[Engineer]

(07-14-2015 01:44 PM)Aenigmarius Wrote:  

I posted that Time cover to echo what Zelcorpion said about political propaganda on climate change, not in an attempt to "prove" anything about what science was predicting in the 70s. (snip)

(Engineer's responses are underlined because nesting quotes properly is a hassle: OK, fair enough. I tend to ignore the political propaganda parts and try to focus on the science. The political issue is much less interesting for reasons I'll get to below)

You didn't address any of my arguments about the lack of reliable, independently verifiable evidence of man-made global warming, or the leap of faith required to extrapolate the existing data into a legitimate "trend" in climate change, or any of the other issues I raised.

(My response: The core of the scientific debate centers around a climate change model and the input data into the model. To paraphrase one of Zel's quotes I agree with 100%: all models are wrong, some are useful. So we have lots of measurements of actual current and past markers with various uncertainties, some good and some bad. The trick is to ask the model to tease out what is man-made and what is natural solar/volcanos/whatever. There is no double-blind alternate earth experiment around to test any hypotheses unfortunately. So we are left with: Build the best models you can. Improve them with better data. Run them on historical data sets to see if early runs duplicate what we've already seen. Improve the models until they are useful. The evidence is there of warming in the long term that begun in the post-industrial age when we started burning fossil fuels. Coincidence or not? Let's find out.)

Instead, you ask what is a "better solution than studying the problem until it's understood and taking rational action." But that presupposes that there is, in fact, a problem.

(My response: No, I presuppose nothing. I consider all rational arguments, including those of my rational critics. "The problem has zero magnitude" would be a great outcome of studying the problem.)

It also presupposes the fact that it is a problem that we can actually do anything about, which suggests a bias towards man-caused climate change. It further presupposes the fact that we should do anything about it if it exists at all.

(My response: You would not believe what we're capable of. For $20B you can build a 1000 km diameter fresnel lens in the Earth-Sun L1 orbit to reduce the solar flux hitting the earth 1%. Whether we should do that is another question. But what we can do is amazing.)

You are arguing that the elephant in the room is pink because somebody who is paid to find pink elephants published a report saying it is a elephant painted pink by Evil, Inc., and we should do something about it. I'm still haven't seen enough legitimate, reliable evidence to convince me that there is an elephant in the room at all, and I don't think you can decide what (if anything) to do about what color it is until you figure that part out first.

(My response: Elephant in the room or not is oversimplifying. Here's a better analogy. You and I live in the same jungle village and every 10 days or so someone goes missing, never to return. We have no idea why. One day someone comes running back saying "an elephant tried to eat me and I barely escaped". I don't believe him, because I've never seen elephants around here and this guy is unreliable anyway. You think it might be possible, because you remember a crazy old legend that the elephant gods ate someone every 25 days. So you tell me maybe the elephant problem is real and increasing and if there's a herd and it's growing our village is threatened. You say it's easy to find out, let's organize a scout party and check. The scout party finds big round footprints. "Still no elephants" I say. Eventually we find them and I am eaten, because I didn't arm myself against "nonexistant" elephants. What to do about them and why they're carnivorous is another issue.

Finally the politics and tax issues. Sorry, but I don't care about either. Politics is usually boring and I pay other high taxes that are easier to reduce. Sorry your carbon taxes are high. I'll focus on accurately quantifying the magnitude of the problem.

I enjoy debating with you guys when I have time. +1's to Zelcorpion and Aenigmarius.