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I started with the main, loud evidence -- Al Guru and, at the time, the main IPCC technical document. Flush. Bubble, bubble. It's possible to do some good work in 'climate science', and maybe there is some by more than just the one guy at MIT or the one in Georgia. If they do good science, then maybe Nature would publish it. Here I mean they can do some good science which, however, is a very long way from really answering the main question, are we about to cook the planet? E.g., the MIT guy did some diffusion in a column calculation. Looks okay, but it's a very, very long way from an answer to the main question. But generally my view would be as you put it that on 'AGW' -- anthropomorphic global warming? -- science is broken. Why don't I get rich and famous debunking the alarmist nonsense? Because the alaremist 'science' is making various approximations. Maybe with their assumptions, their arithmetic is correct. E.g., if do the energy balance arithmetic carefully and get it right, then okay. Nice work. If it says no changes, good. If it says big changes, then, sadly, the work is good only until the changes start to become significant. If they do everything correctly on energy balance, then my objection would be, in the case of big changes, using that analysis to say what the climate will be in 10, 50, 100 years. I could say that, and maybe it would get published, but it would hardly make me rich or famous. Broadly Al Guru picked a 'good' problem, that is, like the Mayan priests who scared people without enough solid information do debunk. Again, the solid science we want is not available. With such science we could debunk the alarmists by saying in rock solid terms what the climate would be year by year for the next, say, 500 years. I can't do that. No one can do that. So, why is science broken for AGW? The fundamental reason is that no one can really get a solid answer to what the climate will be decades into the future under various scenarios of human activity. The shorter term political reason is that the 'climate science' community was started heavily by VP Gore's direction of the funding and, then, the interests of the IPCC to find a way to send money from rich countries to poor ones. So, there are lots of vested interests and not much science solid enough to settle the issue. So, again, note (1) the temperature is, as far as we can tell, now just where it was before the start of the Little Ice Age; (2) from the good temperature data we have now from satellites, apparently the planet is not getting warmer now. So, what to do? Just keep watching the data and the science, If there is any that is very important, and then readdress the question once it begins to look important. But there's a big HUGE thing NOT to do now: Wreck the world economy over very inconclusive science. |