Power Line's Steven Hayward summarily dismisses the fact that 97% of climate science supports man-made global climate change because there's too much data supporting climate change, so it's really just noise that covers up the fact that we should continue to do nothing about it.
No really, that's his entire argument.
No one can possibly keep up with the flood of scientific articles published on climate-related topics these days (we’re spending way too much on climate research right now, but that’s a topic for another day), so it is ridiculous to offer sweeping generalizations like this about the character of the scientific literature. I keep up with a fair amount of it in Nature, Science, and a couple of the other main journals, and what is quite obvious is that most climate-related articles are about specific aspects of climate, such as observed changed in localized ecosystems, measurement refinements (like ocean temperatures, etc), energy use and projections, and large data analysis. Many of these articles do not take a position on the magnitude of possible future warming, and fewer still embrace giving the car keys over to Al Gore. Only a handful deal with modeling of future climate change, and this is where the debate over climate sensitivity and the severe limitations of the models (especially as relates to clouds) is quite lively and—dare I say it—unsettled. (Just read the IPCC Working Group I chapter on climate models if you don’t believe me.) The “97 percent of scientists ‘believe in’ climate change” cliché is an appalling abuse of science, and a bad faith attempt to marginalize anyone who dissents from the party line that we need to hand our car keys over to Al Gore. The tacit message is: if you dissent from the party line, you must be in that 3 percent who think you shouldn’t brush your teeth, take painkillers for headaches, etc.
Got that? Hayward admits there is an overwhelming amount of data that shows climate is changing, but now the "unsettled science" is "should we bother to do anything about it" and that's just too complex for science to prove that we should.
Better to do nothing, as he goes on to attack the 97% figure with one example from one paper, declares all of climate science to be junk, then declares it a moot point, even though he's just got through explaining how climate change exists and rails against the 3% that somehow believes it's a myth and how dare you put him in that category, because he believes in science, dammit.
The basis of climate denial is this: the models predicting the climates of the future vary widely. Because they vary widely due to the complexity of all the factors of climate, the majority of the models can't possibly all be 100% right, so we have to assume that the vast, overwhelming majority are flawed in some way. Therefore, we can't possibly construct national political policy, let alone international policy, based on these models that we've just proven are all flawed in some way. We can't take action that could be cost-effective based on this uncertainty. The only safe path is to do nothing.
This of course is akin to saying "Well we don't know how long a person will live when they are born, and the majority of the models predicting a person's lifespan are going to be historically incorrect or flawed in some way. Therefore, we shouldn't bother to spend money on public education, police and fire safety, medical advances, clean air and water, or a safe food supply because we don't know if that will really extend a person's lifespan or not in a cost-effective way. We can't predict the future based on this uncertainty, so the only safe path is to do nothing."
You see where the problem begins. Hayward obviously doesn't.
Posts
3 comments:
Also, he seems to believe that there's a movement to give Al Gore a car.
You are on point about why they hate Holder.
And, it's the reason I love him so much.
Sigh. Somebody needs to teach this joker that there is more to an education than sitting in on a few classes and more to keeping up with the research than flipping through the editorials in Science and Nature.
Now, I read Science and Nature, and the professional journals of my own field, and New Scientist and Scientific American, and the professional journals of allied fields, and opinion journals such as Commentary and the Nation and Proceedings of the US Naval Institute, and a whole lot of books on a whole lot of topics... so that I can gather ideas to inspire further research in my own field, to stay abreast of interesting work where ever it might be found, and to integrate all this work and all these ideas into a balanced professional appraisal of the world and my place in it.
Steven Hayward appears to be ignorant of what I call the Web of Understanding that makes Science work. I am a full expert in the little slab of my own technical area, but because I make an effort to stay informed I can comment with greater or lesser force on a broad array of areas around me; because I take my professional responsibilities seriously I can serve to call attention to areas that are important and to raise flags when something goes awry. The upshot is that while I personally am not a climate scientist I know enough about what they do to recognize that what they claim is perfectly consistent with my own expert knowledge; the network resulting from my overcheck in concert with the parallel overcheck by a million allied scientists gives us all a tremendous confidence that we are on the right track.
So I do a lot of physical modeling. This is distinct from the modeling that economists do, and the modeling that climate scientists do, but there is enough of a family resemblance that I can follow their work with a fair degree of confidence. Steven Hayward likes to whine that the climate modeling is not accurate enough to suit him, so we need to junk the whole business. My professional opinion is that this is the pathetic mewling of an ignorant little toad who understands nothing. As we say in the field, all models are wrong but some models are useful: we could prove, by the physical evidence, that global warming is an ongoing process occurring at a known rate and likely to have certain consequences EVEN IF computers had never been invented. In fact, the model allow us to quantify our uncertainties and thereby render them manageable. The fact that models give different predictions is not a problem but their great strength: by examining how outputs depend on inputs,we can forge a solid link between the present and the future.
As Frank Drebben taught us, you take a chance waking up in the morning, crossing the street, or sticking your face in the fan. If Steven Hayward actually lived his life by the philosophy he espouses for deciding the future of the Earth, he would spend all day under covers - and everyone else would live happily ever after, especially if he never again disgraced my skaerm with his blatherings.
Post a Comment