…in a sense, the video doesn’t even refute the straw man it set up. It’s not that climate science consists only of models: obviously there are observations too. But all the attribution claims about the climatic effects of greenhouse gases are based on models. If the scientists being interviewed had any evidence otherwise, they didn’t present any.
When you can’t even knock down your own straw man, you don’t have much of an argument.
So how did the video do refuting Scott Adams’ cartoon? He joked that scientists warning of catastrophe invoke the authority of observational data when they are really making claims based on models. Check. He joked that they ignore on a post hoc basis the models that don’t look right to them. Check. He joked that their views presuppose the validity of models that reasonable people could doubt. Check. And he joked that to question any of this will lead to derision and the accusation of being a science denier. Check. In other words, the Yale video sought to rebut Adams’ cartoon and ended up being a documentary version of it.
This is a huge loss to the space community. No word (yet) on how he died, but he was only twenty-nine or thirty years old. Some of us knew him since he was a kid. And my deepest condolences to Steve and his family. This has to be shattering to them.
[Tuesday-morning update]
Future leaders in space has set up a memorial fund. But I wonder if they have permission from the family?
Between tech advances like this, and lower fuel costs from fracking and the end of OPEC, I think we’re going to get a lot more mileage out of internal combustion, Al Gore’s mindless hysteria aside.
Thoughts from Judith Curry on the current state of knowledge in climate. The warm mongers never consider the possibility that their proposed cures may in fact be worse than the disease. I personally think it’s nuts to consider climate a greater threat to humanity than poverty, and particularly energy poverty. But then, many of them don’t really care about humanity, or consider humanity a problem in and of itself.
[Update a few minutes later]
A new paper on the epistemological status of general circulation models.