I never understood why "climate skeptics" don't see past this glaringly obvious fact: almost every time there is some "rebuttal" against climate change, the source comes back to a conservative think tank or oil company. Hello??? It's so frustrating.
Saying something is biased might be a fallacy in a debate, but not in statistics. In a complex topic, where the data is fuzzy and misrepresentation is easy to do and harder to detect, you must consider biases in your sources.
An alien can look at this "debate" and make a rational decision without even knowing what the debate is about. The world's scientists study X and overwhelmingly agree: X is going to wreak havoc on the world within a few decades. In response, the humans who make extraordinary amounts of money off of X (and won't be alive in a few decades), pay large sums of money to a few people who say: X isn't that bad.
So an alien examines this situation and thinks: "Hmm... should I believe the overwhelming majority of rationalists, or the few people with financial incentives to be contrarians?"
The alien concludes: "Since there are two sides to the debate, that means each side is exactly 50% likely to be right. The answer must be unknowable, and therefore they shouldn't make any decision on it and just maintain the status quo (making the contrarians the victors)." Just kidding. The alien says, "Wow, if this species is stumped on this one, I'll just come back later and harvest their newly melted water and filter all their corpses out."
I'm certainly convinced at this point that climate change is a real thing that we should be concerned about, but that's only because I have (to the best of my ability as a cs person) critically examined the position taken by the climate scientists.
no one is immune to bias and misaligned incentives, especially on contentious political issues, and especially in fields where your entire job depends on government funding. in general, I am quite skeptical of academics.
Maybe, but if the alien wants water, the easier path is to just go to Europa, which has more water than Earth, plus a lower gravity well. We have no way of stopping them from harvesting resources from anywhere in this star system.
This is not an accurate characterization of the debate. "The world's scientists" are in fact a small cadre of self-described climatologists whose academic careers depend on this being a real issue.
If you want to be skeptical of the skeptics, fine. We all should be. But the notion that the bias is one-sided is silly.
I never understood why "climate change" advocates don't see past this glaringly obvious fact: almost every time there is some action advocated to "stop climate change", the source comes back to some progressive group. They are always advocating some pet progressive agenda like mass transit, human population reduction, or the reduction of living standards by forcing energy use reductions. Hello??? It's so frustrating.
We need to find ways to reduce CO2 emissions that will improve the lives of people instead of making them worse. How about massive R&D into nuclear power to make it safer, education about radiation so that people are not so irrationally afraid of it, fusion power research, a carbon tax and research into how to remove CO2 from the atmosphere so that, if we can get cheaper power, we can use it to fix the problem. The Tesla Roadster and the Model S is how you get people to switch to electric cars, not at huge gas tax (they tried that in Europe, btw).
> I never understood why "climate change" advocates don't see past this glaringly obvious fact: almost every time there is some action advocated to "stop climate change", the source comes back to some progressive group. They are always advocating some pet progressive agenda like mass transit, human population reduction, or the reduction of living standards by forcing energy use reductions. Hello??? It's so frustrating.
That's not quite true - there are plenty of non-partisan and even conservative groups that accept climate change. For example, the US military and the Department of Defense: not exactly a progressive think tank. Yet they accept the reality of the situation, since they are pragmatic and actually have to deal directly with the consequences. They study how climate change affects world stability and combat and are actively preparing for it. Many oil companies have finally admitted to the facts and tip toe around the issue for PR safety. Even Trump is building sea walls around his vulnerable properties while milking the political benefits from denialism.
As for your second paragraph, yes, I agree, let's focus on the implementation. There's a lot of imperfect solutions that we need to sort through. I just wish we could already all be at that stage.
> Certainly not the CEI's (Competitive Enterprise Institute) who distributed your figure.
The CEI is only one of many places that "distribute" this figure. As you can see from the lower left of the figure, it was actually made by John Christy, a climate scientists who showed it in testimony before the US House of Representatives in 2015. A good discussion of the chart and what it means is given in the Judith Curry article I linked to in another post upthread.
Notice that all the graphs in the previous charts have that weird step where warming stops for while around 2005 then suddenly shoots up after 2015 to get back to predicted levels? Your graphs end at 2014.
Who is right?