Saturday, December 22, 2012

We link, you decide …

… Matt Ridley: Cooling Down the Fears of Climate Change - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull, who also sent along the next piece.)

… Why Climate Deniers Have No Scientific Credibility - In One Pie Chart.


My view? Ridley is offering facts and figures. Powell is simply proceeding on the assumption that science is somehow a matter of consensus. It is not. It is a matter of evidence, and the scientist holding the correct evidence is a majority of one by definition. Copernicus was right. The scientific consensus of his day was wrong. Ignaz Semmmelweiss was right. The scientific consensus of his day was wrong.

It is also worth noting this little bit leaked from the working draft of the next IPCC report:
Many empirical relationships have been reported between GCR or cosmogenic isotope archives and some aspects of the climate system (e.g., Bond et al., 2001; Dengel et al., 2009; Ram and Stolz, 1999). The forcing from changes in total solar irradiance alone does not seem to account for these observations, implying the existence of an amplifying mechanism such as the hypothesized GCR-cloud link. We focus here on observed relationships between GCR and aerosol and cloud properties.

Also the term climate denier takes that slur to a new low. Who in the hell denies climate, or climate change for that matter? Climate is a chaotic system. It is in continuous change. The "denier" part, of course, suggests that to be skeptical on this issue is tantamount to being a denier of the Holocaust, something that doesn't even rise to the level of a cheap shot. It is more of an obscenity.

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