Climate Change

[RiotInferno]

2) John Coleman, Founder of the Weather Channel, is an adamant denier of Climate Change. Granted, he's a meteorologist, not a climatologist, but he's one-more high profile scientist who thinks it's a bunch of hooey.

He isn't a scientist, neither by academic qualification nor by professional experience. He has no scientific degrees - his education is in journalism. He has never worked on any part of climate science, either from the empirical or theoretical side.

He is a TV personality. Colour me unimpressed. Even among AGW skeptics, one can find overwhelmingly more qualified experts.

Point taken. I don't really make a habit of searching out Climate Change skeptics and he's really the only one I know. That being said, one can assume that meteorology wasn't an actual degree back when he was in school and/or he picked up quite a bit of knowledge on the job.

Now, the question of meteorology = hard science, that's a whole 'nother question.

3) Perhaps someone here can explain this to me, as this is the part that I don't get:
Experiments and Statistics. I understand sample sizes and data verification. I understand variables and controls. What I don't understand is how Climatologists get data from older times. The Earth is X Bajillion years old. We have hard data from the last century or two.

A) We can't be sure of the accuracy of any data older than when we started paying attention to this, so like the 1970s. There is no way to show that the old hard-data is correct, per today's standards.

B) Ice cores / Tree Rings / etc. There doesn't seem to be much of a control (as in control group ) for their tests. They have a hypothesis of this is how it works, but I don't know if they have the means to prove that it's accurate.

From what I understand, we have good instrumental temperature data going back into the 19th century, although obviously the coverage is not as good. Climate has always been of interest to scientists, and one does not require a theory of global warming to justify collecting temperature data on different parts of the world.

As for checking, the series can be compared against known (measured) temperatures in more recent times, and also against one another. All climate data is regional, peculiar, and fuzzy, but it would be strange indeed for all of our sources to tell roughly the same temperature story, independently, if they were all idiosyncratically biased.

Understood. What I have problems with is the media portraying it as:
"It's warmer now than it was five THOUSAND years ago. How do we know? Ice Cores." I know there's science behind it. It's just hard to prove that science.

TL;DR: People ( aka Media, Scientists, Gov't ) need to keep regarding Climate Change as a theory, not a hard fact. That being said, we need to look out for the Environment anyway.

Rather the opposite. The evidence for climate change (that is, the fact that the climate is observably changing) is completely overwhelming. What is in question is *why* - what are the factors (climate forcings) that are causing it to change. What contributes, and in what measure? To what extent are humans the cause of the change (anthropogenesis)? These are theoretical matters - that is, we try to explain the facts with models and concepts that help us to understand and predict.

But perhaps the difficulty is, as Quark rather pithily pointed out, the difference between the colloquial and scientific definitions of "theory" and "fact." Theories do not "become facts." Gravity is still a theory, even though it is uncontroversial.* Theories describe abstract causal relationships, which are then tested with evidence. (This error is so common, wiktionary even has it in the usage notes for the word theory!)

-Jester

*Well, its reconciliation with quantum mechanics obviously isn't. We need a new theory! But that doesn't stop the earth from orbiting the sun, or rocks from falling when you drop them.

Yes, the climate is changing. This year we had the mildest winter in recent memory. The questions are the obvious ones: Are we to blame? Is this unnatural?
And yes, I'm super-guilty of misusing Theory. It just feels like the crazy hipness of Climate Change has lead to an explosion of "research" for grant purposes, but that research always falls in line, (for grant purposes).

In the end, I don't feel like we have enough data points to come up with a conclusive model, and anyone (scientifically) who tries to go against the grain is a pariah and ruined academically.

Again, I take the stand of "There's a lot we don't know, but that doesn't mean we should trash the place".