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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (18657)	12/19/2007 2:41:35 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36927

It is easy to understand how to compare 10K vs. 4.5B, but it is not easy to compare sea-level rise if you start from zero and want to talk about magnitude of correct predictions. That's irrelevant to my point. You used the 10K old world as an example, of uncertainty and compared it to uncertainty about global warming, implying that the uncertainty should be ignored, because its rediculous to claim the Earth is only 10K. So again I'm responding to your point not a strawman. Now if you meant to argue "there is uncertainty that the world is 4.5 billion years old, but we should ignore that uncertainty, then you would be making a very questionable statement. The uncertainty that the world is 4.5 billion years old is large enough that its not unreasonable to consider it potentially important. In many ways the conference had political pressure to paint a more dire future. I'm making a statement about the net pressure Fine, then I'll make a statement about net pressure. There was net pressure to conclude that global warming is a serious problem and strongly related to human CO2 emissions. --- 1) Scientists are by nature cautious about predictions. They get kudos for being proven correct, not incorrect. They will be considered correct if things change at least as much or MORE than they predict. They will be considered wrong if things come in weaker than predicted. If things come in massively below or above their predictions they will be considered to have gotten it wrong. Otherwise they probably will be considered to have gotten it right. 2) The models are not good at things like "tipping" points. "Tipping" points are likely to be positive feedback not negative feedback. Most of the feedback is likely to be negative, either all along or eventually. The models are far from perfect on both forms of feedback. 3) There was very well publicized political pressure to tone down the conclusions. There is equal political pressure to make dire predictions, coming from the outside, and probably more pressure from the internal politics of the conference and climatology in general to at least make predictions of serious problems. Also the summary of the IPCC report was written by a small team, not the whole IPCC, and than they where approved by government representatives, at least most of whoom where from government committed to CO2 reduction targets.