When Subpoenas Threaten Climate Science
Against my better judgment, I will respond, because your assertions are self-contradictory and obviously wrong.<p>&gt; 1) There is no great Conspiracy. That would imply that climate scientists were somehow well organized, and they are not.<p>For starters, the UN IPCC is an obvious counter-example.  I suppose you&#x27;ll claim it&#x27;s &quot;not well organized,&quot; but I&#x27;m not going to argue with you about that; if you think that many scientists from around the world working under one name to advocate for a single view is not &quot;well organized,&quot; I can&#x27;t convince you otherwise.<p>Secondly, there need not be a &quot;great conspiracy&quot;--that is a strawman, which I did not claim.  Instead there need only be an emergent phenomenon in which the interests of a variety of entities coincide to compel them to behave a certain way.  Briefly, this is exemplified by scientists whose careers are based upon research grants, which are issued by governments whose politicians are lobbied by certain groups.  A scientist today will not get any grants for wanting to do research to disprove AGW theory.  This is not a &quot;grand conspiracy&quot; with a person or a council at the top, issuing edicts to bureaucrats who issue grants--this is simply the way the politics have evolved over a period of time, due to the tremendous efforts of certain lobbies.<p>&gt; 2.) I would claim that most scientists understate the dangers of climate change. This is because we are well past the point of no return, as far as &quot;fixing&quot; the problem goes. The climate models show that there are already going to be big changes to the earth&#x27;s climate in the near future, some of which are already taking place in the ocean, which is particularly vulnerable. At this point our efforts are just damage control and that is not an easy message to send.<p>You are begging the question: you have already presupposed that there is a problem, that we are causing it, that we can do anything about it, and that there will be disaster if we don&#x27;t.  And your own point #4 contradicts this.<p>&gt; 3.) Science communication and scientific literature are not the same thing. Stephen Schneider, was making simplified statements to the public, not to his peers in his publications. So if you are unwilling to trust what scientists say, then maybe you should read what they write (at a library because elsevier owns their publicly funded findings and you and I probably can&#x27;t afford a subscription to any of it.).<p>So you also think it&#x27;s justified for scientists to mislead the public, because you assume that their findings must be correct, and their policy proposals must be as well.<p>You don&#x27;t seem to realize that this not only effectively takes away the power of people to self-govern (because doing so relies on information provided to them, and tainting it taints the result), but it also effectively makes science into a religion and scientists into priests, whose expertise and pronouncements cannot be questioned.<p>You clearly have greater faith in science and in scientists than I do.  They are people, as fallible as anyone, as vulnerable to bias and self-aggrandizement as anyone, and history shows that while science as a whole tends to move forward, individual scientists are quite often wrong.  Science is a process of steps both forward and backward, with pauses in between.<p>&gt; 4.) If the weather man can&#x27;t predict rain consistently over the next 24 hours than why should climate scientists be expected to have perfectly accurate predictions? Climate is really really chaotic, and that leads to unpredictability. As for your hurricane worries please see the following (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;nclimate2646.epdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;nclimate2646.epdf</a>).<p>If climate scientists can&#x27;t be expected to make accurate predictions, and climate is &quot;really really chaotic,&quot; why do you think their predictions are accurate?  You can&#x27;t have it both ways: you can&#x27;t praise their expertise and put blind faith in them while also saying that they can&#x27;t be expected to be accurate.  You are contradicting yourself.  And you want to make policy based on this?  In principle, this is no different than hundreds of years ago when the church ran everything, except instead of blindly trusting a few people who interpreted ancient texts, it&#x27;s blindly trusting a few people who interpret numbers and write in periodicals.<p>As for that article, all I get from that URL is a redirect loop, but <i>Nature</i> is, unfortunately, a heavily biased publication.  See my other comment in this thread for an example.  It would be more instructive to look at some raw statistics, but this isn&#x27;t really the place for that, and I don&#x27;t think you&#x27;d be convinced by them, anyway.<p>&gt; 5.) Sea level is going to rise, and many many people will die as they are displaced and find themselves with no where to go. I will be very impressed if you can find credible evidence that contradicts this.<p>You have already made up your mind.  You are predicting unavoidable disasters and death and destruction.  Nothing anyone can show you would change your mind.  Anything I would present to you would be dismissed as &quot;not credible.&quot;  It&#x27;s the standard dismissal technique, throwing anything out that doesn&#x27;t meet your preconceived notions.<p>&gt; Note, I read both or your comments, and googled the assertions you made and examples you provided. I hope you will do the same.<p>I&#x27;ve done a lot of reading on the subject over the years, and I continue to do so.  I&#x27;ve no doubt that you do as well.  Unfortunately, when you trust blindly, you can be lead down dark paths.  I encourage you to spend some time reading alternative views and be more skeptical of what you read.  After all, real science is a process of disproving, and is best served by skepticism.<p>P.S.  This response will be quite delayed because, since I expressed unpopular views in my earlier comments, they were downvoted, which penalizes me by making me &quot;slow down.  Thanks.&quot;  One of these days I&#x27;m going to just stop wasting my time...