Hi koan; Re: "But back to the IPCC; in a certain sense, the IPCC has done its job. For this fifth report, they have synthesized the science and provided enough evidence that action is warranted. How many more reports of this type do we need? Will a sixth report that confirms what we already know make much of a difference? Will a seventh? Do these reports need to be written every 5-6 years? Perhaps one a decade would be sufficient? These reports require enormous amounts of time and energy. Scientists who take authorship roles put their own research on hold, sometimes for years. ";
The IPCC is somewhat behind the times. It's also a little politicized (it is a part of the United Nations which is hardly where you'd go to get unpoliticized news about science). The real failures in global warming predictions have been coming out in the last 6 months or so and that's after the cut-off date for inclusion in this 5th report. It will have to be included in the 6th report but between now and then, the writing is on the wall for anyone willing to read the peer reviewed literature.
Of course we're not climate experts but this we do know:
(1) Back in 1998 the climate scientists were "certain" that the "science was settled" and that the temperature now would be substantially warmer than it was in 1998.
(2) Temperatures did not, in fact, rise over the next 15 years. Now the climate experts are saying roughly the same thing they did 15 years ago. Some of them say that they know why they were wrong then, but we really have no way of knowing whether or not they know now. What we do know is that they're willing to tell us that their predictions are "certain" when time proved that they were not.
This is not the first time that modern science has been just plain wrong. When the physicists began working on the problem of getting electricity from water using fusion, they told us that the first plant would be operating in 20 years. This was back around 1950. Since then, the only thing that's changed is that their estimates of when the first plant would begin operation have gotten pushed back. Now instead of being 20 years in the future, it's supposed to be 25 years. What would have happened if we'd made permanent plans to ban all other sources of energy back in 1950? Should we ban other sources of energy than fusion now because the problem is going to be solved so soon?
Given the bad history of climate science predictions, we need to see them test their predictions before we can trust them. This is the case no matter whether 97% of them agree that the science is settled or not. We can trust them neither as a group or as individuals. They have been wrong as a group and as individuals in the past and so we do not have a record of their ability to deliver what they promise.
What's more, from the "Climategate" emails, we know that the beliefs they have about the reliability of their science and what they say in public are very different things. It's not just that they're fools who tell us that they can predict things that they demonstrably cannot predict, they're also liars.
Furthermore, they now admit (peer reviewed paper in Nature) that their predictions were wrong for the last 15 years. But it took them 15 years to reach the point where they admitted it. What does that tell you about how good their science is? What does it tell you about their intelligence and their ethics?
No, we can't trust the IPCC reports any more than we can trust the individual scientists who contributed to it. Making it into a UN document doesn't improve any of the reliability that is missing from the parts it was made from.
Hey, maybe they'll be right about their predictions for the next 15 years. But that could be the result of blind luck. Even a broken watch is right twice a day. Since we know that they are fools and liars, we really should require that they predict the weather for a much longer period. Let them make predictions for 50 years out and we'll talk about it then.
-- Carl |
