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Quote of the Day: Climate Science
“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
— Kenneth Watt, Ecologist, Earth Day 1970
Science is settled. All those people talking about global warming are science deniers! Glaciers are coming for us… slowly.
Climate predictions and climate science are in an extremely primitive state. The modeling systems in common use are still ignoring major factors, such as solar activity and cloud formation, and cannot retrodict (predict the past) with accuracy. They often make use of poorly justified correction factors, which tend to always point toward global warming or whatever the cause du jour is.
This is not really a conspiracy, outside of stuff like Climategate (hide the decline, anyone?). All it takes to skew science is to have a lot of clout at the granting agencies. Scientists live and die by grants, so the evidence presented will be interpreted so as to get published and support their next grant proposal.
The way to get around this is to look at the actual papers, and the evidence and methodology presented. While you can do a lot with statistics, people should be able to replicate your results and look over your method. A proper challenge to scientific orthodoxy starts there, like the talented folks posting at WattsUpWithThat or Climate Audit.
Published in Group Writing
One issue is that they only track the metrics that are easily tracked. For example, atmospheric water vapour, which is the most important greenhouse gas, is virtually impossible to track on a global scale over time because it’s distributed so unevenly in the atmosphere and also because it moves around so much with global air circulation. As such, the models simply ignore it.
It’s sorta kinda like telling a cop that you shouldn’t get a speeding ticket because your speedometer is broken. “If I can’t measure my speed, how can I take it into account?”
A quote for a quote, “Who controls the past controls the future.” (George Orwell, 1984). This idea can be applied to the official climate models. The people that control the models (assumptions and feedbacks and inputs and outputs) are the people that control the policy choices. We don’t have honest models, because we don’t have honest people controlling the models. We have people with agendas creating models that support their agendas. To disagree with that, is to be a (pschology) science denier.
Quoted from a recent Quote of the Day:
Along with Socialism, Climate Change seems to never go away.
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Here’s a good example of this practice from Coyote Blog:
Therefore, it stands to reason that we should stop burning efficient-combustion fossil fuels like natural gas and gasoline and instead switch to coal and diesel because those emit way more particulate, and particulate has a cooling effect.
;-)
I have begun to notice how many doomsday predictions include the phrase “if present trends continue.” But present trends rarely continue. Ecosystems include inherent feedback loops that alter future trends. People develop new technologies that alter future trends.
So most of the doomsday predictions we read are based on a faulty premise.
“Between 1960 and 1965, Family x had three children. If present trends continue, this poor family will be burdened with 24 children by the year 2000!”
;-)
We know from historical records that Greenland was inhabited and farmed for centuries during the Middle Ages. Thus, it seems to me that global warming has quite a ways to go before we get to that level–if such should occur. Until the climatistas can explain Greenland’s more temperate climate for that long without recognizing the importance of solar cycles or other non CO2 causes, for example, in their impact on global warming, the alarmism seems overwrought.
When it hits 110 this summer I will try and remember this is an ice age.
Here’s a question: where do you think this comes from? It’s c. 1971.
This was proposed a couple years ago by a “leading climate scientist.” He was not well received by the “scientific community.”
And actually, objectively, this would be the way to cool the earth, per actual quantative data. There was the 1883 eruption of Kratatoa, which did just that. And subsequent experiments with particulate matter from wildfires. It works.
I’ve used a similar line myself, when speaking to someone who was worried about some statistical blip. “Last year at this time your daughter had zero husbands. Now she has one husband. If this trend continues, in another decade she will have 11 husbands!”
From xkcd.
There’s a relative of mine for whom that trendline did carry out. I think in 12 years she was married and divorced 5 times.
Holy Matrimony, Batman!
Pretty sure there was nothing holy about any of it.