re: #179 ludwigvanquixote

Right, because you know, maybe part of his work as a reviewer is to make sure that bad papers are rejected.

So let me explain something. If he went to town in his review, that means he found a lot of errors, so many that he wrote a very lengthy rejection about everything that was wrong the paper.

The inconvenient truth here is that people’s talents are all over the place, and not all in math and science. The AGW crowd is giving evidence before a jury that is just tone deaf to their music.

It’s not fair to call the deniers morons. Many of them are bright in their own way, and would perform Shakespeare better than us wonks. But they’re in a fix when it comes to the science. There’s no use telling them to inform themselves on the technical questions, that it’s simple, that with a little study they’d see. People told them that about calculus, physic, and chemistry, and it didn’t pan out.

We can’t win by calling them names. They know they’re not stupid, and they fondly imagine that that means they’re not hopeless at the things they’re hopeless at. Maybe some of us can’t sing but think we can—-we all know the type.

What we can do is to point to the unchallenged and unchallengeable basic facts. Glaciers in retreat. Ice shelves falling apart in Antarctica. Arctic sea ice thinner than ever and on its way to going-going-gone, summers. Rivers and lakes that freeze over seasonally doing so later and breaking up earlier. Plants establishing themselves higher on the slopes of mountains with a treeline than they used to. Migrating birds wintering further north than they used to.

As this and that high-altitude species disappear from the mountains of Texas and New Mexico, that’s proof that something has happened that didn’t happen 400 years ago, or 800, or 2000, or 8000. All that time, the pika and the chipmunk have been there. But the way things are going, pretty soon, not any more.

All these things are things that do not depend on regression analysis, filtering, 10-year moving averages, computer models, and the like. They are arguments that any bright ten year old can understand, and arguments for which the deniers have no answer. None.

They’re not our best arguments. The real main course dinner is the CO2 infrared absorption spectrum, positive feedback loops from albedo changes, etc. But we cannot expect our jury to sit still and listen closely to this forensic evidence.

So we should just mention, well, we did this solid work, if you’re interested. But over here is the video of the butler standing over the victim, with pursed lips as a drift of smoke clears from his gunbarrel. That’s our second-best reason why we think the butler did it.