Climate Change Authority Admits Mistake

> If you are drawing the conclusion that there isn't evidence for AGW you are either denying evidence or ignorant of it.

You know what I'm waiting for? "The average temperature and standard deviation of these 50 regions are X and Y. We expect them to increase by A and B over the next five years. If that didn't happen in at least 35 regions, that would cast doubt on our model." I'm looking for falsifiable claims, and not seeing any. This instills doubt.

As for what I think after looking at most of the mainstream accessible things on climate? The Earth seems to be getting slowly warmer, that's been happening since before the Industrial Revolution, and probably isn't a bad thing. Pollution is a bad thing, but not because it's going to bring on catastrophic amounts of global warming.

> This is _all you have_.

No. The burden of proof is on the people who are making the claims of catastrophe and calls for trillions of dollars. The argument is not settled, and the burden is on them. The general culture of "global warming is a big deal, so we need to sell it any way possible" is a bad thing.

> Classic political/conversational trick. "Btw I am actually a member of group _____, so I can say with authority." It's bullshit, of course. No one cares if you are a conservationist, and it doesn't affect your correctness in any way.

It does matter. Three reasons:

1. I believe there's local solutions to improve Earth's ecosystem, including managing nitrogen cycles, precipitation cycles, reforesting, irrigating, and increasing soil quality, and the (relatively small) amounts of warming can be managed that way.

2. Improving local ecosystems seems to give a much better bang for your buck than some set of global regulations managed by bureaucracy.

3. I wanted to preemptively let you know that I wasn't on Big Oil's payroll, or something like that.

Environment - good thing. Improving the environment - good thing. Catastrophic amounts of global warming? Unproven at best, strongly looking like false.

The overall theory becomes less believable with each "isolated incident." You can dismiss one or two, I guess, but eventually you have to wonder how many more isolated incidents there are going to be.

You couldn't have made up a more alarming factoid if you tried. I'm a skeptic (not a "denier"), but when I read this particular prediction I was alarmed. 2035? That's within most peoples' lifetime. 100s of millions of people? Yikes!

After a minute or two of thinking about it, I concluded that it sounds pretty unlikely and they probably either don't really know how to get from current data to melting glaciers and were merely guessing, or they were lying, or they were bumbling.

In general I don't worry about global warming. I believe there is some. I believe humans contribute to some of it. I believe that the scientists and politicians understand almost every little bit of detailed data that they have (isolated incidents notwithstanding). And I believe that their ability to effectively predict broad results based on that data is no better than Popular Mechanics back in 1940 predicting that we'd all have flying cars in 2000 (and where's mine?).

No one is claiming that truth is decided by a vote among scientists, and I don't see what's gained by pretending that anyone is. What is sometimes claimed (and a good thing too, because I think it's true) is that when the great majority of experts in a field agree about something then they are likely (though of course not certain) to be right.

The Hadley emails do not in fact show that the consensus on climate change was the result of "derailing the literature", whatever exactly that is supposed to mean. And this glacier thing looks to me much more like a confluence of cockups than a deliberate attempt to mislead anyone.

Everyone should be critical about everything. That applies not only to the claim that humans are causing climate change, but also to the claim that we are not. It seems to me that the former claim wins easily in (1) plausibility on the grounds of basic physics, (2) weight of scientific evidence (so far as I or any other layman can tell), and (3) historical honesty/dishonesty of proponents.

Are you suggesting that AGW needs to be "proved" whereas not-AGW does not? If so, why?

The theory of AGW is based on climate modelling. Climate modelling is a brand new science with a very short heritage and very little experimental verification. It is silly to say that climate modelling is derived from "accepted principles", as if it were borne from first principles.

All modern climate "models" are horrible hacks. All contain one or more empirically determined "fudge factors". All gloss over numerous critical important elements of climate dynamics (such as clouds) because they are too difficult to model currently, or we lack understanding of their mechanisms.

The idea that anyone anywhere on Earth has some pristine from-first-principles climate model that you can input data into, turn some crank and spit out data on the climate of the future with any degree of certainty is just plain wrong. Nobody has an accurate model of climate. The AGW proponents have been claiming that they have created accurate climate models (to a degree), but the evidence to back that up is extremely thin. And, what's more, we've discovered recently that the evidence is even thinner than we thought it was.

This is why people object so much to the AGW doomsayers, because the evidence is very much lacking. At best, at best, there's a tiny window of a few decades where some models of climate show a similar trend in global average temperature to the actual trend. And on this tiniest thread of "evidence" so the entire catastrophic AGW theory and all of its proscriptives on human behavior and industry hangs.

If you know that the earth has been warming since the end of the little ice age, it is also a plausible conclusion that warming would have occurred in the absence of humans.

To differentiate between your plausibility argument and mine, you need vastly more than "simple physics".