Independent Research

Please pardon the profanity in the discussion at left, but this is too good not to share.  I don’t have the level of animus as this guy, but I totally see where he’s coming from.  (Btw, the Dunning–Kruger effect is that people with low ability at a task tend to overestimate their ability, stemming from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability.)

FWIW, I have the same conversation about climate change with people constantly.  Why don’t you do your own research?

Well, since the 1970s, thousands of people have been gathering and analyzing data.  I don’t have access to 99% of that data, and I don’t have the computation hardware, and especially the software to make sense of it anyway.

When I meet these people in person, like V. Ramanathan at Scripps, or Rajendra Pachaui at Yale, or the leader of the team at JPL (NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory) that studies the dynamics of the Greenland Ice Sheet, I like to ask them how they draw their conclusions.  What I find is that there are huge numbers of people, mainly graduate students, busily pumping away, gathering temperatures and laying them over past data.  This in and of itself takes some doing if we want apples-to-apples comparison, as modern methods of collecting these data are not the same as they were when record-keeping began 140 years ago, and the changes in man-made infrastructure needs to be taken into account.

Then you have data on ocean water temperatures, ocean currents, sea-level rise, land erosion, the number and strength of storms, droughts, desertification, and wildfires.

On top of that, there are tons of variables that could be causative: CO2 concentrations, methane emissions, solar irradiance, solar flares and coronal mass ejections, and Milankovitch cycles that include: The shape of Earth’s orbit, known as eccentricity; The angle of Earth’s axis is tilted with respect to Earth’s orbital plane, known as obliquity, and the direction of Earth’s axis of rotation is pointed, known as precession.

I suppose I could do a metastudy, i.e., a study of studies, but there are tons of smart people whose entire careers deal with this as well.  Thus, I content myself with knowing people directly gathering and analyzing the relevant data.

Now, could all these people be lying, and twisting or manufacturing data to support their conclusions? I can’t say that this is impossible, but it strikes me as ridiculously unlikely.  As someone told me a few years ago, “If I could perform a valid study and publish a peer-reviewed paper to the effect that there was another proximate cause to global warming than human activity, I would become, virtually over night, one of the most famous scientists in world history.”