68 Comments

No doubt Andrew's reasoning is correct on the usefulness and accuracy of models. But there is an entirely different line of reasoning which makes me also want to exclaim, "Please, God, makes these arguments stop!"

Even if global warming were to end immediately (which of course will not happen-- but, EVEN IF...), EVERY step we take or should take against global warming would be a good thing to do, even if the warming did not continue. Electric cars, solar and wind energy, better batteries, better insulation, less food waste-- all of these steps would help in other important ways, even if global warming were a myth. The merchants of doubt (largely fed by the fossil fuel companies) love to get us into arguments about models-- all a distraction from what is needed for our sad world-- which is a crime against truth but also a crime against humanity.

Jack Yates

Sharon, Massachusetts

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A large grain of truth. The least cost policy, taxation of net emissions of CO2 and methane are not "large" (not enough to significantly dampen growth) especially if the revenues replace taxes with higher dead weight losses like taxes on business income, still they aren't negative as the cartoon guy implies. :)

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Heh. That was the first thing I thought of when I read Jack's comment!

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Best climate change comment/comic ever!!!

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The thing is, all of those things which temporarily make our (i.e. humanity's) world better actually make the rest of the world (and eventually our world) worse. We should be doing none of those things over and above using increasingly less energy resources to have a reasonable life.

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Yep, that's the fundamental irony of "Whig" history, framed as an inexorable march of Progress (yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/3977-march-of-progress)!

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There's no such thing as green/renewable energy. Lithium and cobalt mining, done by fucking child slave labor, is an environmental disaster. Manufacturing EVs, batteries, solar panels, etc are also disastrous for the environment. We don't win this😞

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In the long run we are all dead - John Maynard Keynes (1923).

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You don't say🤦‍♀️ But we don't have to take all the other species with us.

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He's not wrong. We're all going to die. It's the QUALITY of life that matters. Capitalism destroys people's lives intentionally. Capitalists are sadistic and they get off on other people's suffering. Capitalism is a death cult.

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I tried to keep this short, but had too much to say! Please don't respond until you've read the whole thing. You're not wrong either, but humans have behaved unsustainably since the widespread adoption of agriculture freed our population growth from ancient ecological constraints. As our population grew, so did the area of land under the plow, upon which the energy and nutrient fluxes were drastically simplified to divert larger shares into human biomass. We killed or chased away all but a few favored species from each new patch of cultivated ground. Thus the 6th Great Extinction Event in the history of life accelerated.

Now we're at 8 billion, and still rising. But the global total fertility rate has fallen from 5.1 in 1964 to 2.3 today (data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN). It's now approaching the replacement TFR of 2.1, at which point human population growth, for the first time in history, will stop without a catastrophic die-off (assuming global warming doesn't intervene). There's little reason to think TFR will stabilize at replacement rate, either. Many, though not all, demographers are now confident our peak number will be reached before the end of this century, then begin to decline.

The prospect of a falling human population should be good news for the ecologically educated, and suggests that other than supporting economic uplift of the world's poor, improved public health, and the education and empowerment of females, there's little we can do collectively to reduce our population faster than will happen on its own (deliberately elevating the death rate is presumably off the table). But even when our numbers stop growing, per capita overall impact will continue to rise along with affluence (again, if global warming doesn't intervene), and technology will continue to develop. That last is crucial, because technology is a force multiplier that can either exacerbate or mitigate our environmental impacts. Technology gives its users enhanced resource extraction and habitat modification capacity, which rise with per-capita income as well. Technology can also give users less impactful alternatives. That's true of anthropogenic global warming. It's specifically dependent on the technology of energy extraction, so collective measures to drive the global economy toward carbon-neutrality can reduce and eventually halt fossil carbon emissions. Global heat content will then stop rising, but will stabilize for decades to centuries around the highest value reached by then, as long-term feedbacks to CO2 forcing work themselves out while natural carbon sinks drawn down the atmospheric reservoir. Assuming we decarbonize in time to avert a global human die-off, the cumulative cost of anthropogenic global warming will be capped. Otherwise it's open-ended, and will eventually overwhelm all other causes of biodiversity loss, along with destroying technological civilization, with mass human casualties!

The bottom line is that climate change is the most urgent Tragedy of the Commons, on the largest possible scale. That is why I, for one, am focused on building an effective federal decarbonization policy in the US. It may appear futile, knowing that for decades, fossil fuel producers and investors have invested $millions to thwart collective intervention in their profit streams, which are now in the $trillions annually; and they still stand in the way of decarbonizing the US economy. But I choose to interpret the current political news as encouraging.

Anyway, what's your proposal, Jasmine? I'm pretty sure we here all acknowledge capitalism's role in accelerating the ongoing great extinction in addition to destroying people's lives, and also that it's the foundation of a large fraction of Americans' comparatively secure, comfortable first-world lifestyles. As you surely know, politics is the art of the possible. How do you plan to neutralize the power of concentrated capital beyond all historical dreams of avarice, before you can launch your program? And how will you ensure the support of the American masses, once you've stopped the ceaseless flood of bespoke denialism in the public sphere?

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🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂

Even if we could magically shut down every industry on the planet right now, the damage is done. We can't mine, drill, manufacture, and consume our way out of a nightmare we mined, drilled, manufactured, and consumed ourselves into 🤦‍♀️

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Exactly as I said:

"Assuming we decarbonize in time to avert a global human die-off, the cumulative cost of anthropogenic global warming will be capped. Otherwise it's open-ended, and will eventually overwhelm all other causes of biodiversity loss, along with destroying technological civilization, with mass human casualties!"

Surely you're aware that most of us are primarily concerned with our own survival to the limits of human longevity. The transfer of fossil carbon to the atmosphere by the gigatonnes annually isn't the only onrushing common-pool resource tragedy, but it's by far the most immediate and all-encompassing threat to the survival of ourselves, our families, our civilization, and large numbers of other species. Once we fully decarbonize the global economy, we'll have time to at least slow down further industrial damage to the planet. Perfect is the enemy of better-than-it-is!

Yes, even "mere" open-ended global warming is nightmare inducing, and the mind shies away from the totality of our environmental crimes. But why the bitter nihilism? No one can stop you from checking out whenever you wish (though I, for one, hope you won't). No one is going to berate you for choosing to live, either. And as long as global heat content is rising, it's never too late to leave the remaining fossil carbon in the ground. Your comments sound like mood-congruent ideation, to me. Have you been treated for Major Depression?

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I think Jasmine Wolfe is very angry, which is somewhat blinding her to the possible - eg it is not science that is responsible for poor mining practices it's human greed and indifference to others.

The problem is people don't like change, it make them uncomfortable, and career politicians don't feel safe making voters uncomfortable.

I am old and old people think the world is going to end anyway, but I am worried Guy McPherson is right - it's all over bar the shouting. I keep hearing about human ingenuity and resilience, but I sometimes wonder if the universe isn't just a virtual reality program in some devil's computer.

It does seem more likely than a world created by a loving god.

Actually of course it's all just a sequence of accidents and humans serve no purpose in the universe, which is why we are most likely going to disappear sooner rather than later - but not before destroying a planet that looks like, the more you learn about it, a miracle.

Aren't we lucky Andrew and Zeke allow some of us to go off on a tangent...?

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"I am old and old people think the world is going to end anyway, but I am worried Guy McPherson is right - it's all over bar the shouting."

Thanks for the feedback, Dennis. But do you not agree that as long as the anthropogenic transfer of fossil carbon to the atmosphere continues, it's never too late to leave the remainder in the ground?

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That is why we need to keep the focus on the POLICIES. As you imply, the policy implications of the differences in models are probably not that large. And even is net emissions of CO2 ceased today, we would still need the same models to guide adaption.

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Very good explanation and illustration of the pitfalls of cherry-picking and thinking “small” instead of global. Roy Spencer used to be a scientist - I suppose he still is, in some fashion - but his 2010 book “The Great Global Warming Blunder” suggested he’d gone off on his own agenda, and from then on, it’s just gotten worse. As other commenters say, to some extent you’re preaching to the choir, but it’s still valuable work, and who knows, the message may reach a larger audience. As a cousin of mine likes to say, Carry On!

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Well, Spencer's signature on An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming (cornwallalliance.org/2009/05/signers-of-an-evangelical-declaration-on-global-warming/) repudiates the most basic values of science. The document promulgated by the "Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation" states:

"We believe Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence —are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history...

"We deny that Earth and its ecosystems are the fragile and unstable products of chance, and particularly that Earth’s climate system is vulnerable to dangerous alteration because of minuscule changes in atmospheric chemistry. Recent warming was neither abnormally large nor abnormally rapid. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming..."

IOW, evidence be damned! His God wouldn't allow "dangerous alteration" of global climate, and the overwhelming consensus of his scientific peers is blasphemy! What's really embarrassing for Spencer, is that he still expects honest scientists to take him seriously. But check out the names on the "Who We Are" page (cornwallalliance.org/about/who-we-are). Looks like an echo chamber if I ever saw one!

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I heard somewhere that Spencer had gone the religious route but didn’t know the details. Thanks for confirming my understanding that he’s no longer much of a scientist.

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Spencer's touchy about it. See his blog post titled "Science and Religion: do your own danm Google search" (drroyspencer.com/science-and-religion-do-your-own-damn-google-search). He complains he's unfairly criticized when Katherine Hayhoe and other devout Christians aren't:

"First, the hypocrisy. When warmist scientists like Sir John Houghton use the Bible to support action to fight global warming (e.g. his book Global Warming: The Complete Briefing) that was OK with everyone. Same with Katherine Hayhoe and Thomas Ackerman."

Way to miss the point, Roy! Those "warmist scientists" (really, Dr. Roy?) don't allow their religion to overpower their scientific training and discipline, duh.

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Do you have links to similar pronouncements by another evangelical, John Christy?

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"Kevin" [sorry Dennis, senior moment], Christy never signed the Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming. I wonder why he didn't but Spencer did. Christy may have sympathized, but unlike Spencer, was unwilling to expose himself to censure by his non-theistically-motivated peers. I've previously seen things Christy has written for the Cornwall Alliance, and he was once listed among their contributors, but I can't find any direct quotes by him there now. A search of the CA's website for "christy" returns multiple of documents, but none actually authored by him. One of them, hower, contains the following:

"April, 2015: [President, Founder, and National Spokesman] Dr. Beisner, joined by climatologist Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama and environmental economist Dr. Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, spoke opposite 350.org founder Bill McKibben, joined by environmental economist Dr. Rusty Pritchard and Blessed Earth founder Matthew Sleeth, M.D., for the seven-hour Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, New Orleans, LA."

Beyond the Cornball Alliance (H/T Russell Seitz), I found this on NYTimes.com: "Though Scorned by Colleagues, a Climate-Change Skeptic Is Unbowed" (nytimes.com/2014/07/16/us/skeptic-of-climate-change-john-christy-finds-himself-a-target-of-suspicion.html). Excerpt:

"But in speeches, congressional testimony and peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals, he argues that predictions of future warming have been greatly overstated and that humans have weathered warmer stretches without perishing. Dr. Christy’s willingness to publicize his views, often strongly, has also hurt his standing among scientists who tend to be suspicious of those with high profiles."

Again, no shit. His erstwhile peers aren't just suspicious, they know he's a theistically motivated lukewarmer from his own mouth!

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I've seen quotes about religion but nothing outrageous. I'm sure he and Spencer were delighted to find little warming until other scientists questioned their satellite measurements.

Yes, the name Kevin does spring to mind - Trenberth was Christy's PhD supervisor; he is back in NZ now. I've never met him. By the way he writes he doesn't seem like a man who would brook much nonsense.

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Er - I've never met Kevin Trenberth either, though he's certainly eminent. I'm thinking of another Kevin, on another blog.

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Brilliant analysis, cogently laid out. Many thanks.

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This is absolutely excellent. Well done. Can you apply this analysis next to WWA "event attribution" studies?

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Haven't you got better things to do than trying to understand climate science?

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Surely Prof. Pielke Jr. has nothing better to do than praise Prof. Dessler!

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Looks like we've got a dollar each way and the dollar Trumps the science!

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Thanks Andrew, this is an even better explanation than I hoped for. My brother sent me the.. Truthed(?) claim and we both went "Huh? It's focused solely on the Corn Belt, so isn't this entirely misleading?"

I didn't realize you'd previously written about Roy Spencer. It boggles my mind each time I see people like him who are equipped with a great education and notable experience yet seem to abandon their integrity, or at best abandon critical thinking, for whatever reasons.

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We see the reality everyday of the increasingly erratic weather patterns. Models have never been accurate except in the broadest sense. What is increasingly apparent is that the collapse is happening way faster than expected.

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Climate is weather in its broadest sense - over 30 years usually.

One reads comments on liar-denier sites like, "How can they predict what will happen in 30 years when they can't get the forecast right for three weeks."

Weather is the climate system moving energy around and more energy in the climate system means worse weather.

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Not bad. But I like to say climate is statistical weather. Averages need to computed from as much as 30 years of data. But when the observed limits of extreme weather phenomena are being repeatedly surpassed year after year, it doesn't take as many years to conclude climate is changing.

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Yes, thanks. I have said at times we don't need models but of course I mean the computer models the climate deniers refer to - in a sense all science is modelling.

I can't recall any detail now but I believe that although there are many thousands of thermometers reading temperatures of the surface and oceans, far fewer would give an accurate "picture".

Climate deniers crack on about "fiddling" with the data, and especially kriging upsets them, but the global mean surface temperature is a statistical construct and seems to me to be a proxy for something we can only imagine.: the temperature of Earth.

Interesting you talk about extreme weather events, because climate deniers say, "I thought these warmists wanted data over 30 years..." completely forgetting it's mean values over 30 years not extreme values.

And yes, I would never dismiss anything James Hansen said. There's more to science than "formal" science.

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"Models have never been accurate except in the broadest sense." Well, "all models are wrong, but some are useful." (George Box). Those that inform the IPCC Assessment Reports have been accurate enough to confirm the urgency of decarbonizing the global economy ASAP. Tamino statistically confirmed that the rate of observed GMST rise over the last 30 years has accelerated (tamino.wordpress.com/2024/07/10/how-fast). That quantitatively increases the urgency of collective action to cap the warming at the lowest possible value, but I for one thought it was sufficiently urgent already. And anyway, last April NASA's chief climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, a modeller, said (realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2024/04/much-ado-about-acceleration; emphasis Dr. Schmidt's):

"Remarkably, the Hansen et al projections are basically indistinguishable from what the mean of the TCR-screened CMIP6 models are projecting. Or, to put it another way, *everybody* is (or should be) expecting an acceleration of climate warming (in the absence of dramatic cuts in GHG emissions)."

Apparently, it's not happening "way faster" than some climate modellers expected.

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Hi Andrew, this is a useful post, thank you. I like the article, learned a few things about climate modeling, but I'm not the audience you need to reach. For the masses, it needs to be dumbed down and made visceral. This is not a criticism, but an observation from someone who used to work in marketing as a graphic designer for a long time. Three years ago, I decided to use my abilities to bridge this gap between science and communication. Here is my most recent article. https://geoffreydeihl.substack.com/p/no-fury-like-a-planet-scorned

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Thanks for the comment. I agree that this substack is not for everyone. That said, I do this in my spare time and I'm limited in how much time I can spend trying to make this more accessible. Alas, my days are only 24 hours long ...

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Glad you're doing it. Guys like you give me the critical information I try to present to raise awareness and hopefully spur thinking and action. Yeah, no day is long enough.

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Nor can even the simple working out of basic physics be dumbed down enough for fanatical culture warriors.

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The culture warriors are beyond help. Maybe they can go to Mars with Musk.

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Subscribed!

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Glad to have you, Bruce. Warning, my words aren't always easy reads, but these aren't easy times, and there is no sugar-coating the trouble we're in.

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The fallacy of all models is to point to only CO2 as a greenhouse gas, which is not an abundant gas anyway, watervapor, the cloud deck is a far greater influence, but that you cannot tax. Very convenient that CO2 is measurable and can then be taxed. After so many years, has it had any results so far? Besides making everyone poorer.

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Reputable climate models have only been wrong on to particular fronts. The speed and intensity of all climate crisis real world affects, Including surface temperature of the planet

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Interesting article.

I'm always a bit wary of using "averaged" results as a basis for making decisions about serious matters though.

My everyday example would be preparing for a road trip, and your vehicle manual says that your tires pressure should be 40 psi for proper road grip and safe handling.

You check all 4 of them, and they're 20, 30, 50 and 60 psi.

That gives you "average global pressure" of 40 psi.

So you're good to go, right?

(If proceeding on this basis, I would anticipate a Darwin Award will be forthcoming).

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'Specious nonsense' …. Goodness, how I wish it were!

Take one fairly recent example, research by Hansen et al.

https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889?searchresult=1&login=false

Past carbon dioxide levels “ about 450 ppm at transition to a nearly ice-free planet, exposing unrealistic lethargy of ice sheet models. “

Indicating that the variety of models are not the real thing.

And “ Equilibrium global warming for today’s GHG amount is 10°C, which is reduced to 8°C by today’s human-made aerosols. “

I.e. Nowhere near an arbitrary 1.5. C degrees target.

We - at least us in the more developed nations - are seriously maladapted to appreciate let alone maintain this planet’s delicate equilibrium. It’s uncharted territory.

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I would imagine that .2 degrees per decade is well within natural variability.

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I guess it's a good thing that "imagining" is not considered a valid scientific argument. If you use physics, you'll find that you can't actually explain it.

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But you'd be wrong.

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Models are a warming humanity should heed and then follow the precautionary principle, removing the risk. Models are inaccurate, approximate and they don’t incorporate unknowns such as the several probable tipping points with their positive feedbacks.

At the end of the day it’s physics that’ll determine our planets trajectory, in every sense. This planet has been 10 plus degrees warmer than now, [with a similar level of CO2 i believe], besides the sun iis getting hotter, - now ~ 30 % more than during the earlier solar system.

The physics as far as I can tell indicate that when the total warming potential of the earth is reached ( no one or model, knows when]; when the CO2 levels reach saturation point and radiation inwards has to balance radiation out, the temperature could be over 40C...

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Specious, pernicious nonsense.

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Looks like good analysis, but the bottom line what are losses contingent on alternative policies? Losses can occur from local cooling as well as warming and that DES make the bottom line harder to calculate, but that's the only thing that makes sense.

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This is climate denial. Unfortunately, my tolerance for this level of ignorance is zero. Your next climate denial comment will lead to banning. You have been warned.

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"...the objections I put to you are ones that any intelligent person can raise having read your program’s literature. Yet, in my experience, when I put them to advocates of the hypothesis, it invariably results in some variation of banning - just as you responded."

No shit! Has it occurred to you that it's your problem, not Prof. Dessler's? My question is rhetorical, since you're not allowed to spew any more aggressive denial here.

"Yet it is the hypothetical basis for a startling political program - the subjugation of billions to authoritarian regimentation accompanied by the deaths of billions from cold, starvation, disease, and violence."

{{citation needed}}.

Next, the banned Mr. Lyon, making the argument from consequences, claims the burden is solely on Prof Dessler to "establish the truth" of the anthropogenic climate-change hypothesis. Doesn't he realize that ship has long since sailed? Clearly unlike him, Prof. Dessler is comprehensively familiar with the two hundred year history of climate science research, carried out by generations of trained, disciplined, competitive skeptics all beavering away at multiple lines of evidence through the present day. Lyon has nothing but dishonest rhetorical tactics to support him; but since accepting the overwhelming consensus of thousands of actual working climate scientists around the world, some living under authoritarian regimentation, some under popular sovereignty, means accepting the risks of targeted collective action to decarbonize the global economy as soon as politically feasible, he's compelled to reject the scientific evidence no matter how conclusive. If he was motivated by scientific values, the evidence for anthropogenic global warming ought to dissuade him from ideological paranoia. But apparently he isn't.

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"Prof Dessler is advancing the hypothesis. On who else should the burden be placed to establish it?"

You just revealed that scientific culture is alien to you. The burden is on his peer climate specialists, who have long since collectively, iteratively evaluated all the evidence and come to similar conclusions. Ever see the quote by Isaac Newton: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”? Dr. Dessler hardly needs to recapitulate all work since Aristotle, as it's readily accessible to you on the Internet. Many people (we call them "Google Galileos") think they know more than they do, despite knowing only a fraction of what the full-time specialists know in aggregate. In some climate-science deniers, it's due to the Dunning-Kruger effect (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect). You appear to be among them. Never mind. No scientific argument will satisfy a resolute, ideologically motivated denialist, who can't recognize genuine expertise. I'm done playing whack-a-troll. Somebody else take a turn.

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Literally nothing in your comment is right. e.g., I've spent much of my career evaluating how well water vapor is reproduced by models (spoiler alert: they do a good job). my advice is to not read TCB anymore and rather go to places where science is neither understood nor respected. I certainly have some suggestions about where you can go, so let me know if you want me to tell you.

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Like those of many deniers, his writings sound “science-y” but they are simplistic, qualitative, and essentially incorrect.

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Lotta trolls here, for some reason. You could use an anger translator (youtube.com/watch?v=HkAK9QRe4ds)!

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