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I'm going to cut you some slack here and assume that your reading comprehension skills are pretty low right now, as is your ability to think clearly. I'll just

I'm going to cut you some slack here and assume that your reading comprehension skills are pretty low right now, as is your ability to think clearly. I'll just go ahead and blame that on allergy meds, since it's that time of year. The list given earlier (which has now disappeared from this thread, apparently) showed at least a dozen or so dire Earth Day predictions which obviously didn't come true. There's no particular reason to believe that at least the more dire of climate change predictions will come true, either, especially given that many predictions haven't come anywhere close to being true even though we were told to expect serious consequences by now. By that I mean things like "major ice loss at the poles", "polar bear population collapse", "the end of snow", "the new normal" (in various contexts), "major agricultural decline", and so on. Though it's certainly easy enough for some folks to play the "Well, maybe it didn't happen as early as originally predicted, but it will definitely happen by the year 2050 or 2100" game, isn't it? BTW, I don't necessarily consider it a coincidence that item number 6 from that list mentioned 4 billion people, and Gov. Brown also mentioned 4 billion people in total. That's a big, scary number, but it apparently was taken at least somewhat seriously in the past, so why not just recycle it for the future? And yes, I'm quite aware of various forecasts concerning heat and such. However, historically cold has generally been far more deadly than heat; see the following, for example. https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2015/05/20/cold-weather-deaths/27657269/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2015/05/20/cold-weath... Now see the following, which near the end makes the following bold claim: "One thing that’s clear: climate change will make things worse" https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/1/17/16851398/cold-snap-heat-wave-deaths-human-health https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/1/17/1685139... Well, gee, folks, if cold-related deaths are historically up to 20 times higher than heat-related deaths, then common sense suggests that the above claim is just pretty much total bullshit on the face of it, since we're being told to expect cold waves to decrease while heat waves increase. As to your "We don't have a precedent ..." statement, common sense should tell you that we probably still don't have any such situation! I've actually looked at some of that data directly myself and found it wanting. I'm somewhat hesitant to use the word "fraudulent" here (but I think that applies to at least some of it), so I will just use the words "sloppy" and “highly suspect” instead. A funny thing about your “vast” statement: The latest numbers that I recall seeing (I’m not sure where) claimed that there are currently something like 70,000 climate scientists out there who have by now published hundreds of thousands of climate-related papers, or some such. Which is funny because just a few years ago the numbers that I recall seeing weren’t anywhere close to this; we’re talking at least an order of magnitude difference here, IIRC. So, taking these claims at face value, then you probably would have to have had a truly remarkable increase recently in the number of climate scientists (maybe they just breed like rabbits?), with an equally remarkable burst of publishing productivity on their part (maybe they’re just working really, really hard trying to save the planet?). All of this, of course, in the face of painful restrictions on research funding and competition for journal space in general. I’m just not buying said claims personally, so methinks that maybe you’re being a bit too gullible here.

Certhas 9y ago
It's fine to roll your eyes at more outrageous statements, but keep some perspective. You're not better at science than many many scientists out there. This science was developed in an exceptionally hostile atmosphere, where any results to the contrary (climate change isn't happening/isn't human made/is benign) would have been vastly helpful to a scientists career, so there is no misaligned incentive structure here. So the idea that there is a massive misrepresentation of results, skewed towards the extreme, driven by sloppy science, is just a conspiracy theory. Again, the IPCC report I linked above explicitly compares the expected increase in mortality in summer and the expected decrease in winter and finds the former outweighs the latter. And yes, research into climate change, and specifically climate change impact has vastly expanded in recent years. It's still a tiny fraction of the overall research budget, so this is simply a shift in emphasize. Of course there is sloppy science out there, not every of the 70.000 you quote (I don't know where that number comes from) is a beacon of integrity. I've refereed enough papers in my life to know that first hand. That's why IPCC reports were such an important exercise. They document consensus, not just publications.
- southern_cross 9y ago
  "You're not better at science than many many scientists out there." As an unbiased, outside observer who's been a huge science nerd almost since birth, yeah I kind of am - in at least some very important respects. While I have no particular skin in this game (it's not my bread and butter, so to speak), I'm generally quite good at seeing the big picture on things (the forest vs. the trees). Plus I've rubbed elbows with enough PhD-types in my life, both inside academia and out in industry, to know that they very often don't really have a good grasp of reality. They can be pretty freaking clueless, in other words. As a computer nerd myself, I have no fear of downloading large datasets and analyzing them - and finding them wanting, perhaps. Nor do I have any particular faith in various computer models which are being relied on so heavily these days in fields like climate science. "Garbage in, garbage out", as the old saying goes. As a referee, how much of that kind of thing do you actually do yourself? Download the data sets and analyze them? (This amounted to thousands of files in my particular case.) Review the algorithms and the supposed logic behind them? Maybe even run the modeling software itself to see what the results look like, perhaps as you tweak various settings? Or do you just take whatever is given to you in those papers at face value? There are quite a few people out there now who have actually gone through these analysis steps - spending hours, days, maybe even weeks or whatever doing so- and they often have't been particularly impressed with what they've found. "there is no misaligned incentive structure here." Yeah there is, in that apparently there are quite a few researchers and others out there who will quietly tell you that they themselves may have real doubts about an issue (whatever it is), but are afraid to speak up too loudly out of fear of being beaten down professionally because of it. And then there's the whole "gravy train" problem, where folks will just jump on whatever bandwagon they think will get them funding and get their papers published and so on. This even though they themselves may not necessarily particularly qualified to speak in that area. In that I’m including things like saying “These ugly furry critters may be in real trouble now!”, which may not get them much traction. But change that to say “These ugly furry critters may be in real trouble now because of climate change!”, and then they may get lots of traction. There’s also the issue where negative results and results which go too much against the grain may rarely get published - because those peer-reviewed journals that everyone if supposedly so enamored of are first and foremost a business, after all, and they need to move product, so they will pick and choose whichever papers they think will help them do that. They also don’t want to go around ticking off their best customers (especially the ones who control the subscriptions), if publishing said research papers might make those customers look bad.

Certhas 9y ago

It's fine to roll your eyes at more outrageous statements, but keep some perspective. You're not better at science than many many scientists out there. This science was developed in an exceptionally hostile atmosphere, where any results to the contrary (climate change isn't happening/isn't human made/is benign) would have been vastly helpful to a scientists career, so there is no misaligned incentive structure here. So the idea that there is a massive misrepresentation of results, skewed towards the extreme, driven by sloppy science, is just a conspiracy theory. Again, the IPCC report I linked above explicitly compares the expected increase in mortality in summer and the expected decrease in winter and finds the former outweighs the latter. And yes, research into climate change, and specifically climate change impact has vastly expanded in recent years. It's still a tiny fraction of the overall research budget, so this is simply a shift in emphasize. Of course there is sloppy science out there, not every of the 70.000 you quote (I don't know where that number comes from) is a beacon of integrity. I've refereed enough papers in my life to know that first hand. That's why IPCC reports were such an important exercise. They document consensus, not just publications.

southern_cross 9y ago
"You're not better at science than many many scientists out there." As an unbiased, outside observer who's been a huge science nerd almost since birth, yeah I kind of am - in at least some very important respects. While I have no particular skin in this game (it's not my bread and butter, so to speak), I'm generally quite good at seeing the big picture on things (the forest vs. the trees). Plus I've rubbed elbows with enough PhD-types in my life, both inside academia and out in industry, to know that they very often don't really have a good grasp of reality. They can be pretty freaking clueless, in other words. As a computer nerd myself, I have no fear of downloading large datasets and analyzing them - and finding them wanting, perhaps. Nor do I have any particular faith in various computer models which are being relied on so heavily these days in fields like climate science. "Garbage in, garbage out", as the old saying goes. As a referee, how much of that kind of thing do you actually do yourself? Download the data sets and analyze them? (This amounted to thousands of files in my particular case.) Review the algorithms and the supposed logic behind them? Maybe even run the modeling software itself to see what the results look like, perhaps as you tweak various settings? Or do you just take whatever is given to you in those papers at face value? There are quite a few people out there now who have actually gone through these analysis steps - spending hours, days, maybe even weeks or whatever doing so- and they often have't been particularly impressed with what they've found. "there is no misaligned incentive structure here." Yeah there is, in that apparently there are quite a few researchers and others out there who will quietly tell you that they themselves may have real doubts about an issue (whatever it is), but are afraid to speak up too loudly out of fear of being beaten down professionally because of it. And then there's the whole "gravy train" problem, where folks will just jump on whatever bandwagon they think will get them funding and get their papers published and so on. This even though they themselves may not necessarily particularly qualified to speak in that area. In that I’m including things like saying “These ugly furry critters may be in real trouble now!”, which may not get them much traction. But change that to say “These ugly furry critters may be in real trouble now because of climate change!”, and then they may get lots of traction. There’s also the issue where negative results and results which go too much against the grain may rarely get published - because those peer-reviewed journals that everyone if supposedly so enamored of are first and foremost a business, after all, and they need to move product, so they will pick and choose whichever papers they think will help them do that. They also don’t want to go around ticking off their best customers (especially the ones who control the subscriptions), if publishing said research papers might make those customers look bad.