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The Observer\’s still not quite grasped it

The climate conspiracy theory falls apart when you consider the effort that would be required to sustain such a scam (recruiting thousands of scientists, falsifying mountains of data) and then ask what plausible motivation there could be to continue such a vast conspiratorial effort? None, is the simple answer.

Sigh.

Sadly, not understanding quite how this climate science stuff works. You don\’t need to have thousands upon thousands in a conspiracy.

For you don\’t have thousands upon thousands looking at the same thing, all of whom need to be whipped into line.

Of those thousands working on climate science some will be over here writing papers on bristle cone pines. Others will be over here writing the economic models which underpin possible paths for the future. There will be a group over here looking at the influence of clouds, another there thinking about methane from peat bogs.

The current unknown in climate science is not each detailed part of it. Certainly, I\’m (for what zero amount my opinion is worth) happy with what each of those groupuscules is coming up with as the pointillist detail of their specialty. The current unknown is how it all fits together: specifically, what is climate sensitivity?

What is the sum of all of these diferrent interactions….which is the important thing we want to know in trying to work out how bad (or how trivial) it\’s all going to be.

And that working is indeed being done by a very small group. At most some hundreds and the influential people seem to be well under one hundred in number. Even if it\’s not conspiracy here, certainly it\’s possible to have groupthink…as we\’ve seen at CRU.

We don\’t need to posit a conspiracy of thousands to think that the seriousness (as opposed to the existence) is being exaggerated. We simply need to observe that one small group, working on the synthesis rather than the detailed science, has (might, could be, maybe) succumbed to groupthink.

And if we look at the history of science that really is not an unusual occurence. In fact, it has been happening all the time.

First is money. On a simple cost-benefit analysis, the best value lies in substantial and early action, as Sir Nicholas Stern\’s landmark report in 2006 found.

Ah, no. As (Now Lord) Stern\’s landmark report of 2006 asserted, on the basis of a number of potentially dodgy assumptions he made. Assumptions attacked/called into question by a number of equally, if not more so, erudite and informed economists who specialise in climate change. Like Sir Partha Dasgupta, Richard Tol and William Nordhaus. Stern is not settled science, not by a long way.

5 thoughts on “The Observer\’s still not quite grasped it”

  1. If I were buying a house I would insist on sight of the deeds and a survey before completion.
    Those proposing AGW refuse to release either their data or their calculations. That is all the reason I need not to purchase.
    There are we are told four temperature databases on which AGW is founded, and we are further told that these are independent. We are currently told that CRU have lost theirs, Hadley is about to spend three years checking theirs (what have they been doing the last twenty years- certainly not checking their own work) None of these databases have been published, so we only have the word of their keepers that they have made correct deductions, or that they are independent. The e-mails which should have been released under FOI (I assume that a prosecution is in order because CRU have not themselves complied) show the curators of these datasets to be working closely together, which makes me further doubt their independence. Computer code wrung out of Mann in connection with his hockey stick was found to be fraudulent- and the Code from CRU appears ludicrously sloppy.
    On this basis I am to commit my grandchildren to poverty , and the poor to worse? It’d be more sensible to buy a house on the estate agents description- no checks necessary.

  2. I am fully in favour of using the technology we have today on the satellites, to initiate and maintain a truly comprehensive database of all the relevant measurements, across the entire planet. And I’m also in favour of an internationally binding treaty for earth based data collection, so that we do not face, in the future, problems caused by loss of weather stations and loss of their integrity (to urbanisation and heat island proximity). If we wish to even map out, with any useful resolution, the temperature distribution across our land masses and oceans, this has to be done. We need good, consistent coverage in both time and space (and ocean depth, and height above sea level.) That would be money well spent.

    But we should not be considering synthetic data purporting to represent what the weather stations would have seen back to the 17th century, if we had had those weather stations then. (In Patagonia. And Siberia. And the Sahara. And everywhere else on the planet spaced at regular intervals.)

    It seems to me that there has been a great meshing together of historical data from proxies of various kinds, and modern data from weather stations and satellites. And from that, a determination that the modern data shows a departure from the historical norms. What that suggests to me is we are seeing a discontinuity in results simply due to the measurement methods being radically changed.

    It’s like if you went upstairs now and got on the bathroom scales, and you were exactly 180 lbs. Then you go next door and get on their scales, and you are 182 lbs. We all know that you haven’t gained 2lbs in the 5 minutes it took to do that. And if a UN committee accused you of catastrophic fattening you’d say they were loopy.

    I suspect they never had the data to really support what they have tried to do.

  3. Pingback: Climate Summit v ClimateGate - Charles Crawford

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