Comment by agentultra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by agentultra | Hacker News Reader

He offers very little charity to the subject of his critique and dives right into reactionary rhetoric. I waited patiently for the slide with the lizard-people but it didn't come. Sadly, it seems, this whole boon-doggle has been caused by grant-seeking academics, ratings-obsessed media, and opportunistic eco-political activists. Too tame for my liking.

I'm not involved enough in climate science to know one way or another if the IPCC's findings are biased. However I like to believe that the simple solution is the answer: that a team of hundreds (thousands?) of highly-specialized people have staked their lives on this project. From talking with my acquaintances in various science fields I find it improbable that people do it for the money. You could have a more comfortable working environment writing Javascript web apps to share photos with strangers. That leaves out grant-seeking academics -- hardly pay dirt. Ratings obsessed media? Even Al Gore's stunts pale in comparison to the deluge of profits from block buster films. Weather is a good scare for news but murderers and corrupt officials tend to make the prime time. That leaves opportunistic activists?

I guess? Seems unlikely that they'd have been able to orchestrate a conspiracy of this scale on their own simply to get their message out. Fudging ICPP data from hundreds (thousands?) of experiments alone would be rather difficult to do as an activist on the outside...

but what about on the inside? Might make a flop of a movie but I doubt it could be true.

All we have here are some lofty claims that science is wrong and a lone test-engineer has found the truth: climate change is just a scare tactic used by the Alarmists to fool you into... buying electric cars, trying to use less energy, and recycling? I don't get it.

Just a lone test-engineer? Sorry to be a bit rude but it does appear you're too lazy to bother to look at the arguments. There are plenty of people with distinguished careers in science whose sceptical positions are very well argued. There's Richard Lindzen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen and Judith Curry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Curry (chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology) for instance but there are many more if you look. Two websites to check are http://wattsupwiththat.com/ and http://bishophill.squarespace.com/. Both sites invite counter-arguments from 'warmists' whereas you'll find it difficult if not nigh impossible to post a sceptical comment on a non-sceptic site. That tells you a lot about how the science is conducted.

If you want to skip the science and move on to the economics try this one. Billions of dollars are being spent world wide on the basis of lousy climate models in so-called climate effect mitigation. However let us assume they correctly predict the future. The expenditure is demonstrably insane - there is no other word to describe it. Countless billions to lower temperatures by literally immeasurable fractions of a degree! http://topher.com.au/50-to-1-video-project/. And would you like to argue that the stupendous flow of cash doesn't influence anyone? That has to be a fairy story.

Watts Up with That is an instructive example, really.

Mr. Watts really tipped his hand a few years back. He had been banging the drums on insisting that the measured increase in low atmospheric temperatures had been an artifact of the heat island effect. He insisted that if we take a closer look into the techniques climate scientists use to correct for the heat island effect, we would find that mean surface temperatures had been drastically overestimated. He worked together with some folks to come up with a plan of attack to do just that, and off to the races we went.

So what did he do when the numbers came back and it turned out that climatologists had actually been overcorrecting for the heat island effect, with the result being that the study supported the exact opposite of his hypothesis? He moved the goalpost, and carried on.

The whole episode really wasn't much different from what we see with other junk scientists who've proven similarly capable of supporting an untenable position in the face of overwhelming evidence on the subject of the supposed vaccine-autism link, or whether or not dogs have ESP. Any of these propositions may be true; in principle any scientific consensus can be overturned (and it has happened in the past). But anyone who wishes to do so needs to be extremely scrupulous in how they assemble and present their arguments. Folks like Lindzen, Watts, and Rutan simply haven't proven themselves to be up to the task. Those who would like to challenge the scientific consensus on scientific grounds rather than the court of public opinion (which is influenced by the Dunning-Kruger effect more than evidence) would do well to try and find more capable spokespeople.

Let's suppose I am lazy (I am, most of the time) but that I actually did read every single slide (I did). What do you find wrong with my analysis?

"Sorry, but..." is just an excuse to be rude and not feel guilty about it. You don't have to sugar coat it. If you don't want to be rude then don't say rude things. Just say what you mean and get on with it.

The only statement closely resembling a premise is the question on slide 7: "Is 'Climate Change' just another over-blown scare?" The other 91 slides go on to support his foregone conclusion.

He offers few, if any, citations. No counter-evidence. He sketches on blurry graphs without explaining his data or methods. He takes quotes from other people to prove his point without giving the context from which they were taken. He even quotes himself a few times. He uses an imaginary taxonomy of Alarmists and skeptics -- guess which one is virtuous? Rutan may be a brilliant aviation engineer but he is not persuasive in his arguments against climate science.

The problem climate "skeptics" have is not one of a dominant conspiracy. It's over-whelming evidence.

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