RealClimate

> reducing carbon seems like it should be a much lower priority compared to how hard its pushed

I'm not sure what you mean. The last 50 years (and even 5) have been far more bark than bite.

> incoming nuclear fusion would alleviate a ton of our carbon issues

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. I worked on nuclear in a previous career and still have friends there, including fusion (including the big labs). Being bullish, fusion net gain is still 10 years away. It'll take decades to add to the energy portfolio after that. The case for fusion is worse than the case for fission. We should work on both, but we can't hold out for future technologies (we can say the same about storage). We needed to act decades ago, pushing it off by a few more decades is not going to solve the issue, it is repeating the same mistakes.

> fleshed out cost-benefit analysis

I wouldn't trust any of these. Zero of them. You need to have a pretty good understanding of these systems (highly complex) to even understand if the analyses are good. Every single one has a bias and is highly politicized. The more politicized a topic is, the higher level of expertise you need to understand who is telling the truth (politicization adds large amounts of noise).

> Bjorn Lomborg

Who is a political scientist. He isn't a climate scientist, nor even a scientist. Here's a rather well known scientist, Stefan Rahmstorf (studies physics of oceans) discussing Bjorn[0]. You can check Bjorn's scholar page[1] to…

The IPCC is supposed to summarize the state of the existing literature, but it was born political, tends to attracts eco-activists of all sorts and relies more than it should on "grey literature" - unrefereed "reports" written by ecological organizations. The IPCC also to some degree generates the consensus it is supposed to be merely reporting on, in that the lead authors have been known to push specific articles into print supporting "their side" of things and delay articles supporting "the other side" with IPCC deadlines in mind so that their side gets the last word. That's one part of the process where excess alarmism gets to creep in. On the other side, your sources are correct that the result then gets massaged into acceptability. The "summary for policymakers" in particular is the result of political compromises - various country's representatives argue about it and then the rest of the document in some cases gets rewritten to reflect what the summary says, leaving nobody happy.

Nonetheless, the IPCC documents aren't terrible and do tend to be worth reading if you really want to know what's going on.

On being "past skepticism": The most credible skeptics tend to be "lukewarmers". They believe reality is a bit more complicated and uncertain than has been portrayed, they tend to suspect climate sensitivity is a lot lower than the models predict and they tend to be suspicious of doomsday claims generally. But almost nobody at this point doubts "CO2 is a greenhouse gas"…

I'm not a climate scientist, but something bothers me about this debate. Why is it that skeptics are dismissed at best as ignorant or stupid, as paid shills for big oil, or even terrorists. I'm skeptical of at least some climate change claims, but I don't feel like I'm stupid or ignorant or a terrorist. Instead, I constantly hear confused or misleading statements about the environment, often stated with a religious fervor that characterizes those who doubt as sinners.

While at happy-hour, a friend's boyfriend started complaining about how much waste there was in some pizza box. So far, I'm at least partially on-board with what he's saying, but then it goes off into alarmist claims about landfills. Now, I'm starting to realize that he hasn't really read anything about the subject (I read a lot). So I say, "Well, it's probably not the world's biggest problem, there's not a shortage of holes in the ground." He end's up getting mad and casting aspersions. (The best being that he accuses me of being a "Capitalist").

At a party I'm talking to a self-identified "geologist". He's talking about global warming and loss of glaciers, etc. I say, "Isn't it weird that that's going on while central Antarctica is actually cooling?". His response was "Oh, well of course, warming can cause that too." He was a nice enough guy, but I notice that it didn't matter what direction the temperature of Antarctica was heading, to him, it confirmed his belief.

I really like Phil Plat's Bad…

>This stuff has been debunked over and over.

Debunked? I linked the science around the subject. I have never seen anyone debunk these scientific theories.

>. Just one example showing increasing temperatures with low solar activity http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2016/11/record...

Your link is looking at 1960s and closer. My links are looking at the last 20,000 years. Solar activity dips are not measured in such a short period of time. The solar activity is in the 'modern maximum' for the entire graph from 1960s on. You are not debunking anything with that link. It is of no surprise to me that during a 'modern maximum' solar cycle that temperatures are going up.

>Also arguments about temperature millions of years ago are not really meaningful, humans (and most other of the current species) did not live on earth at the time.

The 6 celcius increase in the last 20,000 to 10,000 years ago was something humans greatly benefitted from. The IPCC says that we are going to warm 1.4celcius by 2100. I'm 100% certain that humans can survive and very likely thrive because of this warming.

>But at least the deniers have now as predicted progressed from "it's not happening", to "it's happening but it's not that bad", soon we will be at "it is definitely happening but it's to late now to do anything so might as well do nothing"

Are you asserting that I am a denier? I have never been a denier. No, my links literally prove climate change is real. My problem is that people…

"This article was not particularly insightful - it contained lots of classic proof by assertion. It doesn't treat seriously any of the valid criticisms of the current thought and research processes on global warming. That said, I'm not going to flag it because I think it deserves some thought and rebutting."

It's not really an article about climate change. Ben Goldacre's field is more to do with the public perception of science. In that light, making the assumption that the "scientists in charge" are correct isn't invalid, although he would have done well to point it out as an explicit assumption. However, I would note that your concerns have largely been addressed, both in his article and in the general field.

"First, if it's really happening to an extent as to require severe urgency, you ought to be able to say things like this: The current average temperatures and standard deviations of temperatures in these 50 regions are X and Y. We expect the temperatures to rise by A over this period of time in at least 35 of these regions, and the standard deviation to increase by B. If this does not happen over the next five years, that creates serious doubt in our claims and methodologies."

This has been done, in several ways. A prediction has been made that, if we limit our total CO2 emissions to (from memory) 650GT between now and 2050, the anthropogenic portion of global warming will be limited to 2 degrees. This is falsifiable. Predictions of sea-level rise over the shorter…

Thank you for citing your claims. Now I am not familiar with the particulars of the alleged manipulations by GISS in Australia, but I would note a few things. One, the analysis in your citation was missing any sort of error analysis, and so it is impossible to formulate a statistical hypothesis test of the claimed manipulations. Being a personal blog, I wouldn't expect more, but without that sort of detailed statistical analysis, the claims have very little weight to them. Second, climate change is not my area of scientific expertise, and so if there are errors in his analysis, I am not likely to notice them; thus, I refer you to a group of people who have expertise in this area: http://www.realclimate.org/. Third, even if the alleged claims are true, they are far from showing a systemic error in all climate data. Our understanding of climate change is far broader than GISS's efforts, even though they are important in that understanding. In any field of study, there will be errors and failures of the review process, and so to conclude anything about the validity of climate data as a whole would require some sort of evidence that the alleged manipulations are occurring on a large scale and across organizations. This has not been provided, and thus your earlier assertions are still not backed up by evidence.

On the issues of the the Hockey Stick, the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, there is decidedly more to say that has been said by people much smarter than I.…