Climate response

response.md

Next we are told that science is impartial. Yet I just saw an article with an climatologist who is pretty well respected Science Academy William Happer and Duane Thresher and Judith Curry saying they had to play their cards close to their vests in regards to their doubts about the models to keep funding and not kill their career. That's not good science and it supports the distrust that many of us have that this may be political and not good science. It certainly makes a case that we aren't crazy for wondering if there is political bias. The article points out that much of the research they do must be funded by govt. Which means politics decides what is researched.

• Judith Curry supports the consensus opinion on climate change.
• William Happer is a physicst who was exposed for taking money to write anti-cliamte science articles: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/08/greenpeace-exposes-sceptics-cast-doubt-climate-science
• Not familiar with Duane Thresher

I think the big difference we have is that you see no reason to question this large number or scientists while some of us feel like scientists have very flawed human motives that do lend themselves to question

Scientists are humans, everyone is human, all humans are flawed. The idea that a whole field of science is corrupted via bad motivations though is sort of an unprecedented concept. When scientists said leaded gasoline was harming the environment, and industry fought against them, it turned out industry was lying motivated by profit. Same for cigarettes can cancer, same for acid rain. The idea that funding motivation is more of a problem for climate scientists than it is for the fossil fuel industry is just absurd. It isn't even a secret that companies like Exxon paid groups like the heritage foundation to write climate change doubt articles for years. We know this happened! It still happens.

For instance, pride. Hansen is a failure if discredited.

I'm not aware of anyone who thinks he is discredited outside the climate-denial blogosphere. Look through his career: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hansen

So are most of these climate change scientists.

most cliamte scientists are discredit?

Next you have govt funding which leads to the very real possibility of politics steering the science.

All science has always been funded, yet spaceships still got to the moon.

You mentioned the old tree ring data not being important. I was there when this all started and it was a big deal then. So imagine how it looks to us now that suddenly it is tossed aside and not important to the science when it used to be pivotal in the theory of global warming. It looks like when it was shown to be weak data that it was tossed aside because it never was good data. Much like the name change to climate change. It looks suspicious.

Tree ring data is important, but it is not the primary reason we know that co2 is warming the earth. There was never any name change, see: https://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-change-global-warming.htm

When I go looking for data from 1990's, I have old stuff that predicted much faster growth in CO2 and much faster temp rises.

I'm sure you could find models from the 1990s that were wrong, but the IPCC report from 1990 that would have been used to drive policy look excellent to me: https://skepticalscience.com/lessons-from-past-climate-predictions-ipcc-far.html

Honestly, I don't know exactly what is going on there, but I am very sure that the graphs u show me that have Hansen nailing it Don't think Hansen had anything to do with those graphs

I find so many articles that say he missed by almost double and yet people like you send me to sites saying he pegged it. You find a lot of articles like that because fossil fuel industry funds people to write those articles constantly.

I also believe that over 100 years that tech is going to naturally change in ways that will handle much of this.

Maybe so, but by then the coastal areas will be flooded already, and for a long time. Co2 doesn't go away fast.

But your answer also admitted the very thing that Scott said (and then I stumbled in and said as well) and that is the model is VERY complex and it seems likely that we don't have it so right that we can make policy based on these models.

Orbital mechanics models are also very complex, yet we land SUVs on mars. Experts are good at their jobs. There are lots of details we don't understand, we don't know exactly what ice sheets will do, but we do know they will melt more, when it gets hotter.

I don't know for sure what systems the planet has hidden in place that we don't know about and whether we have the impact we think we do, but I'm going to try and understand that better.

At this point the impact isn't theoretical, the ice is already gone, the sea is already up. Its happening. It has happened.

You might find this article interesting, this guy was a cliamte skeptic for a long time, and he got a lot of attention because he was a legit Physcisit, obviously smart guy. Funded by the Koch Brothers to do his own reconstruction to see if climate science was wrong: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html

This is way better than dealing with Twitter. I will respond later to clarify a few things and after I look over the Koch link. I love stuff like that. It fits my view that we should be looking at it from that angle.

You can stop following me again. :-) I'll just come back here. I have a github account for my smarthome stuff. Thanks. Didn't know this was here.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-heretic/

I didn't communicate well about Hansen. I was saying he has a lot at stake personally because IF HE WERE found to be mistaken he has a career staked on that. I wasn't saying he was wrong or had been proven wrong. I was just saying he is in that situation where he has a vested interest in not changing his position.

Reading the Happer thing now.

I am not sold on him being a paid shill yet. Consider my view that there is little to no govt funding, partly because of politics and especially the past 8 years. So scientists know any money is coming from oil or coal.

The article says "The physicist was receptive to the commission, and asked to donate his fee to the CO2 Coalition, a group founded this year to “shift the debate from the unjustified criticism of CO2 and fossil fuels”."

So he wasn't doing it to get rich. He believes that the science should be refuted.

I'm not saying he's right or you are wrong in your estimation of him yet, I just don't think this is the slam dunk it is presented as being him taking money to shill for the coal industry. Please bear with me as I try to work through some of this. The problem I have is that on one hand it doesn't look great to be sure. But it is a sting operation that was DESIGNED to not look great and it is being sold as a slam dunk but he didn't plan to take the money, he was going to give it to a group he believed in.

I hate just throwing his work completely out of any consideration because someone set out to get him and in a confusing way appears to have gotten him by their claim, yet Kerry didn't think it was worthy of pursuing (perhaps because the details weren't so damning?) and he wasn't taking the money.

Going back to my mention of my kids earlier. If this guy wasn't pocketing the money, what is his motivation then? He believes climate change science is flawed.

I'll leave him out of it for now. Just saying hes a real scientists in the field who disagrees. So the first step is to marginalize him. But I'd rather see his science disproven than just say he doesn't count.

I'm also very curious about the coastal areas. This is an area j have not researched since I haven't in the past really accepted the models. And don't do any work on this, but I am very curious at what level the sea has to rise to harm humanity.

It seems like a few feet in most of the world wouldn't make much difference. But I'll look into what the models predict and what that is supposed to do.

I finished the Happer piece. It definitely doesn't make him look great. In his defense he wasn't taking the money and he believes what he is writing. No one would take his path unless they believed what they were saying. But his argument is quite extraordinary. I would think that it must be very easy for the community to argue against. I have not seen his work. I'm curious how he ends up saying that CO2 is good for humanity? Ok, I'll leave him out.

I do have strong feelings about your next claim. I know a little about NASA and without boring u with the details, orbital mechanics are nothing like climate models in complexity. We can wind them up and back millions of years to extremely precise accuracy and we have the ability to make the equivalent of huge adjustment in our spacecraft to match them up when we get there. Its a mostly closed system with very few variables compared to the climate. Even climate change science acknowledges that we are trying to model something that is new. Climate change is a giant wrench thrown into a system that has done some pretty extreme things in the past even without us.

I'm going to read the last article now.

Wow, we should have started with your last article first. It is very close to my position all along. Not exact, but really really close.

I haven't gotten to some of them specifically, but I've been arguing with you pretty much from the time we started corresponding that my main point is that climate change skeptics and people who doubt the models are accurate enough (which was Scott Adams point all along and what drew me to this conversation on Twitter to begin with) aren't stupid and treating them as if they are does not help the situation.

This guy says 90% of what has made me skeptical of clmate change in his article. People who doubt have been told numerous ridiculous claims that are supposed to verify climate change and its horrors. But he straight out agrees that many of these alarmist stories are BS. CC scientists told us we would see crazy hurricane seasons. We did not. They told us, see its hot in the USA but they didn't admit it was cool elsewhere. They throw all these numbers around that don't turn out to be true then they act like doubters are the dummies.

This is exactly why climate change needs doubters to sell it to other doubters. He doesn't try to predict a bunch of stuff that we don't think can be modeled and claims it is exact. He's willing to call out the alarmism and try to stick to the basics that might be modeled well, instead of trying to model every possible detail of what might happen due to CO2 increases.

I've said all along in this discussion that I don't really doubt that mankind is adding CO2 and other greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere and warming the planet. I don't believe I have said differently.

What I've said is that the models aren't accurate enough to make policy on. This guy says he has one that is, but it is a much different methodology than previous studies. He also, unlike others, appears to want transparency and welcomes criticism unlike the others.

I have no idea if his science is good, but his willingness to be transparent and unwillingness to make claims he doesn't think the data supports is refreshing. This is what I've been seeking.

Thanks for this. I really feel like it supports a great deal of what I am saying. I want to see his science and the reviews of it. I'm interested to see what the consensus thinks of his work. I have to wonder if he is considered a plus or a minus to the establishment.

If he's right, then doubters were right. The initial methods weren't right. They may have - after adjustments and tweaking - been close, but if they used poor methods to get the right answers, of course people would have questions as they didn't see the math making sense even if the answer was close.

I'm gong to do a lot more reading on this guy. Thanks.