Socialized Health Care in the USA

[kandrathe]

The part of this discussion that is really disturbing to me is the general irrelevance of expertise. Someone's an economist? They must be qualified to judge the earth sciences, eh? Someone's a physicist? Sure, that must be about the same thing, right? Someone's a known shill with no relevant experience at all? Attack the ideas, not the person! But if someone's a climate scientist, or relies on them for their opinions? Well, the whole discipline must be biased! It's all Al Gore and the climate conspiracy, spinning out junk science!

Ok, so then Tim Ball, a climatologist and known global warming skeptic. Richard Lindzen an atmospheric physicist and a professor of meteorology at MIT. Sallie Baliunas an astrophysicist (who maybe understands things like the sun, and planetary processes). Mark Z. Jacobson an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. OR, Gerd-Rainer Weber... There are many science trained, people who are qualified to question the supposed consensus on climate catastrophe. Now, I'll fast forward here. You will attack them as a biased pro-industry sources. But, it seems to me that one of the problems here is the whole pro- and anti- bias in the first place. How can I trust your sources? They are biased against industry to the detriment of humanity. No one is claiming that the whole discipline is biased, however just as you find some scientists may be swayed by their funding source, so do I (as Pete noted, they do know which side of the bread is buttered).

First, as I explained, looking at the "11 year trend" is specious. If you took random data, and cherry picked your start or end dates, you could find all sorts of "trends" that aren't trends at all, just statistical artifacts. Take a 10 year period, take a 15 year period, whatever, and you end up with more normal results. 11 in particular is poor because of 1998 being a peak year.

Sure, I agree. The short term cooling period was unfortunate in making the claim that CO2 results in warming. Obviously there is something more complicated involved. To understand the data, you need to look at a longer period. But, then, if you choose one convenient to show warming you will find other anomalies due to larger cycles, such as solar radiation variability, distance from the sun, geologic activity, and other climate processes we might not understand very well.

Second, CO2 emissions could have a direct, one to one causal relationship with temperature, and you still wouldn't see perfect correlation. (It doesn't, but that's another issue.) The "11 year trend" might prove that CO2 is not the *only* thing affecting climate variability, but that's a stupid position that nobody has ever held.

It might. And, then there might be something else that would have resulted in an even larger drop in global temperature, but didn't due to atmospheric CO2. But, no one has pointed at the last decade and explained to me why it has been cooler. (although, I suspect it has to due with solar radiation and albedo effects).

Third, if you seriously have any good evidence that CO2 is a "red herring", then publish it. Peer-reviewed journals are where science discussion takes place. Since (of course) you have no such evidence, then you should probably be at least a little hesitant before flat out declaring you know where the science is going to be in "5 or 10 years", especially when that result is suspiciously in line with what you'd like to be true, and completely against the vast majority opinion of climate scientists.

No. No. No. You've got this backwards. Shouldn't science be able to some what conclusively prove to us that what they say is fact before we jump in to spend trillions of dollars and reduce our standard of living resulting in millions of additional human deaths over the next decade? Politically savvy snake oil salesmen have taken us down these roads before resulting in decades of needless regulation and wasted productivity. What makes this time different?

I'll end here by quoting from a recent article by Prof. Lindzen in EcoWorld, <blockquote>"For a much larger group of scientists, the fact that they can make ambiguous or even meaningless statements that can be spun by alarmists, and that the alarming spin leads politicians to increase funding provides little incentive to complain about the spin.

Second, most arguments about global warming boil down to science versus authority. For much of the public, authority will generally win since they do not wish to deal with science. For a basically political movement, as the global warming issue most certainly is, an important task is to coopt the sources of authority. This, the global warming movement has done with great success.

Thus, for over twenty years, the National Academy had a temporary nominating group designed to facilitate the election of environmental activists. The current president of the academy is one of these. The American Association for the Advancement of Science has been headed by James McCarthy and John Holdren in recent years, and these have been public advocates for global warming alarm. Holdren is now President Obama’s nominee for science advisor. There are numerous further examples. How often have we heard a legitimate scientific argument answered by the claim that the alarmist scenario is endorsed by, for example, the American Physical Society (regardless of their lack of expertise in the issue)? How often have you heard innocuous claims by some society or another taken as endorsements of alarm? How often have you heard that any particular argument has been dealt with by realclimate.org (a clear advocacy website designed to assure warming alarmists that the basis for alarm still exists)?

Thirdly, the success with respect to the second item also gives the climate alarm movement control over carrots and sticks – which, in turn, is what makes it expedient for most scientists to go along. Note that the carrots are as important as the sticks, though the sticks matter a great deal when grants, publication and promotion are at stake."</blockquote>