For today, some climate heresies:
In a post at her blog, Actual Climate Scientist Judith Curry discusses a diagram that divides scientific work into four quadrants. The corners of the diagram represent high vs. low priorities on two different axes: the pursuit of some kind of practical utility (X), and the pursuit of basic understanding (Y). In the upper-left corner — pursuit of basic understanding, with low concern for practical application — we have someone like Niels Bohr, or Isaac Newton. In the opposite corner — application above all, with just enough understanding to make a thing work — there’s Thomas Edison. The upper-right corner, where understanding and utility combine in equal measure, is occupied by people like Louis Pasteur.
Who gets the bottom left? In Dr. Curry’s post, we find it occupied by the skeletal scaremonger and cult-Marx cult-hero Bill Nye. Have a look here, and be sure to visit the many links.
We also have some remarks from a recent lecture by another anathematized Actual Climate Scientist, Richard Lindzen. In it he continues in his role as vox clamantis in deserto; all he has ever tried to do is patiently to explain that there are many good reasons for any critical thinker to approach the subject of climate change with wariness and circumspection, and to make clear that the Science is far less “settled” than we are led to believe.
Drs. Curry and Lindzen are not cranks or shills; they are highly credentialed experts who simply will not mute themselves and get in line. For this they are shunned and reviled with all the viciousness that a great and powerful religious establishment can bring to bear.
From the closing paragraph of Dr. Lindzen’s presentation:
[T]here is one thing that should spark skepticism in any intelligent reader. The system we are looking at consists in two turbulent fluids interacting with each other. They are on a rotating planet that is differentially heated by the sun. A vital constituent of the atmospheric component is water in the liquid, solid and vapor phases, and the changes in phase have vast energetic ramifications. The energy budget of this system involves the absorption and reemission of about 200 watts per square meter. Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget. So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common. In this complex multifactor system, what is the likelihood of the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables and not just globally averaged temperature anomaly) is controlled by this 2% perturbation in a single variable? Believing this is pretty close to believing in magic. Instead, you are told that it is believing in ”˜science.’ Such a claim should be a tip-off that something is amiss. After all, science is a mode of inquiry rather than a belief structure.
Read the whole thing here.
Coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef has been in the news lately. It can only be due to global warming, right? Well, no: it may very well be the result of falling sea levels in the region, due to El NiÁ±o. (Have you heard any mention of this coherent and persuasive explication in the mainstream media? Of course not.) Learn more, in considerable detail, here.
Finally, see also this comprehensive takedown, from 2014, of the (apparently) unkillable “97% consensus” myth.