong. But I'm putting my bet on them getting the most important stuff right. Calling out some of the people involved in climate science who have fudged numbers as representative of all of them feels a bit disingenuous to me. Because some were guilty of doing this does not impugn the entire lot. There's no reason to assume that the majority of climate scientists are acting with anything but integrity, just as there's no reason to assume that the majority of electrical engineers are acting with anything but integrity. (The same cannot be said, unfortunately, for politicians.) We feel free to question a lot of physics in this forum in light of their rejection of LENR experimental, as well as some obvious excesses by physicists who have ventured into some pretty shaky territory with their off-the-wall thought experiments. The physicists who argue vocally against LENR are not behaving as scientists, but rather as politicians. This much is obvious to us and eventually will be to the general public, so we go to town with them. But anyone who has read a few experimental papers from a physics journal in the last few years will come away with the impression that those who focus on what they know, as surely the majority of physicists do, could not be on more solid ground. My sense is that the majority of climate scientists are on similarly solid ground. Their consensus view is that human activity is leading to changes in the climate, and that some of these changes could make life more difficult, not necessarily for us, but for people several generations out, and they have concrete, well-researched data to back up these conclusions. Count me as one who is listening attentively to what they have to say. Eric
