So, noted skeptic Richard Muller has come around.BBC Article - my emphasis
Does this change anything for any of our local deniers?
[Super cynical mode]
What I have seen is that Muller is publishing his research before peer review, (more on that later) and no sooner that was done Anthony (I will accept the BEST results, not) Watts also published his denial piece with no review, virtually repeating once again his many times debunked criticism of the USA temperature record, early checks of the Watts paper are not flattering.
Now why is Watts being mentioned here? Because I have to say I see a manufactured “scientists do not agree” moment here. As Mann put it awhile ago, Muller has just reached a conclusion that virtually all climate scientists reached decades ago, what I see on many sources (specially in right wing sources) is a false equivalence meme once again.
So what about that item of virtually all peer review papers supporting the accuracy of the temperature record and the reported effects that we are seeing in nature because of the warming? Tossed away to report to the public that “scientists can not make up their minds.” :rolleyes:
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Oh well, on a less cynical mode I have to agree with many that in any case Muller has gone against his pay masters and delivered what people like the Kochs were not expecting.
Muller in any case could not control the denialosphere so I will have to take him at his limited word, limited because I have seen reports that Muller still mumbled several old climate change myths in an attempt to get many fake skeptics to take this huge bitter pill.
Alas, I have very little hope that we will see guys like Watts accepting the facts, sooner or later anyone relying on Watts and others of his kind should see that and should finally reach the conclusion that Watts and others are only seeding false doubts on this issue and sources like him should be ignored forever.
Doubt it. Climate change deniers are like reverse scientists.These folks take an unmovable position first and then only consider information that supports it. Facts don’t matter much, except inasmuch as they can be skewed. If they ever supported this Muller guy, he will suddenly become persona non grata.
Yeah; climate change denial is a faith based position. Neither facts nor logic affects most of those people.
Presumably you would have said the same thing about Richard Muller himself, if asked last month.
And yet…
Hint: he’s not a denier.
I always have to chuckle (well, in between that feeling where I almost throw up in my mouth a bit) whenever a denier accuses a climate-change proponent as having a faith-based position.
Faith based?? A lot of supposed deniers are not deniers of man made climate change. They are just not buying that the entire cause is from co2.
I wish that was the case, even in this forum many well recognized conservative posters start claiming that and just like clockwork they repeat debunked points like CO2 is not a pollutant or that it will be good in the future to have more plant food.
And then if the debate goes long enough then we get also points that should had been acknowledged before, denial is not limited just to the temperature record, even after this study by Muller’s BEST reports that** the recent warming is “almost entirely” human caused** one can still expect the denial of this bit of information.
The problem is that the True Believers handwave away anything they don’t like with ‘Denier’ as though that is a winning argument. The True Belivers are unwilling to admit error, unwilling to provide a falsifiable set of criteria (surely you remember that trainwreck since you could never provide a decent answer) and attack anyone who even thinks of engaging in what the rest of the world calls real science ( see Judith Curry).
Science is about questioning, except of course, climate science. Climate Science is, if you listen to the true believers, fully settled and there are no errors or flaws. All is known in this particular field of knowledge. The models are perfect, even if the model shows warming no matter what data is entered into it*.
Compare this to physics. Recently a study showed a result that violated special relativity. Something apppeared to travel faster than the speed of light. Did the physicists start yelling ‘denier’ at the top of their lungs? Did they shun the people who ran the experiment? Nope. They said ‘if this result is real it is huge but we need to check it’. And they did. They didn’t scream about it, they didn’t yell. They did science. It turned out that the experimemt had a flaw. But they checked it instead of devolving to a Ralph Wiggum ‘That’s unpossible!’.
There are multiple things a real scientist asks. What do we know? How well do me know it? What do we not know that we should? How can we test what we know? How can we find out what we don’t know?
But, apparently in climate science, asking the question ‘How well do we know this?’ is verboten. All knowledge is already known and not to be questioned. The models are flawless. The data is pristine.
And you are calling the skeptics faithbased?
Slee
*when the climategate thing happened someone took the model and ran it using random numbers. It still showed the same warming. If your complex model is the equivelant of y=x^2 then the conclusion is going to show a similar result no mattetr what. I posted a link to it in another one of these threads a long time ago and I don’t feel like hunting it up again, especially because god himself could come down and tell the True Believers that it isn’t happening and they’d just call him a denier and act like they proved something.
He did say “most,” not “all.”
Yeah. I’m not known for participating in the debates here so I’m not really a ‘local denier’, but this article has probably pushed me from my fence-sitting.
Unless something credible comes a long to disprove his findings, which doesn’t seem likely at this point, then I will accept his conclusion.
Piffle, several times I pointed at these ten items that can be falsified any time, but the problem with denialism is that you even deny that I did it already.
Also this is a good review of the empirical evidence, AKA as evidence that can be falsified:
[Rest of filled with strawmen points post snipped]
Actually several investigations already took place, and even that item was not what the deniers told us, in essence, if one should not want to be branded a denier you should had learned a long time ago on the results of those investigations and dropped this old baloney point a long time ago, but this is evidence once again of what a fake skeptic is, they are not ever willing to stop using even the already debunked points.
On this short video scientist Richard Alley explains briefly that the big picture (that has taken more than 100 years of research to reach*) is telling us that we should be doing something about this.
This is to deal with the silly point from **sleestak **that somehow scientists have not done this, or they invented this issue just recently, that is just about the only way to interpret that item of “All knowledge is already known and not to be questioned.” on the contrary, there are still continuing attempts at falsifying items from the list already mentioned, the fact is that that those attempts have failed.
What you should be aware is that if you had checked the history of this issue you would had noticed that until the 1950’s the consensus was that yes, CO2 caused warming, but it was not a big deal for several reasons, like not enough emitted gases or the oceans and other places would take care of it, Plass and others found there that indeed that needed to be questioned and their evidence won the day as it was tested and confirmed, the shift then was from general apathy to declaring that this was a problem.
*Currently it is ideology what is driving most of the efforts to deny the evidence, and on the scientific front that ideology is making the few skeptic scientists to fail spectacularly.
http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2011/09/the-science-behind-the-spencer-braswell-paper/
Yay! That’s great! I mean, it sucks about the climate and all, but it’s great that you’ve been persuaded by evidence and all that.
If we’re thinking of the same trainwreck, it’s not that he “could never provide a decent answer”; it’s that – after weeks of refusing to do so – he provided a decent answer. (I never understood why it took him so long, and it’s possible you stopped reading his posts before he eventually managed it, but he’s currently got a falsifiable one.)
He hasn’t yet mentioned that prediction in this thread, but as far as I know he still sticks to it, and therefore deserves to be taken seriously.
It is sad to see comments like this that simply perpetuate ignorance on a website dedicated to fighting it. (Well, I guess it shows us what we are up against.)
(1) Clearly, you have not actually immersed yourself in studying climate science, where in fact the flaws and limitation in both the models and the data are discussed all the time and things are constantly questioned. Your whole tirade is simply that…a tirade that displays your ignorance of the field more than anything else.
(2) Your analogy to the physics case leaves out important details. For example, one is that the authors of the study did not boldly proclaim that they had shown Einstein to be wrong. Rather, they produced a very detailed paper discussing their results, including all of the checks they had made, and explained that they were going public not because they were convinced they were correct but because they thought they had scrutinized what they could and wanted to now let the broader scientific community subject it to scrutiny. Contrast this to climate contrarians who just regularly pronounce the entire climate science community to be wrong, often based on silly and debunked nonsense.
(3) It may be true that climate scientists and those who defend the science can sometimes come off as somewhat defensive in how they communicate with the public. However, that is only because of the lengths to which the denialists go to lie, distort, etc. The analogy to the special relativity is not very useful here because there is not a dedicated group of people whose sole goal is to discredit the science of special relativity for their own ideological or financial interests. A better analogy is to evolutionary science and attacks by creationists and intelligent design proponents. In fact, almost all of the arguments that you see used by the climate change denialists have direct analogs in the evolution debate, sometimes eerily so. (It doesn’t help that one of the very few climate change contrarian scientists who is actually doing any real publishable science is actually on the record as believing that “intelligent design, as a theory of origins, is no more religious, and no less scientific, than evolutionism.”)
By the way, I think that climate scientists have mixed feelings about Muller: They are certainly happy that he came around on this and that yet another independent study of the surface temperature record has arrived at the same conclusions as the previous ones. On the other hand, some are annoyed by his self-promotion and the idea that it is only now that Muller has weighed in that one can trust the conclusions of thousands of scientists around the world. It is also a little strange that Muller puts such weight on his conclusion of the human contribution based on what is basically just an argument from correlation (i.e., the correlation between the rise in CO2 and the rise in the global temperature record) when the field of detection and attribution of climate change has more advanced techniques for such attribution.
Are there prominent climate scientists that have changed their minds in the other direction in the last few years? Every once in a while I hear conservative commentators describe the scientific case for anthropogenic climate change as having gotten weaker or even fallen apart in the recent past, but I’ve never seen anything but strengthening support.
What other man-made causes are hypothesized? Serious question.