site banner
srid  1mo ago (cafeamericainmag.com)   Edited 1mo ago   3174 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!

-5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I am curious, have they bothered to explain why temperature is growing? Or at least leave it as an open question?

Or are they denying that Earth gets warmer?

In normal sensate reality, heat only flows from hot to cold, but the greenhouse effect appears to involve an inverted heat flow within this system.

Nope. It is about how efficient energy transfer from Sun (hot) to Earth (cold) is and how it happens. Second law of thermodynamics is not violated.

This is an article written by someone that used to strongly believe in anthropogenic global warming

This is not a strong credentials at all.

Your curiosity can easily be satiated by... reading the article :)

I tried, but from part when author apparently fails at understanding second law of thermodynamics (or thinks that Earth during summer is hotter than Sun) I started skimming.

Can you point me to relevant part if I asked about part I missed?

It appears you started skimming earlier than that, as this is in the 3rd paragraph: "Worst of all, the alleged recent warming trend that is said to confirm earlier model predictions is based on data that appears to be adjusted to match the very models it is meant to be independently corroborating." It is elaborated in the article on the "Correlation is not causation" section.

As to the 2nd Law: "As to the thermodynamics, the arguments are plentiful. I'll just point out two physicists believed that it does violate the 2nd Law and published a peer-reviewed paper to that effect (Gerlich & Tscheuschner). Most others, of course, disagree. The point in the article is that rather than debate it, let's demonstrate it experimentally, in the real world - and this has not been done for the GHE."

As to thinking the Earth during summer is hotter than the Sun... genuinely not sure what you're addressing here.

As to the thermodynamics, the arguments are plentiful. I'll just point out two physicists believed that it does violate the 2nd Law and published a peer-reviewed paper to that effect (Gerlich & Tscheuschner)

That is not giving any info whatsoever what the claim is - and if we are going via ad authority arguments then surely you are aware that you are going to lose here? And appeal to peer-reviewed papers is not going to help you much?

Why supposedly GHE would violate second law of thermodynamics?

@dale_cloudman thinks that 2LoT means "heat flow from cold to hot is zero" rather than the correct "heat flow from cold to hot is less than heat flow from hot to cold such that net local flow is from hot to cold". It's a reasonably-easy misunderstanding to make (at least, for someone trying to make sense of a topic without the proper grounding), since when you're dealing with conduction or convection there's no separation between forward flow and back flow, and non-scientists don't deal with radiative heat transfer often.

The reason to point out that two physicists published a peer-reviewed paper where they argue the GHE violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is to show that it's not a layperson's mis-understanding that underlies this claim. Trained physicists with extensive experience precisely with thermodynamics, made the argument. So it's just not effective to say it's because of lack of "proper grounding".

The terminology can be tricky. For a detailed explanation I refer readers to the paper in question, https://arxiv.org/pdf/0707.1161.pdf, p75-79 in particular.

Trained physicists with extensive experience precisely with thermodynamics, made the argument.

Not sure why you assume that scientists cannot ever be hilariously wrong, make stupid mistakes, engaging in harmful conspiracies, troll or be insane cranks. Also in their own field.

It is especially confusing given that you are claiming that massive number of scientists do at least one of this things or similar.

Mix of conspiracy theory about scientists engaging in conspiracy AND appealing to authority of scientists is weird. Can you decide on doing one of these?

"two scientists published paper about X" is not as strong argument as you think it is. Have you heard about replication crisis?

Well it appears my strategy worked. The critique went from "reasonably-easy misunderstanding to make" for someone "without the proper grounding" to: scientists can still be wrong. Mission accomplished.

More comments

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats