Re: Climate pseudo-science versus science
The controversy is no more among scientists (crackpots excepted), but among the uneducated and populists.
Indeed. 33,500 of them jetted off to Egypt recently to for a spot of subsidised fine dining and to demand $100bn+ a year to save the planet. Some even took a Swedish school dropout who believed she could see CO2 emitted from power stations and turned her into a prophet & multi-millionaire. Some took a poll, and boldly announced '97%' of scientists bought into CO2 dogma. Then scientists pointed out the flaws in their reasoning and sampling methodology. Others counted tree rings, weighed wood and came up with a formula that converted wood density to highly accurate temperatures.
Others called BS. One of my favorite examples here-
https://climateaudit.org/2007/10/12/a-little-secret/
While paleoclimatologists are attempting to update many important proxy records to the present, this is a costly, and labor-intensive activity, often requiring expensive field campaigns that involve traveling with heavy equipment to difficult-to-reach locations (such as high-elevation or remote polar sites). For historical reasons, many of the important records were obtained in the 1970s and 1980s and have yet to be updated.
Which was a quote from the 'Nobel Prize' winning climate genius, and creator of wooden thermometers, Michael Mann. Steve McIntyre's 'Starbucks Hypothesis' and a quick road trip easily disproved Mann's claim. Plus it gave a good explanation as to how the tree-ring circus operated, and added to the scientific record when McIntyre's core sample was added to the record.
But historically significant because antics like this helped show the... quality of 'science' from some practioners in this field. Especially as the 'Hockey Stick' became the poster child for the Global Warming cult and industry. The MWP and LIA didn't happen. The trees tell us this. But this is how scepticism often starts. Someone makes a claim backed by some gish-gallop involving terms that sound plausible, like 'black body radiation'. Ok, trivially true. But then claims appear that trigger educated people's BS meters, and they're called 'sceptics', and later, 'deniers' for daring to question the faith.
For me, that was the radiation claims. I do optics and was familiar with some fun things like the water peak that can plague optical fibres, or just the way impurities or doping can alter transmission characteristics. Same principles are core here. Sun heats surface, surface absorbs energy, energy in motion is heat, if heat is 'trapped', it gets warmer.
It doesn't take much effort to understand the basics. It's fundamental physics that eminent scientists like Arhennius and Angstrom argued about a long time ago, then Einstein et al around quanta, photons and energy in general. Then it gets bastardised by shiesters like Al Gore & Mann doing tricks with bottles full of CO2 as 'proof'. That's showmanship, not science.
Science is using tools like MODTRAN, HITRAN, molecular dynamics and general intellectual curiosity to learn stuff. Which is fun, except the more you learn, the more dubious climate 'science' becomes. Bold claims, collosal sums of money but precious little quality science to back that up. Especially when the dogma is essentially based on homeopathy. So assume CO2 is the principle climate driver. Past evidence shows wide temperature excursions. If so, then smaller concentrations of CO2 had dramatically larger climate effects. Especially in the far past, when CO2 concentrations were far higher than today, and was at a time when most life evolved, and thrived. How can this be?
But along the way it also demonstrates more relevant stuff. A second is a second, a year is a year etc. Except when they're actually variables rather than constants and we need to make adjustments like leap seconds. Only really been a problem since the digital age, but in climate science there are far more variables at play than just CO2. You could for example calculate the insolation changes and energy flux changes to the leap second, should you choose to.. But in reality, much as with anthropogenic CO2, it's not statistically significant.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
