Sorry to seem off course in my opening dialogue. Please understand that by “alarmists” I refer to those who feel that “climate change” is a disaster and that humanity will cease because of it. I believe that there is a genuine and dangerous shift occurring on our world and that humanity is in deed responsible for its magnification if not the true source. I also believe that humanity has the ability to adapt and reverse the effects. We just need unbiased data projection. More on that later. A response to: [A great deal of simplistic outright nonsense there which I’m not inclined to spend a lot of time arguing about. Just two of the most egregious errors, aside from the gratuitous use of the word “alarmist” which I presume is supposed to describe climate scientists, not that I’ve ever known any to warrant such a dismissive label:
][/by wolfpup]
I encourage anyone to decide for themselves if I am quoting Emanuel out of context.
The relevant passage in its full context is in Chapter 5 “The consequences” of “What We Know About Climate Change,” near the end of the chapter.
I have never said that Emanuel himself wants anything other than “decisive action.”
But at issue here is “the specific effects of global warming.” We can model what we think will happen. We can defend the accuracy of those very very complicated models. We can do our best to create the parameterizations without bias.
We do not have a good track record of predicting 50 and 100 years out, either for specific consequences of a given set of initial parameters, or for generally placing what it is we are predicting within a future context of all other possible challanges which will face us. And so we muddle through.
But the idea that “it is not in dispute” regarding what will actually happen and where climate change will rank overall in the problems facing us 50 and 100 years out or more overstates the typical view of a typical scientist, in my opinion. A more honest and typical answer is that we are doing the best we can to model the future, and because the predictions are concerning, despite the fact that we recognize our limitations, our best recommendation is a call to decisive action.
You don’t have to pretend certainty where none exists (or maybe you do, and that’s why so many scientists have a personal distaste for the kind of marketing that occurs on both sides of the debate around what to do with ACC).
Indeed, our best recommendation is a call to decisive action. And we should ignore the ones that recommend us to do nothing as they are constantly wrong in their predictions.
The only nit here is that you are falling into a false equivalence fallacy when claiming that both sides are doing it wrong.
Where, in the more than 800 posts I’ve made on this board, have I ever attributed to climate science the kind of unjustified, unsupportable “certainty” that you like to accuse me of?
There’s a difference between substance and style, a difference between sometimes impatiently debunking utter nonsense and being naively uncritical of the many particulars of the science. And since more nonsense has been written about climate change than probably any other scientific endeavor, impatience abounds among the more scientifically grounded. Indeed it’s been the singular success of those denialist campaigns that has led the general public – or at least its more naive members – to believe that there’s a legitimate “controversy” over whether or not anthropogenic climate change is real, and whether its effects will be damaging. In the land of a certain breed of scientific illiterates, there are also controversies over whether evolution is real or whether the theory of relativity is just a liberal conspiracy to promote relativism (I am not making this up!). Those who denounce such nonsense are neither absolutists nor uncritical “believers”.
Your favorite Emanuel quote is clearly misleading since it runs directly counter to the theme of the very book that you quote it from, and directly counter to all of Emanuel’s other writings, including his famous cautionary essay “Phaeton’s Reins” which I encourage you to read if you haven’t already. Emanuel acknowledges that both sides of the unscientific public debate have engaged in hyperbolic distortions, but his position on the magnitude of the problem and the strength of the underlying science is clear. Like most climate scientists, Emanuel is deeply concerned about the difficulty of trying to educate an uninformed and apathetic public whose views are being manipulated by a powerful cabal of vested interests.
The major problem with the basic thrust of your assertions about “predictions” is that you seem to be confusing scientific predictions with speculative WAGs. You seem to be confusing projections like those of climate models, derived from physical principles, with generic futurism. Futurism is the business of wild-ass speculation about what our lives and technologies might be like 50 or 100 years from now, and it’s usually more wrong than right, because it’s pure guesswork, and doesn’t operate within any kind of empirical framework. Don’t confuse it with science. And don’t be this guy. (From GIGO’s previous link.)
