[Vision2020] Scientific Consensus: Global Warming: Skepticism & Replicatability

[Paul Rumelhart]

Ted, it's all a matter of degree.  I'll make a statement that will make 
your day...  Humans are helping the Earth grow warmer and are 
contributing to global warming.  If we've burned one liter of gas that 
was heretofore underground and out of the carbon cycle, then that has to 
be true.

I'm still skeptical that we should be panicking about it.  If the threat 
is dire and obvious and imminent, then let's quit dancing around the 
issue and call in the troops and start making power plays that will make 
our founding fathers roll over in their graves.  But that's not what I'm 
hearing.  "Something our grandchildren will have to deal with" seems to 
be another way to say "our worst predictions could end up that way if 
nobody does anything about it for the next century and our models are 
correct".  Fifty years from now, the bastards that are in charge of the 
oil companies will have started becoming some future generations oil 
supply themselves.  Technology will have changed greatly, and who knows 
what the technological landscape will look like then.  Will oil be the 
major source of power then?  Maybe, but I doubt it will be as large a 
chunk of the pie as it is now.  There was movement in this direction 
before the global warming scare.  It's a consequence of the finite oil 
supply.

When I'm talking about money for crowing about it, I'm not talking about 
back alley deals where the green movement is paying scientists to spin 
for them.  I'm talking about which subjects get funding and what 
subjects sell well in Barnes and Noble right now.

And yes, I'm still skeptical about the accuracy of these predictive 
computer models.  I deal with computers and databases on a daily basis, 
so as a layman I feel the right to have somewhat of an opinion on this.  
It's a limitation of the data.  That's why our best computer models do 
only a little better in predicting the weather a few days out than the 
"just assume the weather will be the same as yesterday" model.  To get a 
highly accurate model, you would have to factor in the shape of the 
terrain, the exact precipitation over a wide area (not just at the 
airport) over time, the vegetation over the area because it affects 
evaporation rates and ground temperature, the temperature of large 
bodies of water, the temperature and course of currents in the ocean, 
the composition of the upper atmosphere over any particular point on the 
ground, the exact amount of cloud cover at any given time, measurements 
of the albedo of the ground as it changes over time due to 
precipitation, not to mention the affects of such man-made things as 
asphalt, irrigation of crops, burning of fields, raising of dust due to 
construction, and who knows what else.  Then you'd have to come up with 
a representation that would show you over a wide area just what the 
temperatures will be and how they would change throughout the day.  Even 
with all that, you have processes that are fundamentally chaotic at the 
core of your predictions.  The exact way that clouds change over time 
will affect the result.  How do you predict what a cloud will look like 
an hour from now?  I think that the computer models for global warming 
would have the same problem.  We can't even predict how our Sun behaves 
with that kind of accuracy, which would surely affect the model, and 
that's as close to straight physics as you can get.  I don't think this 
is going to get me money from the oil companies, alas.  They need the 
exact same thing the global warming alarmists would need - a highly 
accurate predictive model.  Just one that proves what they want.

However, I'm still behind getting rid of our dependence upon oil for 
reasons that do affect us right now.  Such as pollution, political 
conflict, and the dwindling of the resource.

Paul

P.S.  What do you call the people that think that global warming will 
occur?  "Alarmists" sounds too touchy, but "proponents" or "advocates" 
sounds too much like they actually want our seas to boil.  "Warners" is 
bad grammar and probably infringes on a trademark.

Ted Moffett wrote:
> On 10/21/07, *Paul Rumelhart* <godshatter at yahoo.com 
> <mailto:godshatter at yahoo.com>> wrote:
>  
>
>     Or could it be that it's not that bad - but there is a lot of money in
>     crowing about it?  We've been over this ground before, but our
>     biosphere
>     is a complicated set of interacting variables that I don't think
>     we can
>     model that precisely.  
>
>  
> You keep repeating this assessment, in one way or another, that the 
> "complicated set of interacting variables" results in too much 
> uncertainty, to model the climate precisely enough, for the scientific 
> consensus predictions among climate scientists on global warming, 
> caused by human emissions, to be reliable.  You must understand 
> climate science, and the modeling being used by climate scientists, 
> better than these scientists.  Or have documentation of money changing 
> hands to fraudulently present misleading scientific findings in 
> numerous peer reviewed journals in hundreds of published papers:
>  
> http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686#ref9
>  
> I would dismiss your statements as playing devils advocate for 
> amusement, or the rantings of someone at the bar after too many 
> drinks, but you are obviously someone of high intelligence, who 
> repeats over and over this objection to human induced global warming 
> predictions made by hundreds of climate scientists.
>  
> You might be right!  If the tobacco companies could pay doctors to 
> publicly state misinformation about the medical risks of tobacco, it 
> is possible scientists are being payed to publish false warnings about 
> human induced global warming.  Of course this conspiracy theory must 
> address the considerable financial motivation to dismiss human induced 
> global warming, given the impacts addressing this problem will have on 
> some rather powerful interests, such as Exxon/Mobil, recently earning 
> the status of the most profitable corporation on the planet.
>  
> Given you understand the daunting uncertainties in modeling climate 
> science better than the National Academy of Sciences, the Union of 
> Concerned Scientists, the American Meteorological Society, the 
> Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, The American Geophysical 
> Union, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, and 
> other organizations, I suggest you inform these organizations of your 
> superior understanding of the uncertainties involved in climate 
> science, and expose the back room financial corruption that is 
> motivating all these organizations to publicly state that human 
> induced global warming is a serious problem based on a scientific 
> understanding.
>  
> Consider the grant(s) you could obtain from Exxon/Mobil and 
> other entities with great financial resources, who most decidedly have 
> a financial stake in dismissing the warnings about global warming 
> coming from the scientific community, if your claims, both about the 
> uncertainties on climate science predictions, that are being ignored 
> by climate scientists, as you imply, and the financial corruption 
> involved in motivating hundreds of scientists to publish hundreds of 
> falsified or fabricated papers, in peer reviewed journals, could be 
> substantiated? 
>  
> You'd be on the national news in a New York Minute!
>  
> Ted Moffett
>