A decidedly odd subject

I really can't figure out why folks are so fucking strange when they talk about climate change.

Otherwise intelligent people screaming like schoolgirls, mocking any writer that doesn't hew to their party line.  Global warming doesn't exist;  the Earth is going to become Venus: All the shades in between.

Look dudes, this is science.  This is mathematical modelling.  This is meticulous data collection over generations.   This is positing hypotheses and testing them.  This is plugging vast arrays of data and trying to establish what the long-term results will be years from now.

Talking about science in a politically or economically oriented discussion group is about as useful as sensitivity training from a Redneck.

The work being generated has flaws.  No doubt about that.  But the trend seems to be real and I will predict (hypothesize) that there will be pain; because the data that has been cross-checked and beat up any number of ways sure as hell points that way.  But remember, the predictions made need to be verified and that can only be done by waiting for the years to pass.

I think that the folks who troll concerning climate change (maybe 20% of the overall) fall into two categories:

1.  People who are concerned about getting rich and don't want anything to interfere with that process.
2. People who used to wear "the world is coming to an end" sandwich signs and stand on street corners

Look, here is the deal.  In science, you wait until the data come in until you say true or false.  You examine the data and try to decide valid or invalid.  In the case of climate science, the decades and centuries subsequent to now are the experiment.

The data thus far, for the most part, support the assertion that the model positing climate change is accurate.  Done and done.  Whether that correlation continues will be decided by facts on the ground.

The science is established.  Correlation currently is supporting the hypothesis of climate change and long-term warming.  Causality is being investigated, with preliminary results pointing toward industrial civilization pumping a whole shitpot of burnt remnants of fossil fuels into the atmosphere.

Who fucking knows?  By the time the data comes in, I will be pushing up daisies.  But to not pay some serious attention to this might make my children and their children's life harder than it needs to be.

I think that the data lends itself to a lot of caution in the next century.  The better bet is to ratchet back on the industrialization thing and the perpetual growth thing.  Time to seriously make inroads on energy consumption (Make that consumption in general) and make an effort to not fuck things up.

My favorites are the "scientist" type that try to disparage the data.  And the methodology.  Over at SST, where I first posted this piece, A "scientist" spent a whole bunch of time slamming my post, only to admit tangentially that his science was as a patent lawyer..

The real point of this over-long ramble is just to emphasize the odds-based nature of global warming/climate change.  There is no "proof" out there.  There are only odds and chances.  To me, the chances that such a thing exists is fairly high.  The chances that humankind's activities are responsible is almost as high.

We probably won't act on it until too late.

But I have always been a fan of Allopatric speciation.