You may not want to hunt it down but some of us like actual evidence to back up claims. Your statement sounds closest to a denialist talking point regarding Michael Mann’s work in reconstructing Northern hemispheric temperature records over the last millenium with climate proxies. If it is in reference to that:
(1) It has nothing to do with climate models. It has to do with reconstructing past temperatures from tree rings and other climate proxies.
(2) While the National Academy of Sciences / National Research Council study of the issue did conclude that the method used by Mann et al. in their original paper could conceivably produce “hockey stick shapes” from “red noise”, they also concluded that the method did not adversely affect the results in this particular case, i.e., that the results could be reproduced without this particular method. Furthermore, the field has moved on to better methods in the more than 1 decade that has elapsed since Mann et al.'s original work. [Mann also argues in his recent book that there were other technical problems with McIntyre and McKitrick’s original claim of hockey sticks from red noise. As I recall, these include the particular type of red noise that they used, whether they cherry-picked a small subset of their results, and the lack of proper statistical tests of significance of the resulting “reconstructions” that gave the hockey stick shape.]
“And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.” Luke 16:31. Yea, verily, and if they hear not the International Panel on Climate Change, neither will they be persuaded, though their star shill should notice his latest ExxonMobil check bounced and chuck it.
And I really don’t see any evidence that this isn’t still true. His evidence isn’t any better than anything else he had access to before this. The facts therefore didn’t convince him; it was instead something about doing the work himself, something he wouldn’t have done if he weren’t getting paid for it.
My experience with faith-based people is that many think my thoughts about science are faith based as well, and they think I picked the wrong side. It is a different way of thinking that I just don’t get.
They think I believe things like monkeys had children that were human, or other caricatures of scientific theories. They harp on the fact that all we have are theories, they ask me “if you think it is true, why do you not call it a universal law?” Another thing they can’t get is why we keep changing our minds about stuff, and then claim the new thing is true - they don’t get the new evidence thing at all.
These are sometimes very bright people in other ways.
Of course, it’s also impossible to state that the sun will come up tomorrow with any certainty; for all we know, it could get sucked into a black hole before midnight tonight. “Impossible to say that with any certainty” is not much of an objection when one considers the well-understood effect that a quickly-warming planet has on extreme weather events, in particular summer heat waves.
You’d have to look at years of statistics that document “extreme” weather and see if there is a correlation between increasing incidence of “extreme” weather and global temperatures.
I agree it’s silly to point to every bit of extreme weather as evidence of global warming, even though it probably is. The real evidence comes from statistical examination.
I will have to report this growing myth to Skeptical Science, what is going on is that there are simple questions like “was this (insert specific extreme weather event) caused by global warming?” that are tailor made by denier media to get the sincere reply from many scientists that it is not.
What deniers usually do not do is explain how misleading that question is when one looks at the big picture, in baseball one can not say what specific home run was made thanks to a player taking steroids, but looking at the record one can say with great certainty when steroids allowed a player to toss more balls out of the field, and the increase in distance. Greenhouse gases are the steroids of the atmosphere.
What Hansen is reporting is like finding that a shrimp of a baseball player that early could just make 2 home runs in a year now is doing a thousand.
“In any thousand heat waves, for example, only two would be expected to reach this extreme level in the absence of global warming.”
So while one could say that there is no 100% way to be sure that an extreme heatwave is caused by global warming, what is happening now is that the odds are so stacked that it is not weird to say with a lot of certainty that the increase and quantity of heatwaves that we see (and the increase in the damage that they are causing) are happening thanks to our global warming gas emissions.
No, how could I.
It’s the ammount of money that counts, not the source, do you agree?
I’ll say it again “The total ammount of money received by institutions and idividuals that fight agaisnt GW/AGW/CAW/CC is much more than what denialist institutions and individuals receive.”
BTW, I think denialist is a term that really, even if it were true, doesn’t help in any debate.