The only reason you need to ignore the alarmists

A couple of weeks ago I found this post on Jo Nova’s site.  I have been meaning to comment on it for a while but as per usual life kept getting in the way.  I did not forget about it though because I think it contains a very important point.  Her excellent post gives you the only reason that you need to disregard climate alarmists.  Before I get to her point, I want to give you the background as to why I think the post is so important.

I have posted before that the climate consensus is not what you are told.  You can follow this link to an interview Judith Curry did where she discusses the same thing.

when you talk about ‘scientific consensus,’ like the Earth orbits the sun, you don’t need to say ‘There’s a consensus that the Earth orbits the sun,’ it’s a well-known fact. When you’re talking about consensus, it’s usually on a topic where there is disagreement, and a government has asked a group to come to some sort of an agreement on what’s what. You see it in science, you see it in. . . medical boards. . . So, it’s a manufactured consensus. It’s a consensus of scientists, which is different than a scientific consensus. . . there’s a true scientific consensus on very little of this, you know that,

All scientists agree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and adding more to the atmosphere should cause some warming.  That is where the consensus ends.  There is no consensus about how much warming or if that warming will be harmful.  In a previous post I summarized the 4 schools of thought about how much warming additional CO2 might cause.  The warming estimates range from a fraction of a degree to several degrees.  A fraction of a degree is hardly noticeable.  Several degrees could be harmful but even that is uncertain since, despite what you are told, there is no clear link between hot temperatures and natural disasters.

If you are following the logic it went like this.  CO2 causes hot weather which causes dangerous weather related events (Climate change).  They cannot prove either link.  You cannot link CO2 to dangerous levels of warming and you cannot link hot weather to increased dangerous weather events.  This is a 2 link chain and both links are broken yet somehow they are getting away with this farce.

The highest estimates used by the alarmist crowd are based on the existence of positive feedback that has never been proven.  Low estimates come from scientists who believe that the feedback is negative or that the overall impact of greenhouse gases has been overstated.  That group believes the cumulative impact of all greenhouse gases is small so adding more makes very little difference.

So, there is a consensus, but it is not a useful consensus since no one can agree if we have anything to worry about.  “The science” is not settled, and the data supports the notion that the impact will be negligible.

Our analysis revealed that the solar forcing (i.e., TSI and albedo changes) measured by CERES explain 100% of the observed global warming trend and 83% of the interannual GSAT variability over the past 24 years 

According to this analysis and a recently released paper by Dr. Willie Soon, the warming to date has been caused by the sun.  Even though CO2 went up during this period and should have caused some warming you can’t see it.  This is what almost brings us to the point of the Jo Nova post.  Science is more of a verb than a noun.  It is not a thing that you can touch, it is a series of actions you can take to uncover the truth.  And there is a consensus as to how science should be done.

To guarantee a fair test when you are conducting your experiment, you need to make sure that the only thing you change is the independent variable. And, all the controlled variables must remain constant. Only then can you be sure that the change you make to the independent variable actually caused the changes you observe in the dependent variables.

In order to develop a hypothesis, one should have:

A good testable question

Understanding of the dependent, independent and control variables of interest

Some prior knowledge, such as from observations and research

The scientific method acknowledges that you do not know what is causing the phenomena you are studying.  It also cautions that there could be more than one contributing cause.  That means to do science correctly you must first consider all possible causes.  When you design an experiment, you must control the variables which might affect the outcome.  If you are studying a large natural system, you must collect data to assess the relative impact of variables that are outside of your control.

Finally, that gets us back to Jo Nova.

Nobody mention the 91 volcanoes they discovered there seven years ago which line up with the warmest parts of Antarctica. We sit on a ball of lava, and there is an edge of crustal plate under there. But really, it’s more likely the warming is caused by your Ford fiesta and those beef kebabs…

To the lunatic alarmists everything is caused by climate change.  There is absolutely nothing else that can melt ice even active volcanoes under the ice.  Climate change also has only one cause, CO2.  Alarmists do not follow the scientific method because they are not trying to account for other variables.  They won’t even consider glaringly obvious factors like volcanoes or the sun.

If you do not follow the scientific method, you are not doing science.  The people who lecture you about science being settled are not even doing science.  That is the only reason you need to ignore them.  You don’t need to sift through all the papers and try to understand them.  All you need to know is that they are not doing science, so their predictions of the upcoming climate apocalypse are worthless.