I have not been presented with sufficient evidence to suggest we ought to make drastic expensive changes. I’m not a conservative, or a republican. I voted for Obama. I’m not a big business apologist. I just have higher standards than you when it comes to scientific proof. And I do not believe that current circumstances constitute anything resembling a crisis. I have lived through the rise and fall in fashion of a bunch of drain circlers clubs. As a result of seeing so many earnest hand-wringers be wrong, I don’t scare so easy.

The thing you have to keep in mind is that these are not hugely expensive changes.

For example steam engines, a technology the Greeks had, work because steam can turn a turbine generating power. Most smokestacks are hot enough to turn water into steam. It does not take a genius to figure out that we could probably generate a whole bunch of power if we simply put boilers and turbines on the top of a bunch of our hottest smokestacks.

It’s called co-generation. Without the monetary incentive provided by cap-and-trade it accounts for 8% of US electricity production, and advocates believe it could go up to 20%.

Windmills are older technology. Buildings that stay the same temperature even when it’s freezing outside with minimal power have been around since people moved to Europe.

If you want proof that this stuff is not terribly expensive just look at modern Europe. They are doing it as we speak. They implemented a cap-and-trade program in 2002, and their economies are doing better than ours today.

Criticizing particular studies should be allowed … this is science, not religion.

Well, maybe its science …

You say you cannot prove a negative. Please. Is your understanding of science and logic really that weak? Let me re-phrase. I stated a known fact. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. I stated a corollary, that since it is a greenhouse gas, increased levels of it must result in warmer temperatures. Therefore unless you can provide a viable mechanism that would cause the corollary to the known fact to break down you have no basis for denying that CO2 contributes to a warming climate. This is not a request for you to prove a negative. It is simply that if you are going to say it’s wrong you have to provide an explanation of why it would be wrong.

As far as your claim of superior standards of scientific proof, I assume your claim also applies to the American Chemical Society, the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology, the American Geophysical Union, the American Institute for the Biological Sciences and the many other scientists that agree with my position and not you, Hagan, McIntyre or other contrarians.

And when it come to issue of what the cause is, don’t even get me started.

Jim, this is a general statement of my belief that its extraordinarily difficult to show that current climate trends are the result of human agency, and not other factors. We know for a fact that Earth’s climate has varied quite substantially over time, even in times prior to the existence of humans.

I am sorry that you have some sort of obsessive priapism about one of these writers. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m talking about, and it doesn’t mean that there just isn’t very much in the way of conclusive evidence that current climate trends are primarily due to human activity.

The fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas has been known since the earliest days of physical chemistry. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing for decades. Explain how it can’t contribute to warming.

You can’t prove a negative. I can’t prove that CO2 doesn’t contribute to global warming. Neither can anyone else. I don’t know if it is. Even if it really and truly were the case that CO2 is NOT a contributing factor, no one could conclusively prove this.

I am utterly delighted to acknowledge that its quite possible that CO2 is contributing to global warming. Just as I am utterly delighted to acknowledge that its quite possible that the recent record of a small warming trend on Earth could be due to factors that have little or nothing to do with human activity.

And just as I am delighted to acknowledge that if Earth continues to warm, we really don’t know that the consequences will be entirely or even substantially negative. I have no basis for believing that the climatological state of the last several centuries is optimal or especially desirable in the first place.

I think the real jerk here is the one who abandons whatever science they might have studied the instant they decide for whatever political, religious or psychological reason they might have that it no longer fits what they want to believe.

Spoken like a total jerk, Jim. You have cast the aspersions first in all cases here. My policy is to return them. My opinions on this matter are based on my studies in the scientific method, and what they have taught me about how much evidence is needed to prove a hypothesis which if true, demands drastic changes in behavior. The greater the prescriptive changes demanded, the higher the level of proof I want. That’s extremely fair.

I have not been presented with sufficient evidence to suggest we ought to make drastic expensive changes. I’m not a conservative, or a republican. I voted for Obama. I’m not a big business apologist. I just have higher standards than you when it comes to scientific proof. And I do not believe that current circumstances constitute anything resembling a crisis. I have lived through the rise and fall in fashion of a bunch of drain circlers clubs. As a result of seeing so many earnest hand-wringers be wrong, I don’t scare so easy.

I am all for a continuation of both vigilance and patience, and for making sensible changes. Conservation, for example, is a virtue all by itself.

Maybe in 10 or 20 or 30 years I’ll be convinced that global warming due to human agency is an undeniable fact for all sensible reasonable folks. I’m not there right now, and there are lots and lots and lots of non-ideological but naturally skeptical folks who feel the same way. Casting further aspersions upon us will not make us change our minds. It will make us dig in our heels. That’s how skeptics roll.

As with KK I’d really like to know how much this affects the body of evidence. My default reaction is that removing Briffa’s data is but a small ripple… can someone change my mind?

(McIntyre’s work could be much like the Monty Hall caveat debunking some studies ‘proving the existence’ of cognitive dissonance but there is so much other evidence that no textbooks were rewritten)

FWIW, I haven’t stated my opinion in the great GCC debate here, only my opinion to politician’s responses to it. You can read my opinion at http://www.frankhagan.com/blog/2009/10/08/of-mice-and-hockey-sticks/, unless you care to remain ignorant, and therefore free to sling ad hominem attacks my way.

Adam – re: the cost of “not acting”; you can apply that concept to nearly anything, often with disastrous results. In this country, removing all the cars from the road would have much less impact than shifting from coal-fired power plants to cleaner technologies (wind, solar, nuclear). I’m much more interested in obtaining the dual goal of reducing pollution and dependence on foreign oil through development of those technologies than heavy-handed tax policies that punish the American middle and lower classes.

OTOH the costs of doing nothing tend to be ignored. It’s true most of those costs will be paid by folks who live close to the equator. And that, by and large, ain’t us. But if those people don’t like us our security is directly threatened.

And think about this from their point of view. They are poor. In most cases fully half their population can’t afford food. And the UN scientists say they’ll all turn into deserts unless the richest country in the world, with the most advanced technology in the history of history, can’t put some damn solar panels up, trade in a few SUVs for subcompacts, and live with a room temperature of 75 F.

Then those same people come to you with a reasonable request: arrest a local priest (thus angering millions of your own people) who may be planning terrorist attacks in their country. But he may just have a big mouth.

It is that sentence, particularly the part that I emphasized that earned you my comment. Claims about your studies don’t impress me. Hagan worships McIntyre, who is an ideologue with ties to industries that reflexively criticize climate change research. In addition Hagan claims that McIntyre’s critique has resulted in an admission of how bad the data was. This was based on his own writing that referred to a tech blog called the Register, which in turn referred to McIntyre again. There was no such admission. Hagan also produces this gem which bears no resemblance to reality: “Because in science, the consensus view is always wrong, until it is finally right.”. The realclimate article does more than be snarky about McIntyre and his followers. It explains why they deserve it so richly.

“So along comes Steve McIntyre, self-styled slayer of hockey sticks, who declares without any evidence whatsoever that Briffa didn’t just reprocess the data from the Russians, but instead supposedly picked through it to give him the signal he wanted. These allegations have been made without any evidence whatsoever.

McIntyre has based his ‘critique’ on a test conducted by randomly adding in one set of data from another location in Yamal that he found on the internet. People have written theses about how to construct tree ring chronologies in order to avoid end-member effects and preserve as much of the climate signal as possible. Curiously no-one has ever suggested simply grabbing one set of data, deleting the trees you have a political objection to and replacing them with another set that you found lying around on the web.

The statement from Keith Briffa clearly describes the background to these studies and categorically refutes McIntyre’s accusations. Does that mean that the existing Yamal chronology is sacrosanct? Not at all – all of the these proxy records are subject to revision with the addition of new (relevant) data and whether the records change significantly as a function of that isn’t going to be clear until it’s done. ”

I think the real jerk here is the one who abandons whatever science they might have studied the instant they decide for whatever political, religious or psychological reason they might have that it no longer fits what they want to believe. I suggest the use of a mirror, KK, if you want to see him.

Tks for the explanation – I had gone to the link expecting a far more obvious (to a non-scientist like me!) confirmation of McIntyre

I would also add the perspective that we should also factor in the potential cost of not acting should climate change forecasts prove anywhere near accurate, as well as the cost of acting.

An interesting example is down here in Australia where the National Party (a party specific to rural interests) is firmly opposed to climate change/carbon costing/etc because of the potential near term costs, whereas the longer term (a few decades) impact on the rural sector will be absolutely devastating if the forecast changes wrought by global warming materialise.

cheers!

I studied research methods as an undergrad, and I know plenty about math, the scientific method, modeling and predictions, and more than a little about climate science.

Your baseless insult shows you to be a jerk. An insult which is no more than a little tit for tat that you richly deserve. You invited it.

It’s the arrogance of jerks like you that practically guarantees that cap and trade won’t pass. Which is good news.

I think there could be a bit of selection bias at work in some of the studies. Inverting a few graphs so that they show what you think may be happening anyway doesn’t seem impossible, even for the most well-intentioned science guy. But before we raise taxes on energy, with the unintended consequences (including lost jobs and increasing malnutrition of the nation’s poor children), perhaps we should make sure the data is correct. They could start by publishing all of it, and not waiting years for the Royal Society to demand it.

I agree with KK that C&T is going nowhere but we should have a response to climate change that keeps our options open based on where the science takes us.