It certainly fell under the heading of IMNSHO, rather than science or reason.
Hell, many of the comments here in this here thread are pure IMNSHO!
If there were a science section here, I would probably post in it.
Someday. someday …
AGW deniers kind of remind me of the guy who watches the mechanic work on his car,
[ul]
[li]is the water pump working right?[/li][li]are the sparkplugs long enough?[/li][li]maybe the coil wire is bad.[/li][li]did you check the pistons?[/li][/ul]
People who know a few things but fail to grasp the Law of Muir, that everything is connected to everything else.
Milankovitch cycles are produced by orbital perturbations. As your own earlier post described:
Those periodic multi-millennial orbital oscillations and their impacts on climate systems are exactly what the term “Milankovitch cycles” refers to.
But okay, you now say that’s not what you meant by “Orbital Mechanics”. Fine. Let’s move on and see what you do mean:
So…your suggested “orbital mechanics” mechanism driving current planetary warming is a long-term orbital shift occurring in a timeframe of tens of millions of years?
Exactly how are you proposing that such a mechanism would operate? What equations describe it?
Is this related to your speculation about multimillion-year effects in your previous sentence? If so, what are you suggesting that the “entire ice core dataset” tells us about the effects of orbital perturbations extending over millions of years? AFAIK, the longest ice core samples on record go back less than a million years before the present.
Er, no. That definition also requires a hypothesis to be "a proposed EXPLANATION for a phenomenon" (emphasis added).
A serious explanation of a phenomenon in physics (such as warming of the atmosphere) has to involve a quantitative physical model that actually describes how the physical causes are thought to produce the observed effects.
Absolutely right. So please start by actually stating your hypothesis (or citing a location where it’s stated).
I.e., present a scientific hypothesis in a quantitative form involving explicit mathematical modeling of the phenomena involved.
You don’t need to worry about frightening me with equations. I’m a math professor, I see equations all the time.
You haven’t proposed any hypotheses at all so far. You’ve just made some vaguely sciencey-sounding nebulous guesses.
Without detailed quantitative structure describing how the physics of the proposed explanation would actually work, a guess does not qualify as a scientific hypothesis.
:dubious: Really? watchwolf49’s statements seem scientifically rigorous and factual to you? You find the sketchily-described buzzwords that he calls his “eight alternate hypotheses” to be a plausible alternative to the actual physics presented in mainstream climate science research?
No, I was talking about bringing in scientific definitions and shit like that. Nothing kills a thread faster than facts.
The Warmist Mechanic:
Umm, there’s something wrong with your car. I won’t tell you exactly what is wrong, or what will go wrong, or when. But something bad will happen so you better give me $10,000 to study the problem. And if you dare ask for specifics or express skepticism, then you are a denialist moron.
Well, I hope you’re wrong, because I would very much like to see some facts about a quantitative explanation of how the non-Milankovitch multimillion-year orbital perturbations that wolfwatch alludes to would account for currently observed global warming.
Then start a topic about it.
OMG that could be an entire series about climate science and scare tactics.
More accurately:
“Umm, there’s something wrong with your car. Specifically, it’s overheating. You’ve been putting a lot of stuff into its ventilation/radiation systems that basic physics and chemistry indicates will cause overheating, although the interactions are very complex so I can’t be certain about a lot of it.”
“I won’t tell you exactly what is wrong, or what will go wrong, or when because, as I just told you, I don’t know all the details of how this very complex system works. I’m doing a lot of tests on it and learning a lot about it, but I don’t mind telling you candidly that there’s still a hell of a lot of uncertainty about exactly what could fail and exactly when and exactly how badly.”
“But it’s extremely likely that something bad will happen if you keep putting in more and more of the stuff that tends to cause overheating. Your car has never had so much of this stuff in its system in all the years you’ve owned it, and the more you keep loading it up, the more probable it becomes that some of the safety and reliability features you depend on will start to go out of spec.”
“…so you better give me $10,000 to study the problem if you want me to learn more about it and give you my best advice about how to handle it. Up to you, of course.”
“And if you dare ask for specifics or express skepticism, I will happily explain to you all I know about what’s going on and be as clear as I can about the parts of my diagnosis I feel confident about and the parts that are still very iffy. In fact, I’ve already done thousands of studies on your car and written up thousands of reports at various levels of specialized detail, and I would be more than thrilled if you want to carefully study them so we can share informed opinions on the matter.”
"But if, on the other hand, you’re just going to stand there without understanding any of the technical aspects of car repair and keep screaming that you just know there’s no problem with your car, or it must be a temporary glitch and nothing to worry about, or it must have been a pothole or a nail in the tire or that one time you drove through the desert, or that I must be a crook or a tool of a government conspiracy for daring to tell you that there’s something seriously wrong with your car…
“then you are a denialist moron.”
Why? Are we not allowed to go on talking about it in this thread?
It was watchwolf49 who made the claim in this thread that something he vaguely alludes to as “orbital mechanics” counts as a valid “alternate hypothesis” to account for observed climate data. I’m simply asking him for a cite.
I was pretty sure he was just making a point about what a hypothesis is, and his examples were not supposed to be viewed as completely serious, for example proposing that “Whale populations recovering” is a valid hypothesis to explain climate change.
Again, I’m not sure it was done in all seriousness, despite the point being a serious one.
See? There could be an entire series of escalating horseshit using a car as an example. If a mechanic told me that whopper I would laugh in his face.
Really? Because back in your own post #1761, you yourself said pretty much exactly the same thing as a simplified summary of basic global warming science:
Or in other words, “you’ve been putting in a lot of stuff that basic science indicates will cause heating, although the interactions are very complex”.
Gold. Absolute gold.
And my point is that his point is wrong. An actual scientific hypothesis is emphatically not just a speculative guess that some vaguely identified physical phenomenon might in some unspecified manner be responsible for producing a certain observed effect.
It has to involve an explicit description of a realistic mechanism by which that phenomenon would produce that effect. And in the case of a mathematical science like physics, that description has to include a quantitative model of the phenomena in question.
Sure, scientific hypotheses generally have their origin in some smart person’s vague speculative guess about possible causes of an unexplained effect. But that doesn’t mean that a guess and a hypothesis are the same thing.
Again with this? I’m pretty sure I already demonstrated that the clock is broken. We currently have C02 levels 30% higher than at any time in the past, even the peaks in your beloved ice core chart, something the lamestream (really?) poster I’m responding to utterly fails to address.
And yet, still you talk.
You continue to entertain. Think of it as applause.
Christ, no wonder your thread has been going for 1.8k posts!