On 11/10/2013 12:29 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
As I said before, I am agnostic on this issue for the following reasons:
- I am not educated in climate science and I am sufficiently educated
in science to understand that it would take years of full-time effort
to get to a point where I could judge the merit of climate science
research findings by myself -- even there I would probably have to
become an insider, because I understand that a lot of key data is
never made publicly available;
- I am sufficiently knowledgable of complex systems to be skeptical of
the predictive power of any complex systems model at our current level
of sophistication;
- The issue became so heavily politicised that it is basically not
reasonable to trust news reporting on either side of it.
I am aware of the 5th IPCC report and I am also aware of claims by
reputable climate scientists that the models' predictions appear to be
deviating increasingly from the observables:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/10/30/implications-for-climate-models-of-their-disagreement-with-observations/
Are you aware that Judith Curry was on the Berkley Earth team to resolve the question of
whether the earth is actually warming. She and Richard Muller had been critical of the
analyses performed by NOAA, Hadley, CRU, and GISS. When the new analysis, which met all
the past criticisms, confirmed all the previous conclusions, she quit the team and shifted
her criticism from "it's not happening" to "it's not predictable". Notice that means it
could be a lot worse than predicted too - but the Deniers and FUDers never mention that.
I am not invested in disproving global warming. I like to think I am
scientifically-minded, so I accept reality whatever it is. I hope it
is wrong. I suspect some people want it to be true.
Yes, you're the perfect example of the success of the Deniers FUD campaign. 98% of all
climate scientists agree that AGW is happening and it will have bad consequences. But
you're aware of skeptical scientists, like Judith Curry (who are given TV time on Faux
News), so it's a toss-up. It's been heavily politicized - by money from the fossil fuel
companies - so no news can be trusted. You're not expert enough to read the scientific
literature - so you're agnostic.
You *suspect* some people want it to be true??? In other words you suspect some academics
of wanting to trash the world economy for vague, unexpressed personal reasons. But you
don't suspect the Koch brothers, Exxon, BP, Faux News, the Discovery Institute, the
MacArthur Foundation, and a host of right-wing think tanks of wanting it to be false AND
paying a lot of PR firms to obfuscate the issue.
Brent
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