
I was feeling guilty about taking so long to give this spectacular Comment of the Day by Ryan Harkens the exposure it deserves, but I am glad I did. I’m pretty sick today, and getting a fourth post up was really going to be a challenge; Ryan’s profound essay is better than anything I was going to be able to produce…indeed, it’s better than most of what I write here.
Ryan’s’ topic is science, and climate science in particular. I’m honored that he vewed this forum worthy of such thoughtful and profound work.
Here is Ryan Harkens’ Comment of the Day on “Climate Change Media Hype, 2022”:
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In the analysis of any phenomenon, there are several layers to peel back:
1. Is the phenomenon real?
2. Is the phenomenon being measure accurately?
3. Is the phenomenon on a whole beneficial or deleterious?
4. Are the causes of the phenomenon understood?
5. Are there solutions to the phenomenon?
6. Do those solutions cause more problems than the phenomenon?
7. How should those solutions be applied?
We have to understand that science is about creating hypotheses about the real world and testing them. Science collects data, analyzes data, makes predictions about the data, and then observes whether those predictions come true. Thus science can help to a certain degree with the first 6 items on the list, but it has much less to say on the 7th. But even for the first 6, science does not necessarily provide definitive answers, certainly not enough to say that any “Believe the science!” mantras should be heeded. In more detail:
1. Science can offer a tentative answer to whether a phenomenon is real. Upon testing and retesting, it can assert with a certain degree of confidence (never 100%) that a phenomenon is indeed real. But there could always be further data discovered that shows the phenomenon was not real, or at least what it was was much different that was proposed. In the case of climate science, we have observations since the 1970s that show a general warming trend. It seems very reasonable to accept that we’ve seen a general warming trend since then. However, even now there are some factors that could still upset that conclusion. The urban heat index could be greater than we imagined; the fact that most of the temperature gauges we’ve used around the world are located in first world countries, leaving much of the world unmeasured; and the reliance on satellite data (while currently of high confidence) might have some undiscovered error that invalidates 50 years of data collection. (I’m not saying this is the case or I have any evidence satellite data is flawed, just that that would be an example of how even our belief that the world has been warming could be in error.)
2. Science can only measure to a certain degree of accuracy. Again, the issues of urban heat index and the location of various temperature gauges could skew the data, and while global warming could be a real phenomenon, the degree to which the world is warming can be misrepresented by poor measurements. Similarly, efforts to reconstruct historical climate patterns based on ice core samples, tree rings, and other methods could be helpful, but still inaccurate, and thus lead to different conclusions about current warming or cooling trends. Furthermore, there is the question of whether we are truly measuring the right things? We need to measure air, land, and water temperatures at a variety of elevations, and we have to properly measure the incoming energy in the earth’s systems, as well as the outgoing energy of the earth’s systems, and this leads to literally hundreds of thousands of data points for one timestamp. Multiply that by years of data, and we are talking about an enormous amount of data, and we could still be missing a crucial measurement that we didn’t think we would actually need to measure. Continue reading →
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