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srid  18d ago (cafeamericainmag.com)   Edited 18d ago   2985 thread views

The Vacuity of Climate Science

cafeamericainmag.com

There has been a lot of CW discussion on climate change. This is an article written by someone that used to strongly believe in anthropogenic global warming and then looked at all the evidence before arriving at a different conclusion. The articles goes through what they did.

I thought a top-level submission would be more interesting as climate change is such a hot button topic and it would be good to have a top-level spot to discuss it for now. I have informed the author of this submission; they said they will drop by and engage with the comments here!

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I can't comment on most of this, except the following:

This makes it all the more peculiar that nobody has been able to experimentally demonstrate and therefore verify the greenhouse effect.

Wouldn't the existence of Venus be pretty definitive proof that such a thing is possible?

The key here is “experimentally demonstrate”. Pointing to Venus isn’t an experiment! I thought the following demonstrated why rather effectively:

“The problem this poses is best exemplified by going back to Pekeris 1932. (It must be noted that Hansen et al 1983 cites Wang 1976 which cites Goody 1964 who then cites Pekeris 1932). In Pekeris, the models of the time led the scientist to believe that “it becomes plausible the temperatures on […] Venus, Earth, and Mars are about the same”. As Venus’s temperature is 464ºC while that of Mars is -63ºC, his egregious error reveals the fundamental problem of not having experimental means by which to validate models. This leads to a situation where models are susceptible to overfitting available data, with no ability to check their operations by proving that the actual effect matches the model’s prediction.”

Sure, it’s an observation, rather than a prediction. That’s fine for a control group, but insufficient. At least it lets us rule other theories out.

So…what would constitute experimental demonstration? What could I do to convince you that the greenhouse effect can, in fact, trap some amount of heat?

For that matter, I don’t see you providing any experiments yourself! Why should I privilege your bench-top reasoning over the IPCC’s?

It’s a good question and is already addressed in the article:

“Although the burden of proof is on a theory’s proponents rather than its critics, we can conjecture what one such proof might look like: it would have to consist of an external energy source – such as the sun or a heat lamp – that is set to warm a surface. The energy input should be measured and the surface, in the presence of greenhouse gases, should get much hotter than that input alone can provide, emitting much more energy in response. This would definitively demonstrate the greenhouse effect itself, after which the anthropogenic influence could be gauged by introducing more carbon dioxide into the apparatus and measuring the marginal temperature response.”

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