Jed, the argument from authority approach with regard to climate change doesn't work because there are so many highly educated dissenting voices, so many examples of deficient analysis work in Climatology (check out Climate Audit), and yet seemingly so little interest in improving woefully bad scientific practices amongst climatologists.
No one (with a brain) disputes that we have experienced warming during the 20th century, and most agree that CO2 increases are causing some warming, but there is way too much evidence that chalking it all up to increases in CO2 is wrong. Predictions of several degrees of future temperature rise are based on extrapolations of a temperature increase from 1980-2000 that has since halted, but that rise was similar in size and speed to the 1920-1940's - which was before CO2 took off. The projections of catastrophe are further founded on assumed large positive water vapour feedbacks multiplying the impact of CO2 by 2-8 times that are looking less and less tenable as more data is collected. A rather nice summary of uncertainty in that at: http://judithcurry.com/2011/07/05/the-ipccs-alteration-of-forster-gregorys-model-independent-climate-sensitivity-results/ Amongst the many holes: - CO2 started rising sharply in the mid 40's, yet the world then cooled for 30 years till the mid 70's. - world has not warmed in the last 15 years (how much longer does that trend need to continue before IPCC acknowledges their model predictions are wrong?) - missing tropospheric hot spot that is a central prediction of CAGW climate modelling (in other branches of science failed predictions = failed theory/model, but apparently not so in climatology) - lack of acceleration in sea level rise during last few decades - the rate is basically unchanged for >80 years (since before significant CO2 rise) - temperatures that have varied by 3°C during the current interglacial (holocene) for unknown reasons. - temperatures getting colder as CO2 level rose during last 7000 years of holocene (since holocene climate optimum that was a lot warmer than today) : http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif - unexplained 1100 year periodicity in historical warming (Minoan Warm period, Roman Warm period, Medieval warm period, next one in that series would be ... now, but no, this time it's definitely all CO2. - no explanation as to why 18th century little ice age (basically the coldest period in last 8000 years) occurred. - claims of worse storms, droughts, heat waves, floods etc in disagreement with historical data. - Global Climate Models do not account for very long period ocean and thermo-haline circulation processes that appear to dominate climate as evidenced by the well known 60 year PDO and AMO cycles. - GCM's do not account for noted correlation between sun-spot cycle and temperature. - GCM's not even remotely capable of modelling cloud physics (and quite probably never will be given difficulties of modelling cloud nucleation, and associated convective circulation process on a grid that is fine enough to be useful, turbulence modelling on a mind numbing scale). You cannot hope to get modelling right if you can't accurately model cloud formation, as even a 1% change in cloud cover has more effect than CO2. - GCM's tuned in post-hoc manner by fudge factors like aerosols when the the historical concentration and distribution of aerosols is not known, and even if they were known their actual influence on climate is not known (being tied up with cloud nucleation physics and some really hairy light propagation physics). Exceptionally poor practice that is more augury than science. Most educated people, particularly anyone with a background in STEM find that the more they look into catastrophic CAGW the less convinced they are. In fact you could say that it is a perfect example of a positive feedback system in human terms when the proponents (Climatologists, Activists, Politicians, Corporates involved in carbon trading) of CAGW get ever more power and money for creating and promulgating bigger and badder scare stories. It's naive to think that the IPCC could ever let the message be a balanced one of scientific uncertainty in the face of such powerful and venal motivating factors. On 4 December 2012 12:25, Robert McKay <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, 3 Dec 2012 22:02:33 -0500, Jed Rothwell wrote: > >> I will grant that in some cases, experts are blinded by their own >> professional knowledge and by the bias of the field as a whole. That >> is why many physicists do not believe in cold fusion. But the key >> > > That's pretty much exactly the problem with climatologists- they only > believe in global warming (sorry "climate change") because that's what they > do.. as you say the field as a whole is biased. > > IMO you don't need to know anything about climate science to understand > global warming - it's all about politics and banking (imagine a global > economy underpinned by financial products where the only underlaying > deliverable is itself an intangible book keeping entry). The powers that be > have decided that co2 trading is the way forward and are determined to ram > it down everyone's throats. It doesn't matter if it's a pack of lies or > not, they're already too invested in the idea to do anything else at this > point. > > Rob > >
