re: #567 Indepublicrat

It’s not about purity of thought. It’s about separating science (the search for truth) from politics (the search for action). I want the scientists to be able to collect their data and refine their theories in a politics-free atmosphere so that the laymen, politicians, and pundits can have the best information and most accurate models we can get. Then I want the politicians to engage in good faith discussions on what political and economic policies would best respond to the problem. That’s where the debate should be, but you don’t get there if you’re disingenuously questioning the underlying data and intimidating the scientists from doing their jobs.

huh, how on earth do you suppose to remove politics from billions if not trillions of dollars and policy proposals which range from genocide to doing nothing? And where do you get the politicians who are going to engage in good faith negotiations about matters which range from billions of dollars at the very least to genocide on the other extreme? I am sorry but the world isn’t the perfect model of Thomas More’s Utopia or Plato’s Republic.

AGW is and has been for quite some time a policy issue. A policy issue which is influenced by science and which in turn influences science. There are several powerful forces which affect those scientists and we’d be fooling ourselves if we didn’t recognize that. That doesn’t mean that everybody is in the pocket of some nefarious forces or that there’s some massive conspiracy afoot. It only means humans are humans.

Having said the above doesn’t mean that AGW isn’t real (or that it is real). It is a restatement that for the lay people the question is ultimately a matter of faith.

re: #565 Sharmuta

We can’t discuss math if people are going to insist that 2 + 2 = 5.

Climate change is never going to be as simple matter as math where you can demonstrate how 2+2=4 with the aid of four fingers. By insisting that it is somehow comparable, you remind me of those clregymen of the past who insisted on their ideas of purgatories and whatnot by making hugely improbable analogies and allegories.

You guys will just have to accept the simple fact that we don’t have world with 7 billion climatologists. The world only has some tens of thousands of climatologists and I dare say only a handful of those would think it is as simple a matter as 2 + 2 = 4.