Climate Change skeptic

[Pointedstick]

The author makes several points that I find very compelling.

1. We should be wary of betting the farm on predictive models.

2. It makes no sense to only consider the human-caused carbon dioxide emissions if we want a complete picture.

3. The climate has already dramatically changed in the history of the earth, including during human history prior to the industrial revolution before humans supposedly had the ability to alter the climate on the scale that the models say is required.

4. It makes more sense to adapt to change than to try (probably futilely) to stop it.


I am firmly in the "conservation and adaptation" camp. Conserving resources, avoiding pollution, finding ways to make use of waste products, etc are really awesome and things we should absolutely do. But to the extent that something as macro as the climate of the entire world is changing... well, that's simply something we're going to have to adapt to. Because even if we humans are causing global warming, does anybody intelligent really think we have any possible hope of reaching the requisite amount of political unity to actually cut carbon emissions to the level that scientists say would be required to avoid any of the catastrophes they're predicting? Anyone? Anyone?

[Tyler]

One should note that the author is Patrick Moore, the cofounder of Greenpeace who left when he saw that the organization became more about politics than science. I've always admired his brand of environmentalism.

http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Green ... ce+dropout

[Pointedstick]

Your point #3 was the most interesting to me.  If true, it puts the whole issue in a completely different light.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_c ... e200AD.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperatu ... ations.png

[moda0306]

I found this to be a very weak article...

IPCC Conflict of Interest:

Of course there's a conflict of interest.  These are found all throughout government and the private sector where complex information has to get communicated.  And it's no different on the opposition to climate change.

Political Powerhouse:

Of course there's large political implications and fingers in the pot.  Just like on the side of burning fossil fuel, we're talking about huge issues here, on a global scale.

We saved the planet:

I guess I'll have to look more into this.  According to him, the appropriate amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is 4 times higher than we have today.  And that plants are at "starvation levels" today.  That's a pretty bold statement considering no sources are listed, and that no natural self-corrective ecological processes are mentioned.



But to the point that the earth has been getting "steadily warmer" for 300 years... yes, after a short "ice age" (see PS's link) the earth started to do its ebb/flow back to a warmer state.  But you'll notice that there's nothing "steady" about the tail end of it. 

This is pretty common in what I see that "skeptics" do... they take some numbers, over a very convenient time frame (to fit the right part of the graph (this guy is doing it with the "300 year gradual warming" when it's not, and others do it with their "the earth has been getting cooler since 1998" (facepalm))) or location (recently, using "U.S. temps" instead of world temps), and use those to back their claim. 



PS, to your other points:

1. We should be wary of betting the farm on predictive models.

Holy hyperbole.  Who is asking people to "bet the farm?" Solutions range anywhere from modest taxes on carbon emissions to credits for carbon to encouraging activity in alternative fuels (not enough in nuclear... I'd agree with you).  These are HARDLY "betting the farm."  If we're not causing climate change, it could be a slight drag on the overall economy and will likely also reduce other forms of pollution as we reduce coal and oil consumption.

3. The climate has already dramatically changed in the history of the earth, including during human history prior to the industrial revolution before humans supposedly had the ability to alter the climate on the scale that the models say is required.

Yes... over BILLIONS of years, the earth has changed dramatically.  Even in the past few hundred million, in ways that would have decimated society as we know it.  The point is, we've built our entire civilization to not very easily absorb rapidly-rising sea levels.  If modest changes can prevent that, then risk management 101 says we act.

4. It makes more sense to adapt to change than to try (probably futilely) to stop it.

It makes more sense for individuals to adapt.  IMO, it makes more sense for larger governments of the world to try to stop it, as well as a potential adaptation.  But we're probably getting into a mix of moral/functional and national/individual debate that this could get messy.

[Pointedstick]

But to the point that the earth has been getting "steadily warmer" for 300 years... yes, after a short "ice age" (see PS's link) the earth started to do its ebb/flow back to a warmer state.  But you'll notice that there's nothing "steady" about the tail end of it.

This is pretty common in what I see that "skeptics" do... they take some numbers, over a very convenient time frame (to fit the right part of the graph (this guy is doing it with the "300 year gradual warming" when it's not, and others do it with their "the earth has been getting cooler since 1998" (facepalm))) or location (recently, using "U.S. temps" instead of world temps), and use those to back their claim.

1,800 years of data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_c ... e200AD.jpg

12,000 years of data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperatu ... ations.png

PS, to your other points:

1. We should be wary of betting the farm on predictive models.

Holy hyperbole.  Who is asking people to "bet the farm?" Solutions range anywhere from modest taxes on carbon emissions to credits for carbon to encouraging activity in alternative fuels (not enough in nuclear... I'd agree with you).  These are HARDLY "betting the farm."  If we're not causing climate change, it could be a slight drag on the overall economy and will likely also reduce other forms of pollution as we reduce coal and oil consumption.

A modest carbon tax is too late at this point, no? I keep hearing scientists preaching cataclysm if we don't reduce emissions dramatically RIGHT NOW. According to a lot of information I read and hear from others, the longer we wait the more we have to do to prevent catastrophe.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I love solar panels and I think we should all have a shitload of them. But in order to meaningfully reduce carbon emissions by replacing fossil fuel burning with solar PV, wouldn't that have to have happened years ago, or be happening on an absolutely massive scale right now?

The point is, we've built our entire civilization to not very easily absorb rapidly-rising sea levels.  If modest changes can prevent that, then risk management 101 says we act.

It can't? Says who? Certainly change is more costly than not needing to do anything, but that's not what's being proposed: what we're being asked to accept is a radical re-ordering of the global energy infrastructure. The certain pain of that to alleviate a possible (not certain) necessity to reorganize parts of civilization need to be weighed against the potentially positive aspects of global warming (e.g. the potential for Canada and Russia to become breadbaskets) and the possibility that no changes will actually need to be made at all. If you think this is a simple sort of calculation, I really think that's hubris talking.

4. It makes more sense to adapt to change than to try (probably futilely) to stop it.

It makes more sense for individuals to adapt.  IMO, it makes more sense for larger governments of the world to try to stop it, as well as a potential adaptation.  But we're probably getting into a mix of moral/functional and national/individual debate that this could get messy.

It also makes sense to acknowledge what governments are capable of doing, practically-speaking, especially when many of the participants have competing domestic interests and their own interests are directly opposed to other governments' (e.g. Industrializing nations vs developed nations, oil producing nations vs environmentalist nations).

Think about the perverse incentives: the governments of the world are being asked to hurt themselves in the short term by expending resources on something not yet necessary in order to potentially (not certainly) help everybody in the future. Any country that opts out has a competitive advantage in the present without even the certainty that being hurt in the future at all, either because the predicted catastrophe fails to happen, or because they can become free riders due to the other governments' contributions being enough. Where's the giant meta-government capable of whacking the national governments into line? Asking the governments of the world to unite with this common goal is just a utopian fantasy if you ask me.

[MachineGhost]

That's a pretty weak article.  It's all bloviating, no proof.

Anyway, it may be that the 300-year cycle has peaked so we're going into a global cooling period.  How's that for egg being on millions of faces?

It's funny how thoughtleaders are so certain about predicting the future of an entire planet, yet we're advised not to do the same with our investment portfolios.

[Kbg]

I know nothing about this topic really other than the occasional news article. 

So I'm not pro/anti either side. One thing that I've always wondered about that makes me inclined toward not being all that concerned...aren't all of us mammals the only folks who could hack a radical drop in climate temperature? Didn't the earth work OK with it being way warmer than now (you know dinosaurs, hot swamps and all that stuff)? I don't discount rising ocean problems and perhaps some radical changes in weather/local geographical climate change as compared to recent history...but on a global ecosystem scale, does it matter? Seems all reversion to the mean for me. Did we hit an RSI(2)  low for temperature and now we are riding the rebound? :-)

This is a serious question by me.  Crush my thinking if it needs to be crushed.

[Mountaineer]

I know nothing about this topic really other than the occasional news article. 

So I'm not pro/anti either side. One thing that I've always wondered about that makes me inclined toward not being all that concerned...aren't all of us mammals the only folks who could hack a radical drop in climate temperature? Didn't the earth work OK with it being way warmer than now (you know dinosaurs, hot swamps and all that stuff)? I don't discount rising ocean problems and perhaps some radical changes in weather/local geographical climate change as compared to recent history...but on a global ecosystem scale, does it matter? Seems all reversion to the mean for me. Did we hit an RSI(2)  low for temperature and now we are riding the rebound? :-)

This is a serious question by me.  Crush my thinking if it needs to be crushed.

I won't comment on all the heavy duty scientific facts, others are more versed.  I will only report my conclusions (I am a chemical engineer, long career at a Fortune 50 company, trained to be objective after reviewing facts, have been retired for several years).  I have come to the conclusion that: the earth's climate does go through cycles of hotter and colder, the influence of man's activities on that temperature cycling is minimal, most climate scientists have a biased reason to report their findings - either to gain more funding or keeping their jobs, almost all climate change publicity is politically motivated and since most politicians care little about the public welfare and are not spending their own money on the grandiose programs they propose their motives are extremely suspect, the media is in general interested in sensational stories so they can sell their wares to a largely uninformed public.  In short, earth's climate cycles through temperature, sea level, and atmospheric composition changes for natural reasons that are not well understood, man has insignifiant impact on the change via fossil fuel burning or anything else, man's ability to influence the change in a way he desires is minimal and technologically not possible at this time, and we should not waste money chasing a ghost - there are way too many known needs that we do not have sufficient money to fund as it is.  I agree with Pointedstick about smart VOLUNTARY conservation and smart VOLUNTARY use of solar (or any other that is economical) energy; by smart I mean when it is cheaper than the alternatives considering a life cycle, cradle to grave, analysis for the options.

... Mountaineer

[MachineGhost]

I think the burden of proof is on the prophets of doom.  At MINIMUM, I'd need to see evidence of:
1. Correlation of global temps with CO2 concentration

Does this work for you?  It is from ice core samples.  Note that CO2 actually lags the temperature increases because it is not the initiator of global warming, but amplifies it.

[align=center][/align]

2. Correlation of CO2 concentration with CO2 emissions

You do realize there are far more stronger -- but mostly short-lived -- gases by orders of magnitude than CO2, right?  Despite CO2 being a relatively minor player, humans have increased the CO2 emissions in the atmosphere by around 40% in the last 150 years and CO2 has been the major player for the last 35.  The key thing here to understand is that humans do not remove the excess CO2 that's been accumulating into the atmosphere, unlike which occurs with natural CO2.  I don't know about human emissions of the other, stronger gases, but it's likely to be true also.

[align=center][/align]

So I think the real question is whether or not human emissions is leveraging the warming cycle on this 300-year cyclical upswing that the "science is settled" claims does not exist.  There's only a potential "runaway greenhouse effect" so long as the the upswing doesn't reverse.  It may actually be good thing to be warmer ahead of time for the downturn!

It's already hit 80-90F here and it's not even spring yet.  The increased heatwave frequency sucks!!!

[Mountaineer]

It's already hit 80-90F here and it's not even spring yet.  The increased heatwave frequency sucks!!!

And we had snow on the first day of spring in my area - very unusual, usually the grass is green and the trees blooming by now, not this year.  But anecedotal stuff like this is worthless anyway ... other than making for interesting stories.  Send some of that warm air to the east coast, MG.  I'm ready! 

... Mountaineer

[dragoncar]

The beauty of bi Ng human is that we can adapt to climate change by trying to slow or stop it.  Nothing wrong with trying to preserve what you have, right guys?  If it turns out that change in human behavior doesn't really help, so what?  If it turns out the US enters a new age of prosperity and out good tanks, so what?  At least we tried to hedge.

[moda0306]

Jesus...

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/f ... 83720.html

Apparently public officials at the Department of Environmental Protection in Florida aren't even allowed to discuss "global warming, climate change, or sustainability."

Apparently, "anything that is not a true fact" isn't allowed...

Except, of course, for every other crappy inductive reasoning policy prescription argument that both Dems and Repuks will propose in that backwards-ass state.  There are plenty of things that aren't either deductively proven nor near-conclusively inductively proven before we implement them in public policy.  I guess global warming is different because...

[moda0306]

Oh, and to the whole "the 97% consensus is a myth" argument, I'll forward you to this...

http://skepticalscience.com/debunking-c ... enial.html

The Monckton paper takes the point about quantification above to the extreme.  It focuses exclusively on the papers that quantified human-caused global warming, and takes these as a percentage of all 12,000 abstracts captured in the literature search, thus claiming the consensus is not 97%, but rather 0.3%.  The logical flaws in this argument should be obvious, and thus should not have passed through the peer-review process.

Approximately two-thirds of abstracts did not take a position on the causes of global warming, for various reasons (e.g. the causes were simply not relevant to or a key component of their specific research paper).  Thus in order to estimate the consensus on human-caused global warming, it's necessary to focus on the abstracts that actually stated a position on human-caused global warming.

When addressing the consensus regarding humans being responsible for the majority of recent global warming, the same argument holds true for abstracts that do not quantify the human contribution.  We simply can't know their position on the issue - that doesn't mean they endorse or reject the consensus position; they simply don't provide that information, and thus must first be removed before estimating the quantified consensus.

There is definitely some "cooking of the books" going on here.  And in almost every measurable vector, it's the "skeptics" that are showing the most likelihood of arguing in bad faith.  (That, or it's just truly good people believing the the fraudulent "skeptics" more than the "hippies" that they don't respect on other issues)

[WiseOne]

Note that CO2 actually lags the temperature increases because it is not the initiator of global warming, but amplifies it.

[align=center][/align]

2. Correlation of CO2 concentration with CO2 emissions

You do realize there are far more stronger -- but mostly short-lived -- gases by orders of magnitude than CO2, right?  Despite CO2 being a relatively minor player, humans have increased the CO2 emissions in the atmosphere by around 40% in the last 150 years and CO2 has been the major player for the last 35.  The key thing here to understand is that humans do not remove the excess CO2 that's been accumulating into the atmosphere, unlike which occurs with natural CO2.  I don't know about human emissions of the other, stronger gases, but it's likely to be true also.

[align=center][/align]

This is one of the strongest arguments for global warming, and it's why I happen to agree with the majority of scientists on this conclusion.  It is true that correlation does not equal causation, but what you have here is that plus the element of time.  Although it's true that the huge increase in average temperatures over the last century has happened before without human-generated CO2 emissions, it's not exactly a common event.  The chances that it would exactly parallel (and lag slightly behind) an equally dramatic increase in CO2 emissions are vanishingly small.  When you add a large pile of additional evidence, it gets very, very difficult to rationalize away.

And by the way...the increase in temperature extremes, both high and low, and also variations in precipitation, are a predicted result of increased average temperatures.

However - I do agree with PS about what should be, or can be, done about it.  The fact is that we can't simply cancel industrialization, nor can building a few solar panel installations here and there make a meaningful dent in CO2 emissions.  Conservation and "negawatt energy" sounds like an excellent plan to me.  I wonder how many of the people clamoring for cap and trade systems are willing to hang dry their laundry, for example?  There's also the example of the "energy star" dishwashers that I talked about in another thread that can't dry dishes without a finishing rinse that must be manufactured, packaged, shipped etc. 

If more people walked or biked to work, lived in reasonably sized houses, bought less stuff that they don't use or need, and cooked at home instead of buying fast food, a lot of good would be accomplished AND a lot more people would be able to retire early - and just perhaps, invent things that increase efficiency even more.  Now THAT would be a true utopia!

[moda0306]

WiseOne,

I think what you, and PS to a degree, are hitting on, needs to be split into a few different vectors of analysis:

1) What should I do to minimize risk (ie, save a lot of money, work a lot, don't buy property in an obviously climate/shoreline sensitive area, invest in  diversified portfolio, keep my SHTF supply ready).

2) What should I do to be a "good citizen" (ie, don't live in a huge house, don't over-consume, don't drive a big car, don't live far from work, etc)

3) What should the government and governments of the world do to prevent or manage the risk of AGW (ie, reduce carbon emissions, create contingencies for evacuations of costal cities, decide what to do with impoverished coastal country populations, subsidize research of alternative fuels, use of nuclear power, etc)

I think all of these are a good idea.  But personally, when discussing public policy, diving into #2 or #1 as "alternatives" is really comparing apples and oranges.  I would COMPLETELY agree on #1 and #2 as personal decisions worth pursuing.  But when having a public policy debate, personal decisions aren't really a part of the analysis unless we are trying to induce different personal decisions not through mere suggestions, but through taxes, government spending priorities, governmental contingency strategies, treaties to engage in, etc.

[Pointedstick]

This is where a sort of nudge-style government paternalism can come into play. Governments can build incentive structures that encourage people to live in smaller homes, drive less, etc. Unfortunately the problems with this as a policy framework are numerous:

1. Asking government to develop a coherent framework for this is really out of its area of expertise; most such programs have not met with a lot of success so far. This doesn't mean it's impossible, but it certainly seems impossible on the timeline of urgency that I see discussed.

2. Jevons' Paradox accurately captures the reality that un-motivated mandatory efficiency standards merely cause people to consume more and spend the same amount of money. People buy high-SEER AC units and then turn the thermostat down to 68. They get higher MPG cars and drive more.

3. Many obviously good things would hurt the government itself. For example, encouraging people to drive less and own fewer vehicles reduces gas tax collection and sales taxes from the sale of vehicles and mechanics services; encouraging people to buy smaller houses dramatically shrinks the property tax base. Etc.

[Benko]

1.  Not only is agreement by majority of scientists not proof on anything, but time and time again people hang on much longer than is warranted to theories which are false.

2.  There is no model that has been verified i.e.  There is no model that you can start with e.g. temp of 1970 (or any year) and accurately predict the temp for this year.  They all wildly overestimate that temp should be rising.

Those are simple facts.

[moda0306]

1.  Not only is agreement by majority of scientists not proof on anything, but time and time again people hang on much longer than is warranted to theories which are false.

2.  There is no model that has been verified i.e.  There is no model that you can start with e.g. temp of 1970 (or any year) and accurately predict the temp for this year.  They all wildly overestimate that temp should be rising.

Those are simple facts.

1) Agreement by 100% of scientists does not prove anything, either.  Science is a very organized form of inductive reasoning.  Inductive reasoning does not prove things to 100% certainty.  Even gravity is being re-considered from what Newton's equations taught us about it.

Should our government and all individuals proceed as if inductive reasoning is ignored?  I don't even know where the first implications of that are.

I agree that some science is eventually proven to be bunk, and takes a while to do so.  I'm not really seeing that by skeptics.  I'm seeing cherry-picked data and bouncing from one argument to another as they get out-debated on topic by topic.

The question is, in the absence of reasonable scientific data to the contrary (which I haven't yet seen provided), what do we do as a society?  I haven't seen capitalism or morality deductively (or even very well inductively) proven by philosophers or economists... does that mean our government should quit enforcing private property?  Of course not. 

2) If we're talking about models, please list your sources.  You tend to simply make statements about AGW without posting any sort of background source.  Last time, you mentioned "the 97% consensus is a myth."  I linked you to a very organized rebuttal to that assertion just now.  You seem to have left that argument alone for now.... does that mean you are admitting you were wrong in that assertion, or perhaps just potentially wrong?

[Benko]

Moda,

1.  I doubt the 97% (aside from 97% of all NY times staffers, scientists, etc) but it is simpler to point out that either way it is irrelevant.

2.  "If we're talking about models, please list your sources. "

Seriously?  If there were any model that could predict temp with accuracy, there would be no need for all these discussions.  As a skeptic the onus is not on me, the onus is on the chicken littles to prove that any of their models is accurate.

3.  and one of the problems i.e. conformational bias is better described by Jryan on another board:

[quote=jryan]

It used to be that in all scientific studies the theorists, data collectors and data interpreters were all different people.  This was done because it is well known that a statistician, when given an expected answer, has a 75% chance of proving for that expectation.  It's simple conformational bias.

The problem with the fledgling Climate sciences is that we have a bunch of jack-of-all trades people who do all steps of the process personally and have managed to prove their own hypothesis, and groups of scientists who have become tied to these conformation biases in the existing data.

Michael Mann is only one, but makes a great case in point.  Following his career shows that his work is horribly corrupted by confirmation bias.  In the late 90s he made his name by "proving" catastrophic climate chance through his "hockey stick" graph that showed global climate remaining unchanging for the last 2000 years and "disproving" the existence of the global  Medieval Warm period.  Fast forward through all of his subsequent studies and resulting reconstructions and you see, as the scientific "consensus" starts to reconsider their abandoning of the MWP (as historical and scientific data re-proves what was already known), that mysteriously Mann's reconstructions have started showing the MWP again.

You simply can't trust a theorist who does their own statistics.

[/quote]


http://forum.dansimmons.com/ubbthreads/ ... art=7      scroll down to post #159468

[moda0306]

Benko,

If your going to go on and on about confirmation bias, while exhibiting example after example of it yourself, please be open enough to provide us with the very counter-points that you somehow have come to believe are true.  I've listed some sources. There's lots of scientific literature.

And unlike your positions on health/diet, you don't seem willing or able to post sources on these points you bring up.  So on this topic, perhaps you are the one exhibiting the supposed confirmation bias.  We will never know until you help shed some light on some of these rebuttals you've read that have been so convincing.

Here's a good resource and back-and-forth on the climate models:

http://skepticalscience.com/climate-models.htm

If you have some of your own, please provide. 

And really... to the degree we don't understand the technical nature of this topic, we eventually have to rely on scientific consensus.  We assume that we are made up of atoms, but do you really KNOW that?  We assume that you can't travel faster than the speed of light, but how well can you be sure?

What's annoying is when people conveniently pick and choose when they want to align with scientific consensus vs not align with it based on the subjective, tribalist, political biases and will to not have to pay more for gas, live in a smaller home, live closer to work, or consume less.  They then take weak pot-shot arguments that are quickly disassembled by those that know the issue, and then quickly move onto some other pot-shot argument to distract from the fact that they got man-handled on the last three.

Michael Mann is not 97% of the scientific community.  He is not my argument.  Let's stick to the arguments on this rather than explaining confirmation bias for the umpteenth time with no real evidence that it is occurring.  If you disagree with a set of facts or logical process I propose, then feel free to point me out as incorrect.  But please post some sort of opposing info, or at least some source of inkling as to why I'm not correct, before accusing me of confirmation bias, please.

[Mountaineer]

Let me throw a turd in the punchbowl.  Instead of us trying to prove via some logical or illogical argument inductive or otherwise, why don't we just say "why" we conclude whatever our view is on the climate change or non-climate change issue, i.e. what is the material that swayed you to believe one way or the other?  It seems rather silly to try to prove something that likely hundreds, if not thousands, of scientists can't agree upon and can't (as yet) prove.  If it comes down to "I like pink houses better than green ones because it reminds me of my great grandmother", so be it.  Just acknowledge it and move on.  The odds of being swayed via an internet argument are somewhere between zero and zero - my opinion.  Or, take a poll, the results of which will go into the toilet bowl of climate scientology with the rest of the so called facts that really have not as yet proven anything.  Pretty graphs are pretty graphs - so far not predictors or models that have proven accurate about much of anything.

Just a thought, probably a bad one.  Pass me the strainer and I'll clean up the punchbowl. 

... Mountaineer

[Benko]

Moda,

From your link:

"So all models are first tested in a process called Hindcasting. The models used to predict future global warming can accurately map past climate changes. If they get the past right, there is no reason to think their predictions would be wrong"

Because that works so well in the finance sector?

This is not science.  Medical articles look for past trends and are then required to validate them prospectively.  That is basic science. 

And Mountaineer's posts are much more eloquent than mine.

[moda0306]

If you read into the comments, you can see that many were able to be verified prospectively. There's actually a pretty rich scientific debate between a couple guys that gets in a bit deeper than I understand.

Which is why, much like you and everyone else in the world, eventually I rely on scientific consensus.

Obviously, sometimes that bites us in the ass.  However, if we want to play the "what is the riskier option" game, I'll play that all day long on the topic of climate change.

They mention that models will obviously be imperfect.  We're dealing with a topic here that is naturally much, much more difficult to do controlled experiments on, and has other variables involved that are difficult to measure.  This doesn't make it "not science."  Science is simply a very organized form of inductive reasoning.  Modelling around climate change will be a work-in-progress. 

Just like modelling on gravity is showing some discrepancies against the work that Isaac Newton did.

I guess he wasn't a scientist either, since he wasn't working with uber-controlled experiments in a lab throwing baseballs around Jupiter to test its gravitational field.

[moda0306]

If you read into the comments, you can see that many were able to be verified prospectively. There's actually a pretty rich scientific debate between a couple guys that gets in a bit deeper than I understand.

Which is why, much like you and everyone else in the world, eventually I rely on scientific consensus.

Obviously, sometimes that bites us in the ass.  However, if we want to play the "what is the riskier option" game, I'll play that all day long on the topic of climate change.

They mention that models will obviously be imperfect.  We're dealing with a topic here that is naturally much, much more difficult to do controlled experiments on, and has other variables involved that are difficult to measure.  This doesn't make it "not science."  Science is simply a very organized form of inductive reasoning.  Modelling around climate change will be a work-in-progress. 

Just like actual results around gravity are showing some discrepancies against the modelling work that Isaac Newton did.

I guess he wasn't a scientist either, since he wasn't working with uber-controlled experiments in a lab throwing baseballs around Jupiter to test its gravitational field.

[moda0306]

Benko,

I guess I'd ask, if the study of climate isn't real science because it relies on natural experiments and imperfect models, do you consider astronomy a real science?  What about quantum physics, where things are happening at such a small level that we can't observe them efficiently as mere laymen, and have to trust scientific consensus that we can't travel faster than the speed of light?