Fox boss ordered staff to cast doubt on climate science

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Utterly false. You are the one making slanderous accusations against an entire scientific community and inpugning their honor. It is up to you to prove that any data has actually been altered.

And I never said you had to get something from "every single e-mail." Show me one single solitary scrap of hard evidence that climate data has actually been deliberately falsified.

What a bizarre connection to make. The two are completely separate. The scientists are not the policy makers. The only interest scientists have in studying climate change is to seek the truth. They are researching the possibility of both human-induced climate change and natural climate cycling and so far, nearly all of the evidence points to humans. There is little evidence to support the idea of natural causes, not with the unprecedented given rate of warming. What evidence do you have to support your hypothesis of natural causes? Remember, only hard science counts .

My own opinion about policy is very much in line with marshall's. The rabid environmentalists are generally a separate group from the scientists. No one is suggesting that you "must freeze in the dark and lead squalid impoverished lives." There are sensible and cost saving solutions that can reduce our dependency on fossil fuels - a very good thing no matter how you look at it (unless of course you're in the oil biz).

I don't even think carbon's the biggest problem we have anyway, environmentally speaking. I'm much, much more concerned about pollution. There are some efforts to reduce carbon that can actually increase pollution which I think are bad, such as CFL's. I broke one in my house a few years ago and the cleanup instructions were insane due to the mercury in the bulbs. Maybe they've changed since then, I don't know, but my point is efforts that focus on reducing carbon and reducing toxic waste products are worthwhile and beneficial. How many more oil spills do we need for us to figure out that there must be a better way?

Wasn't he saying that the ice melting was decreasing the total amount of CO2 held? If so your argument doesn't really address this.

I still think it's disingenuous for people opposed to certain policy measures to attack scientists. By attacking climate scientists they are attacking the messenger. Especially since most climate scientists are not radical environmentalists pushing for extreme and/or draconian measures. It really seems to be a matter of taking baby steps towards weaning ourselves off the carbon energy sources vs taking no steps at all. It actually makes sense whether you believe in anthropogenic climate warming or not because eventually fossil fuels will become scarce. The way things are going isn't going to be sustainable in the long run no matter how you look at it.

My issue with the "climate scientists" is epistemological, not political. There approach substitutes too much adjustable statistical correlation for a sound physical theory to account for physical causes. Their models have too many parameters that can be fiddled. A sound theory is overdetermined by the facts which it explains or close to it. In any case a good physical theory has few adjustable parameters. The General Theory actually has no adjustable parameters. All of the constants it uses are empirically measurable.

If the "climate scientists" can come to terms with the obvious epistemological deficiencies which I have pointed out several times. I would be the first to give them my whole-minded support. I look forward to the day when we have real climate science, not the statistical ersatz we now suffer.

You notice I do not have problems with the Standard Model or Einstein's theories of relativity (special and general) although both will eventually be demoted to heuristics when contrary facts and effects are discovered. That is the nature of science. We go with theories that are well supported by experiment and have not been (yet) falsified and we have our doubts about theories that are ad hoc and loaded down with epi-cycles.

ruveyn

Am I wrong? Are you, perhaps, indifferent to the cause of global warming? Do you even hope that it is anthropogenic? If so, I apologize - but I don't think, if so, that I am alone in my mistaken impression; you repeatedly equate anthropic global climate change with 'freezing in the dark, unless one is wealthy,' which implies a fairly strong emotional rather than a logical reaction.

Hell no. I live in the same environment that you do. What I want to avoid is a set of policies that will

1. impoverish us
2. Will not address the problem
3. Will divert us from taken meaningful action to live with the consequence of world atmospheric and oceanic warming.

Furthermore I have advocated for years that we stop burning oil and natural gas so much, not for ecological reasons but for political reasons. If we stop burning that sh*t we will not have to be so involved in the middle east which is a sh*t box and a hell hole. I say build 2000 fast breeder reactors from coast to coast (which we could do in 10 to 15 years) and generate our electric power from fission, not combustion. We would have enough electricity to generate free hydrogen from ocean water and we could finally have our squeaky clean hydrogen economy and we could let the Arabs swim and drown it their oil.

ruveyn

Well, there's not much I can argue with in that.

The only thing I would say is that California - especially coastal California - is a bad place for a nuclear reactor of any size. There is actually a small one just south of the town I live in that was closed down once people figured out that building a reactor on an active fault was a stupid idea.

So how have climate scientists established causation? Have there been controlled experiments?

They have demonstrated correlation using statistics and some of those statistics are highly questionable.

We do not have climate science. We have climate models.

ruveyn

Those models are being consistently, repeatedly borne out in reality by the natural experiment that we are currently in the midst of.

The rise in average air and ocean temperatures are far short of the increased predicted back in the 90's.. But this is irrelevant. What has not been conclusively demonstrated is that the arming we have is exclusively or largely caused by human activity. So even if all the factories in the world shut down and all the hydrocarbon powered vehicles were turned off it would not guarantee that the temperature increase we are now experiencing would halt. The result would be economic ruin and increasing temperatures anyway.

ruveyn

This is actually demonstrated.

What is not demonstrated is that it is actually possible to fix the problem even in the long term by shutting down factories.

But to claim that we are yet to prove the cause for the worsened climate is mostly human is just wrong.

I already explained that most climate models are in fact deterministic, not statistical.

In any case they are underdetermined. Too many parameters to fiddle with. And they are not fully based on controlled experimentation. Read Newton's Laws for Experiments and Phenomena at the beginning of Book III of -Principia Mathematica-.

Write us when the Climatologists get something as good as the Standard Model of Particles and Fields.

There's a good fellow.

ruveyn

We've already been through this several pages ago. You already know that your demands are impossible. Your argument is just a tactic to avoid seriously addressing the evidence we do have for anthropogenic warming.