Category Archives: Science And Society

“Expert Climate Economists”

Are apparently morons:

When asked at what date climate change will have a net negative impact on the global economy, the median survey response was 2025. In the recent past, climate change likely had a net positive impact on the global economy, due primarily to the effect of carbon fertilization on crops and other plant life. However, even contrarian economists agree, when accounting for the vulnerability of poorer countries to climate impacts, global warming has been hurting the global economy since about 1980.

The NYU survey asked when the economic benefits we experienced up to 1980 would be completely wiped out; 41% of respondents said that’s already happened. Another 25% answered that it would happen within a decade, and 26% said we’d see net negative economic impacts by 2050. If we continue with business-as-usual pollution and warming, on average the experts predicted a GDP loss of about 10% by the end of the century, and that there would be a 20% chance of a “catastrophic” loss of one-quarter of global GDP.

There is no scientific evidence to believe any of this.

The Science Is Settled

I don’t believe that science is done by “consensus,” but if you are sufficiently unfamiliar with how science works that you do, the consensus seems to be that CAGW is a crock:

Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.

It’s also worth noting that the BS 97% number is not about CAGW.

An Unnatural Consensus

Judith Curry says we can’t understand climate without understanding the underlying natural cycle. And we don’t.

It’s insane to be making policy decisions on the basis of our current state of knowledge.

[Update a while later]

“Science journalists are not science advocates, and scientists are not science.”