The fuck are you talking about? Are you asking me to name the posts in which you said the things that I have put in quote tags and attributed to you?
This is nonsense.
Daniel
Well when you construct what are provable strawmen and refuse to answer direct questions that seems pretty simple. You are refusing to engage me in the debate.
There is argument about, for example,. How energy intensive it will be and whether it will sequester the carbon for millenia or merely centuries or decades. That’s; certainly true. I know of no argument that suggests that it’s not perfectly effective at buying time. We may have to deal with severe leakage later, but that is later andhenc not relevent to this part of the debate.
It’s curious how I haven’t said it is easy or impossible or extremely expensive.
Another strawman?
CO2 can be extracted from the air with sufficient energetic input. Once liquiefied it can be treated as CO2 from any other source. All the trial runs are utilizing current release because that’s the most efficient way to reduce net emissions. But there’s nothing inherent in the technology that means it can only act on future emissions.
Possibly true, but not relevant to a response about the dire consequences of acting later.
Once again, I was addressing a comment that the effects will be drastic if we wait. Unless by drastic consequences you mean “we won’t save as much money” then it’s rather irrelevant.
No, I can’t because that is a dead link. Even if it wasn’t it would at best be the IPCC homepage. Given that you haven’t told us what publications these “several statements” were made in it’s a non-reference. You can’t seriously expect anyone to read everything on the entire IPCC website to find an unattributed stament like that.
You might just as wells ay “There are books in the library that agree with me”. You need to name the book dude.
No, it isn’t dictated by the science. The science doesn’t dictate anything, as you said yourself.
Well gee, that sounds like precisely what I have been saying since my first frekin’ sentence in this thread.
A combination of the current state of the science and economics suggests to us that it is the most foolish policy choice.
Make up your mind. You just said that it dictated policy choice.
We can indeed, And when we ask that we get the answer “We can’t be reasonably sure that it’s anthropogenic”.
Cite!
To what degree of significance is it having an impact. You said it is significant. How significant is it, given that we can’t even be significantly certain that it exists.
Argument from ignorance.
Yet you just declared that the effect was significant. Hmmm. We can’t be exact, but we can give significance figures >95%. That’s good enough for me. Can we see them now>
Cite!.
You’ve said something is impossible. In GD that’s one hell of a statement. Please provide a reference for this claim. I’m assuming it’s not just baseless assertion.
IOW you made shit up.
Go back to my previous posts and answer all the questions you refused to respond to. Those are the ones I want answers to. I have no intention of taking the time to post them all again so you can ignore them again.
Never. It’s a red herring. My contribution to this discussion has had nothing to do with market forces or by instead relying just on people’s goodwill. It’s quite irrelevant to the standing of the science, which is what we are discussing.
…And, here courtesy of the Discovery Institute is a list of several more articles and books, many of them subject to peer review, that are claimed to be supportive of intelligent design.
It is indeed nonsense. And I apologise unreservedly for it.
I confused you with Jshore, who has indeed directly attributed things to me that I never said.
Sorry.
In your case I will however ask you again why you introduced the fact that solar positioning is more important than atmospheric gas concentrations in direct response to a quote form me. It was not a point I ever contended and you never went anywhere with it. Similarly your reference that humans have added greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, another point that I never contended. Those sure look like starwmen but I’m giving you the opportunity to explain why you thought they were relevant in replying to my posts.
I also await with bated breath those references for your claims.
Especially your ad hominem claim that Loehle is paid to produce science with prior approved outcomes.
And of course there are several other references for claims that I have requested that you have also ignores to date.
Dire consequences can include dire economic consequences.
See here for the estimates of likelihood of changes in extreme events, for example.
Great…So, I now expect citations on all the stuff you have been saying in regards to sequestration. And, you really ought to include ones that provide some estimates of the costs involved, especially to implement them virtually instantaneously, since we want to avoid dire economic consequences too, as I noted above.
Yes, “dictated” was the wrong word here and I understand you are very literal in these debates (when it suits your purposes). I would rephrase what I wrote to say, “That does indeed seem to be the prudent policy given the current state of the science.” Obviously, this is a judgement call. If you like to live dangerously, you may want to just let things play out. See my discussion of science and policy choices in what followed.
Well, it certainly doesn’t sound like what you have been saying to me. But, hey, if that is what you’ve been saying, I guess you no longer stand by all this stuff regarding the idea that what you need to know about the current state of the science can all be summarized by one statement in the IPCC report regarding the specific question of the extent to which it is currently understood whether or not most of the warming in the last 50 years is due to greenhouse gas emissions.
I don’t know about anyone else reading this thread, but I am finding this debate with you, Blake, to be pretty much of a waste of time. All we seem to get is a display of the fact that you have very impressive debating tactics even when you are supporting a position with very little substance. I am sure you did very well in your high school debate club. I am duly impressed.
First, apology accepted.
You’ve suggested that it’s plausible that humans have not contributed to the greenhouse effect, if I understand those quotes properly. I posted that cite to show that:
- The most important cause of greenhouse warming was greenhouse gases (thus the reference to one alternate theory, solar positioning); and
- The most important source of new greenhouse gases is human causation.
Neither of these seem to me to be in any doubt.
Brevity is the soul of wit, and I think you’d benefit from condensing your posts. I’m not finding nearly as much substance as words in them, so if there are specific references you’re looking for, you need to provide them.
Okay, this is a fine request in form, but I’m not going to provide it. If you seriously think that his paycheck would continue to come in if he produced science inimical to his employer, I confess you’ve got a different understanding of the free market from mine. I cannot, however, cite internal documents between him and his employer, so until I can employ the services of Captain Obvious, I’m going to continue taking it on faith that an industry group whose sole existence is to encourage science friendly to the industry will fire a scientist who starts issuing articles inimical to the industry.
Rather than intermingle them with meandering, spurious claims about what I’ve said about what you’ve said, it’d be good to list them here.
Daniel
The problem is that to imagine that the vast majority of scientists working in the field are all doing this necessitates a rather grand conspiracy theory. To imagine that a handful of scientists all associated with a few right wing think tanks or industry are doing this requires considerably less of a grand conspiracy theory.
Clearly, if just about all of the scientists who were supporting the theory of anthropogenic climate change were associated with the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and NRDC, you probably wouldn’t be too impressed with the arguments and would tend to believe a much larger community of scientists working in the field who don’t all have these obvious affiliations.
They can indeed, but in this case there’s no indication of that. We are now really coming down to an insoluble semantic debate about how people choose define dire. I s\disagree that things must get more dire.
For extreme events yes. But we are talking about the reality of whether thereis evidence of this happening now, not what might happen if things are extended to their extreme position.
Anything specific? Or do you just want a reference that I know of no argument that suggests that it’s not perfectly effective at buying time? Or that CO2 can be extracted from the air with sufficient energetic input? Or that once liquiefied it can be treated as CO2 from any other source.
Because that’s all the stuff I’ve have been saying in regards to sequestration. And you can indeed expect references for those things, if you still really want them. Just say the word.
As soon as you tell me why we need to implement them virtually instantaneously we can get to work on that. And then you can define “dire economic consequences”. Obviously I can’t provide references to counter those things when they are so ill-defined.
No, that does indeed seem to be a half-baked policy given the current state of the science.
Obviously, this is a judgement call. If you like to live dangerously, you may want to just start tinkering with the economy, diverting money to this right now and depriving people of their freedom right now.
Gee, another blatant starwman.
Nowhere have I ever presented an idea that what you need to know about the current state of the science can all be summarized by one statement in the IPCC report.
Dude do you want to start adressing my actual posts rather than gross characterizations? I know it’s harder for you to debate my actual position, but at least try.
You could also try answering those questions sometime.
I don’t know if anyone else reading this is getting this impression, but debating Jshore is pretty much a waste of time. He leaped into the fray with wild claims about how what I said was wrong. And he has produced no errors at all in what I said.
Instead he resorts in almost every post to strawman mischaracterisations. He simply can not stick to what I have actually posted. Moreover he refuses to answer direct questions or even address issues I raise. He is essentially refusing to engage me in debate on my position. Instead he is forced to repeatedly resort to strawmen and ignoring my points entirely.
It appears that Jshore doesn’t actually have any dispute with anything that I have said. He simply objects to the fact that I am saying it.
Again, exactly. IPCC isn’t funded by someone with an explicitly vested interest in the outcome of their research. It’s not so much as if IPCC were funded by the Sierra Club–it’s as if IPCC were funded by the makers of solar panels.
Show me that a significant percentage of climatologists who do not work for industries on one side or another of the debate suggest that there’s a significant chance that global warming has no human causation, and you’ve got something. But that’s not, as near as I can tell, what we’re looking at.
It’s perfectly legitimate to point out who’s paying the piper.
Daniel
But all that shows is that humans are (potentially) major contributors to greenhouse warming. It doesn’t show that greenhouse warming is the major warming event contributing to current conditions. It may not be a strawman, but it’s certainly no more logically valid.
Well they were not hidden as you imply. They were all quite clearly marked with a big “CITE!”
Specifically:
A reference that “It’s well-established that human influence exacerbates the warming effect.” And reference that Loehse is paid to produce results, which you have already conceded.
In which case it is indeed a baseless ad hominem, just as I said.
Hang on, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t claim that in one case it’s possible to engender this bias by an industry group whose sole existence is to encourage science friendly to the industry being willing fire a scientist who starts issuing articles inimical to the industry, and in the other case it requires a conspiracy on the part of the scientists themselves.
Either free market forces will can affect this as you originally claimed, or else it requires a conspiracy involving the scientists themselves. This whole thing is one massive false dichotomy. This isn’t a choice between a few scientists in a conspiracy or many. It’s case of whether an industry has been established that will see scientists fired if they produce inimical results.
Now unless you have some evidence or some damn good reasoning that the IPCC is less likely to do this than a privately funded thinktank then we can discount it out of hand. Market forces w\either affect both groups of scientists or none.
Clearly exactly the opposite is true.
Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and NRDC all existed before global arming. The IPCC exists only because of global warming. As a result a scientist funded by the IPCC is even more compromised than if he were employed by Greenpeace. And far more compromised than if he were employed by private industry.
LhoD at this stage you really do need to trot out some evidence or strong reasoning that leads you to believe that industry thinktanks are more likely to fire a scientist who starts issuing articles inimical to the industry the IPCC and affiliates are. And make it real good. I’m part funded by the IPCC as I said, and I can’t believe it’s true.
I wouldn’t be fired if my results weren’t producing the desired effects, however I have to reapply for a large segment of my funding via IPCC every 3 years. I doubt if the funding panel would approve me if my results were even ambiguous much less contradictory.
Basically you are employing a massive double standard that attributes the IPCCC with characteristics that you don’t attribute to industry thinktanks, and yet youj have no reasoning or evidence to support doing so. At this stage it just appears to be ‘evil corporation’ prejudice on your part. You are assuming that corporations must be more unscrupulous or cold-hearted than the IPCCC, yet you have presented no reason why you believe that.
You clearly don’t have much idea how IPCC funding is distributed in most cases. The UN itself doesn’t write cheques to me as a scientist.
What happens is that I and several others in my group submit proposals to my supervisor for IPCC funding. Now if they get rejected I have trouble meeting budget, so I will submit proposals showing results that I know from experience are likely to be approved by the funding board. In turn if they get rejected people will be transferred to other divisions or fired and my supervisor will likely be transferred or fired. So she has a vested interest in my proposals proceeding. And she suggests research or manipulations or examinations that are increase the chance of funding.
And my supervisor takes those proposals to a local funding body. And they examine them. And they have a vested interesting getting proposals approved because they are paid by a national board. So they will suggest changes to the proposals. And the same at the national level. And then it goes to a branch of the IPCC itself. And they have a vested interest in getting the best research so they get a bigger slice of the IPCC budget than the other sections.
And I suspect that ultimately the IPCC presumably gets its share of the UN budget by proving that it is important.
So “The IPCC” may not be funded by someone with an explicitly vested interest in the outcome of their research. But every single person on every funding body affiliated with the IPCC worldwide is someone with an explicitly vested interest in the outcome of their research.. Well that might be slight exaggeration. But certainly the vast majority of people involved in funding within the IPCC structure have a vested interest. Everyone form us ground floor researchers to the department heads within the IPCC itself has a financial interest in getting the best research, because the best research gets the biggest budget.
It’s that simple.
And yes, this compromises me as a scientist. It can’t help but do so. I have to compete with other scientists for the IPCC dollar, so I have learned how to produce data that the IPCC will fund. Not manufacture data, but some areas I believe should be examined are ignored because I know the IPCC is unlikely to fund it. And I can only submit one proposal per round and if I fail my budget shrinks.
It’s worse than that. It’s as if IPCC researchers were funded by producing data the IPCC is likely to approve of.
This is a false dichotomy. The IPCC is an industry on one side of the debate. This isn’t a case of “works for an industry on one side” or “works for the IPCC”. This is a case of deciding which side of the debate the employer is on.
It is indeed. What’s not valid is to say that the person who pays the piper will pay him even if he plays the wrong tune, and the other will fire him without a shred of evidence.
“just bear it”? Bear it smartly, that is.
Shouldn’t we look at this pretty much under a game theory scenario? Surely enough, the consensus found within the scientific community suggests we don’t know to what extent our involvement in greenhouse emissions will affect the rest of the globe. Correct? The 1990-2100 projection of about 4 degrees celsius could be either way off or pretty close. We don’t know if we’re right (right: we humans will raise the Earth’s surface temperatures to potentially dangerous levels) yet we don’t know if we’re wrong (wrong: our industries’ effects on climate are significantly less powerful when compared to Earth’s inevitable and “natural” climate cycles).
The real question here is, “What’s the best strategy to accomodate our current knowledge and economy to a potentially (and possible) devastating outcome?”. So, in other words, and in light of our somewhat ineffective predictive models, how do we play it safe? What’s best for both the environment in the long run and for us now?
A magic new source of energy is out of the question since we’re talking about the now and here, but of course a parallel program consisting of scientific research on climate change and alternate fuels (which would hopefully become the norm in a short number of years) is indeed a must.
Greater minds than that of mine are needed to answer this, but does anyone have any ideas that could enlighten me? Specially now that we’ve covered several chunks of debate ground on this thread alone. I find this thread to be deliciously informative (though if I hear the word “strawman” one more time I will engineer a 30-foot tall Bio-StrawMan and send him to eat the whole lot of you).
What series of experiments would uncover a more certain etiology?
If you can not propose any such experimenst then you may be admitting that the conlusion is inherently not unscientific. There may not be any practical experiment possible, that is the case for a great many things in this world. Those are often the things that fall outside the scope of science. That’s not a problem, so long as we don’t pretend that they fall within the scope of science. Once we do that we have entered the realm of psuedoscience.
In practice we deal with these sorts of dilemmas all the time in my line of work. We don’t need to do experiments to increase certainty, what we can do is look at the assumptions we have made concerning the magnitude of effects and then make predictions of what should occur if those assumptions are true that should not occur if they are untrue. We can then wait and see if the predictions come true.
The utilisation of computer models is essentially just a fancy way of doing that to allow us to factor in multiple assumptions and project it over multiple timeframes. But the models are still only useful if the can make significant predictions. If they can’t then we have no idea whether our assumptions are correct andthus we are no more certain.
Hint taken.
From now on when JShore grossly misrepresents me I shall simply repsond with "I never said anything like that. It will still mean he is utilising a str…, err, delibereately weakened misprepresentation of my position.
In the context of climate change, where the predicted alarming outcomes are decades away, what experiments can be conducted that can settle within the short term whether human contributions are significant and whether they ought to be tempered?
This is where it gets tricky of course. As I said above, if we can’t make any predictions or engeage in experiments over that timeframe then whatever decisions we make within that timeframe inherently lack a scientific basis simply because the basis can never be falsified. We are forced to resort to making predictions and taking action based on things other than science. But once again, this isn’t problem so long as we don’t claim that we are doing it for scientific reasons.
In the case of climate changeof course the situation isn’t quite so difficult as you portray it. The alarming outcomes may be decades away, but the putative factors are at play and measurable today. Because that we can make predictions about how things should be in 5 years time, or even next year. If our hypotheses about those factors are correct then we should get a significant result that can be separted from the noise.
And if we can’t do that then we need to ask ourselves whether any decision to temper human involvement is really based on science. If the basis for the decision isn’t derived from a tested falsifiable prediction and can’t be replicated then it fails the most basic requirement to be science. That doesn’t mean that we can’t base our decision on on the facts, but we can’t call that factual basis scientific.
Yes, Blake, we’re all aware of falsifiability and all that, but what do you suggest? Do we simply emit CO[sub]2[/sub] without limit, such that the current +3ppm per year actually increases, bringing those 450+ ppm concentrations which climatologists warn us about closer even faster, perhaps within a couple of decades?
Like I said, it seems like the only absolute way they could prove that we should heed their warnings and start to limit our emissions is by getting above 450 ppm and seeing people die in huge numbers from an undeniable increase in extreme weather events, or some undeniable Big Bad Thing like disuption to the Great Ocean Conveyor. What data in the next few years would convince you of a need to limit emissions? Say, if this graph continued that disturbing trend and followed the model evermore closely? Or if this graph showed ever more economically damaging effects?
Of course, each particular graph or fact could be argued with, but it is surely the combined wealth of evidence which leads climatologists to recommend starting to limit emissions. Could anything convince you to support an emission-limiting Treaty? (And further, would it have to be ultra-radical for your support, or could you accept that something as weak as Kyoto is a better-than-nothing start?)
I;ve already answered that question in this thread, in some detail. To summarise myself, I’d like to see a statistically significant probabikity that this is not simply a natural trend and a model that makes predictions with significant accuracy.
IOW I’d need to see some reasonable scientific evidence endorsing state enforcement before I will conlcude that there is reasonable scientific evidence endorsing state enforcement
It’s hardly an unreasonable request and I actually thought I made that pretty clear the first time around.
There are two different issues here. One is about the change in climate. The other is about the mechanism. Since the anthropogenic variables won’t be significantly tampered with, what correlations in the short term (5-10 years) are required to tie climate change to human factors?