On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 7:36 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > My integrity is not the issue, >
Yes it is, since you made an error in your reading of the Royal Society/National Academy of Sciences paper, and instead of admitting the error you simply ignore the issue even when I repeatedly question you about it. > for someone who states- > *This all falls under "gossipy political speculations about human > motivations", I'm not interested in dragging this stuff into a conversation > about natural science* > Not sure what connection you think there is between this statement of mine and "integrity". Would you respect my integrity more if I made up unfalsifiable fantasy narratives about the nefarious motives of conservatives and global warming deniers to counter your equally unfalsifiable fantasy narratives about the nefarious motives of liberals and environmentalists? > Again, its science when its on your own terms, and it suits your > ideology. > Not at all, as I said to John Clark I treat it as the default position that whenever scientists in a field of natural science express confidence about ANY technical claim in their field, and there doesn't seem to be substantial disagreement among them, then my starting assumption is that they are most likely right about this claim (an assumption I would only be likely to change if I acquired enough knowledge the field to understand the detailed basis for the claims myself and find technical reasons to doubt them, or if I found out that some substantial number of other scientists disputed the claim). This is a blanket view of all natural science claims that has nothing to do with political ideology, for example I have no patience with the view (all too common among those on the left) that GMOs are a dangerous health risk since all the scientific experts I've seen say that extensive study has shown no more health risks from GMOs than from crops created through selective breeding. Anyone who does NOT adopt this blanket view of scientific claims is almost certainly filtering their evaluations of science through their personal ideology, and lacking respect for the importance of detailed technical understanding when evaluating scientific issues. I suspect your understanding of the detailed evidence behind many other scientific claims, like estimates of the age of the universe in cosmology, is just as poor as your understanding of the evidence surrounding global warming, but I imagine you don't put forth fantasy narratives of cosmologists peer-pressuring each other into accepting each other's models and wildly exaggerating the strength of the evidence for their theories, presumably because you have no ideological reason to dispute the idea that the Big Bang happened 13.75 billion years ago. Unless you are equally skeptical about *all* scientific claims whose technical basis you don't understand, you have a clear double standard--mistrust the scientists when their claims conflict with your ideology, but trust them when there is no such ideological conflict. > Your nuclear energy remediation proposal will be violent opposed by your > green chums, so it becomes, effectively, no answer. > Certainly there are plenty of "greens" who oppose nuclear power (and examples like Fukushima show the risks are not to be scoffed at, although they are mainly risks to human health rather than environmental risks), but also plenty of greens who have come around to the view that nuclear power is a lesser evil when compared to fossil fuels, see for example this article that details many leading environmentalists who have become more nuclear-friendly (I suspect the number would be higher if we had thorium reactors, which should be significantly safer): http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/23/AR2009112303966.html Meanwhile, you completely ignored my point about it being well within the range of possibility to get all our energy from solar. > I will prove your prediction correct with pure volition. I read the Nature > realclimate link, article and my take away is its a struggle to try to > figure out where the IPCC predictions went wrong? Was it el nino, heat > sinks in the Pacific, etc. > I'm glad you at least looked at it, but as with the Royal Society/National Academy of Sciences paper, your understanding of what you read seems to be quite poor (perhaps because you read with the attitude of "looking for flaws" rather than just trying to understand what's being argued). No one says the cooling is because of El Niño, but rather because La Niña has replaced El Niño for a while (part of a long-term cycle called 'pacific-decadal oscillation'), and the La Niña stage is thought to be ASSOCIATED WITH more heat being stored in the pacific, not a separate phenomenon that could be construed as a conflicting explanation. From the link at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/12/the-global-temperature-jigsaw/-- "Leading U.S. climatologist Kevin Trenberth has studied this for twenty years and has just published a detailed explanatory article [ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EF000165/full ]. Trenberth emphasizes the role of long-term variations of ENSO, called pacific-decadal oscillation (PDO). Put simply: phases with more El Niño and phases with predominant La Niña conditions (as we've had recently) may persist for up to two decades in the tropical Pacific. The latter brings a somewhat slower warming at the surface of our planet, because more heat is stored deeper in the ocean. A central point here: even if the surface temperature stagnates our planet continues to take up heat. The increasing greenhouse effect leads to a radiation imbalance: we absorb more heat from the sun than we emit back into space. 90% of this heat ends up in the ocean due to the high heat capacity of water." The author also specifically says that when El Niño comes back, replacing La Niña once again, he predicts this will end the pause in global warming: "How important the effect of El Niño is will be revealed at the next decent El Niño event. I have already predicted last year that after the next El Niño a new record in global temperature will be reached again - a forecast that probably will be confirmed or falsified soon." > The point is that your team is fumbling about trying to look what went > wrong > "My team"? Again you show your obsessive need to cast everything into us vs. them, tribalistic terms. Hint: truth about the natural world should not be determined by whether the people that typically take a certain position are on the right "team". 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