The USS Quad Damage

I believe the correct term now days is Climate Change. Which is an even more worthless definition than Global Warming.

Not believing in Climate Change is qualitatively different to taking a moral stance on abortion. It is claiming that the scientific models of climate are incorrect. It is a tenable position to hold (but see below for some minimum requirements for it to be rational).

Talking about scientific models, in the greenhouse analogy, the CO₂ is represented by the glass in the greenhouse, not the air. An MythBusters experiment to change the gases would prove nothing. CO₂ is one of the greenhouse gases not because it stores heat, but because (like glass) it reflects infrared energy while being transparent to other parts of sunlight – sunlight can get into the greenhouse, but the reflected infra-red can’t get back out.

Carbonic acid “perforates plankton”? Huh?

Climate change has long-term effects on average temperatures, amongst a lot of random noise and other factors. It doesn’t make sense to say “It is hot today because of climate change.”

I like your “put your money where you mouth is” idea of telling people to start insurance companies. I am not sure it is practical, because insurance companies need to offset their risks with underwriters who do believe/fear climate change.

“Science is like a brick wall”? I argue that, in that analogy, reality is the brick wall, science is the blind, but deliberate and purposeful, feeling around for it.

I agree that merely naysaying in the face of many years of careful research isn’t a logically sustainable position. At first, it is the responsibility of the scientists making extra-ordinary claims to provide extra-ordinary evidence. Now that there a large body of evidence has been provided, if you want to disagree, you need to provide counter-models that better describe the evidence, counter-evidence that falsify the models, or demonstrate logical flaws in their models. You do need to work harder than just saying “Bullshit!”

Julian: You can put most of these points down to bad writing on my part. In the first paragraph I was actually attempting to say what you said in your first paragraph. I am not arguing that “someone who doesn’t believe in climate change is wrong or irrational”, I’m saying “believing or not believing in climate change at a macro level doesn’t really make sense, and it’s also not something you really even need to worry about” (so really, I am saying it’s an untenable position to hold the belief that climate change is true or false, at an aggregate level).

You may be right about the reflection stuff. However, this doesn’t change the fact that the theory, at least, is readily verifiable. The concession really is that the effects on the environment are so wide-ranging, and the climate modelling so difficult, that the theory may not really map well to reality.

For the CO2 perforating plankton, this was the best I could find. Laziness again means I didn’t bother looking for the source. Basically, the CO2 increases the acidity of the oceans, and the calcium carbonate which plankton have on them gets dissolved away (as well as in coral reefs, etc). Basically, you can see plankton today vs a few years ago, and it looks like it’s got little holes in it.

The point there is that this isn’t clearly “climate change” stuff which is happening. For a climate change skeptic to continue to believe that nothing is happening, they will have to address a number of different issues across a wide variety of the natural sciences.

While it doesn’t make sense to say “it’s hot today because of climate change”, a lot of people are saying “temperature variances are going to get greater, as are extreme weather events, due to climate change”.

Insurance can take many forms. I’ve heard of a stock market technique which is really just collateral against climate risk. This is meant for farmers who want to hedge risks against a bad season. In any case, insurance in the strictest sense is not necessarily the only opportunity here, and there are arguably enough climate change skeptics to form some workable solutions.

I wanted to write “reality is like a brick wall”, but that softened my point fairly significantly (after all, it’d be like saying “you can break science”). So I cheated and possibly saved a paragraph.

I agree with your final paragraph, but want to add that the key here is that the evidence is usually confined to a small space. That is, scientists doing science could show that some specific aspect of the environment is not due to climate change (in fact this has already been the case a few times), but this does nothing to prove or disprove climate change as a whole.

I am saying it’s an untenable position to hold the belief that climate change is true or false, at an aggregate level.

I am afraid I still don’t understand this. Furthermore, I don’t trust this position.

One of the basic tenets of science is that your theory must be falsifiable. There must be some evidence that, if someone actually found it, would disprove the theory. If someone found reliable fossil evidence of a human and a dinosaur living at the same time, the Theory of Evolution would have to be discarded or majorly revised. On the other hand, there is no conceivable way to disprove the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, so it isn’t a scientific theory.

If you argue there is no conceivable way to take the position that Climate Change is untrue, then Climate Change is no longer science. (To clarify, I don’t believe that, for example, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is false, but I can conceive of ways that it could be proven false. Until such evidence is found, you would be irrational to believe it is false, but it isn’t logically untenable.)

Now, where I get nervous about Climate Change models is that I am ignorant of what it would take to falsify them. I have heard some people claim that, due to sun-spot cycles, the temperature will get colder before it gets warm, and that therefore colder temperatures won’t disprove the greenhouse effect. My reaction is: well, what would it take to disprove it? I am ignorant of the answer.

However, this doesn’t change the fact that the [reflecting gases] theory, at least, is readily verifiable.

I don’t believe anyone seriously doubts the fundamentals of how sunlight passes through greenhouse gases, but infra-red doesn’t. The doubt occurs when the effect is put into very complex climate models that include hundreds of other factors, like how much gas volcanos will belch out in the future.

the climate modelling so difficult, that the theory may not really map well to reality.

Right, I think we agree.

calcium carbonate which plankton have on them

The reference talks about shellfish with calcium carbonate shells. Plankton are not shellfish. Your point about the effect on the eco-system holds, but the details were a bit confused.

For a climate change skeptic to continue to believe that nothing is happening, they will have to address a number of different issues across a wide variety of the natural sciences.

Agreed.

Insurance can take many forms. I’ve heard of a stock market technique which is really just collateral against climate risk.

Good point. You could buy futures in commodities that will suffer if the climate change theory is true, and that wouldn’t need much infrastructure. Similarly, some people made a lot of money from the sub-prime mortgage crisis, by predicting it was going to happen, against the general market sentiment.

Seeing as our disagreements are at the beginning of your comment, let me start from the end.

The plankton is mentioned only in passing in that article. You’ll have to grep for it. It’s also mentioning only a specific type of plankton. However, I think we both agree the fact that it’s plankton doesn’t really matter. There’s a direct and causal effect taking place and more CO2 is the likely explanation.

I am actually arguing that “Climate Change” is not a science, because (AFAIK) no one has written a paper called “climate change”. They’ve probably written a paper on the theme or topic of “climate change”, but “Climate Change” in itself is not the science part. There could be a paper titled “the long term effects on the atmosphere given an increase in Carbon Dioxide”, but that’s far more specific than what “Climate Change” and it’s meaning encompasses today.

The other hand-wavey part about the science of climate change is that it’s based on modelling and statistics. I believe we understand well how things work, so we can come up with formulas for how things behave, but when it comes to putting input variables against those formulas, that’s when debate comes into play. This isn’t exactly right, because the mathematics of Chaos Theory should allow some mitigation of the risk of modelling a system like the climate, but as you say it’s fairly complicated, and I expect that the exact predicted outcomes will be in flux for a long time.