[wrycoder]

There is the left narrative, and then there is everyone else.

The classic example is CAGW. If I know a person's position on that, I find I can predict their position on most any other contentious issue.

The average people on the street have plenty of received opinions that they are happy to share, but know little about the actual science relevant to them.

But, we were discussing Wikipedia science articles. The issue with Wikipedia is what is permitted to be said on some science pages, and what is quickly reverted.

Everyone is political. Good scientists (and good encyclopedists) ought to try hard to suppress that.

[revolvingocelot]

>The classic example is CAGW. If I know a person's position on that, I find I can predict their position on most any other contentious issue.

In case anyone was curious, it seems to stand for "catastrophic anthropogenic global warming" [0] (or Citizens Against Government Waste, which seems an equally stark signifier of the invoker's political position -- who better to exemplify "waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government" than, uh, Bernie Sanders?!).

"CAGW", for "catastrophic anthropogenic global warming", is a snarl word (or snarl acronym) that global warming denialists use for the established science of climate change. A Google Scholar search indicates that the term is never used in the scientific literature on climate[104][105] except in reference to denialist tactics.[106]

[0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Global_warming#CAGW

[wrycoder]

Ok, I can guess your positions on the issues now ;)

It’s not a “snarl” word. It’s an acronym which is used because the whole fully qualified set of words is too long.

All four words are necessary to state what’s being discussed. Anything less is trying to deflect the debate.

Working backwards, Warming: it’s a rare scientist that thinks the world isn’t warming. We are still coming out of the last ice age. Fifteen thousand years ago, there was ice a mile thick where I’m sitting. We are also coming out of the Little Ice Age. A couple of centuries ago, you could walk from Manhattan to Staten Island on the ice in the winter.

Global: local climate change happens all the time. No one disputes that. The discussion is about global climate change.

Anthropogenic: significantly caused by humans, specifically by emitting excessive CO2. This is theoretical, because by itself, CO2 can’t account for the projected warming. There must be a feedback to the real greenhouse gas, water vapor.

Catastrophic: The amount of warming is going to alter the global climate to the point that the Earth’s ecology and human civilization will be seriously affected.

The last two points are in scientific dispute. The computer models, which have many knobs, predict a bad outcome.

Historic satellite measurements of the global tropospheric temperature show that nothing unusual is happening. The increase is 0.14 C per decade.

https://www.drroyspencer.com/2022/01/uah-global-temperature-...

It appears to me that the CAGW hypothesis is disproved.

Global climate change is a topic for some very interesting science. The solar system's position in the galaxy, for example. Or, the effect of the sun on the intensity of galactic cosmic rays.

The climate models can't address even recent pre-industrial global changes.

[revolvingocelot]

A "snarl word" is a neologism for the age-old practice of the creation of derogatory labels by people who are trying to dismiss things without the listener realizing they don't have good cause.

>The last two points are in scientific dispute

I don't think that's true. I think that a casual google will show that climatology is actually in overwhelming agreement that human activities are driving climate change, and here's one I did earlier [0]. To the reader: this is a testable hypothesis!

>It appears to me that the CAGW hypothesis is disproved

Argument by personal incredulity isn't always a fallacy. Sometimes, smart people are intuitive and well-informed enough to jump directly to conclusions without needing to cover the intervening intellectual distance. Maybe this is happening here, and I'm just not an exceptional person, but if I were you I'd consider wondering why the likes of Dr Roy Spencer and I couldn't turn our ability to outthink entire scientific disciplines to a more profitable end.

The issue is that stupidly oversimplified models from 40+ years ago have been borne out, sourced from both capitalist and Soviet science [1][3]. By all means, there are many, many inputs into the grand planetary system, but the inconvenient truth, if you will, is that atmospheric CO2 increases seem to track with temperature increases, in both modeling and the historical record. I think, by "many knobs", that you're trying to suggest there are many variables that can be tweaked -- nope! It's actually very straightforward. Are there complex, "more realistic" climate models that produce unorthodox results when their knobs are twiddled? Probably! But for every one of those you fixate on, remember that there is one big, simple one that continues to track with the thing we're trying to measure: observable reality. Bald-faced denial of observable reality is a pretty good signifier that some aspect of science has been politicized, whether in a Wikipedia article or in a congressional hearing.

You've made a lot of claims, but haven't really backed any of them up, or even explained them; "CAGW" is pretty clearly a snarl word.

[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966

[1] https://eos.org/features/a-50-year-old-global-warming-foreca...

[2] https://xkcd.com/1732/ <- "This is just a temperature chart!" That's right, but its sources, which track the CO2 rise, aren't

[3] https://www.climatefiles.com/exxonmobil/1982-memo-to-exxon-m...