Tag: Scientific consensus

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Here’s a Thought – Refutation of a Scientific Consensus is not just “I Disagree”

 

If you want to put up alternative theories you have to find some kind of credible evidence to support them … if you can’t do that you tend to resort to name-calling, calling global warming things like a religion or a cult or some kind of conspiracy.

Australia’s “Chief Scientist,” Ian Chubb. (Via The Guardian)

He has a point, doesn’t he? (Chubb was responding to Tony Abbott business adviser Maurice Newman advising Australia and the world on Friday of the “perils” of “ignoring nature’s warnings” or global cooling for which we are “ill prepared.”)

Yet it’s what’s repeatedly missed on Climate Change refutation. (Though maybe something else besides true scientific analysis is driving climate change refutation):
Calling AGW a cult or religion isn’t a reason why a radical increase to long term greenhouse gases – to levels not seen on earth in millions of years – would not lead to a similar major shift in climate. Particularly given that climate is ultimately a longer term response to energy changes: And a major increase in atmospheric thermal absorption and re radiation, constitutes a major change in long term energy.

One of the major Climate Change refutation sites is run by a well known college science professor, Judith Curry, who always seems to write posts strongly slanted towards refuting climate science; although without basic analysis as to why basic climate science, on the issue of AGW – as opposed to the ongoing process of scientific correction and adjustment itself – is wrong.

My question for Judith Curry – among others -, has still gone unanswered:

…Since it is so important for the diversity of scientific thought – …and despite the clamor for diversity and challenge, [the fact that] this leading site, for laying out the myriad errors of climate change skepticism arguments, is nevertheless, among many similar ones, decried, denigrated, and dismissed as unworthy and worse – what, exactly, is the “contrarian” position?

Let’s discuss it, as a viable… theory for the idea that the climate [nevertheless won’t significantly shift,  as a result of our ongoing accumulation of increased atmospheric re radiation of energy capacity in response to geologically radical changes to our atmosphere’s long lived greenhouse gas concentrations to levels not seen on earth in at least several million years, and still rising fast]….

But first, please, tell me what it is.

Notice, again, no one answered what it was.

In part because CC refutation is not about saying why, based upon geophysics, the earth, for some odds reason, won’t shift – or why it doesn’t face a large threat of shifting. It is about taking the ongoing process of science itself, and using selected mistakes, corrections, adjustments downward, cherry picked, and often even misrepresented parts itself, as false refutation for the separate underlying theory itself.

That’s not skepticism.  It’s self reinforcing, selective goal oriented refutation itself – something very different from rigorous objective scientific examination, while serving the purpose of convincing itself it is not.