125 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury 12 Mar \ on: Tough Questions for Libertarians 1/15 libertarian
Good first post out of the gate.
At the risk of launching some kind of holy war, my ambient understanding was that the world had, en masse, actually experienced pretty significant climate change over the last few decades, and basically everybody agreed on that except for literal nut cases and conspiracy theorists. I know in my part of the world it's hard to deny, since the evidence is so tangible. Even my right-wing relatives acknowledge the change, they just attribute it to other stuff.
In fact, I'm genuinely surprised that the framing of the original question suggests that climate change people have egg on their face, but presumably that's the case, otherwise the parallel btwn the failure of inflation to materialize for so long makes no sense. So my actual question is: is it, in fact, the dominant view of this tribe that:
a) there has been no climate change, and the science shows this
b) there has been no climate change, and scientific claims to the contrary are bullshit
c) there has been climate change, but it's not anthropogenic, and science shows this
d) there has been climate change, but it's not anthropogenic, and scientific claims to the contrary are bullshit
e) something else?
I'm not asking to litigate the question, because I'm unqualified to participate in that litigation. But I would be interested in your assessment of the state of reality as pertains to the the nature of the disagreement.
I tried to find a quick reference for you and discovered that the top search results take the position "Actually, there was no pause. Our data was just messed up." I don't particularly care one way or the other if that's correct, but it sounds fishy to me.
I'm not sure I know what the dominant view is on the scientific question of climate change. My sense is that it's somewhere around option d, but I've seen all of those options advanced by different people in different ways.
The point isn't about denying any particular scientific claim. It was more about pointing out that after years of claiming global warming was going to destroy the world, the warming trend stopped and it didn't seem to give the activists any pause. They just adopted a convenient explanation and continued making the same claims.
In other words, the Global Warming adherents seemed to be failing at falsifiability.
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It was more about pointing out that after years of claiming global warming was going to destroy the world, the warming trend stopped
That's the part that I was asking about, though -- the warming trend stopped?
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Yes, at least according to the official data.
I was studying atmospheric physics around this time. One of my professors was giving a general audience style presentation about global warming that was explaining the prevailing models. One of the points he made was showing that without anthropogenic warming the models showed flat or even declining temperatures, which meant that any warming was evidence of anthropogenic warming.
The fact that he and other climate scientists didn't reevaluate their stance on anthropogenic warming when the warming trend stopped was my first inclination that something other than pure science was going on. As a big psychology guy, I'm sure you're not surprised that scientists don't easily discard preferred hypotheses even when they're falsified, but as an idealistic scientist in training I expected conformity to the ideal of the scientific method.
Here's a national temperature graph from the EPA.Imagine looking at this before about 2015. You'd see a spike in the late 90's followed by a downward trend.
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