There is more money at stake with climate change than most areas of science, which means it becomes a political issue. There would seem to be a very strong incentive to show existing models are not accurate, or to come up with scientifically plausible models with very different outcomes. However no arguments against climate change do this, presumably because it's not very easy to do so.
Dyson here points out some areas that he thinks are not possible to model accurately or are not currently modelled accurately, such as the benefits and threats of various changes to the climate, the impact of climate change on sea level change, cloud modelling uncertainties, and the chaotic effects of different carbon reservoirs on each other.
His points on the exact impact of climate change and what the ideal climate is are important, but they are also studied and discussed. The supposed political reasons for supporting or being against climate change theories do not change the facts. If there are real problems with the models these can be flagged up - sensitivity testing can be done for all of these issues.
One major problem here is that the communication of the climate mainstream is very poor. The IPCC produces massive reports that are designed to be printed as PDF, and are targeted at policy experts. They're not really readable, the web versions don't really use hyperlinks and have minimal pictures and poor structure.
They're slowly getting better, but still a long way from ideal. Example for reference:
It must have been in the early 00s when there was the first report that created a big media echo, since it was presented at the UN. It was full of obvious flaws and the results were not reproducible because the data wasn't published and the team behind it only reluctantly gave out the data and the calculations that were done based on that.
That's quite a contrast to the Theoretical Physicist Dyson. In both experimental and theoretical Physics everything is calculated with great care and cross-checked by other people.
Probably the governments/universities would do well if they created funds to enhance the theoretical backing of the black boxes. On the other hand nobody minds using black boxes, after all every equation based on experiments is one. (Historically many equations in Physics and Chemistry were created based on experiments and later on theoretical backing was deduced) But a bit more transparency would be good...
Yes. But even beyond that, power is at stake. Climate change isn't about science, it's about geopolitics/globalism. It's about instilling fear to create a global political system. At least that's my take. If the climate change alarmism was valid, we'd simply end global trade today because global trade is the driver of pollution. But you never hear that from the elites. They demand more globalism, but with a global tax. Maybe a global system is the next step of human societal evolution, but instead of being open and honest and having a global discussion, these people are being sneaky and using fear to sneak a global system on humanity.
> There would seem to be a very strong incentive to show existing models are not accurate or to come up with scientifically plausible models with very different outcomes.
Not if enough of those with money and power are aligned on one side. Then there is very strong incentive to show one side.
> The supposed political reasons for supporting or being against climate change theories do not change the facts.
Sure. And the facts are that climate science is a very young science and have been reliably wrong that we shouldn't take it as gospel. Especially when so much of climate science is politically driven.
I love climate change alarmism. When their predictions are wrong, they claim that the climate is so complex that it's hard to model and predict accurately. At the same time, they claim their predictions are facts and we must believe everything they say. Even when these alarmists all say and have different predictions. How about this, how out of dozens/hundreds of climate alarmist models, which is the right one?
I personally believe that climate change is natural and the forces of nature ( mostly the sun ) drive climate on earth. Also, I don't think there is anything we can do about climate change, just like we can't do anything about earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. And I reject the false notion that climate change is bad. Climate change can be bad for some, but good for others.
If climate alarmists want to be taken seriously, then let them protest globalist bankers and global trade instead of advocating for a global carbon tax and enriching the wealthy bankers and industrialists. But of course they won't because these climate alarmists are funded by the globalist bankers and industrialists.
Like who? The evil oil companies who are one of the major drivers of the greenwashed consumerism that is being touted as the solution to "climate change"? They don't care about oil, they care about money. They invest in whatever they think will make them money, including silly nonsense like wind and solar.
>You are being used as a useful idiot to spread uncertainty about absolute facts about absolutely real and highly pressing threats to our entire planet.
That's a very arrogant take on it. No part of climate hysteria is absolute facts, and climate hysteria is very clearly distracting people from REAL highly pressing threats to our ecosystems. We're letting huge portions of the oceans DIE while we pretend it is because of CO2 emissions, rather than doing something about the disposable consumer culture driving the massive amount of pollution coming from Chinese rivers and causing the problem. We just want to go on causing the problem, but pretend that charging our worthless electronic garbage from a solar panel instead of a natural gas plant makes it ok.
>Stop repeating them. Stop repeating them NOW. Stop helping those who put their own profits before the needs of all of humanity. Stop helping bring about destruction. Just stop
Consider taking your own advice. You are promoting an environmentally destructive system driven by corporate greed because it is a current social virtue to do so. Are you going to come back and apologize to all the people you needlessly lashed out at in 30 years when the shambling corpse of the climate boogeyman can no longer be made to look scary? When you realize that promoting the continuation of an unsustainable global economic system CAUSED a real global catastrophe, rather than preventing one? Or will you gradually allow yourself to pretend you never really believed in global warming and always knew it was fake as that becomes the predominant opinion?
Existing climate models are really good. They are used with little modification to correctly model climate of Mars, Venus, tidal locked exoplanet and previous historical eras on Earth. You just set the parameters and they pretty much produce the climate that exists on those planets or time periods. Yet constant shade thrown at them.
Do we have global data for historical eras?
why are they wrong all the time then ?
If you can't predict certain known inputs, and theres unknown unknowns, how can your model have predictive accuracy? If you believe that the model is accurate, what makes the model falsifiable? One of the indicators of a pseudoscience is nonfalsifiability.
It's possible some of these inputs may be of the form "the Gulf Stream continues to operate within historically observed parameters", i.e. we make no attempt to claim accuracy for the model outside of its studied conditions. That's fine: there are a large number of accurate models which are known to have breakdown conditions.
It is literally impossible for any model to be robust to unknown unknowns. All we can do is endeavour to drag them into the light and become known unknowns, then attempt to quantify them as known knowns. Sadly, our ability to experiment repeatedly in the same conditions with the environment is deeply limited, in a way much akin to astronomy.
That doesn't help if you are not gathering the correct proxy data to represent the actual physical system. For example, CMIP6 includes particle forcing while CMIP5 & before did not. The global & solar electric circuits are not considered. Are xrays, which have a large variance with solar cycles, included in CMIP6? I don't think the Birkeland Current is considered.
What also doesn't help is adjusting historical measurements such as temperature. It's like changing the rules mid-game, which indicates that past observations are mutable to fit the models. Also note the incomplete data, as modern satellite observations span a tiny window compared to Earth's lifespan. The solar system travels through different parts of the Galaxy, crossing the Galactic Current Sheet at times, passing through ionized dust, among other phenomena.
> Sadly, our ability to experiment repeatedly in the same conditions with the environment is deeply limited, in a way much akin to astronomy.
We can experiment with ions, plasma, & high voltages applied to plasma. Note the Birkeland Current between Sun & the Earth, ions being ejected from the Sun, XRay emission varying wildly with solar activity, cosmic rays, etc. There's also a Birkeland current sheet in the solar system & a galactic current sheet.
One of the major issues is that the standard model does not consider plasma & electricity, in light of recent observations of the prevalence of Plasma in space, effectively blinding large parts of the astronomical theory to it's impact. This led to a legacy of ad hoc, non-observable (thus non-falsifiable) inventions such as "dark matter", "dark energy", "black holes", "neutron stars", "the big bang", "space/time", "magnetic line snapping", "parallel universes", "11 dimension space" & whatever other mathematical patches are used to fit the observations. Note inconsistencies with the assertion that redshift equals distance with observations such as examples of a Quasar with a high redshift being connected to a Galaxy with a low redshift.
Point is climate science is built on a tower of assumptions built on assumptions where some of the foundational pieces are called into question. Ad hoc tweaking of observational data & ad hoc tweaking of models to fit the transformed observed measurements makes it easy to doubt the accuracy, predictive ability, & knowledge of applicable boundary conditions of the model. It sounds like a tough job to get it right.
Never heard that claim. Could you back it up?
Side note. I did a calculation of PV=nRT on Venus which has a 96.5% (965000PPM) CO2 atmospheric concentration. Assuming RT is close to equal on Venus & Earth, P~T.
Venus has a surface temp/pressure of 7.96 K/bar vs 287.15 K/bar on Earth. If Venus had a runaway greenhouse effect, the K/bar on Venus should be significantly higher than on Earth. Would love more feedback & critique on this calculation, particularly a relevant PVT diagram for CO2.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mn4yuh2TUKWeMtMpZkDN...
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Heres a PVT phase diagram for CO2 but hopefully theres better ones wrt Venus. Note that theres a bend in the liquid/gas border. 1 to 10 bar has a lower increase of K/bar than for the 10 to 90 bar region.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-phase-diagram-for-CO2_...
Proceed by testing and accepting or disproving hypothesis. Nothing more, nothing less.
The word salad looked good, though.