Physicist offers $10,000 for anyone to scientifically disprove climate change

Has the planet gotten warmer in the last 150 years? Yes.

Does that correlate with increasing CO2 concentration? Yes.

Does that prove the causal link? No.

There are about a million confounding factors that could disprove that causality. I mean there are enough man-made refrigerants in the atmosphere to literally blow a hole in the ozone layer. That's a real, proven, nobody-argues-about-it thing.

But if you look at the wikipedia refrigerants page you can see their Global Warming Potential (GWP). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_refrigerants Many of them are quite high, such that even at tiny concentrations they can have a significant impact.

The wikipedia page on CO2 emissions has this picture, which shows that tropospheric ozone, methane, nitrogen dioxide and the refrigerants combine to have as much impact as CO2 does. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmos...

That to me says that things are pretty complicated. The idea that our understanding of something that's complicated like that MIGHT not be complete isn't unreasonable.

Furthermore a lot of people say "climate change is settled, we need to do something about CO2" and I don't buy that argument. MAYBE climate change is settled, but even if it is there's a lot that can be done without even touching CO2 and all the economic pain and/or non-compliance to agreements that'll happen.

What I mean is that it might well be easier to deal with methane, NO2, and refrigerants than CO2. If it doesn't require the entire world giving up on developed country standards of living in the near future that's going to be a much easier sell. Mandating efficiency doesn't work re: jevons; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox Putting hard limits on emissions in the developed world is doable but nearly impossible in the developing world.

And even if we could get all the countries in the world to agree to hard limits on emissions, it's got to be population based, not history-based (i.e. the developed countries get larger quotas because they're already developed) or else you're basically making the undeveloped world slaves to the developed world. But even if you could somehow get the entire world to agree to such a thing, it's still terrible for one of two reasons:

1. if individuals can sell their quota on the open market fraud will be rampant since verification is impossible

2. if they can't, their governments will do so for them and we'll continue to prop up dictators all around the world

Neither is a very defensible moral position to take.

So while I'm less skeptical of climate change today than I was 10 years ago I am not 100% convinced as of yet (since complex things are complex). And all the "obvious" solutions to the problems even if I were to say "sure, it's a big enough problem we gotta do whatever we can!" end up with neutered, bad or horrible outcomes for the world. Possibly even in a worse way than if climate change continues.

EDIT: The other thing I'll mention is that we already have proven success on the trace gas emissions problem. The ozone hole should eventually close now that the problem has been solved. Rather than attacking energy (which is a multi-trillion dollar industry and affects every person on the planet) perhaps going after other sources would be more fruitful. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WorldOfChange/ozon...

First in maths you have models. Of course some models match reality and some don't, but proven "given" a model means a very specific thing and is extremely rigorous.

Second physics, at least particle physics, has a lot of models these days. The most famous "in use" one is the standard model. It is not based on measurement, but on the assumption that a specific geometric shape determines the laws of physics, along with a number of constants, none of which can be directly measured (and generally, you don't use the "real" ones for calculation because they're somewhat inconvenient). The conclusions of the standard model are valid given those assumptions, just like mathematical theories are. That has good sides and really bad ones. The good, everybody knows. The worst: according to the standard model, gravity shouldn't exist.

You'll find most rigorous theories of exact sciences work like that. We can give a very, very thorough argument why electrical current and magnetism work in perpendicular planes, give exact values for the magnitudes, and you will not find a single measured quantity anywhere in that argument with one exception : the one that determines the units used. But that is an arbitrary constant, different for the metric versus imperial system.

Now I'm not saying there aren't variations on what it means to be proven within these sciences, but you can reasonably say that given the peano axioms and the model used, these conclusions are proven.

No such claim can be made for climate science. The "laws" of climate science are not the result of first principles (because they don't match observed behavior of the atmosphere), but statistical best estimators of observed measurements. This is absolutely not the same standard as used in exact sciences.

This could be a good argument if the actual profits from coal and oil were really going to development of sustainable technologies (or poor people, in case of argument from streptomycin). In fact, that's precisely what the carbon tax proposals try to induce.

But I am not convinced; oil and coal companies fight this tooth and nail.

However, given a theory, you can prove whether or not something is correct in the model described by the theory. So while it can never be conclusively proven whether, say, the standard model matches the real world perfectly, you can most definitely prove that electrons behave in a specific way in a world that behaves like the standard model says it should.

That leaves open the question whether the real world matches the standard model or not, and while very compelling measurements and experiments can be produced, we don't really know. Well, we do know, actually. There's no gravity in the standard model, so it most definitely does not describe our world, which is why the whole string theory research is happening.

But climate science does not have that. It does not have tiny theories with constants that try to find the smallest possible unit and how it behaves. Climate science laws talk about volumes of air, say cubes of 10km on a side, and statistically it will behave like X. But nobody really knows why we got X, except that it "tends" to predict measurements fairly accurately. Why ? We have some idea, like "co2 keeps sunlight from reflecting out", but we don't know why the observed concentrations in the athmosphere don't match what you see in a gas experiment (basically in experiments greenhouse effects stop at ~250-280ppm depending on concentrations of other gases, doesn't happen in the athmosphere obviously). But climate science doesn't even try to explain this, or reduce it to first principles, they just try to model whatever they see.