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

I look at the tech world (which I know very well) and "experts" are wrong all the time. I can't imagine it being much different in other fields.

I see people here on HN making comments about the economy. Should all of these opinions be ignored because they aren't experts?

Look at the guy that discovered bacteria: The experts of his time shunned him and he died in an insane asylum.

Scientists pretty much lose their career overnight if they have any study or research on non man-made climate change.

How can we really have an honest debate when this kind of behavior is going on?

First, we need to establish that human activity can change the climate. For the sake of argument, let's try rainfall in the Sonora Desert. What we could do is to burrow an underground canal from the Gulf of California into Laguna Salada, and from there to the Salton Sink. This would establish shallow, inland, saltwater seas upwind of the desert, in a very sunny area, as a source of atmospheric humidity. Evaporation would be further encouraged with sea salt manufacturing beds and Salicornia bigelovii plantations.

(It would also displace thousands of people whose homes would now be underwater, but let's handwave that aside for now.)

We then erect solar-powered ionization towers downwind of the new seas, to stimulate cloud formation via charged particles of dust. Those clouds will tend to blow east over the desert and rain out. To extend the rainfall further east, we simply plant dry-tolerant plants--such as sorghum, lucern, and field pea--in the newly wet areas, to recycle moisture back into the air via transpiration.

Results of the experiment will compare weather patterns in Yuma and Mexicali before and after the megaproject.

And then, after spending (optimistically) $20 billion on the subterranean saltwater tunnels, and $100 million on the cloud seeders, we can collect our $10000. Yay!

In comparison to what it would cost to test experimentally a hypothesis that states the entirety of global human economic activity is influencing weather patterns, you will have to spend an amount capable of simulating a portion of the global human economy towards a directed experimental purpose. $10000 isn't even a round-off error.

You would be better off buying up unproductive arid land and leasing it to cattle ranchers as semi-arid grazing land afterward.

As I said, I am not a climatologist myself. I am a bit surprised that tree rings are supposedly not accurate enough to say things about a 150 year interval. I was under the impression tree rings develop on a yearly basis? I suppose there are other factors besides temperature that affect their growth. Then again, for standard derivation as you desire, those factors might be easy to cancel out?

That's not an honest debate.

The reason people don't engage with you has nothing to do with whether you're an expert or not. It's because people who deny climate change often grab a snippet of science, out of context, and that's been given a spin by deniers. Then, rather than learning why that bit is flawed or what the context is they'll just throw it into a discussion and demand that it is explained. And then they'll grab another bit. And another bit. Eventually it's easier to regard this as trolling (which it is - concern trolling) and treat appropriately (by stopping feeding the trolls).

And atmospheric temperature has a simple physical model that relates it to C02 levels. And I use the term "simple" deliberately because whilst the short term fluctuations of climate are indeed vey complex - on geological time we have always seen rising temperatures with rising CO2 and have a simple compelling atmospheric model to explain it.

Without arguing over the resolution of the historical scientific data or how fast global warming will happen - it seems inevitable that with the current CO2 levels it will happen.