To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (1044 ) 9/6/2011 8:28:09 PM From: Nadine Carroll 3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) | Respond to 1. Do not the non-climate scientists have a better understanding of the methodologies at play here than layman. IN other words even if they are not doing the research themselves wouldn't they be able to read the research and tell whether it was good science or not? (This happens to me all the time in my field (law) I may not know anything about the particular case and statute, but usually I can get a sense of how "legal" the issue is--whether it is in the ballpark so to speak and what treatment it might get on appeal--or before a trial judge.) Probably, if they bother to look AND if it weren't such a career-limiting move to express doubt on AGW. I can't speak to the extent of training foresters have to examine computer models. Oh,yes. Just do your own research on some of the skeptics. All of them are senior, tenured people and all say hundreds of young academics tell them they don't dare express the least doubt. Skeptical papers get treated in the most extraordinary way. Instead of being answered by other papers in the usual manner, we see editors being forced to resign (as we just saw with Remote Sensing), or papers published with 'leper bells' hung over them by the editors, as happened to prominent English skeptic Lord Monckton when he published a paper in American Physics a few years ago. Mind you, the subject being discussed is behavior of the Earth's climate, a fiendishly complicated, chaotic system full of feedback loops. It is the LAST subject which should be regarded as cut-and-dried, scientifically speaking. It can be, of course. The chief obstacle is that admitting the models need improvement throws doubt on results that have been proclaimed as certain. Anytime an issue becomes politicized on one side, it will become politicized on the other. As it became clear that more and more people were piling onto the AGW cause in the hope of passing Cap and Trade and establishing transnational regulation on energy use via Kyoto and its successor treaties, people who think these treaties describe The Road to Serfdom join the opposition. Lay person in terms of the physics, which I don't know enough to argue, but with an engineering background sufficient to understand the scientific method and not to be awed by the words "computer models". Besides my engineering background, I have a degree in classics and a lot of knowledge of history. When I first saw Mann's hockey stick graph in the early 1990s, my first reaction was, "Hey! What happened to the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age?" I knew from reading history they had occurred. 1000 years ago, they grew the grapes for Bordeaux wine in Southern England and olives in Cologne. Those are long lived plants that take years to start bearing and can bear for a generation or more. You don't plant them without generational knowledge of the local climate. It's too cold to grow those crops in those places today. I also have a working memory and political knowledge enough to detect propaganda campaigns. I remember what Hansen was predicting in 1990. I remember how back then, the working line was "We can't wait until we have proof because the stakes are too high." Then they co-opted the media into treating global warming as a certainty, and used the scare to extort enormous funding from government for all kinds of BS studies, all fitting the framework: "Predict the bad effects (no good effects allowed) that global warming WILL have on the local flora/fauna/water levels, etc etc and recommend how the the local/state/federal govt should prepare") If I have heard news stories fitting that framework once, I have heard them 1000 times. (These studies provided lots of work for the foresters et. al.) Along with the media blitz, came enormous pressure on the skeptics to shut up and get with the program. Al Gore (who stood to make billions) made An Inconvenient Truth, full of junk science lies (that's been court-adjudicated, btw), which has been shown in nearly every school in America. About then they started calling skeptics "deniers". You know, like Holocaust deniers. Does this sound like science to you? It sounds more like the Spanish Inquisition to me.
