Challenge to Democrats/Leftists: If you believe climate change is an existential crisis, prove it

Professor Peabody · Mar 9, 2020

NullSpot the Destroyter said: ↑

Frankly, I'm not expecting any serious replies, but let's go at it.

Climate alarmists have been announcing our doom for decades, but now they're hysterically claiming humanity is in an existential crisis with only a decade or two in which to turn things around. They claim to have science on their side while keeping mum about the most inconvenient fact: 1 degree C.

When humans have doubled the atmospheric concentration of CO2 from the 280 ppm it was at in 1750 (the start of the Industrial Revolution) to 560 ppm in 2050, after three centuries, the most that CO2, by itself, can increase temps is 1°C:

The radiative forcing due to doubling CO2 from the pre-industrial 280 ppm is approximately 3.7 Watt per square meter (W/m2). This energy inbalance would eventually result in roughly 1 °C of global warming in the absence of feedbacks. This is easy to calculate and undisputed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_sensitivity#Different_forms_of_climate_sensitivity

Quick review: Without naturally occurring greenhouse gases (CO2, methane, etc.), the Earth's average temp would be 0° F instead of 60°F as it is now.

Other factors, such as the sun, affect climate, but climate itself is not random. It is the long term result of what happens in the atmosphere when the inputs (mostly the sun's energy) are reduced or increased by such things as the Earth's albedo (how reflective the Earth is) and the amount and type of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (water vapor, CO2, methane, etc.).

As to why CO2 is given more attention than methane (which is many times more potent a greenhouse gas), it's because CO2 hangs around in the atmosphere far longer than methane, so its heating is more enduring.

That said (and this is what the alarmists don't like to talk about) CO2's ability to warm an atmosphere is not linear, it's logarithmic as shown in the image below.

And so you get 1 °C of warming just from the CO2 after 300 years.

Does that sound like the seed of an existential crisis? No.

And that's where the alarmists's argument falls apart. In the earliest days of climate alarmism, there were dozens of planet-ending results from increasing CO2, one example being CO2 warming the sea bottom, along with the permafrost, releasing methane that would cause the climate to warm out of control.

None of those disasters are still considered serious threats. So what's left?

Extreme weather and sea level rise.

Yawn.

Neither of those so-called calamities threaten our existence or even our way of life. If they do occur, they'll require human ingenuity to engineer our way out of the problems, and that's all.
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We can prove our beliefs by our committal to it, and in no other way. Any belief that does not command the one who holds it is not a real belief. And it might shock some of us profoundly if we were brought suddenly face to face with our beliefs and forced to test them in the fires of practical living. If you hate Big Oil, give up your car. If you think coal causes global warming, close your account with the electric company. To not do those things make one a hypocrite.

One Mind · Mar 9, 2020

Professor Peabody said: ↑

We can prove our beliefs by our committal to it, and in no other way. Any belief that does not command the one who holds it is not a real belief. And it might shock some of us profoundly if we were brought suddenly face to face with our beliefs and forced to test them in the fires of practical living. If you hate Big Oil, give up your car. If you think coal causes global warming, close your account with the electric company. To not do those things make one a hypocrite.
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We can save humanity by taxing energy so much that hot climates those people there cant afford to have AC and those in cold parts cant have much heat .

This will thin out population and save humanity !

FreshAir · Mar 14, 2020

I trust the Scientists, I am not like Trump and claim to be an expert at everything

most scientists agree on this one

that said, I also know people won't change unless a better option comes along... so we will need to rely on science for that too

FreshAir · Mar 14, 2020

for those of you that do not think man can effect the climate on earth

do you have any objections with people trying to do random things to our ozone to test theories on how to fix this? I mean what harm could they do, man can't affect the climate... can they?

UprightBiped · Mar 15, 2020

FreshAir said: ↑

I trust the Scientists, I am not like Trump and claim to be an expert at everything

most scientists agree on this one

that said, I also know people won't change unless a better option comes along... so we will need to rely on science for that too
Click to expand...

My question to you, sir, is which scientists do you trust? The 32.6 stuffing the green in their pockets? Or the 67.4% who have not declared a "man-made catastrophe"?

no role for consensus in science

Though Cook et al. (2013) reviewed abstracts of 11,944 papers on climate change and concluded that 97.1% of those expressing an opinion supported consensus, the philosophy of science allows no role for head-count.

Aristotle, in his Sophistical Refutations, (c. 350 B.C.E.), identified the argument from consensus as one of the dozen commonest logical fallacies in human discourse.

Al-Haytham, the astronomer and philosopher of science in 11th-century Iraq who is recognized as the father of the scientific method, wrote that “the seeker after truth” – his phrase for the scientist – does not place his faith in any mere consensus, however venerable. Instead, he checks. “The road to the truth,” said al-Haytham, “is long and hard, but that is the road we must follow.”

In 1860 T.H. Huxley said: “The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties: blind faith the one unpardonable sin.”

Albert Einstein, when told that 100 Nazi scientists had published a book rejecting his theory of special relativity, responded that a single paper would have sufficed to refute his hypothesis. His own single paper of 1905 on the electrodynamics of moving objects had demonstrated why Newton’s laws, till then universally accepted as true, incompletely described the motion of celestial objects.

Popper (1934) formalized the scientific method as an iterative algorithm starting with a general problem (GP0), to address which a scientist proposed a falsifiable hypothesis or tentative theory (TT0). Thereupon others would either demonstrate during the error-elimination phase (EE0) that the hypothesis was false, in which event it was rejected, or, more rarely, demonstrate that it was true.

By far the commonest outcome, however, especially in the physical sciences, is that error elimination will fall short of demonstrating the hypothesis but will fail to disprove it, in which event it gains some credibility. The statement of the general problem may then be modified accordingly (GP1), and a new tentative theory (TT1) may later be advanced to address the modified problem; and so on. Pedetemptim, and if necessary ad infinitum, science iteratively converges upon the truth (Fig. 1). Consensus adds no value to this process.

In the scientific method, then, there is no place for mere consensus. A hypothesis that is demonstrated – such as Pythagoras’ theorem – needs no consensus, for it is objectively true. A hypothesis that is disproven needs no consensus, for it is objectively false. A hypothesis that is neither demonstrated nor disproven gains credibility, and not because a dozen or even 12,000 papers endorse it but because – and to the extent that – it has not been demonstrated to be false. Science is not a belief system. A priori, then, head-counts are inappropriate tests of scientific results.

http://joannenova.com.au/2013/07/thats-a-0-3-consensus-not-97/
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What Consensus? Two-thirds of climate studies (8,000) from 1991-2011 take no position on cause of global warming

From the 11,994 papers, 32.6 per cent endorsed AGW, 66.4 per cent stated no position on AGW, 0.7 per cent rejected AGW and in 0.3 per cent of papers, the authors said the cause of global warming was uncertain.

https://junkscience.com/2013/05/wha...1-take-no-position-on-cause-of-global-warming
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CLIMATE REALIST DECLARATION TOPS 1,100 ENDORSERS

http://www.climatescienceinternational.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=78&Itemid=1

http://www.petitionproject.org/

http://www.populartechnology.net/2010/06/nasa-astronauts-skeptical-of-man-made.html?m=1

http://www.populartechnology.net/2010/07/eminent-physicists-skeptical-of-agw.html?m=1

I must preface my remarks by saying that I believe that there has indeed been
climate warming over the past few decades and I believe that human action may be one of the causes. While Climategate may bring into greater question some of
the work underlying climate warming, it decidedly does not disprove it.
Having said that, I must add that Climategate is, in my view, the greatest science scandal in my lifetime. Beyond any scientific implications are the
implications of the behavior of the East Anglia scientists and their
correspondents—suppressing information, denigrating those who don’t agree with them, trying to deny others access to scientific journals,
questioning motives, and conniving to disfellow skeptical colleagues. These
are the earmarks of zealotry. While maybe not illegal, they are most certainly unethical. Civilized people, much less scientists, just don’t do those things—but then, apparently they do.

Some time ago, I published a piece about the double standard in environ-
mental science.1 Springing from experiences in my own specialty (soil
erosion) the main message was that it was much more difficult to publish a skeptical piece or “good news” than a jeremiad. I said that I suspected that environmental zealots, acting in the usual arrogant politically correct guise, tried to suppress skeptics and even viciously discredit them when possible.
But my proof was limited to mainly circumstantial evidence and the actions of a few environmental extremists; and there was no smoking gun to expose a general conspiracy to do these unethical deeds. But with Climategate, there is.

Indeed, Climategate seems to prove most of the points I made in that
essay. I wish to make only five points here:
1. The rush by some climate warmers to dismiss this scandal, claiming
it’s just vernacular conversation (“boys will be boys!”), is bankrupt.
These apologists need to get a grip on reality. This stuff was not taken
out of context: indeed, the context is quite clear. They were wrong and
the climate warming establishment should acknowledge this. And if
they don’t, we have every right to suspect they are in on it too.

2. Was East Anglia targeted by the hackers because they knew this
skullduggery was going on—or did the hackers simply tap into a randoms sampleof widespread skullduggery? If the latter, we truly have something to worry about and it raises the stakes by perhaps orders of magnitude. Is this merely the tip of a dark and dangerous iceberg?

3. Climategate leaves no doubt that at least some zealots connive to excludes skeptical environmental science from refereed scientific journals. Then, the ploy is to invoke democracy (“The overwhelming majority of papers in peer-reviewed journals support...”). Where would this have left Darwin or Einstein?

4. The environmental zealots like to paint skeptics or “deniers” (or
“denialists”) as on the make for money—money generally characterized as coming from, you guessed it, “big corporations.” But even if that’s so, it’s the science that should be on trial, not the funding. What we do know, and what many Greens don’t want the public to know, is that some of
them are riding their own gravy train. Neither funding agencies nor
scientific journals want to hear about environmental successes. They want environmental problems, the bigger, the better. Of course, this means more money for research, more likely publication of one’s papers in scientific journals (bad news is good is good news), and the approbation of like-minded academic colleagues. And with that, one’s career accelerates with lucrative promotions, speaking tours and prestigious awards. As I noted in my aforementioned article, it’s no accident that prestigious journals keep picking the same people to review papers and books and especially to write op-ed pieces. They know what they want and the revelations from
Climategate show us why. To summarize, any academic careerist is well advised to be an environmental zealot. That’s where the rewards are. Skeptics are sidelined as soon as possible. It’s the Greens who are getting the largesse, academic and otherwise, not the skeptics.

5. As we can see from Climategate, climate warmers can do some
dastardly things to the scientific process and to scientific colleagues.
But the most despicable thing they do is to call skeptics “deniers.”
What they are doing, of course, is trying to connect environmental
skeptics with Holocaust deniers. If their science is so solid, why must
they stoop to such measures? And why hasn’t the rest of the climate
warming establishment condemned this and other vilification tactics?

I’m proud to be a skeptic. Skepticism, in my view, is the watchword of good
science. It is the process of challenging, perhaps even if Hegelian, that keeps the scientific enterprise honest and moving forward. The recent
editorial by Donald Kennedy, then editor-in-chief of Science, proclaiming that the climate war was over, that the “warmers”had won and no one else
need apply, is in my view a travesty—and Orwellian.

Any idea in applied science is always open to question. Period

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226495985_If_the_Science_Is_Solid_Why_Stoop
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A trial without a defense
is a sham
Business without competition
is a monopoly
Science without debate
is propaganda

UprightBiped · Mar 15, 2020

NullSpot the Destroyter said: ↑

...
Does that sound like the seed of an existential crisis? No.
...
So what's left?...
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Ran across this today, thought you might be interested.

Climate Money

Now look at this tripe:

Patriotism could be the unlikely answer to solving the climate crisis

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Challenge to Democrats/Leftists: If you believe climate change is an existential crisis, prove it

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Challenge to Democrats/Leftists: If you believe climate change is an existential crisis, prove it

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