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Climate dissent muffled by society's top institutions (realclearinvestigations.com)
8 points by hirundo on Sept 13, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment


It's always interesting how these dissidents "don't know" the impacts of climate change.

They claim that CO2 isn't that important yet they have no explanation for how any other known phenomenon could explain temperature increases.

Then they claim the temperature increases aren't as big as predicted.

Then they claim that the natural impacts are not historically unprecendented.

Yet physical modeling of the planetary system gives us a pretty damn good idea of how much more energy stays in the system due to a given increase in CO2.

We have a variety of physical and stochastic models which give various ranges of increases in global mean temperature, and very very few of those models in the ensembles show the impact being "small".

All of this also conveniently ignores the catastrophic effects of ocean acidification due to increases in atmospheric CO2, which is a problem so great it by itself is more than enough justification to alter the climate.

These "dissidents" are being canceled for the best reasons: because their thinking is flawed, they grasp at conclusions, they question established research without being experts in the specific areas, and they always fail to provide the extraordinary evidence necessary to revoke the utility of our current models. Most importantly, they have no alternative system that explain the observed phenomena of the climate system as a working alternative with models with predictive power.

Predictive power is one of the most important factors of the utility of a theory, and thus far from everything we've learned since the 70s, the empirical data confirms that we are, effectively, living in a climate emergency.

And here's why they are "denialists" instead of being people with real claims to alternative theories: because their entire reason for being is to nitpick minor and irrelevant points to a titanic theory that is based on millions of lines of physical evidence, millions of different measurement instruments, entire lines of novel research dedicated to model and instrument calibration and debiasing, advances in chaos theory and modeling of Navier-Stokes equations, etc.

They offer no alternative theory that can claim better precision and explanations. They resort to bullshit claims like solar sunspots and axis tilt, which have been debunked over and over so many times it's not even funny. And they never stay affixed to researching any of these potential lines with the seriousness of anyone who honestly believes they have better explanations, instead jumping from BS to point to BS point, completely ignoring that real climate scientists actually have a bunch of actual differing opinions brought from serious, actual expertise in the field, which has nothing to do with the pretend dissent from these quacks.




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