There is a problem with overstating current climate change impacts. I spend an unfortunate amount of time sanitizing reports and educating other authors on the differences between what is happening, what might happen and what will happen. The funny thing is, misinformation is usually in introductory sections, somewhat unrelated to the work as a whole. Overpredictions undermine the (otherwise sound) credibility of the rest of the analysis.
On the other hand, by far the most misinformation (from wrong impressions to straightforward lies) stems from political and enterprise attempts to deny basic science.
On the unfortunate downfall of cap and trade, I’ve never met a cogent economic argument against it. It demonstrates the vastly flawed educational system and the naïveté of the voting public. If the concern is that carbon trading won’t reduce enough, there is no reason why it can’t be supplemented with a carbon tax. Second, there is no reason not to take advantage of comparative advantage to reduce the overall cost of mitigation—the closest rationale stems from hyper-tree hugging chants of “it’s not fair” regarding offsets or infinite strawmen regarding how a system could be cheated.
The point was that I’m not worrying about the scientists losing their jobs, and that is by looking at the fact that the ones attempting to discredit the science or the scientists are the ones that are being discredited, they champions of the denialists are more likely to lose their jobs.
“Note that these people are actual climate scientists” :rolleyes: like if I had not noticed before in many discussions, I like to point at the MIT researchers to show that many scientists are reporting that the IPCC was too conservative, point being that “skeptics” that minimize the IPCC protections are less likely to be correct.
As for your ire of Hansen vs Romm, notice that we are now discussing policy (that is, what to do about the issue) not the science. Most scientists are not dogmatic about the cap-and-trade vs taxation of carbon emissions, it is more likely that **both ** cap-and-trade and a tax are going to be needed.
The big decision is whether we need to put a price tag on carbon at all. I think everyone in the reality-based community agrees that the answer to that one is yes. Once you’ve gotten that out of the way, then you just have to deal with the small question of how to do it, via cap-and-trade or via a tax. Here reasonable people might disagree on which way is best, but everyone still agrees that doing it the other way would be vastly preferable to doing nothing at all.
Slight nitpick–there is no ‘or’ in cap’n trade and carbon tax. Some areas are more amenable to one or the other. Trading should be allowed in any area that would significantly lower the costs of doing so.
Actually, it comes from this one: xkcd: Science
Comic 836 is a reference to the original.
But, yes, as a meme, it’s generally understood as an argument against anti-science arguments such as creationism or anti-anthropogenic climate change.
No, science is not perfect, but it’s a system for explaining what we see and predicting what we will see. In that respect, it works. It’s been refined a lot since bloodletting.
To further how well this is a refutation of “but science get’s things wrong” and “it’s only a theory,” the graph used in the comic is one of the best, simplest alignments between theory and experiment. Cosmic microwave background radiation
like if I had not noticed before in many discussions, I like to point at the MIT researchers to show that many scientists are reporting that the IPCC was too conservative, point being that “skeptics” that minimize the IPCC protections are less likely to be correct.