Highlighting how this stuff really isn’t credible. It’s junk.
Regarding your link, those counter points are... very unscientific or well reasoned. Take point #1, we all agree climate changes, it snows half the year in the northern hemisphere. What caused the snow isn’t anything we did. But I’m 100% sure you could find correlations, which is all these papers do. Just like humans likely didn’t cause the earth to heat 20,000 years ago when the North American ice sheet melted. But that correlates to when humans arrived in North America.
The problem with correlations are that you need a large volume of data to suggest causation. We don’t have that.
Because of those claims of causation, the field has lost significant credibility
Just based on this sentence I have a hard time believing you really are a scientist as you claim. There is no requirement on large volume of data to suggest causation. In fact no amount of data and correlation by itself can establish causation, because they are very different concepts (Hence the correlation!=causation). You need mechanisms to explain the causations, and you need to verify the mechanisms. This has been done extensively for climate change.
> Because of those claims of causation, the field has lost significant credibility
I would say your claims lost you a lot of credibility just now.
We don't have the full dataset so effectively we're seeing two lines go up at the same time and claiming one is causing the other.
We can't even really make a correlation case, besides to say these two time series loosely correlate.
Put another way, we suspect one event causes another, which are tracked via a time series. Normally, when you're discussing causality you'd looking for multiple instances of said event causing another. We don't have that. Hence, we're effectively shooting in the dark.
You do have a point on credibility though, in that over-politicization causes the field to look much less credible.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Climate&oldid=104...
IMO as we don't have accurate data measuring far enough back we're effectively shooting in the dark.
It's fine to say, these two things could be correlated, it's another to say these things are correlated AND to fix it we have to force everyone to stop traveling, be less healthy (eating a worse diet), etc.
If you drink a bunch of methanol and then go blind without knowing the exact biochemistry, you don't say "eh, there's no causation proven yet" and keep drinking, you stop the things which correlate until you can show they are safe. Where's your credibility? What have you done to give an alternative explanation to anthropogenic climate change? If you don't have one, you aren't acting in good faith here
1. Numbering your opponents arguments isn't a response to them.
2. He isn't asking questions, he's making a variety of statements that have a factual basis and can be debated to determine to what extent they're right or wrong. You're straw-manning to claim these are questions.
3. Asserting there's no debate when someone is telling you there is debate, is exactly the kind of strategy that makes neutral onlookers more likely to agree with him, not you, especially as one of his claims is that journals etc block any alternative viewpoint.
2. The debate you are alluding to has been done, see point 1. But he ignores this, because as long as the debate don't stop, his position is unchanged
3. Asserting there is a debate until someone who has done 0 to engage with an overwhelming scientific consensus agrees there isn't is false neutrality. That one random guys opinion (and mine, for the record) is worth jack shit compared to the IPCC ans the 97-99% of experts who have come to a consensus based on the data they spend their whole career studying. To go against their consensus is perfectly valid but needs to be done in a manner which integrates all the data collected in the consensus explanation at least as well, or better. Not just by listing context free gotchas and claiming the debate hasn't been finished yet
As for the question of creating climate skeptics: I'm much more interested in pointing out to readers that a rhetorical playbook is being used and provide a counter voice than to argue with someone who isn't themselves arguing in food faith. See point 1
For example, point 43 is "CO2 is plant food". No such point is made anywhere in the post you're replying to, so you must be reading it into something else he said.
Point 44 is "there is no empirical evidence". Again, the person you're responding to didn't say that. This time I can't even see anywhere you might be reading an implication of it.
Regardless, the given answers are often not really answers at all; e.g. point 90 "Q: Peer review process was corrupted" is answered by "A: An Independent Review concluded the CRU's actions were normal and didn't threaten the integrity of peer review". I recall reading those emails and they were very explicitly doing exactly that. The "independent review" in question is actually organized and the website is hosted by the University of East Anglia itself. The answer is basically saying everyone should trust academics when they clear themselves of wrongdoing, and if you don't you're a conspiracy theorist.
I looked into this one a bit more and there's a response written by the climate skeptics themselves to this review here, which is far more convincing:
https://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/climat...
Russell's inquiry was slated by MPs, apparently for good reasons:
"The Muir Russell inquiry held no public hearings and did not interview any CRU critics ... Although Muir Russell had been appointed in December 2009 and was due to report in spring 2010, as of the start of April, nobody at CRU had been interviewed on anything to do with the Hockey Stick or IPCC"
An MP said: "In a situation that is almost beyond parody Muir Russell stated that he didn’t ask Jones whether he had deleted the e-mails because they would have had to interview Jones under caution. What was the solution then? The Vice Chancellor asked Jones whether he had deleted the e-mails. This rather negated the purpose of having an independent Inquiry when the only person to ask the crucial question was the Vice Chancellor who saw his prime responsibility to the good name of the University. The accused investigating themselves again."
"Subsequently, it turned out that Vice Chancellor Action’s reassurances that nothing had been deleted were untrue. Following up on that supposed reassurance, one of us (McIntyre) submitted an FOI request for the attachments to the emails which Jones had sought to destroy, attachments which contained the surreptitious and hidden edits to the IPCC report by Mann’s associates after close of external review. The University reported that the documents about which Acton had reassured the Committee did not exist after all."
Here are the criticisms I have seen and share myself:
1. Define "climate change"
2. Funding tends to be provided to those who agree politically
3. Funding is typically tied to particular research objectives. Because of that, outcomes are often per-determined, particularly when we're looking at trend lines in particular predictable ways. For instance, we are likely funding research into "what are the human causes of climate change" -- which implies an outcome.
4. While there may be consensus that it's human caused, that doesn't necessarily mean there's consensus on the reasons, outcomes, scale, etc.
5. Journals / Reviewers actively block publication of counter points.
6. There's significant evidence climate change will benefit humanity, aka the characterization from politicians misrepresents the actual data. This reduces the credibility of the field and influences desired outcomes.
7. Many of the predictions from scientists in the field have been wildly off. If you go through old papers you can see there were predictions of an apocalypse every few years, which never comes. This makes it seem like a giant grift.
8. There's a MAJOR sampling issue. Where are the data samples taken to determine "warming", there are many papers cherry picking data. Certain regions are getting cooler, others warmer, etc. Additionally, we only have data reliably for a hundred years and we're exiting an ice age. We see correlations at that scale, causation are not discoverable; at least for what most people consider climate change (global temperature change & weather patterns).
9. Obvious counter examples exist. Per-industrialization, North Africa went fro a lush land to a desert. It wasn't human industrialization that did that. North America was covered in a sheet of ice a mile thick 20,000 years ago. These events are rarely considered in papers examining human influence.