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The rot runs deep.
Take a look at this paper. Here's the abstract:
Do read the paper. It's not long and it's a good test of one's bullshit detector1. For the impatient:the author assumes a 2% growth rate for humanity's energy use and projects that forward a thousand years.
The paper's isn't that interesting once you spot the trick. But it does bring up two interesting thoughts:
1 I suppose this is technically consensus building. If you think the paper's arguments are reasonable, I'd be happy to discuss that as well...
One swallow doesn't make a summer. One paper (by a non expert) doesn't invalidate an entire field of experts.
I think looking at proposed answers to climate change is what turns evaluating the climate change hypothesis form a reasoning exercise into an emotional/political endeavour - and it cuts both ways. This is the only way I can explain all the special pleading for climate change as uniquely suspect for decades, despite being a bland, intuitive hypothesis. I think it's helpful set aside looking at proposed answers before thinking about the hypothesis.
We should expect some kind of climate change a-priori. Anything else is nonsense. We've known CO2 is a greenhouse gas since 1859. Very basic. We've known the atmosphere:earth is roughly proportional to apple:apple-skin for a fair bit too. I'd be shocked if adding ~1 quintillion Kg's of CO2 to the atmosphere had precisely no effects. Measuring CO2 in ppm is trivial. Measuring temperature is trivial. Even if climate change isn't human caused, it'd still be worth investigating so we can engineer around it.
This is also a dubious line of thinking (its something like the appeal to ridicule). Chess computers, controlled flight, weather prediction, gene editing, nuclear fission, were all once claimed to be too outlandish to be possible. They still feel outlandish, but all can be done by hobbyists.
Most of those things are much easier to model than the climate because there are thousands and thousands of inputs into the climate. GIGO
This still seems like special pleading. Perhaps you can argue/explain to me how its not. As I see it, we can figure out chess, engineer billions of transistors per sq in, manipulate genomes, program LLMs with billions of tokens, perform a million-trillion operations every second. Therefore its not unreasonable to suspect that we can make good climate models.
So, I don't know how pleasing you'll find this answer, but the burden of proof is on the models to show their efficacy. A lot of the things you mentioned were very difficult things to do, but we know they work because we see that they work. You don't have to argue about whether Stockfish's chess model captures Truth with a capital T; you can just play 20 games with it, lose all 20, and see. (And of course plenty of things look difficult and ARE still difficult - we don't have cities on the moon yet!)
So, if we had a climate model that everyone could just rely on because its outputs were detailed and verifiably, reliably true, then sure, "this looks like it's a hard thing to do" wouldn't hold much weight. A property of good models is that it should be trivial for them to distinguish themselves from something making lucky guesses. But as far as I know, we don't have this. Instead, we use models to make 50-year predictions for a single hard-to-measure variable (global mean surface temperature) and then 5 years down the line we observe that we're still mostly within predicted error bars. This is not proof that the model represents anything close to Truth.
Now, I don't follow this too closely any more, and maybe there really is some great model that has many different and detailed outputs, with mean temperature predictions that are fairly accurate for different regions of the Earth and parts of the atmosphere and sea, and that properly predicts changes in cloud cover and albedo and humidity and ocean currents and etc. etc. If somebody had formally published accurate predictions for many of these things (NOT just backfitting to already-known data), then I'd believe we feeble humans actually had a good handle on the beast that is climate science. But I suspect this hasn't happened, since climate activists would be shouting it from the rooftops if it had.
Thanks. I am trying to ignore specifics and make an inductive argument about science in general to shed light on why climate science appears special (ie: most biologist claim that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, physicists say the universe has a speed limit, meteorologists say 80% chance it'll rain in 3 days etc). Normally, people just go "oh okay". AFAIKT, some 95% of climate scientists are saying "yep, the climate is projected to warm for x and y reasons" and yet many people are have been uniquely skeptical for ~50 years despite increasing consensus among people who have studied the science thousands of hours. I curious what the reason for this is.
Personally, I think the hypothesis is the expected one. Humans have added a trillion tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere in 200 years, and its trivial to prove CO2 is a greenhouse gas. I'd expect something to happen, probably warming, although this need not be the case, and I don't really care either way. All I want to know is what makes climate science uniquely dubious from the highest vantage point, without specifics (mostly for practical reasons).
I haven't followed this much at all. I don't disagree with the points you made, but at a 5 minute glance it seems that the climate models are useful. Even if they weren't, skepticism in the face of an increasing consensus in a quantitative field over decades begs for an explanation.
Biology and physics are old sciences compared to climate science. And the list of amazing things we've done with biology and physics over the last 200 years is insanely long. I guess you're saying that we should give climate science the same level of veneration, even without actual results and useful predictions, because it (ostensibly) uses the same processes. But even if you pretend that climate science is conducted with the same level of impartial truth-seeking - despite the incredible political pressure behind it - that's still missing the point that science is messy and often gets things wrong. Even in biology (e.g. Lamarckism) or physics (e.g. the aether). It takes hundreds of repeated experiments and validated predictions before a true "consensus" emerges (if even then). Gathering together a consensus and skipping that first step is missing the point.
And remember, skepticism is the default position of science. It's not abnormal. Heck, we had people excitedly testing the EmDrive a few years back, which would violate conservation of momentum! We didn't collectively say "excommunicate the Conservation of Momentum Deniers!"
Regardless, I'm not saying that climate science or the models are entirely useless. Like you said, the greenhouse effect itself is pretty simple and well-understood (though it only accounts for a small portion of the warming that models predict). There's good reason to believe warming will happen. Much less reason to believe it'll be catastrophic, but that's a different topic!
We should give climate science whatever veneration it earns. AFAIKT, it has produced results and useful predictions, but this is largely immaterial to what I'm talking about.
If there was Blah Science, researched for decades by tens of thousands of smart people who overwhelmingly agree that X is true, I'd bet on X being true.
My point: most people would bet on X being true in normal circumstances. People seem to make an exception for climate science. I'm curious why people make this exception.
I'm also curious if there are any other broad fields where this pattern holds. Things surrounding nutrition come to mind. Perhaps there are many, and what I'm calling special pleading is quite common.
Climate science has made predictions that are laughably wrong, and this doesn't seem to bother the researchers. The IPCC reports have often contained an enormous range of predictions based on various conditions, and even then on at least one occassion they all missed high. Climate science is no longer an unproven science with a curious number of believers; it's a field full of failures and missed predictions excused by "oh but we know better now".
About as curious as our friend Secure Signals is when he claims some discrepancy in concentration camp numbers, I imagine.
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Psychology, sociology, criminology, economics... That's four fields with zero credibility off the top of my head. I'm sure others can add more. [EDIT] - Add whatever pedagogy or whatever they call the study of education methods itself. That one's toast too.
You should not assume science is correct because of a consensus. When that consensus starts shipping engineered solutions based off that consensus, then you can start taking them at their word. This attitude should expand to cover anything from physics to hard math if they engage with a live political issue.
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Can we predict the weather tomorrow? Yes and no. There are just too many variables and randomness in the system to be exact but have a decent approximation.
Climate is more complex. We don’t know how to measure every variable. We don’t know what variables should be included. We don’t know how much each variable should matter.
Chess is simple. There are 9 kinds of pieces and 64 squares. Climate is a lot more complex.
Right, but this line of reasoning could be used to dismiss as inaccurate anything sufficiently complex and niche. The human body, the universe, and AI are complex, but people don't dismiss medicine, astrophysics, and LLM's because of complexity. What is special or unique about decades of climate science that gives people pause?
I don't want to put words in peoples mouths. If people think decades of climate science is uniquely dubious because they reckon its just too complex, that's fine. Special pleading is an informal fallacy anyhow. OP found climate science to be nonsense, and the idea of climate modeling to be outlandish, and didn't elaborate. But saying this isn't special pleading by pointing out complexity is a non-starter. It's rare that, for decades, 90+% of trained scientists agree on some domain specific thing in a heavily quantitative field, yet popular sentiment demurs without easily explaining why.
Astrophysics is interesting but doesn’t really make any demand upon me. Whether they are right or not is by and large irrelevant.
The complexity of AI is part of the argument against AI. That is, we don’t understand exactly how it works and therefore the alignment problem is a concern.
Medicine — well the answer is it depends. The older a practice the more I trust it. I like lindy things.
But it isn’t just climate. I think when it generally comes to predicting complex phenomena we overstate our ability to predict things.
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All of those are discrete (except manipulation of genomes), chess has an finite number of movements and we are barely understanding the genome; grouping it with something simple as chess is disingenuous. By contrast the climate has a number of inputs that can't even be comprehended, are analogue in nature and affect it in variable ways, from mayor ocean currents and wind fronts to cow farts and the movement of people. We can't even predict the weather from one day to another, just forecast it with probabilities.
As an aside, I still think chess fits. I don't even think we know how many games of chess are possible. Humans recently approximated a Go engine - something people long claimed was too complex to ever be done, much like chess. Models + compute can beat humans at games of unimaginable complexity.
Regardless, even if chess is a bad analogy, admitting that doesn't gets me out special pleading that climate science is not only special in its complexity, but also special in that thousands of people with PhD's, from Montana to Mongolia, overwhelmingly agree that its possible to model climate usefully.
What reason do I have to disbelieve climate science that doesn't also apply to designing bleeding edge microchips, or medicine, or applied physics, or the improvements seen in weather forecasting? I'm trying to argue myself into climate science skepticism inductively and/or by way of inferences. A strong quantitative scientific consensus about cause and effect is usually a good bet. What makes climate science different?
The only thing I can come up with is that climate science is more akin to a year-long weather forecast (ie cannot be computed in P time because well understood chaotic conditions). But then why do such a large amount knowledgeable keep spending money on the practical applicability of climate models? I'm back at special pleading that science is a liar in this case in particular.
Well, they have a vested interest in it, no?
that they at least produce the predicted results, be it a bleeding edge chip or a failed attempt at one, weather forecasting as I see it isn't much better than an old man and bad knees.
That is trying to understand a really complex system, that a myriad of special interest have their hands in all kinds of places, and that the system as such began a long long time ago and we don't know much about that period.
not this case in particular, you can add Psychology with its replication crisis to the pile and whatever the COVID clusterfuck was.
This was a common sentiment back when I was growing up in the 90s. Even back then, it was a silly sentiment and wrong, though it wasn't completely wrong, but it's certainly completely wrong today. Even since the 90s to today, weather forecasting has improved substantially. This makes sense, because there's a ton of money to be made by forecasting weather slightly better than the competition. Weather drives energy usage patterns to a significant extent - think air conditioning and heating - and being able to predict those patterns more accurately than someone else allows one to make bets on the energy markets (things like electricity, nat gas, coal, oil) to make more money. An old man with bad knees and a team of professional meteorologists both get things wrong from time to time, but how often they get things wrong and how severely they get things wrong are very very different these days.
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Actually, we do! Antarctic ice-cores let us get a surprising amount of information about the climate of the earth in the past. Similarly, other fields can tell us really interesting things as well - if you encounter lots of fossils of creatures that only lived in tropical rainforests in a place that is now a desert, that is useful information. Similarly, noticing lots of aquatic/fish fossils on ground that's above the waterlevel can tell you things as well. There's a vast wealth of information about the past available to modern scientific inquiry.
I personally believe in global warming - I can't see any other reasonable conclusion when you look over the data we have available to us. Historical changes in temperature and the association with atmospheric carbon dioxide seem fairly undeniable at this point. I don't think that climate change is going to cause Venus Earth or the end of the world, it is going to have a significant impact on human society due to how dependent we are upon the climate as it stands. There will be winners and losers, but at the same time I highly doubt anything is going to actually fix it - there are too many economic, political and military incentives to burn fossil fuels, and most of the current proposals from the left to deal with the problem essentially boil down to letting Goldman Sachs make more money while limousine liberals pay large sums of money to try and avoid facing up to their own massive contributions to the issue.
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This is practically a definition for 'science'.
This is largely true for most fields of science.
Similarly, this is also true for most of science.
I can't find anything that makes these arguments apply to climate science, but not biology, medicine, chemistry, physics, etc.
Eg. Do we really know bacteria cause disease? Researches have a vested interest in continued research, but the proposed mechanisms are beyond complex, based on biology that began over a billion years ago.
Apparently climate models have been, on average, predictive. But this is not the kind of inductive claim I'm searching for.
Apparently, these are accurate 75% of the time inside of 5 days. This would be easy to disprove. Again, not an inductive claim. As an aside, if interested I'd be willing to bet money that weather forecasts are about as accurate as 30 sec. of googling led me to believe they are.
I'm extremely mindful of this regarding climate policy.
The observable defining line between Science and "science" is that the former confines itself to areas that can be thoroughly and rigorously mapped, and the latter does not. Climate is plausibly across the line to intractably complex.
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