I own a hardwood forest. As soon as you cut down a tree, seedlings by the gob zillion start spouting out of ground.

Ken Rice at ATTP whines about ‘deficit model thinking’ and Judith Curry not providing a viable alternative to consensus science. And this pops up – and it is symptomatic of the progressive malaise.

Some recent papers have highlighted the attribution problem. With 50% of warming in the past 40 years – and 40 to 50% of Arctic sea ice loss – attributed to quasi cyclic variability in the Earth system. There is an immense literature on the how and why of this – but it does involve tipping cascades in Earth systems. Decadal variability implies that most early 20th century warming was natural along with half of late century warming – means that AGW is taking us nowhere near 1.5 degrees C. But to “paraphrase C. S. Lewis, the climate system appears wild, and may continue to hold many surprises if pressed.” Swanson et al 2009 To press my own deficit model – I wish people could take this on board.

In between these well defined decadal shifts temperature rise has been modest – although there is an opinion that global warming will resume ‘with a vengeance’ at the next shift due soon.

I have argued that coming in below the RCP4.5 scenario is technically and economically feasible. For reasons of economic growth and environmental conservation more pressingly than a wild climate – although that would seem to provide an added impetus.

Between energy and agricultural innovation and and Earth rewilding in the 21st century – it seems in the bag.

I have also argued that classic liberals take charge of the narrative rather than leaving it to unreconstructed nutbags.

Brad –

Their uniqueness. To my knowledge,

A degree of uniqueness is relative. Many issues are unique in some fashion, but completely like others in a large variety of others. The attribution of “unique” is therefore, often, the product of personal biases. The notion of a “distinction without a difference” was what I was going for.

What do you mean “the prevalence of expert opinion?” Surely it is as prevalent as, but no more so than, experts—who are, by their organic nature, opinionated.

I’m afraid I don’t understand your question, nor your following sentence. By prevalence I was referring to the concept of a “consensus.”

Considering that Cook’s 2013 consensus-quantifying paper is the most-downloaded paper in the IOP stable of journals, and that such a paper by its very design is scientifically abortive, I’d say it’s a fairly “important” indictment of what passes for climate science.

The simple fact of being highly downloaded isn’t a very good metric of the “importance” of a reference to “consensus” within the climate change discussion, IMO. For example, no doubt the vast majority of those who have downloaded are invested partisans whose minds are already made up. And if we took that total number, it would amount to a tiny fraction of the people who are affected by climate change policy. By importance, I’m asking for something more akin to “impact.” What is the impact of the discussion about “consensus.”

Consider, also, that climate science is the only known field of comparable size (in terms of person-hours and dollar-powers wasted invested per annum) to persistently and with impunity flunk the minimum test of science: what have you taught us that we didn’t know 10 years ago?. (When the terms of this challenge were extended to a full quarter-century, Willard came closest to giving one valid example.)

There’s too much subjective there, for me to productively respond. Yes, climate change is a “wicked problem” It is a topic where the policy implications are complicated, and heavily polarized. Progress is difficult. Other issues also fit those descriptors. But perhaps you’re meaning to say that climate change is a problem by virtue of being a “wicked problem?”

Do you think it’s a coincidence that clisci is the first field in modern science to:

1. resort to Oreskeist methods

OR

2. stop working, yet keep on burning hecatomb after hecatomb of capital as if nothing were amiss?

What does that mean?

I don’t actually know what either 1 or 2 mean. Nor is it immediately obvious to me what you think the import of those issues are (maybe if I understood them I would?). Again, I think there is an inherent relationship between the import of the distinctions you are pointing to, and whether they really make climate science “unique.” (Again, distinctions without a difference?)

“What is the history of the factors that lead [sic] to those initiatives?”

Are you asking what prompted Oreskes to do her seminal consensus essay?

I’m saying that to understand the uniqueness of climate science, it’s important to understand context of the attributes of measure that you’re using. In other words, something might look “unique” as an outcome, when what is really more relevant is the uniqueness of the context. On the other hand, a “unique” outcome might seem relatively unimportant because it is just a relatively unimportant variant within a common context. For example, focusing on the prevalence of agreement among experts might not be typical of a high % of scientific questions, but it might be quite common with scientific questions that are highly polarized (e.g., GMOs, do vaccines cause autism, does HIV cause aids, etc.).

Russell Cook, a far better and more dogged investigative journalist than me, has worn out numerous soles chasing down answers to your question.

I don’t think you’re actually focusing on my question.

As you can see at his excellent GelbspanFiles dot com blog, Oreskes and her associates have supplied the public domain with several answers, none of which add up. Someone is telling us porkies, and if even *Russell* hasn’t managed to sift the porkful stories from the kosher ones, I trust you won’t be surprised that I don’t know for sure either.

I don’t really know what Oreskes has to do with what I was asking you..

Regarding woodburning in New York, I think the EPA would care. At least they used to. This is why they set regulations. But then a strong wood lobby who can buy politicians and form their own thinktanks would find a way to reverse that. Who cares about air quality, right? Certainly not the people making the money.

First of all, science does not dispute that CO2 helps your vegetables, but people are not vegetables, and you have to be able to think beyond that, which is what scientists do. They think about the circumstances of the people on earth, what kind of environment they prefer and thrive in, and hot ones aren’t it, even if they are also wet.
As long as accusations revolve around in-it-for-the-money instead of the actual scientific evidence, there is not a debate to be had. If the “skeptics” want to talk about science, even the health of their vegetable gardens, fine, they won’t get an argument, but that’s not the whole story, and they need to hear about the risks of growing extremes and rising sea levels and losing glaciers.
If scientists find something to be dangerous, they speak out, even if it is inconvenient in its implied actions.

Joshua,

I don’t have time to answer you with the systematicity or thoroughness I (or you) might ideally like, for which I apologize in advance.

> The attribution of “unique” is therefore, often, the product of personal biases.

Yes, but in the case of my comment, it was the product of uniqueness.

> By prevalence I was referring to the concept of a “consensus.”

Well then you used the wrong word. Perhaps you meant “the proponderance”? The “mean value”? The “expertise-weighted mean”? Actually, none of those work.

You should’ve said “expert consensus” (“the opinion of most experts”) if that’s what you meant.

> The simple fact of being highly downloaded isn’t a very good metric of the “importance” of a reference to “consensus” within the climate change discussion, IMO.

I picked an easily-available factoid, which appears to me to be more informative than nothing—but you’re welcome to propose a more sensitive metric. Let’s see if Cook’s worthless paper can thereby be displaced from its prima-facie position of record-breaking importance.

> For example, no doubt the vast majority of those who have downloaded are invested partisans whose minds are already made up.

I’m not going to challenge this data-free doubt-free assertion, though in general that is a dangerous pair of traits in a claim.

It makes you wonder, though (surely?) why John Cook was convinced that reiterating the tediously-well-known 97% meme to people already persuaded by it would be “game-changing.” Do you find the following kind of thinking (in reference to The Consensus Project) a tad delusional—or do you think Cook might perhaps be onto something when it comes to the impact of such memes…

“It’s essential that the public understands that there’s a scientific consensus on AGW. So Jim Powell, Dana and I have been working on something over the last few months that we hope will have a game changing impact on the public perception of consensus. Basically, we hope to establish that not only is there a consensus, there is a strengthening consensus.”

…?

> And if we took that total number, it would amount to a tiny fraction of the people who are affected by climate change policy.

Anything can be made to look low-impact if you divide it by 7200000000, Joshua.

> Yes, climate change is a “wicked problem” It is a topic where the policy implications are complicated, and heavily polarized. Progress is difficult.

Huh? Since when has polarization or political complexity ever slowed down a cohort of thousands of scientists to the point where they can spend 10 years failing to tell us anything we didn’t already know?

Those alibis don’t make sense.

The failure of clisci is a scientific failure, and it’s unprecedented AFAIK.

> Other issues also fit those descriptors.

Assuming this is your way of saying, “other fields of science suffer those same disadvantages/challenges/difficulties/hurdles,” great—then it should be all the easier for you to give an example of another field where a cohort of thousands of scientists can spend 10 years failing to tell us anything we didn’t already know. I’m all ears.

> But perhaps you’re meaning to say that climate change is a problem by virtue of being a “wicked problem?”

I don’t recognize wickedness as an attribute of problems, so no. I wasn’t meaning that.

> What does that mean?

To paraphrase:

“Do you think it’s a coincidence that clisci is the first scientific field to use consensus as an argument, and ALSO the first field to spend 10 years in a state of epistemic tyre-spinning despite enviably lavish fiscal/human horsepower?”

> “What is the history of the factors that lead [sic] to those initiatives?”

The only “initiatives” to which your question could have been referring, as far as I could see, were the initiatives to quantify consensus, which were first undertaken by Naomi Oreskes for motives she has yet to provide a non-contradictory account of. (See Russell Cook’s futile attempts to get a straight answer as to the reason she carried out her seminal papyromantic work [Oreskes04] in the first place.)

> For example, focusing on the prevalence of agreement among experts might not be typical of a high % of scientific questions, but it might be quite common with scientific questions that are highly polarized (e.g., GMOs, do vaccines cause autism, does HIV cause aids, etc.).

Well the argumentum ad consensum, which is not just fallacious but fraudulent in science, MIGHT be found in other fields. But is it? I’ve never seen it, and all I can go on is the testimony of mine own retinas.

Does the HIV-AIDS “debate” (for instance) have any propaganda equivalent to DeSmogBlog’s despicable and anti-intellectual Graph of Shame—the infamous “Why Climate Deniers Have No Scientific Credibility – In One Pie Chart”?

In closing, and with no warrant of rigorousness whatsoever, I append (for your information, not your persuasion) a partial list of Unique Selling Points [USPs] I scribbled out on behalf of climate science one lazy afternoon.

1. climate science grows faster than the lower sciences, because research finishes at the ‘prediction’ step. Feynman famously got the scientific method down to 60 seconds; it now takes just 28 seconds. Once we’ve ‘computed consequences’ we’re done

2. retractions in climate science are extremely rare, making it the least scandal-plagued of all fields! This is because climate science has a retraction threshold 10x higher than its cleanest rival. In pharmacology a paper has to be pulled as soon as it comes to your attention that the ideal of double-blindness was violated; in clisci, double-blindness would have to be gang-sodomized, waterboarded and strangled with its own bra live on cable news before things started to get retraction-y. Where but in climate science could a paper half as debauched as Cook13 be published with impunity? For pharmacologists such a joke would end in divorce, prison and seppuku; but for SkS it’s tingles up the leg all round. Despite going out of their way to pervert everything that is scientific, SkS just couldn’t stain the good name of climate science. One of these decades, something semi-shameful is bound to take place in some outpost of the climate science world. But until then, the shamelessness of the field would put a saint to shame.

3a. Are you pro science? climate science introduces a new, more convenient way to show your support for science: simply agree with the entire field. No need to agree on a hypothesis-by-hypothesis basis, as in other fields….

3b. …although, admittedly, this might be because AGW is the only hypothesis anyone cares about in climate science (the world’s first monohypothetical field).

4. Unlike regular scientists, climate scientists only make the one mistake, which they make over and over and over: they underestimate how bad AGW is going to be. For poorly-understood reasons they never seem to learn from their long history of over-optimism.

5. In climate science, most published papers are flawless. (This is why climate scientists use the word “flawed” as an indictment. To a chemist or biologist, it’s virtually a truism that their work is going to be imperfect—to a climate scientist it’s a professional humiliation.)

6. You no longer need to use metaanalysis in order to derive an überpaper from existing papers; climate science also supports Synthesis (stapling) and Summary (cherry-picking), which is great because you don’t have to be an expert in statistics, or even mathematics; it’s basic politics.

7. Climate science decides questions by Gestalt, handwaving, “consilience of evidence,” etc. No paper has ever tested the hypothesis that AGW is severely net-dangerous to the world, because they don’t have to; the evidence is everywhere, if you squint.

8. In the unique etiquette of clisci, papers should only be published if they will “stand the test of time” (see Dana’s Guardian article on Flawed Versus Climate Science), a question that can be determined in advance by a simple vote of 3 peers.

9. As a profession climate science selects for the top 2500 scientists in the world, because it’s exquisitely multidisciplinary (meaning that they have to master several fields to claim basic competence). A garden-variety chemist only understands chemistry, whereas a climate scientist understands and can and will (and ethically must) opine confidently on chemistry, morality, physics, tax reform, psychology, abnormal psychology, group psychology, FORTRAN, C, utility theory, MATLAB, the atmosphere, steroids, game theory as it applies to the ecology of the savannah, geology, and more.

10. Paradoxically, this means just about anyone can do climate science. The average cartoonist should be more than competent to write a textbook on climate science—called, for example, ‘Climate Science: A Modern Synthesis’—provided he studied physics ten years ago. This may appear to the untrained eye to be a case of Fake Experts, but it isn’t, because that’s a Denialist characteristic, not a Believalist one.

11. Thanks to The (i.e. climate) Science, the man on the Clapham omnibus is now adamant of countless propositions he was both agnostic and apathetic towards a few short years earlier. Moreover, the man next to him is adamantly certain of the exact opposite things—effectively doubling the world’s intellectual debt to climate science.

Also, regarding the in-it-for-the-money conspiracy theory, independent scientists and scientific societies who don’t earn from climate funding have endorsed the fact of the dangers of uncontrolled climate change. Apple, Google, you name it in industry, even Exxon, have science-backing climate statements. The science is best not ignored when it provides warnings and rational people pay attention to the science and don’t instead try to besmirch the individuals who publish on their work. Resorting to attacking personal motives rather than the science itself is a sure sign of a lost scientific argument.

You tell me what the bottom line is.

https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/land-resources/science/landcarbon?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects

Scientist have declared that two degees is the end of the corals, and its very likely that we will hit two degrees if we “do nothing”. IPCC has adopted this hypothesis as fact.
Article: Frieler, K., Meinshausen, M., Golly, A., Mengel, M., Lebek, K., Donner, S., Hoegh-Guldberg, O. (2012): Limiting global warming to 2°C is unlikely to save most coral reefs. Nature Climate Change [DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1674]

Jim D

> First of all, science does not dispute that CO2 helps your vegetables, but people are not vegetables,

Hang on. I didn’t say ALL people were vegetables—that’s a strawman.

And even if you’re not a vegetable, a few hundred more ppm of carbon pollution won’t have any ill effect on you whatsoever, Ask for a tour of your hydroponic marijuana supplier’s basement. Feel a slight headache? Dyspnea? The munchies? Hint: it’s not the pollution-enriched air.

It’s a popular misconception that you breathein order to get oxygen through your alveoli. That’s only a secondary drive. The respiratory urge is modulated primarily by chemoreceptors, strategically located in major arteries, that sample the carbon-pollution levels in your blood. You’re very good at keeping these down to a non-toxic (e.g. non-acidotic) titre by speeding up your breathing rhythm as necessary.

And here’s the thing: if you’re casually strolling through a greenhouse, you’re not going to run into respiratory distress unless the CO2 pump has gone on the fritz and the air is several times richer than you’re used to in the Holocene.

> They think about the circumstances of the people on earth, what kind of environment they prefer and thrive in, and hot ones aren’t it,

Question: are Arabs people?

> As long as accusations revolve around in-it-for-the-money

The only reasons salary keeps coming up are that

1) clisci groupies incredulously demand an explanation as to why their heroes might be induced to be be less than honest.

[Hint: unlike skeptical bloggers, alarmist scientists seldom work pro bono.]

2) and clisci groupies smear skeptical scientists with the Merchants of Doubt meme or Al Gore’s jawdroppingly chutzpaceous projections of his own money-grubbing meretriciousness onto his detractors (“It’s hard to get a man to understand something when &c. &c.”).

> Also, regarding the in-it-for-the-money conspiracy theory,

Hasn’t the penny dropped yet? You’re the only person in this thread who seems to think a corrupt fiend can only be explained by a conspiracy. You’re the closest thing to a conspiracy theorist in the room, Jim D. I’ve already told you why such an assumption is completely unnecessary and that there is a much simpler one available. Repeating that explanation would be pointless and thankless work, I fear.

> independent scientists and scientific societies who don’t earn from climate funding have endorsed the fact of the dangers of uncontrolled climate change.

Look up ‘virtue signalling.’

> Apple, Google, you name it in industry, even Exxon, have science-backing climate statements.

No, they have science-ignoring, alarmist statements.

Because they’re signalling either their virtue, their scientific illiteracy, or a bit of both.

But wait… “Even Exxon,” you say? No spoor, Sherlock. Big Oil profits hand over fist from the the climate panic.

> The science is best not ignored when it provides warnings and rational people pay attention to the science and don’t instead try to besmirch the individuals who publish on their work.

Why are you telling me these self-evident platitudes? I restrict my besmirching to pseudoscientists. Exclusively.

Oh, and if you think climate change is a more urgent, existential threat than pseudoscience, think again.

> Resorting to attacking personal motives rather than the science itself is a sure sign of a lost scientific argument.

Tell me about it. Whenever I hear the Merchants of Doubt meme I know I’m talking to an argument-loser.

OK, so now we have established that you believe the part of science that CO2 is good for your vegetables, and just have trouble with the part that quantitatively explains the current climate in terms of greenhouse gases and their insulating effect at the surface. Or maybe you do accept that BAU gets us 3-4 C warmer by 2100, but don’t accept that it is bad. This is where it is hard to get a generic skeptic scientific argument, because they shift positions on saying it won’t get so warm, or even if it does it won’t be so bad, explaining neither view in the process. Science has laid out the case for both these and has even given the politicians a consensus view to act on. You don’t need a consensus for science, but you do for policy. How much lead is safe in your drinking water is a similar question to what level of warming is still safe enough for humanity. The science tells you how much warming you get for how much emissions, and the policymakers have to do the cost/benefit analysis on mitigation versus adaptation and add in other factors like clean energy versus dirty, depletables versus renewables, etc.
Increased prevalence of heatwaves, droughts, floods, coastal issues all come with the warming. Part of the cost side of the equation.
To you supporting the science, even by other scientists, is virtue signaling. Why is it a virtue to back what the science says? Is it virtue signalling to support restricting lead levels in drinking water, or the amount of mercury and arsenic in the air? The degree of global warming? Where do you draw that line?
When science gives you results you don’t like, come up with more science to dispute it. Don’t just say they are not being honest and expect that to be an argument in itself.

“Or maybe you do accept that BAU gets us 3-4 C warmer by 2100…” #jiminy

There is not a Goddamn chance that opportunistic ensembles provide scientifically credible warming projections. Known without a doubt for a very long time. “In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.” IPCC 2001

It all seems a quite evident nonsense.

Jim D,

Sincere thanks for persevering in robust but polite disagreement. Respect.

> You don’t need a consensus for science, but you do for policy.

Right. But for policy you only need a political (or electoral) consensus. You don’t need a scientific one.

And for science, you don’t need a scientific consensus.

So you never need a scientific consensus for any purpose whatsoever.

As long as we agree on all this (do we?) there’s no interesting point of conflict between us, I’m afraid.

> To you supporting the science, even by other scientists, is virtue signaling.

But supporting an alarming or worrying conclusion is NOT supporting the science, since the science draws no such conclusion.

> Why is it a virtue to back what the science says?

Surely it’s not a vice?

> Is it virtue signalling to support restricting lead levels in drinking water, or the amount of mercury and arsenic in the air? The degree of global warming? Where do you draw that line?

It’s virtue signalling wherever groups declare unsolicited opinions on behalf of their members (who may or may not have had any say in the declaration) on topics about which they’re unable to add any insights of their own.

> When science gives you results you don’t like, come up with more science to dispute it.

What I dispute is your mistaken belief that “science” has produced any results I don’t like (on the climate question). I’m as familiar with the “science” as I need to be to say it’s a massive fricking yawn. There’s no climate problem according to the science.

If I didn’t like the results science came up with, more science would probably come up with similar results, which would only double my depression.

The ONLY grounds for dispute in scientific controversies is the methods. If you cannot fault the method, you have no right to protest the results. If you CAN fault the methods, you must do so, even if the results fulfil your deepest fantasies.

If the science used methods I don’t like, then I would be able (and obliged) to criticize it. But if it stuck to the scientific method, I would have no basis to complain about the conclusions it drew.

> Don’t just say they are not being honest and expect that to be an argument in itself.

No, of course not. Far better is to remove personalities from it altogether and simply ask which views are and aren’t correct. It’s only necessary to attack the character of a scientist if that character is used as an argument to truth the results.

Andy,

Whilst your post acknowledges the existence of mainstream scientific proposals that focus upon impacts that may be, or have been, characterised as ‘catastrophic’ in nature, it does so with the purpose of emphasising that they cannot be said to form part of a legitimate ‘catastrophe narrative’; principally, either because they are considered to be insufficiently credible or the scale of the posited impacts is too mundane. Footnote 15, in particular, mentions several examples, but only to demonstrate how they fail, in accordance with your logic, to qualify as examples of a catastrophe narrative, as you define it. That is the exclusion to which I am referring.

Why do I think it I am making an important point? Because it only requires the posited impact to have some plausibility for the precautionary principle to be applicable – there is nothing in the precautionary principle that allows for a posited serious impact to be dismissed simply because it is unlikely to materialise. For example, your footnote 15 points out that the mainstream scientific view is that there is little prospect of the AMOC collapsing in the 21st century. You claim, subsequently, that the lack of “a narrative of high confidence of global catastrophe” invalidates the use of the acronym CAGW when referring to the IPCC narrative on this subject. What you don’t acknowledge in your post, however, is that the application of the precautionary principle has, hitherto, been a mainstay of climate change politics and, in that respect, there is therefore no requirement for a narrative of high confidence, just a narrative of possibility (no matter how unlikely), in order for drastic action to be justified. There may be mainstream scientific confidence regarding the future of the AMOC but this does not preclude a catastrophe narrative premised upon the imperative of precaution. I see nothing wrong in using ‘CAGW’ when referring to such a narrative. It may not be ‘the’ narrative to which you refer, but it is ‘a’ catastrophe narrative that is hugely influential. It is the precautionary principle that “unduly weight[s] the emphasis on catastrophe”, not those of us who see it as the pertinent concept that it is.

I don’t believe this is a trivial semantic quibble. There is a significant narrative within the politics of climate change, based around the avoidance of severe impacts (including the likes of ‘global, irreversible and trans-generational damage’) and yet requiring nothing like certitude to justify action. This narrative is long-established, enshrined in climate change legislation and widely accepted. However, if you thought your article was already too long to include mention of it, then fair enough. I’ll say nothing more.

John,

“…but only to demonstrate how they fail, in accordance with your logic, to qualify as examples of a catastrophe narrative…”

Yet thereby clearly also demonstrating by the very same logic, that these are all perfectly legitimate uses of the word ‘catastrophe’ (or equivalent wordage) within a science and its related concepts that all the way through I’m pointing to as the accepted mainstream.

“…for the precautionary principle to be applicable,,,”

Once again, nothing at all within my post rules out this principle, its history, or any other points within the debate. Once again, if you think something in my post does rule out such points, quote it.

“You claim, subsequently, that the lack of “a narrative of high confidence of global catastrophe” invalidates the use of the acronym CAGW when referring to the IPCC…”

Yes. Because, unlike your own usage which you say above you’re going to stick to, the domain overwhelmingly considers high certainty to be built into the ‘C’, and this is also the understanding on both sides of the divide. There have been several suggestions of alternatives to ‘CAGW’, and per my above a couple are covered within the footnotes. The offerings from the orthodox side have been (based on the assumption that skeptics will continue to use such acronyms to refer to mainstream / IPCC science among other things) ones that dilute this built-in certainty of catastrophe in terms of either probability or size, or both. Hence the exampled offerings such as P for potentially or E for expensive. The P does the opposite of your suggestion, because the orthodox and indeed skeptics too understand that the certainty is already built in. Expensive because this is less than catastrophic, but its implicit even in this alternative that the expensive is as certain as that which it replaces. Yet all such suggestions will not likely change what has already become well established anyhow. The frequent objections of the orthodox to skeptical deployment of ‘CAGW’ (which indeed is what prompted some of the suggestions of alternative acronyms) is because the former know that certain catastrophe is not the judgement of the mainstream science they follow, notwithstanding further issues have now arisen such as general cultural aggression associated with the term. There would never have been a basis for such objections had the domain interpreted ‘CAGW’ in the manner which you are doing.

“What you don’t acknowledge in your post, however, is that the application of the precautionary principle has…”

There are whole rafts of issues within the debate that my post neither explores nor mentions. In no way does this mean either implicit or explicit exclusion of same. Yet again, nothing at all within my post rules out this principle, its history, or any other points within the debate. Yet again, if you think something in my post does rule out such points, quote it. There is tons of narrative of all sorts concurrently with the catastrophe narrative. However, the catastrophe narrative as propagated by all those many authorities including the highest authorities that we have (hence collectively massive influence), falsely claims backing by mainstream science, and is frequently cited as the critical reason to act. The post points out this important issue as part of its remit, which the skeptic side typically miss through not realising that AR5 does not support the catastrophe narrative, while the orthodox side give a free pass to all these authorities at the same time as (in complete contradiction) strongly objecting to skeptics who make an identical association via ‘CAGW’ (and per above the basis of this objection is indeed the high certainty of catastrophe for which the acronym is long accepted domain currency). This contradiction generally goes unnoticed too. Pointing out this situation (and related issues) by no means excludes all sorts of other things happening or discussed within the domain. Such is not grounds for complaining that these thousand and one things are not addressed.

“I see nothing wrong in using ‘CAGW’ when referring to such a narrative.”

If you’d got to the term first, maybe, but you didn’t and I didn’t either. The domain uses CAGW inclusive of built-in certainty and this is what it is. I don’t think your attempt at swimming upstream will make any difference to that whatever. Yet neither does this established usage invalidate or exclude any of your discussive points on the precautionary principle, or anything else come to that, so I can’t see why you would even want to swim upstream.

“I don’t believe this is a trivial semantic quibble.”

Okay. But the only line of argument you’ve put forward to support your claim that this post excludes other interesting points in the debate, the long role of the precautionary principle included, is based upon semantics. And much of that in turn on saying that an overwhelming understanding of ‘CAGW’ on both sides of the divide, is illogical and should instead be interpreted in the very different manner that you personally use. Well it may be illogical, but not only is the domain highly unlikely to change regarding your suggestion, use of the domain standard is completely appropriate. If you have firmer grounds for your claim of exclusion, by all means present them.

Hans, see footnote 31 regarding SR15, with note on corals.

“Regarding woodburning in New York, I think the EPA would care. At least they used to. This is why they set regulations.”

In other words, the EPA will both proscribe wood burning for air quality reasons and require it for carbon emission reductions. Because nobody is going to dam the Hudson and we’re told there is an “urgent” need to replace the emissions-free nuclear power plants that run NYC with “renewables” to reduce, ahem, emissions.
That sounds about right for the current state of climate advocacy. Obviously the only reason we aren’t doing this is because Fox News questions RCP8.5.

Javier, thank you once again for your time. This helps me triangulate where the frontier of science is relative to oceanic vulcanism as it relates to climatology.

It’s an irony how many blame humankind predominately for the worlds woes, but in fact a cascading series of events of some capacity (whether or not in the way I contemplate) undeniably served as the catalyst to advance the human species culturally and technologically, we’re a byproduct of catastrophic events. Maybe instead of warmists seeing humans as the main fault, they instead consider us the bit player we are, along for the ride from the same forces that set us in motion to begin with.

Environmental forces have no sentimental consideration to us and will continue on unabated until some form of an equilibrium is met, at which point a new environmental paradigm shift will force humans to yet again mitigate an entirely different set of circumstances. Obviously humans contribute to our environment, but we’re hardly the “everything” responsible for it. For our part, the human self-correcting mechanism found in the exponential growth of technology will enable us to overcome these challenges, moving beyond; irrelevant to blame.

There’s much bigger things to worry about in the form of human-on-human catastrophe, the Lefts growing fascism, frankly.

Jim D:

We can just jump out of the pot. That’s better than trying to keep the pot from boiling. We do not control the pot. I just read about Indonesia. https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/5/18126145/indonesia-climate-change-deforestation What’s boiling is poor peoples search for energy, wealth and a modern life.