Chad Orzell has some problems with the reboot. So do I and while it’s not his main concern, he puts his finger on it:
The bit where he called out young-Earth creationism for the impoverished scale of its vision was cute, too, though I’m not sure it was all that necessary or useful (in that the people who believe that won’t be watching, and wouldn’t be convinced), but then the show has clearly established a pattern of throwing red meat to the anti-religious from time to time.
Yes, if by “from time to time” he means every episode so far. I’m not traditionally religious, but I find it gratuitous and off putting. The writers and Tyson seem to get some sort of righteous satisfaction from putting a rhetorical thumb in the eyes of believers. It does not advance science, or their own secular religious cause.
Is climate linear or non-linear? As she says, this is the heart of the scientific debate. But even if it can be modeled as linear, we still don’t understand enough about the interactions to model it with confidence.
Sorry, this seems like a ridiculous way to do subtraction (particularly for that problem which is trivially easy). And I can’t imagine how I’d do it in my head. Borrowing seems a lot easier to me.
The biggest implication is that the models are worse than useless as a guide to policy on climate. And places like California are taking a wrecking ball to their economy for nothing.
I think any physical scientist should be extremely skeptical that a long-term stable system is dominated by positive feedback. Systems dominated by positive feedback — and we are talking about incredibly high implied feedback percentages to get to these catastrophic forecasts — don’t tend to be very stable, but it is Michael Mann himself who has argued over and over with his hockey stick chart that past temperatures have only varied in very narrow ranges for thousands of years. Not the behavior one would expect of a system dominated by strong positive feedbacks.
To me, this thought experiment demonstrated that it was more likely that net climate feedbacks were zero or even negative (if only half of past warming was due to man, and half due to nature, it would imply a sensitivity around 0.7C). In either case, the resultant warming would be far from catastrophic. To believe the IPCC forecasts, one would have to believe there were either really long time delays, or natural and manmade cooling factors off-setting the warming. These have all been debated and I won’t go into them today, but I didn’t find the higher forecasts of 5-10C to be at all credible.