Author Topic: Climate Change  (Read 28657 times)

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Offline TimG

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Re: Climate Change
« Reply #510 on: May 17, 2019, 07:32:55 am »
Smoothing and error correction requires knowledge of the subject matter.  Even a mathematician has limited ability to assess things like cofactors, or independence of variables.  While it's possible that the thousands of knowledgable scientists that have read this work said nothing, it's not believable to me.
Well that is the problem. You place too much weight on the idea that every narrow domain is so specialized that someone who is not a professional academic cannot read the literature and learn what is needed to provide a knowledgeable assessment. People with a lot of knowledge of math, statistics and the datasets in question have looked at these issues and provided more than adequate arguments that Mann's methods are junk and violate the basic rules of statistical analysis. I personally have enough knowledge of statistics to read the claims and counter claims to know that the critics have the better argument yet despite that many professional climate scientists refuse to acknowledge the obvious. This is why I say any scientific question that cannot be settled with replicable experiments is subjective and the answers change depending on the biases of the academics providing the answers.

Of course they could but are they ?   And if so, how did they convince you ?
They convinced me only in the areas where experimental replication can be used to validate the claim. In this case it is the warming effect of CO2 and a measurable increase in air and ocean temperatures over the last few decades. However, this tells us nothing about the amount of warming we will have to deal with or the consequences. The only thing that has been established is that it could be a big problem and therefore it would be prudent to act.

Because people allow them to define points of discussion in the debate.  The incredible thing is that the science is far more discrete and has more capacity for objective exploration than the economics, and than our approaches to the problem.  And yet the debate on the science seems to be the more contentious one.
This is entirely the fault of alarmists who decided that they would usurp the authority of science in order to push policy choices that are questions of values rather than science. This forced people who do not share the values and priorities of the alarmists to attack the science. If the alarmists had instead acknowledged that the decision on what to do about the science is a question of values then the science would have been left out of the debate (i.e. people would have agreed on the science but used arguments based on values to argue for their preferred policy choices). To provide an analogy: science may diagnose someone with cancer and provide treatment options but the question of what treatment to follow is a question of values.
« Last Edit: May 18, 2019, 03:20:40 pm by TimG »