Matt Ridley, "The Climate Wars’ Damage to Science"

[Interbane]

What does the consensus say about the oceans impact on climate, Interbane?

Is the consensus a person now?

The impact of oceans on climate is huge.

[ant]

Ant wrote:

Case in point; climate models that predict the current 17 year pause is just that - a pause, but that the globe will continue to warm at an alarming rate in the future.
How can a "it will happen in the future" conclusion ever be falsified?
Is that science?

now read this:

Excusing failed predictions is a staple of astrology; it’s the way pseudoscientists argue. In science, as Karl Popper long ago insisted, if you make predictions and they fail, you don’t just make excuses and insist you’re even more right than before. The Royal Society once used to promise “never to give their opinion, as a body, upon any subject”. Its very motto is “nullius in verba”: take nobody’s word for it. Now it puts out catechisms of what you must believe in. Surely, the handing down of dogmas is for churches, not science academies. Expertise, authority and leadership should count for nothing in science. The great Thomas Henry Huxley put it this way: “The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.” Richard Feynman was even pithier: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2015/0 ... e-science/




We have a whole lot of opinions being blown around by experts but little predictive evidence from climate models to date.
I reject pseudo science and dogma. Both are intuitively easy for me to spot.

[ant]

Climate Change: The Facts (http://www.amazon.com/Climate-Change-Dr ... B00S5L5Y0W) has started out very interesting.

I recommend it.
(Kindle: $9:95)

[ant]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 092955.htm

I wonder how this fits in with traditional climate warming predictions.

[DWill]

The uncertainties of chaotic systems like the weather make me want to retreat to the relative certainty of species extinction, now going at a galloping rate due to our ballooning numbers and voracious appetites. I've always thought that the global warming debate just about completely taking over environmentalism has been unhealthy. You have politicians like Al Gore building their multi-million-dollar homes and buying carbon credits to make everything fair and square with the earth. That's a joke.

[ant]

Weather forecasting (short term) is different from climate (long term) forecasting.
The former is done with more consistency than the latter.

Did you skim the report?
I find it interesting that orbital projections have not been (to my knowledge) factored in climate modeling projections in IPCC reports. At least I dont think they have with any consistency.
The sun has essentially been dismissed as not having any significant bearing on climate change.

Does this mean ice ages are largely determined by orbital deviations?
Was the last little ice age caused by one?

[Robert Tulip]

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2015/0 ... e-science/

Quadrant is an extreme right wing Australian magazine which for many years was funded by the CIA through the Congress for Cultural Freedom as a prime front of the propaganda war against communism. Matt Ridley is one of those duplicitous Tories who are able to sound reasonable and intelligent, but in fact are entirely driven by political interests and have no credibility, and contribute to the ongoing propaganda war in defence of fossil industry as an ossified continuation of the Cold War.

There should be debate about how to address climate change since there is no scientific consensus on that. But if Ridley implies that there is uncertainty that human CO2 emissions are the principal cause of dangerous warming he is a denialist as bad as Holocaust Denialists.

[Robert Tulip]

Now I have read Ridley's article, which is an even more appalling and imbecilic piece of fossil propaganda than I had imagined. I take back my previous comment that he is able to sound reasonable. This article by Ridley is nothing but hysterical malicious nonsense.

For example, Ridley suggests we "rely on a tireless but self-funded investigative journalist: the Canadian Donna Laframboise". How desperate and threadbare can you get? This is the lady who is cheered by fox news for her maliciously stupid implication that people who pursue a higher degree in climate science are incompetent and unqualified.

The Ridleys of this world have an agenda of mendacious distortion, sowing doubt from the tobacco industry playbook in order to support corporate stock prices. The real debate is how we manage climate change, not whether it is happening.

The idea from Ridley that climate change might not be dangerous is as plausible as the argument that tobacco is good for your health. Completely contradicted by all real science and supported only for commercial motives.

[geo]

The current state of climate science is pretty nebulous, I think. We can draw a big inference that our carbon emissions can and do contribute to the greenhouse effect. But, as they say, the devil is in the details.

I was wondering lately about the extreme drought experienced in the U.S. and other areas of the world in 1930s, one of the worst in 300 years, that led to the Dust Bowl and exodus out of the plains states. If this happened today, I'm pretty sure some would try to connect it to anthropogenic emissions. It's easy to draw such correlations, but as we know, correlation doesn't equal causation. The 1930s drought seems to be cyclical event and such droughts happen on a fairly regular basis. I haven't heard of anyone trying to retrofit the facts of the 1930s drought to climate change, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone did.

I'm currently reading Ursula le Guin's 1971 dystopian novel, The Lathe of Heaven, which is set in what was then the future—probably the 1990s in Portland. The world has warmed considerably due to the greenhouse effect. There's no snow anywhere in the world, even Kiliminjaro and the arctic region are completely devoid of snow and ice. And, in Portland, it is literally constantly raining and no one really remembers what a blue sky looks like. I thought this was interesting because it shows a fairly early conception of global warming, which has since changed quite a lot. We know now, for example, that different parts of the world are going to have different levels of warming.

[ant]

Speaking of droughts and similar natural calamities, the IPCC in 2005 predicted that warming would displace 50 million "climate refugees" by 2010.

What year is it?