This comes to us via Vox’s David Roberts, who, though a long confirmed Warmist, who I thoroughly enjoyed over at Grist, is not one of the nasty and/or offensive types. Deluded? Yes. Nasty? No
The two key points that climate skeptics miss
….
1) Climate science represents a convergence of evidence
Why do so many scientists and scientific organizations accept that climate change is real, human-caused, and dangerous?
It’s not because of any single line of evidence or any one prediction. Rather, says Shermer, “there is a convergence of evidence from multiple lines of inquiry — pollen, tree rings, ice cores, corals, glacial and polar ice-cap melt, sea-level rise, ecological shifts, carbon dioxide increases, the unprecedented rate of temperature increase — that all converge to a singular conclusion.” Scientists call this sort of convergence of independent lines of evidence “consilience.” Biologist E.O. Wilson wrote a very good book about it.
Climate denialists — indeed, most people — do not fully grasp the implications of consilience…
Of course, all the Warmists BS boils down to flawed computer models and consensus. If the computer models are failing, then it’s time to look back and find why, adjusting the results and expectations, not changing the data to reflect the desired results. Furthermore, consensus is not hard science.
2) Climate “skepticism” does not
Writes Shermer:
For [climate] skeptics to overturn the consensus, they would need to find flaws with all the lines of supportive evidence and show a consistent convergence of evidence toward a different theory that explains the data. … This they have not done.
I’m not sure the disengaged public understands this: Climate skepticism is not an alternative theory. The climate skeptic community is a hodgepodge, a farrago of theories and conspiracies that range all over the map, from sunspots to adjustments in particular temperature data sets to hoaxes by scientists greedy for grant money. There’s no shared alternative framework, just a fixed certainty that the consensus must be wrong.
What’s missing here is that we do not need to disprove anything. It’s up to Warmists to prove the validity of their hypotheses, which they have failed to do. Yes, the world is in a warm phase. Yes, there have been several periods of spiking warmth. Yes, the world has warmed a bit over .8C since 1850. Anyone who disagrees with this is wrong. But, what the Warmists have failed to do is prove this is mostly/solely caused by Human activities, particularly from “carbon pollution”.
“Because we say so” is not evidence.
