re: #423 freetoken

You say:

“In light of this atmosphere, trying to actually help people understand what is meant by “AGW” or “climate change” becomes a non-starter. People just don’t want to hear. “

There is the same unwillingness by “people” to understand the hypotheses which counter AGW theories i.e. which attempt to provide the “other” explanations for the recent warming (now stopped) which AGW proponents insist do not exist. The AGW theories depend on there being “no other explanation” for increased temperatures except man-made CO2 emissions.

You say:
“This thread is full of accusations of this and that… and again, the sad thing is all of those objections have been answered and discussed (at different levels of detail) all around the web, if only people would spend time looking and reading.”

True, accusations of this and that go both ways. So do objections and their answers and discussions. I have spent a very great deal of time following the scientific debate and for every point at issue I attempt to follow the entire course of the debate not just the statement, but the riposte, but the counter-riposte etc. Most rational people are able to recognize a valid challenge and a valid riposte. What is not valid is arguing for or against an issue of science with propaganda, in which category I include all statements of a “majority” (whether ‘vast’, or ‘overwhelming’) of scientists. This merely leads to the absurd vetting of which scientists are proper scientists or properly engaged in climate science and therefore qualify for recruitment into the Alarmist or Denier army. The logical extension of this is that only scientists publishing on your side of the debate are qualified scientists. Scientists themselves who engage in technical analysis accessible on the web often themselves fall into this fallacy.

I have spent much time looking and reading, and I am certain that every word of any statement that has been made on behalf of AGW has been challenged scientifically - not just politically. The sort of statement that a “majority” could sign on to is so broad that it is scientifically trivial: “Carbon dioxide absorbs infra-red radiation.” But causative theory that relies on selection and interpretation of empirical data has been legitimately challenged - and challenged even on the selection, reliability and accuracy of the data.

I understand that the AGW proponents have built up a big picture circumstantial case against the defendant, CO2 (mankind’s assassin). The deniers - or skeptics, a less loaded term - must cast reasonable doubt on each item of evidence in defending it. The big picture of a planet going to hell (supplied by images of local bad weather) seems to be so strongly present in so many people’s minds, that the painstaking point-by-point challenge is dismissed as “obviously” wrong when placed against that big picture. But this is a mental reflex, a preference for narratives, for stories. When the climate and its changes are eventually explained, it will not be in terms of mankind versus nature, but in terms of the mathematics of a vast system of which the marginal increment of CO2 in the atmosphere due to man, the oceanic oscillations, the orbit tilts of the earth, the vast cycles of planetary and gallactic motions, the physics of cloud formation, are but a few factors among many others, some not yet thought of, and not yet accounted for in even the most sophisticated model.