(eg. is the alarm overstated ? why have the GCM's failed to explain the last decade ?)
"The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear." BHO
"Mr. President, your characterization of the scientific facts regarding climate change and the degree of certainty informing the scientific debate is simply incorrect." CATO
If Obama had said that the
conclusions are beyond dispute and the facts are
unequivocal, I could see how many scientists would logically disagree with such an absolute statement. Scientists hate to agree with any absolutes, I think. CATO crafted an interesting sentence to get the scientist with a semantic ploy, but that seems to be their only contribution to this "petition."
Was this petition published anywhere other than their own website?
===
But Obama's statement was meant for the general public. There is a purpose behind alarms. They are to get your attention when you are likely distracted by something else. Alarms are designed to be louder than needed for basic or logical communication.
If we weren't so distracted by profligacy, maybe the logical communication that we are unbalancing a critical climate system would immediately make people realize the folly of their ways; but being distracted, people need something exaggerated--an alarm--to help wake them up from their dream state.
Here's an example: ...speaking about the climate problem....
...alongside the potential for some nuclear exchange....
This is the one challenge that could completely end human civilization, and it is rushing at us with such speed and force, it's completely unprecedented. As one strategic analyst in the Pentagon wrote in a landmark study of why Pearl Harbor wasn't prevented: He said, we as human beings have a tendency to confuse the unprecedented with the improbable. If something's never happened before, we tend to think: Well, that's not going to happen. [...]Problem is--the exceptions can kill you.”
Al Gore’s Testimony at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: Hearing on Global Climate Change; Jan. 28, 2009. From questions following the prepared statement.===
As for the GCMs failure:
I assume you mean how they completely failed to predict the rapid and record-breaking loss of Arctic ice mass.
The GCM's were all off by about 50 years.
As for nitpicking, that's the way science works. We could look at the "signers" of the CATO letter, one-by-one, to see how much weight of authority to give to them. Science is a cooperative effort, so I started with the first name; others are welcome to continue the effort.
As for the "weight of authority," I also looked at the Freeman Dyson article in the NYT. I think they had a very balanced article:
Bio-tech, he writes in his book, “Infinite in All Directions” (1988), “offers us the chance to imitate nature’s speed and flexibility,” and he imagines the furniture and art that people will “grow” for themselves, the pet dinosaurs they will “grow” for their children, along with an idiosyncratic menagerie of genetically engineered cousins of the carbon-eating tree: termites to consume derelict automobiles, a potato capable of flourishing on the dry red surfaces of Mars, a collision-avoiding car.
These ideas attract derision similar to Dyson’s essays on climate change, but he is an undeterred octogenarian futurist. “I don’t think of myself predicting things,” he says. “I’m expressing possibilities. Things that could happen. To a large extent it’s a question of how badly people want them to. The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people’s hopes.”
Good for him! Maybe he's a bit over the edge, but he's still focused on the future (the distant future, it sounds).
They go on to include:
...purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people’s hopes.”
The Nobel physics laureate Steven Weinberg admires Dyson’s physics — he says he thinks the Nobel committee fleeced him by not awarding his work on quantum electrodynamics with the prize — but Weinberg parts ways with his sensibility: “I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice.”
Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he [Dyson} acknowledges, he could be dead wrong.
p.s. I have some interesting info on the property loss data, but not tonight....
