Worth reading in its entirety. Via Alun Jones.
It is worth asking the question of what scientists would stand to gain by maintaining such a conspiracy, versus what fossil fuel corporations would stand to gain by promulgating the idea that climate change is a conspiracy. It’s not clear what the answer is in the former case: climate science is neither particularly lucrative, nor is it tied to the truth of anthropogenic climate change directly. If we were wrong about climate change, the need to study the climate would not disappear – it’s no more predicated on the truth of this specific scenario than any other branch of science is predicated on a particular theory.
Moreover, science as a social institution is constructed in such a way that novel insights–especially those which overturn widely held orthodoxies–are highly rewarded, not suppressed. A scientist with strong, comprehensive evidence against anthropogenic climate change would become a celebrity overnight, just as a scientist with strong, comprehensive evidence against (say) general relativity would.
The scientific method was deliberately constructed so as to be self-correcting in this way; scientists make mistakes all the time, but the overall system of science has proven very effective at catching those mistakes and correcting them. By contrast, fossil fuel companies quite transparently stand to gain quite a lot by obfuscating the truth about climate change; their whole business model is predicated on a process that emits many tons of GHG annually. Which scenario seems more likely here?
Originally shared by Jon Lawhead
I turned that thing I wrote yesterday into a more shareably formatted blog post.
http://www.planetexperts.com/top-11-climate-change-myths-and-why-theyre-wrong
Some interesting points, thanks for sharing. Some of my questions are yet unanswered and I'm not yet convinced by some answers (though I'll need more time on those), that's better than much of what I found recently.
ReplyDeleteI still have to put together my points of doubt in a comprehensive way, but maybe there are already some answers there, some re-reads and digging will be required.
I still think there are unacceptable flaws in the IPCC report, which is unsettling given its status, but let's be careful to not shoot the message with the messengers.
Also, "there is no greenhouse effect" - this is true... for greenhouses. The glass panels don't actually block radiation on its way out, but prevent convection (which is actually more efficient at carrying heat away than radiation here) (and to an extent, conduction).
ReplyDeleteOr, put another way, there is indeed no greenhouse effect on climate, and there is no such thing as greenhouse gas - because there is no outer space atmosphere to convect or conduct heat away to.
There is, though, an asymmetric radiation effect keeping temperature higher than it would be if inbound and outbound radiations were equally absorbed and reflected regardless of wavelength. A "greenhood effect", maybe?