Things may be somewhat different in the field of climate science. There's the famous quote from Prof. Phil Jones to a skeptic: "We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it."

Actually, that attitude is something that I have observed in physics, math, and biology. It has to do with credentialing. A layman with an agenda can make a mess, and at the same time appear credible to other laymen.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I've grown up believing in man-made climate change, my father is a physicist noted for being outspoken on issues of climate, and I grew up with discussions of the science at the dinner table.

My position germinated with the greenhouse effect, but it's progressed since then.

Right now, I'd say that the science that I find most convincing is the lack/removal of planetary countermeasures to the increasing carbon density of our atmosphere, as well as the possible amplification of the effects via the melting of permafrost. The specifics of what will happen are incredibly difficult to simulate, but if the chemistry of our atmosphere is changing in such a way that we can't bring it back to equilibrium, then we're taking huge risks.

In fact, I DON'T trust the current science to tell me *exactly* what will happen, but I'd rather not live in a test-tube at the behest of a Coal CEO. They're acting like kids with a chemistry set.

I actually *HATE* the phrase global warming. Even if it IS factual, folks assume that "Global Warming" implies "Local warming". Our weather system is so complex with so many different mechanisms for heat transfer that local warming isn't guaranteed.

Every time the weather changes or does something unusual you hear folks on either side yelling "Global Warming" or "Global warming is a hoax". Climate simply doesn't work that way, an abundance of extreme weather phenomena supports the conclusion that the climate is changing, but a single event does not.


The biggest danger from climate change is not drought/desertification, floods, hurricanes etc...

The danger is in the risk of the unknown, I can prepare for any one of the above scenarios, but preparing for all of them is impossible.

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

This is also interesting to me, as I used to think like this as well. May I ask - without googling, what do you believe the rate of sea level rise is? (And perhaps the elevation of Manhattan or Hawaii?)

Has anyone here who is concerned about global warming considered whether there may be benefits to more CO2 in the atmosphere, or to a warmer climate? Or does this kind of thought feel immediately ridiculous, and if so, why?

Or he might just find a mistake that the scientist with an agenda has ignored because he got his desired result. In any case, to me the quote indicates a deep lack of understanding of how the scientific method is supposed to work.

If there are benefits (And there certainly will be), then we must assume there will be drawbacks as well. Neither the benefits nor the drawbacks will be predictable, unpredictable drawbacks will do considerable damage while unpredictable benefits can't be amplified.

This just strikes me as putting one's faith in a lottery.



Laymen can certainly get it right once in a while.

But if we're going to make policy decisions, then we have to make the best bet we possibly can, and the odds are better on the scientists. But if you'd like to put all your money on 31 black and spin the wheel, I'd rather you didn't bet all our life savings.

EDIT: Also, I have more faith in the ulterior motives of "interested laymen" than I do in some enormous scientific conspiracy which encourages scientists to abandon their most cherished principle. (Crushing competitor's theories in journal articles)

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

Thank you for your answers. It matches essentially what I've read elsewhere (both on climate science and skeptical websites), but I find it very helpful to hear it described by someone who is directly involved, to verify the information I have. I hope that on neutral ground like a Go forum we can continue to have a conversation about this topic without the acrimony that usually goes along with it in dedicated forums.

Within this paragraph lies one of the core issues I have with climate science: the concept that you can run "experiments" with models. Personally, I think science must verify its theories in the real world, and a true experiment is only something that is performed on nature. We may think that we learn something by running a model or finding an elegant mathematical theory, but we cannot be certain, we always need a physical system as an unbiased arbiter of truth. The argument "we don't know what else it could be" is dangerous, and it would be easy to find historical examples of where it has gone spectacularly wrong.

Regarding computer models, personally I'm a software guy, and somewhat flippantly I could say I don't trust computers. There's a serious issue however; I know just how easy it is to fool oneself to think that a piece of software you've written is correct only to then find the one logical flaw that makes it collapse. My gut feeling is that trying to model something as complex as the climate is hubris. Even vastly simpler models fail badly - at the start of every Formula 1 season for example, when the cars behave differently on track than they do in the CFD simulation. And in 2008 we saw the mathematical models the economists use blow up all around us; they'd never bothered to check whether those had any connection to the real world.

Since you're working for or with the Met Office - can you tell me how much the climate models you use differ from the weather forecasting ones?

Also, another question I've never really seen answered anywhere - if you need CO2 and feedbacks to explain the late 20th century, how do the models explain the warming period 1910-1940? Greenhouse emissions surely were much lower back then, but the warming occurred at a similar rate at least according to some datasets.

You don't need an enormous scientific conspiracy, you just need normal human biases (confirmation bias mainly) and intellectual fallibilities like groupthink. I don't really expect you to believe me on this, I'm just a random guy on the internet. In lieu of the dozens of links I could post on the issue, I'll resort to the fallacy of appeal to authority. I'd strongly recommend that anyone who's at least a little curious about the issue listen to the following interview: http://prn.fm/2012/08/01/green-front-dr-richard-muller-080112/#ixzz22nkSzW84 (no peeking yet for those who want to answer the question about sea level rise; the interview contains the answer). Prof Muller is celebrated by the interviewers as someone who confirms global warming exists and is caused by humans, so his motivations should not be suspect. A part particularly relevant to our discussion about scientific standards is at 19:00, but the whole thing is very interesting so I'd really recommend people listen to it.

Laymen are subject to the same biases, if not more so.

I also see groupthink at work, but in laymen. I see it arising from a fundamental distrust of scientists as liberal, ivory-tower intellectuals who are out of touch with the real world.

Those with this groupthink then apply confirmation bias to any paper which proposes that scientists as a group are wrong.

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

Like I said the only thing that matters are novel and unexpected findings. As far Health Science no one really considers that a science, since fundamentally they can't do most of their experiments do to ethical issues.

Hmm Black Carbon from fuel.

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/science/index.html

I can see a lot of epidemiologists finding some issues with this post

I do not know what the rate of sea level rise is. The question is the melting of land-locked glaciers.

But as I said, to me what makes global warming a serious problem is the politicization of the problem. It is not climate scientists who did that. It is laymen with an agenda.



If the planet heats up enough, I can move to Canada.

As shapenaji says, the greenhouse effect and the "lack/removal of planetary countermeasures to the increasing carbon density of our atmosphere" are very important. (He also mentions melting permafrost.) If it were a question, as your questions suggest, of moving to a new normal, then we could very likely adjust. The problem is that we are now on a course of accelerating change. To use my metaphor, nobody is putting on the brakes. It is not like we can say, "OK, this is the climate we like. We'll stop here." Most likely, we won't stop until we have experienced enough disasters to know that we have gone further than we want to.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Which will be too late. If we would (in theory) stop co2 emission right now, it would still take decades for the global warming to come to a halt. As is explained in the post at the top of the link in the op, co2 is warming the athmosphere, which in effect warms the oceans etc. which then can hold less co2 and so it goes back and forth until it comes to an equilibrium.
So if sometime in the future the climate gets wild enough for us to take this more seriously, everything we do then might be to little to late.

Scientific training drills confirmation bias out of budding scientists. And you do need a scientific conspiracy for confirmation bias to persist, because if any scientist exhibits it, his fellow scientists will jump all over him. They score points that way. Scientists go to great length to root out confirmation bias. That is one of the main things that makes science what it is. Confirmation bias is the opposite of science.

As for groupthink, I think that the idea of a paradigm fits. A dominant paradigm affects how scientists think and, perhaps more importantly, collect and view data.

As for climate science, I do not see how global warming/climate change is a paradigm. It is not like something without which climate science, as it is practiced, does not make sense. It is not something in which any scientist need be invested. In fact, are there not potential financial rewards in opposing global warming? The typical climate scientist, as CnP indicates, has no dog in this race.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

You stated that there is much orthodoxy, politics, and business, as well as lack of concrete proof of concepts and much uncertainty, in a particular field which you claimed was scientific, maybe your field. I simply concluded that that field is not very scientific, and not well regarded among other scientific disciplines, for example at the end of the day Health is a patient service oriented field, and the only thing that is relevant is a doctor selling services to patients, which is fine and great but not science.

I sense in this question a focus on statistics. Let me pass on something I learned early in college. Statistics proves nothing. It is a heuristic.

Let me illustrate with a famous example from a few centuries ago, back when all probability was Bayesian. The question arose, what is the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow? Given that the sun has risen on the morrow for some large number of days, a satisfyingly high probability was inferred that the sun would rise the next day. Then a German professor noted that, given the same statistics, the probability that the sun would rise 5,000 years from now was only 2/3. The point is, we do not base our belief that the sun will rise on a time series, no matter how long. We base it on astronomical facts.

Yes, temperature statistics are evidence. So are tornadoes, hurricanes, and droughts. But for me the key facts are the greenhouse effect, the increasing burning of fossil fuels, the continued destruction of forests, and the accelerating rise of greenhouse gases. If these trends continue, we know where that ends.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

1. I don't believe global warming is a problem, I conclude it is a problem. There is a difference. In other areas of life, I admit, I’d go with the word “believe” and its subsidiary meaning about concluding things, but because the confusion among its various meanings is used to great effect by deniers, I’ll opt for conclude.
2. Anyway, I concluded that global warming presents a public policy problem in 1994 after reading a rather polemical book, “The End of Nature” by Bill McKibben, which prompted me to read up on the science of it all.
3. If it is incontrovertible, it isn’t science. It might be math. It might be religion. It isn’t science.
4. Your questions confuse two things, things to which difference standards apply, the question of a certainty in science, which is a technical matter with philosophical difficulties, and the question of certainty in public policy and ordinary life. The claim that global warming “is a serious problem” is a public policy claim layered on top of climate science. It is a claim, by the way, based on information and reasoning of much higher quality than that underpinning many of our major pieces of legislation, including some criminal laws, as well as some of the wars we’ve started. When fending off a terrorist WMD attack, Cheney with some justification proposed a 1% certainty rule. Rather distant from "incontrovertible."
5. For a citizen judging a public policy issue, I think the following things are established well enough by scientists and others to support the claim that global warming is a problem. (a) humans are making large scale changes to the chemical composition of the atmosphere (b) those changes are changing the energy balance between space and the surface of the earth (c) those changes are predicted, albeit with much uncertainty, to have significant effects on climate, with consequences for the environment and our capacity to sustain the human economy (d) the predicted changes have been taking place, albeit faster than predicted, and (e) the consequences for us are, with significant likelihood, bad.

I think is slightly unfair to the medical field. Indeed, medicine is an industry and a matter of providing services to people and there are a lot of things about medicine that are not science. However, the fundamental basis of the field is the application of scientific method to human health. The standards of practice change based on observation and experiment. A great deal of the science is distorted, delayed, manipulated by money, tradition, career and other factors, but in the long run, the science tends to win out.

Things are not different at all in the field of climate science. They work constantly to challenge and improve the science. This one cherry-picked quote from one e-mail where one scientist was responding to one person who he believed was asking for data in bad faith is not evidence for your charge that climate scientists don't apply scientific method and suppress information that is at variance with their claims. That charge is falsified by the behavior of other climate scientists, the gargantuan amount of data they release and more importantly the limited and temporary situations where they don't provide some information, the behavior of this scientist in the periods both before and after this e-mail and a lot else.

Without googling, eh? Why without googling? Are you suggesting that to maintain his opinion, the person speaking needs not only to have read something about sea level rise change in the past, but to have kept it in mind? How much detailed climate data do you keep in mind? Why didn't you ask "why do you think sea levels are rising dangerously? what evidence is there?"? Do think folks who ask pop quiz questions liable to make their interlocutor trip up have an agenda in mind?

And do you think we can also put things in question form and use might and perhaps to cast doubt on things without ever saying anything ourselves, hoping you answer with a declarative sentence and we can attack it?



Have you ever considered for a moment that you post something without a question mark? Why do you not say something like "CO2 increase will likely benefit mankind more than harm it; here are references to work on that subject."? Is it because there isn't any?



Ah! Declarative sentences! At last you're saying something. You are drawing a conclusion about Phil Jones. From one line in one e-mail. Time to get back to the questions.

Do you think condemning this guy's whole career from that one e-mail to McIntyre is fair? Do you know how much of the data that was mentioned in that e-mail has since been released? Do you know what effect that data, if released, has had on the temperature record? Do you believe that the temperature record being discussed in that e-mail should have shown cooling rather than warming? Without googling or otherwise looking it up, can you quote five other things Phil Jones said in his life?