Scientists Warn of Climate Disaster – But Are They To Be Trusted?
I marvel at the insanities of our 21st Century existence in so many ways – perhaps the greatest of which is how we’ve used the media to drive the common person to question the judgment of the scientific community. Just when you might think we’d be grateful to the people who had materially helped us double our life expectancies over the last 120 years (the blink of an eye for a species that’s been around for at least 100,000 years) we find reasonably well-educated people reclassifying an entire community of our most learned people and proven problem-solvers as frauds, because of their near unanimity in their concern over anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
Knowing that I’m a believer in AGW, and OTEC (ocean thermal energy conversion) as a potential tool to deal with the problem, frequent commenter Tim Kingston sent me this 139-page paper on the potential unintended consequences on the biosphere, called “Modeling the Physical and Biochemical Influence of Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion Plant Discharges into their Adjacent Waters.”
I now know that, for instance:
Using (these researchers) models, the negatively-buoyant discharge flows were simulated by a dynamically coupled Lagrangian jet-plume entrainment model in the near-field, and by dynamic oceanic circulation and turbulence in the far-field. The result is a three-dimensional time-dependent model of the oceanic circulation, nutrient concentration due to natural variability and OTEC operation, with corresponding phytoplankton growth dynamics. This is the most sophisticated and realistic plume model yet developed for OTEC.
Yes, the common wisdom is that the scientists of the 21st Century have become a band of collaborated charlatans/criminals, feeding from the public trough, sucking funds from the tax-payer to provide more money and bigger offices for those willing to toe the line on the global warming hoax. But maybe we need to take a deep breath here and realize that one of the following is true:
Either 97+ of our climate scientists have conspired to throw their intellectual integrity down the drain, in the hopes of more money for atmospheric research, or
The fossil fuel industry, the most profitable in the history of mankind, is manipulating the truth so that they can rake in many trillions of dollars of additional profits from pumping carbon into our atmosphere.
I’ll wrap it up here for the evening: Which do you find more credible?
History is simply repeating itself. Remember what happened to Galileo.
I think you are doing well discussing this. What is disturbing is how many people are willing to doubt science. But you suggest something different. You say people doubt the integrity of scientists. Perhaps both. Your title suggests that consensus on climate change is somehow a profit motivated hoax. Wouldn’t it be the other way around. Climate change denial is a profit motivated hoax.
Trying to create a “Hot Button” issue? The problem with raising awareness about climate control has as much to do with the cyclic change in the weather as it does with the fact that it just isn’t “Sexy”.
Climate isn’t sexy. Weathermen and women can be sexy, seeing a raging storm can be sexy, but telling people that the average temperature went up 5 degrees last year isn’t sexy.
Typical people (not just Americans) will see that the average temperature went up 5 degrees and say, “So what, longer summers or longer growing season” or “Big deal, it changes more than that in a day”.
But making Doom & Gloom predictions in this age of the internet happens a thousand times a day. 4 or 5 a day may actually garner some notice. But telling people that the weather is going to get worse and that their nth grandchildren will be living on a desert planet isn’t going to get notice because everyone assumes that the same scientists that are blathering about this climate thing, will come up with a solution that will fix it all in 5 minutes.
So, if you want to bring the message to the people, wrap it up in sexy and stick it in their faces. If you do it enough times, maybe they’ll notice eventually.
From the previous post:
“But telling people that the weather is going to get worse and that their nth grandchildren will be living on a desert planet isn’t going to get notice because everyone assumes that the same scientists that are blathering about this climate thing, will come up with a solution that will fix it all in 5 minutes.”
I’m not aware that scientists are asserting that grandchildren will be living in a desert; saying that would be irresponsible. The fact is that exact knowledge of how climate change will affect the earth does not exist. Some things are known. For example, it is known that sea levels will increase enough to cause serious problems in coastal areas. It may even be that as the average temperature of the earth increases, there will be some places that become colder. In any case, some places are certain to become uninhabitable and there will be serious problems coping with the need for people to migrate from those places.
The distrust of science is a serious problem. The media is partly at fault for publishing small studies which reach erroneous conclusions while failing to explain that before firm conclusions can be reached, there have to be larger studies. In the case of climate change, there can be little doubt that it is real since numerous studies, carried out by respected scientists, have reached the same conclusion.