Yes the title was meant as Provocation. But in all seriousness neither dems nor reps are particularly good at the whole sciencing of things as demonstrated by the presidents speech last night. I say that because we heard about climate change and what we should do about it. This inevitably means subsidizing ineffective technologies while leaching tax money away from effective ones. In this case through the idea of a carbon tax. All of this less than a week after the IPCC announced a 2 degree reduction in the estimates for future warming.
Science is supposed to be data driven and falsifiable, the discussion around catastrophic climate change, particularly from the democrats, is decidedly not. Even though climate science has gotten incredible amounts of funding we hear more about children, polar bears and ad hominem attacks than we do about actual data. We hear more about new wind farms or green jobs than we do on the actual data surrounding their costs and net growth rates. It begs the question why.
The answer is that the data doesn't support the narrative. The data says we lose at least 2 traditional jobs for every green job created. The data says we've lost billions to failed energy companies and that green jobs costs hundred of thousands or even millions of dollars per job. More importantly the data says that all of those green projects are an enormous waste of resources. For all of the fanfare and end of the world speeches we heard regarding carbon dioxide and global warming, no one bothered to weed out the natural variation, the bias or other effects. Well, except for the skeptics.
Heres the abstract of the paper http://www.pnas.org/content/110/6/2058.abstract
See skeptics are slowly but surely chipping away at the numbers to determine how much of the warming was caused by CO2. That's kind of important, you see if it's assumed that CO2 is the principle driver of climate and all temperature increases are assumed to result from CO2 then predictions for warming are likely to be high. If that's not the case, and the warming is due to a variety of factors, then those predictions will be wrong. Now when we chip away at the data sets, if CO2 is the main factor, then we should see relatively small reductions in the warming trends.
What we have managed to extract so far is that actual decadal warming increases peaked out at between .12 and .16 degrees celsisus per decade. That's down from some analysis that indicated a possible .3 degree celsius decadal warming rate. In short the data says that actual warming is less than half what was being estimated. This didn't gain much positive press and was actually met with vitriol. Now more recent analysis cuts that trend in half again. Eliminating the data outlier of 1998 actually drops that rate a bit further. so in short our highest rate of warming which is based on the shortest window of data and includes a statistical outlier only comes to a maximum warming rate of .08 degrees celsius. we get that number just by cleaning up the noise in the data. We haven't even begun to deal with other thermal effects
The thing that doesn't get discussed a lot in the debate is that global warming as a theory has been around since about 1988. Until 2001 nobody cared, then Al Gore created a presentation, and while loaded with misrepresentations of data, and emotional pleas, terrified people. Skeptics have been trying to comb through the research and data ever since fighting an uphill battle against groups that are frankly better funded. We exist because there are some real questions about the methodologies, data and interpretation of the mainstream climate scientists. Even though climatologists had a 13 year head start, with papers and publications held in check only by their ambitions, better funding and the fact that it was their actual job the skeptics are making progress. We aren't winning because of a sudden funding increase, or greater acceptance. Were winning because the data disagrees with the narrative, and now, finally some scientists are taking notice. Democrats aren't.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter what the theory or the science says. If the data disagrees the science is shit end of discussion.
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