re: #100 Spare O’Lake

Those who have made up their minds that human activity is the primary driver of climate change and who mock those who are skeptical of this theory.

Is there something wrong about making up your mind on a subject, especially after a monumental amount of data convinces you?

As you’ve probably seen over the past week, the ‘skeptics’ bring up the same points over and over, regardless of whether those points have been already shown to be fallacious. It’s not only not easy to debate ‘skeptics’ who have no actual grounding in the subject, it’s akin to debating creationists. Every time an anti-AGW position is shown to be false— often not just false but intentionally deceptive— that position still crops up over and over, for years, and the main crowd of deniers just spins up some other minor variation on that position and continues as if nothing had occurred. It’s very, very similar to those who deny evolution.

I do my level best not to ridicule anyone who’s truly just uninformed, but it rankles me, truly, when the uninformed don’t, as a first step, attempt to become informed by looking at the actual science— not listen to random conspiracy theories about scientists.

AGW becomes pretty simple when you actually examine the science for it: It has a rock-solid basis in simple physics— CO2 increases heat absorption— which you can test yourself in a literal greenhouse. It has been developed by climatologists into a sophisticated but still simple science, which shows things like CO2 outgassing from permatundra adding to the global warming effect, as well as the few things that act as a brake on the system.

Overall, though, after evaluating all the factors, scientists have not only been able to construct a solid theory— in the sense of ‘theory’ that evolution is a theory— but been able, thanks to the computing power available to us, to model the climate accurately. If you don’t like CRU, for whatever reason, look to the fully open source CCSM. In other words, they can model the climate over decades and their models accurately ‘predict’ the historical range of temperatures. That’s an amazing achievement, and one that should be celebrated as a triumph of science.

Instead, those men and women who have achieved this feat are accused of being money-grubbing politically-corrupt arrogant assholes who are trying to spread wealth distribution throughout the world and reduce everyone to global poverty.

If we’re going to remain the world leader in science, we can’t keep treating our scientists like this. It’s shameful.