Fort McMurray Or... What Happens when you deny Climate Science

Please listen to the talk by Ivar Giaver to understand my position.

I know your message was addressed to Jack, not me, but I can't help but respond to this.

Seriously? You're going to recur to a scientist from another discipline[1], without expertise in climate science[1], and with an obvious ideological opposition to it[2], to inform you on climate science and its implications? How is this any different to recurring to Sean Carroll to inform you on NDE science and its implications?

[1] Even according to the institute which has the most interest in promoting his climate science credentials, he has none. See his profile on the Heartland Institute: he has "a degree in mechanical engineering", "worked in various assignments as an applied mathematician", "obtained a Ph.D. degree [in physics] in 1964", "worked in the fields of thin films, tunneling, and superconductivity", "[studied] biophysics", and "[studied] the behavior of protein molecules at solid surfaces". See anything remotely related to climate science in that? Me neither.

[2] According to Wikipedia, the Heartland Institute, of which he is a member, is "an American conservative and libertarian public policy think tank", which, amongst other things, "worked with the tobacco company Philip Morris to question or deny the health risks of secondhand smoke and to lobby against smoking bans". Mmm, sounds reputable. Scientific credentials firmly established!
 
OK, that last post of mine contained a bit of unnecessary snark and sarcasm, David, I hope you can forgive me. But there's something else I want to ask you. I've noticed that almost every argument a climate skeptic makes is addressed on the Skeptical Science website. Perhaps climate skeptics don't know, or don't care, or don't check, or have counter-rebuttals - I'm not sure which is true. But I wonder whether you can identify any points/arguments made in the video you shared that aren't satisfactorily addressed by that website?
 
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Seriously? You're going to recur to a scientist from another discipline[1]
Yes I am, because physics underlies many other sciences. Physicists - particularly at his level - know an awful lot about measurements and just how practical it is to do certain things.

Look, those thermometers may be good to 1 deg or 0.5 deg at the very best. The average of all that data is looked at at the 0.01 deg level - which is just plain daft. Most of those measuring stations are just weather stations - you would have to take a hell of a lot of precautions to measure temperatures with the accuracy to produce data of this sort. It is notable (as Ivar Giaver pointed out) that satellite measurements show a considerably smaller temperature rise.

Then there is the point that people have known there was a small global temperature increase for ages - it was just attributed to the rebound from the last ice age - and absolutely nobody was worried by it!

Ivar Giaver gets to the very heart of this debate, including the cherry picking of the data.

He also points out the sheer tragedy that so much money has been thrown at this non-problem, and lots of real green problems are eclipsed by this nonsense (personally I think this is part of the motivation behind this nonsense). Think of the issues that really matter - nuclear proliferation, destruction of the rain forests, over population, tangible pollution (not CO2) - as in Chinese air quality - possibly plastic pollution in the oceans, etc etc. Think what the estimated trillion dollars spent on CAGW could have done to help some of those problems :( Yes - politicians like everyone to obsess about carbon because CAGW creates big bucks for business, and distracts loads of well meaning people from the real issues.

I suppose I feel angry about this because I did science - I loved science - and although plenty of scientists will snigger or wince in private about this absurdity, it is only retired scientists (by and large - there are exceptions) who will stand up and be counted - basically because their grant money is at stake.

David
 
Look, those thermometers may be good to 1 deg or 0.5 deg at the very best. The average of all that data is looked at at the 0.01 deg level - which is just plain daft. Most of those measuring stations are just weather stations - you would have to take a hell of a lot of precautions to measure temperatures with the accuracy to produce data of this sort. It is notable (as Ivar Giaver pointed out) that satellite measurements show a considerably smaller temperature rise.

You probably weren't responding to the challenge in my follow-up post, but had you been, you would not have met it: this skeptical argument is covered by the Skeptical Science website: Are surface temperature records reliable?

Then there is the point that people have known there was a small global temperature increase for ages - it was just attributed to the rebound from the last ice age - and absolutely nobody was worried by it!

How on Earth could they have known that if we can't trust the thermometers?!

In any case, again, you still haven't met the challenge. The Skeptical Science website has a response to that argument too, at least with respect to the Little Ice Age: What ended the Little Ice Age?

Think of the issues that really matter - nuclear proliferation, destruction of the rain forests, over population, tangible pollution (not CO2) - as in Chinese air quality - possibly plastic pollution in the oceans, etc etc.

We definitely agree that these are serious problems, the only difference is that I say "as well as the serious problem of global warming".
 
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Look, those thermometers may be good to 1 deg or 0.5 deg at the very best. The average of all that data is looked at at the 0.01 deg level - which is just plain daft. Most of those measuring stations are just weather stations - you would have to take a hell of a lot of precautions to measure temperatures with the accuracy to produce data of this sort. It is notable (as Ivar Giaver pointed out) that satellite measurements show a considerably smaller temperature rise.

I don't know the answer to this- I'm just speculating, but should we assume that the +/- error margins of all these thermometers have pretty equal chance of being + or - ? And if so, with a sufficiently large sample, would we then be justified in considering all the errors to basically cancel each other out in the aggregate? So that an individual thermometer may be a degree off, but the average of the sum total of all measurements should be considered extremely precise?

Again, this supposes a really big sample, I imagine. I'm not sure if that's what we're dealing with or not.
 
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