5 thoughts on “Taking Skeptics Seriously”

  1. This is about as balanced an article as one could expect from the faithful, and I actually applaud it.

    The climate “science” game is no different from the cold fusion phenomenon in 1989. The believers wanted to believe, and the “skeptics” threw out a few (in some cases good) objections that were not easily answered. I was involved in that whole mess, and had hoped that it was real. But by the end of the First International Conference on Cold Fusion in 1989, I realized the mistake that had been made by the Pons-Fleischmann faction. That does not mean that the phenomenon does not exist (there is some evidence that it does), but the promise of an easy route to cheap energy was not supportable.

    In the case of climate “science” and cold fusion, the mistakes didn’t invalidate the hypothetical phenomena — but they invalidate the claims made about those phenomena to the point where it was easy to just disregard the phenomena completely.

    The difference is interesting. In the case of cold fusion, humanity as a whole was anxious to discard a theory that might have led to a clean, cheap source of energy — a true panacea for all human problems. In the case of global warming/climate change, humanity is anxious to adopt a theory that says that we face either doom from our current activities (which are patently good for humanity), or doom from abandoning them — and wants to implement the latter.

    The real question science should be addressing is: Why are we so suicidal?

  2. she still has no doubt that the planet is warming, that human-generated greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, are in large part to blame, or that the plausible worst-case scenario could be catastrophic.

    Quite apart from the fact that I’m more interested in the plausible average case, they don’t even bother explaining what the plausible worst case is..

    “The plausible worst-case scenario could be worse than anything we’re looking at right now,” Curry says. The rise in temperature from a doubling of CO2 “could be one degree. It could be 10 degrees.”

    Argh! What does that mean? Canada might some day be a nice place to live in winter? What’s the effect? Here’s the closest they get to saying anything relevant:

    the report projects 0.18 to 0.59 meter of sea-level rise by the end of the century

    WHO CARES? That’s the disaster you want to throw industrial society under the bus for? Really?

    If there’s anyone reading this who can tell me why I should give a shit about climate change, please let me know.. and no, I don’t mean whether or not I should be worried about the massive overreaction of governments around the world – I’m already worried about that.


  3. The difference is interesting. In the case of cold fusion, humanity as a whole was anxious to discard a theory that might have led to a clean, cheap source of energy — a true panacea for all human problems. In the case of global warming/climate change, humanity is anxious to adopt a theory that says that we face either doom from our current activities (which are patently good for humanity), or doom from abandoning them — and wants to implement the latter.

    The real question science should be addressing is: Why are we so suicidal?

    No. The real question is about money flows. You have a better chance of getting a guaranteed income with a tax or rent on a captive audience than investing into an R&D project which may never get anywhere. In the long term this will lead to widespread poverty and misery, but most people aren’t very good at long term planning. Some people take this as an argument for doing no planning at all. I respectfully disagree. Like some general used to say (guess who) plans are useless but planning is indispensable.

    Heck governments have stopped investing into fast reactors and the science for those has been proven to work already. Thorium reactors are another thing which is being ignored at the moment. Considering that the current stance on cold fusion research is hardly surprising.

  4. Says Gavin A. Schmidt, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and proprietor of the RealClimate blog: “Science is not a political campaign. We’re not trying to be everyone’s best friend, kiss everyone’s baby.”

    Anything involving groups of humans is political to some extent. Add public funding and it’s disingenuous to claim otherwise.

    The experts broadly agree that it will take massive changes in agriculture, energy production, and more to avert a potential disaster.

    An unjustified assumption revealing a bias.

    Following Copenhagen, the U.S. Senate was unable to pass even a modest “cap and trade” bill that would have mandated reductions.

    Nevermind how much this modest bill would have cost us.

Comments are closed.