3 ms·

"Amoral" or just not convinced by the case made by climatologists for their predictions. Although many try to shut down all discussion of it, there are plenty o

"Amoral" or just not convinced by the case made by climatologists for their predictions. Although many try to shut down all discussion of it, there are plenty of rational grounds for suspecting climate change related predictions are incorrect. People who believe that could invest in carbon-emitting industries without any cognitive dissonance or belief that they were being amoral, because they don't believe it's a big deal in the first place. That pushes the decision further downstream to the buyers of the power, and so on. It's a market based solution to making these decisions and weighing the evidence, which incorporates far more people and analysis power than a government department or political party can marshal. So this seems like fair game to me, or at least, preferable to the alternatives.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
adrianN 6y ago
Literally everyone would be more than happy to hear solid evidence that our climate predictions are wrong. The scientist publishing a solid paper with that conclusion would become a hero.
- thu2111 6y ago
  It would be nice if that's the case, but do you really think a global community of academics would welcome a paper with open arms that destroyed their entire life's work and careers? Come on. Plenty of papers and analyses have been published showing many wrong predictions and it's had no impact on the field whatsoever.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    Can you cite a couple? There is an exceedingly rich lobby behind fossil fuels. Do you think they wouldn't be happy to sponsor the career of people that prove that their business model isn't killing the climate? Why do you think the scientific consensus is that man made climate change is real and dangerous despite these powerful incentives?
    - thu2111 6y ago
      OK, so there are multiple things to break down here. Firstly, no such lobby exists anymore, if it ever did. All the supposed oil majors have reinvented themselves as energy companies a long time ago and have big investments in solar, wind, etc. They are well aware that green initiatives aren't going to undermine the oil business any time soon; it will happen on a long enough timescale that they can easily build new businesses and make money from the new tech too. Even if every car factory in the world switched to making electric cars and only electric cars tomorrow, it would take decades for the vehicle fleet to turn over, so there's no real pressure on these people to mount diabolical schemes because the time horizon is far too long. Secondly, the opposite of "climate change science is unreliable" is not "and therefore there is reliable science saying the opposite". If climatology as a field is unreliable then we are in a knowledge vacuum in which the claims might be true, or they might not be, or they might be some exaggeration of the reality or some over-simplification. All these things are possible if the science is not reliable. Thirdly, climatology is uniquely difficult to deal with because academic climatologists are the ones producing the actual temperature record itself. There have been arguments in the past about the temperature record because global temperatures didn't follow predictions, at all (e.g. the "pause"), and the response of climatology was to issue new versions of the historical datasets that simply created the trend they had predicted. Sometimes the raw data isn't even available at all, only their adjusted datasets. Thus if climatology is an unreliable field there's actually no way to construct an alternative more reliable narrative, because you'd have to build on datasets controlled by the people you don't trust and which are repeatedly revised to bring data in line with predictions. (they have various justifications for doing so, but the incentive problems created by scientists "fixing" the historical record are obvious enough that they don't need elaboration). Ideally collection and processing of climate related data would be done by totally different people to those making predictions about it. That doesn't happen: the community is just far too small. So, apparently untrustworthy practices can be pointed out like ... well, like claiming you can accurately predict the temperature a hundred years in advance whilst simultaneously claiming you were unable to accurately measure the actual temperature just ten years ago. But that doesn't then let you say "and so here is a more reliable set of predictions". At any rate, if you'd like a citation for a reasonable, apparently rational and well argued alternative take, have a look at this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYZW-6jw98U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYZW-6jw98U
  - thinkcontext 6y ago
    We know from internal documents that over the course of decades the oil majors had their own scientists both review mainstream climate science as well as conduct their own original research and they agreed with the overall mainstream conclusions. There was also a pretty famous case of a climate skeptic that got funding from Koch to look into things and wound up becoming convinced. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/converted-contrarian-argues-humans-to-blame-for-climate-change/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/converted-contrar... All the oil majors in the world, plus Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, etc have plenty of motivation and resources to poke holes in the theory and have failed to do so. Can you explain why that is?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

adrianN 6y ago

Literally everyone would be more than happy to hear solid evidence that our climate predictions are wrong. The scientist publishing a solid paper with that conclusion would become a hero.

thu2111 6y ago
It would be nice if that's the case, but do you really think a global community of academics would welcome a paper with open arms that destroyed their entire life's work and careers? Come on. Plenty of papers and analyses have been published showing many wrong predictions and it's had no impact on the field whatsoever.
- adrianN 6y ago
  Can you cite a couple? There is an exceedingly rich lobby behind fossil fuels. Do you think they wouldn't be happy to sponsor the career of people that prove that their business model isn't killing the climate? Why do you think the scientific consensus is that man made climate change is real and dangerous despite these powerful incentives?
  - thu2111 6y ago
    OK, so there are multiple things to break down here. Firstly, no such lobby exists anymore, if it ever did. All the supposed oil majors have reinvented themselves as energy companies a long time ago and have big investments in solar, wind, etc. They are well aware that green initiatives aren't going to undermine the oil business any time soon; it will happen on a long enough timescale that they can easily build new businesses and make money from the new tech too. Even if every car factory in the world switched to making electric cars and only electric cars tomorrow, it would take decades for the vehicle fleet to turn over, so there's no real pressure on these people to mount diabolical schemes because the time horizon is far too long. Secondly, the opposite of "climate change science is unreliable" is not "and therefore there is reliable science saying the opposite". If climatology as a field is unreliable then we are in a knowledge vacuum in which the claims might be true, or they might not be, or they might be some exaggeration of the reality or some over-simplification. All these things are possible if the science is not reliable. Thirdly, climatology is uniquely difficult to deal with because academic climatologists are the ones producing the actual temperature record itself. There have been arguments in the past about the temperature record because global temperatures didn't follow predictions, at all (e.g. the "pause"), and the response of climatology was to issue new versions of the historical datasets that simply created the trend they had predicted. Sometimes the raw data isn't even available at all, only their adjusted datasets. Thus if climatology is an unreliable field there's actually no way to construct an alternative more reliable narrative, because you'd have to build on datasets controlled by the people you don't trust and which are repeatedly revised to bring data in line with predictions. (they have various justifications for doing so, but the incentive problems created by scientists "fixing" the historical record are obvious enough that they don't need elaboration). Ideally collection and processing of climate related data would be done by totally different people to those making predictions about it. That doesn't happen: the community is just far too small. So, apparently untrustworthy practices can be pointed out like ... well, like claiming you can accurately predict the temperature a hundred years in advance whilst simultaneously claiming you were unable to accurately measure the actual temperature just ten years ago. But that doesn't then let you say "and so here is a more reliable set of predictions". At any rate, if you'd like a citation for a reasonable, apparently rational and well argued alternative take, have a look at this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYZW-6jw98U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYZW-6jw98U
- thinkcontext 6y ago
  We know from internal documents that over the course of decades the oil majors had their own scientists both review mainstream climate science as well as conduct their own original research and they agreed with the overall mainstream conclusions. There was also a pretty famous case of a climate skeptic that got funding from Koch to look into things and wound up becoming convinced. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/converted-contrarian-argues-humans-to-blame-for-climate-change/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/converted-contrar... All the oil majors in the world, plus Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, etc have plenty of motivation and resources to poke holes in the theory and have failed to do so. Can you explain why that is?